5 ms·

Just a friendly reminder that every charitable donation or cause that a company--any company--supports is marketing. A less charitable interpretation is "virtue

by jmyeet 4y ago

Just a friendly reminder that every charitable donation or cause that a company--any company--supports is marketing. A less charitable interpretation is "virtue signaling". Companies will pay millions to union-busting law firms because labor organization is really the only thing that will improve the material conditions of their workers. To anyone at Starbuck's, Amazon, Apple or really any other company, this should be all the evidence you need that you should join a union because it's the one thing your employer will spend millions to avoid happening. Ultimately, your relationship with your employer is adversarial. Don't forget that.

ksec 4y ago
>A less charitable interpretation is "virtue signaling". It wasn't like that before. Especially for Apple. It used to be borderline Marketing. If you could call it that. But Apple never did any of that. Steve doesn't even want his donation to be known. Somehow Apple went from one end of the Spectrum to the leader in "virtue signaling".
Vanderson 4y ago
Privately owned companies have the direct responsibility to care for their employee's and view their employee's as necessary partners to the company's success helps avoid _some_ of what you are describing. This is reliant on decent ownership of course.
- becquerel 4y ago
  Unfortunately, even private companies have an ultimate obligation to maximize profit (or else they're overtaken by another business which will). This means that employers and employees ultimately remain opposed.
  - Vanderson 4y ago
    Nothing is in a vacuum, and employees (myself included) feel the opposite responsibility. I want a paycheck and to get that I need my employer to stay in business. There is a synergy there. Maybe this is a scale issue. As a single owner of a business I feel personally responsible, and my actions in business are the same as in my personal life. But with a business I share ownership with, I have less personal responsibility, therefore by default I am simply not responsible (and feel less so) about the effects the business has. Multiply this out to thousands of shareholders, where this connection of ownership -> responsibility towards employees dilutes to the point of non-existence.
  - dreamcompiler 4y ago
    One reason for this is that it's hard to measure the value of an individual employee's contribution to the company [0], but it's easy to measure their cost. Since things that are easy to measure get weighted more highly [1], companies tend to see employees as costs rather than assets. [0] except sometimes for salespeople who bring in big accounts, which is why salespeople in many companies are better compensated than engineers. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
    - moate 4y ago
      "Be careful what you measure because that's what gets managed" or some such.
junofan 4y ago
> Companies will pay millions to union-busting law firms because labor organization is really the only thing that will improve the material conditions of their workers. Don’t better working conditions attract better employees? If labor organization is the only way to achieve this (as you claim), wouldn’t companies be encouraging unionization to improve their competitiveness in the labor market?
- becquerel 4y ago
  No, companies don't need to compete on that level, because the labour market is (usually!) weighted in the favour of employers. People are desperate enough to take any job they can get that companies don't have to make concessions like tolerating unionization.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    No thanks. Unions might be good in theory but I don't trust my coworkers to collectively make decisions that are in my best interest. I would rather negotiate on my own and save myself union dues. Unions are basically like a HOA, and I would never lock myself into one of those either.
    - fzeroracer 4y ago
      You're never negotiating on your own, you're negotiating against the entire labor market and what practices have been standardized or adopted. Nominally this can work if you work on the edges of the labor market (smaller shops) but standards are often set by the big tech companies as smaller ones seek to emulate their success. If you don't trust your coworkers, then you're placing your trust in companies to make decisions for you. And that's why we're seeing the rise in unionization again because it hasn't worked out that well.
      - throwntoday 4y ago
        > If you don't trust your coworkers, then you're placing your trust in companies to make decisions for you Why do I have to trust either of them? My coworkers often seem intent on doing as little work as possible. They are somewhere between bourgeois and champagne socialist. Management is comprised of the same people. I think many are just lazy and have gotten worse over the last two years.
xhkkffbf 4y ago
Adversarial? Not in my case. When animosity arose, as it did a few times in the past, I just quit and moved on. Life is too short. Ultimately work is just like any other trade. You trade your time for money. Would you like to go to a store with the attitude that all customer transactions are adversarial? At one place where I work frequently, I watched the union clique screw over someone who wasn't in the union because their target was a competitor for a big prize. To me, the union ends up being another layer of management
- moate 4y ago
  You're talking about a resolution to conflict, not the lack of conflict. Voting with your feet is a great option if you have it. Not everyone thinks they do. Either way, the fact is that employers want the cheapest labor cost they can get while meeting their labor needs (rational decision) and labor wants the greatest salary they can negotiate (rational decision) and this puts them in adversarial positions. This doesn't mean street fights or even curse words get said, it's just a way of describing the situation accurately. When someone wants the opposite of you, you're adversaries. Unions, like any general collection of people, will have good and bad actors leading to good or bad hierarchies. Your anecdote sounds like a shitty situation. Not every union is the same, and there are plenty of times when a union seems like more stress than it's worth for the people involved, and that's all fine. To your anecdote about going to the store: Yes, I go to every store with the assumption that they will, through active or passive means, attempt to take as much money from me as they can. It's why I check sold prices vs advertised price, it's why I confirm I wasn't accidentally overcharged on my receipt. The company wants to make as much money as possible and I want to spend as little as possible, and those are both pretty rational positions.
mechanical_bear 4y ago
> Ultimately, your relationship with your employer is adversarial. Don't forget that. That is a sad way to live.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  The correct word is transactional. Employee/employer relationship is the same as buyer/seller relationship. Do you declare war every time you go to buy a load of bread? Of course not. You negotiate a price both of you are comfortable with. Of course when you have an hammer (and sickle) everything starts to look like a nail
  - moate 4y ago
    Adversarial: involving or characterized by conflict or opposition. Nope, this is correct language. Your company wants to buy labor for the lowest possible cost to them. You want to be paid the highest possible wage. You are in conflict, direct opposition. A negotiation, by its nature, is a way of resolving conflict. War would be another. But the fact that unionists and socialists remove the social niceties and get down to brass tacks doesn't change the nature of the labor market. When you have a hammer and sickle, everything looks like the class war, because it is to us.
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      A negotiation need not be adversarial. See my example of buying bread.
      - MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
        With employment, you're negotiating the means to buy anything.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
Yeah. Don't avoid seeing it as being exactly as adversarial as it actually is. It's not diametrically adversarial, like for instance with fighting a criminal on the street, everything that helps you hurts him and everything that hurts him helps you[1]. That's diametrical. And in fact with the whole union-busting I would say that also is diametrical at an eventual point, Cuyahoga Falls Massacre for instance. The other thing is once there is a union get back to a less adversarial mindset--be at odds to an extent as always, but not opposite. [1] Not going to say viceversa in this situation.

by jmyeet 4y ago

ksec 4y ago

>A less charitable interpretation is "virtue signaling". It wasn't like that before. Especially for Apple. It used to be borderline Marketing. If you could call it that. But Apple never did any of that. Steve doesn't even want his donation to be known. Somehow Apple went from one end of the Spectrum to the leader in "virtue signaling".

Vanderson 4y ago

Privately owned companies have the direct responsibility to care for their employee's and view their employee's as necessary partners to the company's success helps avoid _some_ of what you are describing. This is reliant on decent ownership of course.

becquerel 4y ago
Unfortunately, even private companies have an ultimate obligation to maximize profit (or else they're overtaken by another business which will). This means that employers and employees ultimately remain opposed.
- Vanderson 4y ago
  Nothing is in a vacuum, and employees (myself included) feel the opposite responsibility. I want a paycheck and to get that I need my employer to stay in business. There is a synergy there. Maybe this is a scale issue. As a single owner of a business I feel personally responsible, and my actions in business are the same as in my personal life. But with a business I share ownership with, I have less personal responsibility, therefore by default I am simply not responsible (and feel less so) about the effects the business has. Multiply this out to thousands of shareholders, where this connection of ownership -> responsibility towards employees dilutes to the point of non-existence.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  One reason for this is that it's hard to measure the value of an individual employee's contribution to the company [0], but it's easy to measure their cost. Since things that are easy to measure get weighted more highly [1], companies tend to see employees as costs rather than assets. [0] except sometimes for salespeople who bring in big accounts, which is why salespeople in many companies are better compensated than engineers. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
  - moate 4y ago
    "Be careful what you measure because that's what gets managed" or some such.

junofan 4y ago

> Companies will pay millions to union-busting law firms because labor organization is really the only thing that will improve the material conditions of their workers. Don’t better working conditions attract better employees? If labor organization is the only way to achieve this (as you claim), wouldn’t companies be encouraging unionization to improve their competitiveness in the labor market?

becquerel 4y ago
No, companies don't need to compete on that level, because the labour market is (usually!) weighted in the favour of employers. People are desperate enough to take any job they can get that companies don't have to make concessions like tolerating unionization.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  No thanks. Unions might be good in theory but I don't trust my coworkers to collectively make decisions that are in my best interest. I would rather negotiate on my own and save myself union dues. Unions are basically like a HOA, and I would never lock myself into one of those either.
  - fzeroracer 4y ago
    You're never negotiating on your own, you're negotiating against the entire labor market and what practices have been standardized or adopted. Nominally this can work if you work on the edges of the labor market (smaller shops) but standards are often set by the big tech companies as smaller ones seek to emulate their success. If you don't trust your coworkers, then you're placing your trust in companies to make decisions for you. And that's why we're seeing the rise in unionization again because it hasn't worked out that well.
    - throwntoday 4y ago
      > If you don't trust your coworkers, then you're placing your trust in companies to make decisions for you Why do I have to trust either of them? My coworkers often seem intent on doing as little work as possible. They are somewhere between bourgeois and champagne socialist. Management is comprised of the same people. I think many are just lazy and have gotten worse over the last two years.

xhkkffbf 4y ago

Adversarial? Not in my case. When animosity arose, as it did a few times in the past, I just quit and moved on. Life is too short. Ultimately work is just like any other trade. You trade your time for money. Would you like to go to a store with the attitude that all customer transactions are adversarial? At one place where I work frequently, I watched the union clique screw over someone who wasn't in the union because their target was a competitor for a big prize. To me, the union ends up being another layer of management

moate 4y ago
You're talking about a resolution to conflict, not the lack of conflict. Voting with your feet is a great option if you have it. Not everyone thinks they do. Either way, the fact is that employers want the cheapest labor cost they can get while meeting their labor needs (rational decision) and labor wants the greatest salary they can negotiate (rational decision) and this puts them in adversarial positions. This doesn't mean street fights or even curse words get said, it's just a way of describing the situation accurately. When someone wants the opposite of you, you're adversaries. Unions, like any general collection of people, will have good and bad actors leading to good or bad hierarchies. Your anecdote sounds like a shitty situation. Not every union is the same, and there are plenty of times when a union seems like more stress than it's worth for the people involved, and that's all fine. To your anecdote about going to the store: Yes, I go to every store with the assumption that they will, through active or passive means, attempt to take as much money from me as they can. It's why I check sold prices vs advertised price, it's why I confirm I wasn't accidentally overcharged on my receipt. The company wants to make as much money as possible and I want to spend as little as possible, and those are both pretty rational positions.

mechanical_bear 4y ago

> Ultimately, your relationship with your employer is adversarial. Don't forget that. That is a sad way to live.

cuteboy19 4y ago
The correct word is transactional. Employee/employer relationship is the same as buyer/seller relationship. Do you declare war every time you go to buy a load of bread? Of course not. You negotiate a price both of you are comfortable with. Of course when you have an hammer (and sickle) everything starts to look like a nail
- moate 4y ago
  Adversarial: involving or characterized by conflict or opposition. Nope, this is correct language. Your company wants to buy labor for the lowest possible cost to them. You want to be paid the highest possible wage. You are in conflict, direct opposition. A negotiation, by its nature, is a way of resolving conflict. War would be another. But the fact that unionists and socialists remove the social niceties and get down to brass tacks doesn't change the nature of the labor market. When you have a hammer and sickle, everything looks like the class war, because it is to us.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    A negotiation need not be adversarial. See my example of buying bread.
    - MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
      With employment, you're negotiating the means to buy anything.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

Yeah. Don't avoid seeing it as being exactly as adversarial as it actually is. It's not diametrically adversarial, like for instance with fighting a criminal on the street, everything that helps you hurts him and everything that hurts him helps you[1]. That's diametrical. And in fact with the whole union-busting I would say that also is diametrical at an eventual point, Cuyahoga Falls Massacre for instance. The other thing is once there is a union get back to a less adversarial mindset--be at odds to an extent as always, but not opposite. [1] Not going to say viceversa in this situation.