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The point of unions is that workers are the ones keeping a company afloat. If they act in sync and decide to stop working the company is screwed. google can ve
by kace91 6y ago
The point of unions is that workers are the ones keeping a company afloat. If they act in sync and decide to stop working the company is screwed.
google can very well ignore a union of consumers. The most they can do is stop using the services in sync, and arguably the fact that they're trying to organise a consumer union rather than take their business elsewhere is a red flag that they'll find it difficult to do so.
To put it another way, assuming that the sum of all workers is as important as the sum of all consumers, there are ~150k google employees and ~4.5 billion consumers. since these numbers are several orders of magnitude apart, to have a real effect you'd need about 10k members of a consumer union to have the equivalent force of a worker union with a single member.
- robertlagrant 6y agoA union telling me to suddenly move off Google Cloud because they've told Google they're doing it is unlikely to be high on a list of business priorities.
- kace91 6y agoThat as well! It's relatively straightforward for a worker to stop doing their job for a couple of days/weeks and then resume activity. It is not straightforward at all for a private consumer to stop depending on google for a couple of days, and pretty much impossible for a business.