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What if paying their employees who work in their warehouses as little as possible and tracking them to maximize productivity is actually what maximizes their pr

• SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Respectfully, I just don't understand what your stream of angry questions is about. As I said, what should happen is that companies just provide good pay and working conditions in the first place. If workers are being mistreated, I have no objection to them collectively organizing against it.
  • ygjb 6y ago
    And respectfully, despite the fact that Google is an objectively good place to work for many people (good pay, good opportunities for growth and advancement, etc), there is an abundance of evidence in recent years that for minorities, and for teams under specific leaders, Google has not been a good place to work. Unions aren't just about wages and workloads, it's entirely possible that employees of tech companies (and shareholders of tech companies) that are unionized could be protected from the impact of shitty leaders through the power of collective bargaining and action that demands that abusive leaders and managers be held accountable.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I think unions should be just about wages and workloads. It's not obvious to me that collective bargaining is a good way to handle more complex questions about how things ought to be, because rhetoric of solidarity and workers rights can be very easily subverted to serve the personal and ideological goals of union leaders.
      • wrsh07 6y ago
        When I negotiate a starting salary, I don't just stick to "salary and workload." I keep everything on the table. If there are any benefits that they can provide me that are outside the scope of salary and workload, it's possible I'll be able to get something more valuable to me while being more favorable for my potential employer Eg I might negotiate team size if I'm coming in to lead a team, I might negotiate benefits if I'm going to a sufficiently small company, I might negotiate how frequently I'm expected to travel for the company Being able to negotiate quality of life is important because many employers offer _what looks like_ a generous package but then shove their employees into dangerous working conditions. Remember that unions are always less powerful than your employer, and you can influence the union more easily than you can influence your employer (caveats on seniority in which case a union isn't for you), for better and worse
      • ygjb 6y ago
        That's some real magical thinking there. Why is it acceptable for the leaders of companies to subvert the company to serve the personal and ideological goals of the company leaders, but it's bad for the employees to do the same when they are often the ones who are called on to do the work for those goals, and are less likely to have the freedom to simply change jobs (especially during an economy melting pandemic). I recognize that in general, the leaders of a company are the folks who are either selected by, or are the investors or founders, but at the end of the day, the impact that those investors or founders can have is strongly limited by the talent they can attract. The entire tech industry is a shit show from a human rights perspective because of the ongoing imbalance between the folks who are making decisions, and the folks who are executing those decisions (see: the coinbase affair, the recent Uber ad spend revelations building off disclosures by other adtech researchers, the whole mess with Susan Fowler, the way Timnit Gebru was fired, and any number of issues that seem to come up on a weekly basis) Unions can be problematic, but it is blatantly clear that tech investors and founders are basically the robber barons of our generation. In the pursuit of power and profit they have advanced us towards the type of cyberpunk dystopias most of the folks posting on this forum grew up reading, and most of the people posting here are the cogs that enable some of the atrocious privacy and human rights violations that are happening on the regular. I am a strong believer in the role that unions play because I grew up in a community where unions literally saved lives because managers at a smelter wanted to maximize profits and workers didn't want to die from a massive cauldron of liquid copper or zinc exploding on them, or wanted effective safety gear when prying plates of zinc deposit from cathodes. It may not be quite the same degree of physical risk, but the folks who screen objectionable content on social media platforms certainly deserve protections. Gig economy workers deserve protections. Startup employees deserve protection. If government regulation isn't doing the job, then unions are the natural organizations to step in, as they have during some of the most prosperous times in history. Virtually all of the concerns that folks have about shitty unions (and shitty leadership) can be solved through transparency, but it is incumbent on the leaders selected by constituents of those groups (union members and investors/founders/executives) to choose transparency.
    • mlyle 6y ago
      Different commenter here: I have no objection to workers organizing. I do think that unions are both the kind of mechanism that eliminates the worst workplace abuses ... but contributes to a workplace being policy driven and stifling. There's already reasons why larger employers institute lots of policy and remove individual team, worker, and manager autonomy. But a counterparty demanding a lot of these to be committed to in contract forming its own parallel bureaucracy can multiply these effects.
      • wrsh07 6y ago
        I think one might reasonably say that a company like Google is already stifling with its bureaucracy. The problem is that the existing bureaucracy protects the company and managers and not the workers
        • mlyle 6y ago
          Yah. I just have bad memories of not being able to move my monitor from one end of a desk to another without a worker in a union filing a grievance. Just because you have lots of bureaucracy doesn't mean you can't have a bunch more.
          • wrsh07 6y ago
            To be clear, that's about moving equipment, right? (I've had that issue as well, where the people who managed the equipment were in a union) Note: I think that's a misapplication of their grievances - it's one thing if your employer makes you move your office equipment to avoid hiring movers, a single person updating their desk or location should be an explicit exception But I agree with you!! Unions can cause bad policy, and this is a reasonable example.
  • wrsh07 6y ago
    My questions weren't angry My point is that your claim that "it's good for business" to treat employees so well they don't benefit from advocating for themselves is clearly false in one of the largest tech companies. If you don't understand that, your view of corporations is rosy-eyed