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Google contractors in Pittsburgh vote to unionize
- tynpeddler 7y agoWhite collar unions aren't a new phenomenon though they are less known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Professional_Engineering_Employees_in_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Professional_Engine... Is there a precedence for contractors unionizing? I'm curious what prevents Google from simply not renewing their contract since they will presumably be requesting much higher wages.
- bt848 7y agoConsidering that they work for a third party I imagine it is the third party's problem.
- anoncareer0212 7y agoExactly, thank you for being the first comment to point this out instead of taking a swing at Google/unions
- mrosett 7y agoThe contractors in question aren't necessarily white collar. Most contractors at Google work in the cafes or in maintenance roles, etc.
- bt848 7y agoYou're right but it says that the contractors who unionized work for an IT outsourcing firm. Google has kind of a random relationship with various classes of employees. There are contract cooks and janitors and whatnot but they made the physical security guards full-time.
- mrosett 7y agoAh - I missed that. Thanks for the clarification.
- throw93 7y agoAs someone without any context, 1. Why they are unionizing? 2. Why are they joining a union from a completely different industry? What would this achieve?
- iscrewyou 7y agoThe article answers all these questions.
- bt848 7y agoIt doesn't. Where does the USW come into the picture, if PATP is affiliate of the DPE, considering that USW is _also_ an affiliate of DPE? I don't get it and I wished the article explained it.
- msbarnett 7y ago> Where does USW come into the picture, if PATP is affiliate of the DPE, considering that USW is _also_ an affiliate of DPE? The PATP is a new chapter of United Steelworker’s union. Why steelworkers? Because the union isn’t just a steelworker’s union, although it retains that name in common usage for historical reasons (and also because it’s short enough to say). The union’s full name is The United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union. Years of erosion of union strength and membership in the US has led to a lot of union mergers. The PATP is not part of the DPE. The DPE is a branch of the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO is a federation of unions — a metaunion, if you will. The DPE helped the PATP organize, that’s the DPE’s job. But the DPE isn’t a union itself, it’s an umbrella organization for professional employees represented by the AFL-CIO’s member unions.
- msbarnett 7y agoPerhaps you should consider reading this submitted article, which contains all of the context that answers your questions.
- bluGill 7y ago
- kangnkodos 7y agoI'm running a pool. How long before Google drops HCL? The winner gets my eternal respect. What's your guess?
- anoncareer0212 7y agoNever, unfortunately this also means you won't pay out to me
- ken 7y agoWhy would Google drop this contractor? They were quoted in the article saying they use both union and non-union contractors already.
- clavalle 7y agoI don't know much about unions. What are some downsides to joining a union? Are there onerous obligations?
- changoplatanero 7y agoYou mean besides the dues?
- clavalle 7y agoYeah. I'd expect to pay some sort of cost.
- aaomidi 7y agoIf you don't necessarily agree with a specific decision the union is taking, you're dragged into it. But that's just part of collectivism and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
- derekp7 7y agoDepends on the nature of the work and variability of worker skills, along with the union structure. For work where the skills of the workers are mostly consistent, or where skills can be easily grouped into buckets based on training and seniority, unions work out really good for the employees. For highly variable skill work, and where skill levels are difficult to track (at least in a non-gameable way), you can have lower skilled (or lower performing) employees that drag down higher performers, due to union rules requiring things like seniority-based pay brackets. So people that are really good at convincing their management that they are really good, and work in industries where there is high competition for their specialty, those are the ones that tend to be more anti-union for their line of work.
- makotech222 7y agoThis is misinformation. Unions are democratically led. They can have whatever rules they want regarding skill and pay. The point is that they reach a consensus and then negotiate as a single unit against their employer.
- jiveturkey 7y agoTFA is absolutely worthless. Better one here: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/24/20880727/google-workers-unionized-contractors-hcl-tech-activism https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/9/24/20880727/google-workers... > These 80 employees who work as analysts and trainers for Google’s shopping product To me, this sounds like low skilled labor. > Most of the employees organizing hold college degrees, get paid as little as $40,000 a year, and don’t receive sick days or many of the other perks that direct Google employees get. "perks that direct Google employees get" is irrelevant at best. The first COL calculator I found (ie, first google hit, let's assume google didn't suddenly game this result) says pittsburgh is 1/3 the cost of SF. $40k = $120k. This is not bad at all (?) for such low skilled labor, if the "COL curve" is linear down to $40k. Also, they say "as little as", so we know that's the floor, not the median. (Shame on the editor for presenting it that way.) The lack of sick days isn't that bad if the employees have health benefits and are not penalized for sick time off. (Just take away 1-2 weeks of salary -- the typical amount of sick days one would get.) However, if they don't have sick days, I have doubts about the quality of their health benefits and maybe they don't even have 401k?
- sdinsn 7y agoUsing Nerdwallet's COL calculator, 40k in Pittsburgh is roughly 78k in SF. The HUD defined the lower income limit in SF to be 82k.
- bluGill 7y agoCOL is a terrible indicator. 1/3rd COL isn't really 1/3rd. If you have a large family the requirement of a large house/apartment will make your cost of living much worse in SF than 3x - while if you sleep in your car and cook on a camp stove your COL is the nearly the same in both places (car registration might be slightly more in CA). Both are extreme cases, but they get the point across. While I would expect a somewhat lower salary outside of SF, it wouldn't be 1/3.
- jiveturkey 7y ago> If you have a large family the requirement of a large house/apartment Thanks. That's why I qualified that bit by noting that the COL curve may not be linear. Due to regressive taxes, housing minimum, etc. But without hearing from folks actually in pittsburgh, it's hard for me, sitting here in SV, to know how good or bad $40k is. But the relativity to SF isn't the most important part anyway. If the pay is below market, shouldn't HCL quickly find themselves without employees?
- davinic 7y agoI am a long-time dev contractor (not with Google), and I am sick of staffing middlemen that keep 40%+ of my hourly rate and hold the money an extra month, simply because they had access to the client's contractor system. It's robbery.
- Yhippa 7y agoCan you go work for the client and capture that money for yourself?
- babaganoosh89 7y agoUsually not because large clients are worried about contractors being classified as employees.
- msbarnett 7y agoThe IRS has made that extremely difficult for software contractors, and most companies will prefer to avoid the high risk of an individual contractor being reclassified as an employee.
- scottostler 7y agoYes of course, but companies will prefer to work with middlemen rather than directly employing individual contractors because it makes legal and accounting easier. There’s often a lot of hurdles to employ an individual directly, like requiring the contractor to have a million dollar insurance policy say Seems like a lot of money for that, but companies are willing to pay it
- davinic 7y agoI'm a corp to corp subcontractor and aside from getting nearly half of my rate taken, I keep and pay for my own liability and e&o insurance.
- s3r3nity 7y agoI have two questions that are related: 1) Isn't this really a "problem" for HCL, and not necessarily Google? Google can just not renew the contract, meaning all the benefits they gain from working "for Google" go away. And if you make the assumption that Google is hiring firms like this primarily because of cost, then their incentive as a public company is to keep costs low and switch to another firm. (Unless this is primarily to reduce the margins for HCL? i.e. costs to Google stay flat, but workers take home a larger share.) 2) More of a criticism on Unions: why don't these folks just go work for Google if they want the benefits? Either they have the ability and don't want to, which is their choice, or they don't pass the hiring bar, which then means any comparison to what Google employees make is not appropropriate.
- EKLM-ZK88 7y agoWhy would google ever hire anyone who's already a contractor if it's cheaper to keep them as contractors or vendors?
- thrower123 7y agoGiven that it is HCL, can H1B workers unionize? They are in that constellation of contractors that pulls a lot of people from overseas.
- baud147258 7y agoEarlier this year I left an IT & engineering contracting company (Alten, one of the biggest here in France) and I heard from a friend who was still working there that it was one of the union that prevented remote working because "it would prevent them from controlling the workers".