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The consequence of this means rights for union organizers to be on the job sites and access to other workers. There is a thin edge of the wedge strategy at play
by motohagiography 7y ago
The consequence of this means rights for union organizers to be on the job sites and access to other workers. There is a thin edge of the wedge strategy at play here. It's not just the cafeteria workers.
The opposition I have to unions at companies like Google is that the companies themselves are too politically powerful to have staff who in effect must to behave criminally to be terminated. When you look at the impact of unions in law enforcement and national security, they are almost universally recognized as the main enabler for the social problems bad individuals in these fields cause.
The amount of social harm a malicious Google (twitter, facebook, reddit, pornhub, etc) employee can cause is astronomical and the main thing keeping the worst %10 in check is the likelihood of losing their job. Literally thousands of people who can divert or sabotage the lives of others without accountability.
They already have enough privacy and political problems, but I would predict unionization spreading to their tech workforce would trigger divestment and a general market reduction of risk exposure to their businesses.
These companies are different, and a political artifact of the industrial revolution will have disproportionate unintended consequences.
- wrsh07 7y agoI'm much more concerned about executive accountability than I am about individual employee accountability at a company with as much political power as, say, Google. Unions are a way of balancing executive power. (I don't think they're a panacea though! All I hope for in this case is that it is able to improve the lives and working conditions of Google's cafeteria workers)
- motohagiography 7y agoThere are at least 10x the number of employees to executives who have access to your email contents and browsing history. Using the worst %3 of individuals as a baseline, the executives are the people you have the very least to worry about.
- jjeaff 7y agoAccess to individual personal data is only one small point of power. Billions of dollars for lobbying and the ability to set policy and make sweeping changes is a much larger power.
- motohagiography 7y agoElections at all levels are won and lost on candidate email dumps and internet activity. Blackmail always works better than lobbying, and this is what protecting the worst actors will enable.
- wrsh07 7y agoIf you somehow don't think there will be accountability for an individual employee who misuses PII, we are living in two very different worlds. You must understand that even a single employee doing this is such a breech of brand trust that Google would deal with it swiftly. OTOH, it is quite clear to me that Google executives are allowed to make virtually unchecked and wide-reaching decisions that impact many and have negative consequences. A simple, unambiguous example is "the YouTube recommendation algorithm is bad for kids and seems to cause their exploitation" [1] To be very clear: executives have the power to change the recommendation engine. To demonetize children's YouTube videos. They choose to be wreckless specifically out of greed. [1] https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
- itronitron 7y agoYou make an interesting point. It remains to be seen whether Googlers will form a union in which members that share differing viewpoints will feel more empowered to express their views without fear of losing their jobs.