4 ms·

It is disappointing how all the "union victories" these days seem to involve under 100 employees, and are often motivated by "fake" grievances such as the end t

by powera 3y ago

It is disappointing how all the "union victories" these days seem to involve under 100 employees, and are often motivated by "fake" grievances such as the end to temporary pandemic policies.

rippercushions 3y ago
The article says that Cognizant shifted to forced RTO after the union movement started, in what the union says was an intentional move to basically force people to quit.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  How are they forced to quit? Your job involves following reasonable requests. Requesting people work on the worksite seems reasonable. Unless they were hired in areas far away.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    I'm someone who actually enjoys going into the office, and I think for a lot of jobs a lot of things do suffer when everyone is remote 100% of the time, but for these types of jobs and these types of workers, RTO was pure retaliation, and everyone, including the employer, knows it. The types of jobs these contractors do are pretty rote, and productivity is actually pretty easily measured (which is not the case with product engineering work). It's literally that workers are given a queue of tasks they need to complete, and they are expected to finish a certain number each shift. There is literally no reasonable reason to force these folks to RTO.
  - domador 3y ago
    What if Cognizant workers shifted their lifestyles to take advantage of their ability to work from home? Going back to commuting and being pinned down to an office could now require significant, problematic adjustments for them. Also, how many of these workers are relatively recent hires, who have only experience WFH? Maybe that was a nonnegotiable reason why they took that job in the first place. If Cognizant was still doing WFH in 2023, it must mean that it's worked for them as a company. I can easily see how forcing their workers to come back to the office could steam from shady, union-busting motives.
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    >Unless they were hired in areas far away. I think you have a lot to learn about the average commute. Why would people, whose employer made record profits during COVID/WFH, want to spend often hours of their day doing unpaid commuting to an office where the work is exactly the same as it is at their home?
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      I'm not talking about what they want or what is most convenient. I'm responding to the claim that the workers were "forced to quit". Unless they lived in another city, they aren't being forced to quit, they are being forced to work in the office. They might _want_ to quit, but that's their choice.
      - Spooky23 3y ago
        Give me a break. They started union activity, and suddenly the work rules change. Unions generally don’t take a strong position on WFH… it weakens the negotiation position, as if you can work at your apartment across town, you can also work from the Philippines or India.
      - danaris 3y ago
        When people talk about being "forced to quit", no one means they've got a gun to their heads. No one means they're having their hands moved to type a resignation letter. They mean that conditions are being deliberately degraded in order to make it harder to feel OK working there. You may enjoy the taste of boot, but not all of us do, and some of us recognize that valuing workers as human beings is more important than just blindly obeying every single dictate that comes down from On High. "Human needs" are more than just the things we absolutely have to have for survival; even the somewhat-creaky Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs has over half the height of the pyramid being non-basic needs.
  - olliej 3y ago
    If you were hired while working remotely, and were doing your job, how is mandatory RTO reasonable? Mandatory RTO is uncompensated time for the employer in the form of commute hours. It's paying for gas. It's mandatory child care payments for people with children. I have yet to hear of a single mandatory RTO policy that compensated people or that provided any compensation at all for any of the incurred time or financial costs that mandatory RTO forces onto employees. If you were doing your job effectively without having to be in the office, mandatory RTO is unreasonable. If you were originally hired under remote work conditions, it's also a clear change to the employment conditions you agreed to. Mandatory RTO costs me between 12 and 15 hours of time and around $70 in gas, and that's only 3 days a week. So these aren't irrelevant sums of time or money, especially given that these are contractors at the low end of the pay scale.
    - dehrmann 3y ago
      > If you were hired while working remotely, and were doing your job, how is mandatory RTO reasonable? It really depends what your employment contract said, but the smart assumption (and these workers are in Texas, mind you), is that covid WFH was a temporary situation. RTO wasn't a given, but no one should be surprised if an employer asks for it. If you're actually remote and hired during covid by a previously non-remote company, you went into it knowing the company might change its mind, and you could be easily laid off. > Mandatory RTO costs me between 12 and 15 hours of time and around $70 in gas, and that's only 3 days a week. You signed up knowing there was a possibility of a 2-hour commute. You balanced how much your time is worth, the likelihood of mandatory RTO, and where you want to live. Suppose you want to live on a ranch a few hours from the office in a city. Asking the company to pay for your commute and commute time is the company subsidizing your ranch lifestyle. That's a choice you made, but it makes others pay for it.
      - olliej 3y ago
        > You signed up knowing there was a possibility of a 2-hour commute. You balanced how much your time is worth, the likelihood of mandatory RTO, and where you want to live. low and minimum wage workers don't get to choose short commutes. But you also came into this with the claim that RTO was "reasonable", and if you've had multiple years demonstrating there is no need to be in an office, and multiple years for the details of your life to change, and I would argue that mandatory RTO given that is not "reasonable". It is clear that you are of the opinion that it is reasonable to force employees into a less productive, less safe, and more generally unpleasant environment for no reason other than "because you can". History is littered with things that were legal at the time, that we look back at and say "wow, that's f'd up".
  - Jon_Lowtek 3y ago
    It looks like union busting, when the workers filing to unionize get an RTO for what was, in practice, a remote job, and a threat that failure to show up would be seen as "job abandonment" and "voluntary termination". The cherry on top: According to the filing with NLRB [1] the employer allegedly offered a "work from home option" to the workers should they decide not to unionize. Data is scarce, but from media coverage [2] it seems many were hired during covid and some have been clocking in from Florida and Chicago, for a position that is, only on paper, in Austin, Texas. 1: https://foiaonline.gov/foiaonline/action/public/submissionDetails?trackingNumber=NLRB-2023-000923&type=Request https://foiaonline.gov/foiaonline/action/public/submissionDe... 2: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-02-10/youtube-music-workers-call-strike-against-local-contractor/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-02-10/youtube-musi...
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    > Cognizant changed its return-to-office policy and moved work to other offices, the complaint says. > Cognizant allegedly told workers that failure to move to and work from the Austin office would be treated as “job abandonment” and a “voluntary termination.” When a company moves your office and revokes your ability to work from home in response to a unionizing effort, that pretty clearly counts as trying to force you to quit.
- whatgoodisaroad 3y ago
  I would imagine RTO/co-working to be more of a benefit to union efforts, since organizing in non official channels is so greatly simplified.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    Not if you can't afford to take the job because of commute/daycare/etc...
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    It’s a double edged sword. It’s difficult to organize without using the employers resources. Some companies aggressively police lots of behavior. Walmart considers outside contact with other employees as potential off clock work and will terminate if discovered. The hyper-insanity over unions is really stupid. It’s really all about power and accountability. The inconvenience of having employees who can tell the emperor that he’s naked is drives the attitude. This is especially true at retail - lots of regional supermarkets are unionized and successfully compete with Walmart, despite Walmart’s advantage in purchase power and their carousel of the cheapest employees available.
1over137 3y ago
The current Canadian federal government worker strike is big on keeping work-from home (temporary pandemic policy): https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6822467 https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6822467
domador 3y ago
What kind of union victories would you prefer to see more of?
bugglebeetle 3y ago
>"fake" grievances such as the end to temporary pandemic policies This is why American workers need unions so badly. Disease that overwhelming killed low wage workers relative to other cohorts and is still killing over 1000 people per week, disabling countless more. Workers organize to protect their own health and people describe this as a “fake grievance.” Incredible…
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  look man this boot doesn't lick itself ok

by powera 3y ago

It is disappointing how all the "union victories" these days seem to involve under 100 employees, and are often motivated by "fake" grievances such as the end to temporary pandemic policies.

rippercushions 3y ago

The article says that Cognizant shifted to forced RTO after the union movement started, in what the union says was an intentional move to basically force people to quit.

Gigachad 3y ago
How are they forced to quit? Your job involves following reasonable requests. Requesting people work on the worksite seems reasonable. Unless they were hired in areas far away.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I'm someone who actually enjoys going into the office, and I think for a lot of jobs a lot of things do suffer when everyone is remote 100% of the time, but for these types of jobs and these types of workers, RTO was pure retaliation, and everyone, including the employer, knows it. The types of jobs these contractors do are pretty rote, and productivity is actually pretty easily measured (which is not the case with product engineering work). It's literally that workers are given a queue of tasks they need to complete, and they are expected to finish a certain number each shift. There is literally no reasonable reason to force these folks to RTO.
- domador 3y ago
  What if Cognizant workers shifted their lifestyles to take advantage of their ability to work from home? Going back to commuting and being pinned down to an office could now require significant, problematic adjustments for them. Also, how many of these workers are relatively recent hires, who have only experience WFH? Maybe that was a nonnegotiable reason why they took that job in the first place. If Cognizant was still doing WFH in 2023, it must mean that it's worked for them as a company. I can easily see how forcing their workers to come back to the office could steam from shady, union-busting motives.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  >Unless they were hired in areas far away. I think you have a lot to learn about the average commute. Why would people, whose employer made record profits during COVID/WFH, want to spend often hours of their day doing unpaid commuting to an office where the work is exactly the same as it is at their home?
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    I'm not talking about what they want or what is most convenient. I'm responding to the claim that the workers were "forced to quit". Unless they lived in another city, they aren't being forced to quit, they are being forced to work in the office. They might _want_ to quit, but that's their choice.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      Give me a break. They started union activity, and suddenly the work rules change. Unions generally don’t take a strong position on WFH… it weakens the negotiation position, as if you can work at your apartment across town, you can also work from the Philippines or India.
    - danaris 3y ago
      When people talk about being "forced to quit", no one means they've got a gun to their heads. No one means they're having their hands moved to type a resignation letter. They mean that conditions are being deliberately degraded in order to make it harder to feel OK working there. You may enjoy the taste of boot, but not all of us do, and some of us recognize that valuing workers as human beings is more important than just blindly obeying every single dictate that comes down from On High. "Human needs" are more than just the things we absolutely have to have for survival; even the somewhat-creaky Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs has over half the height of the pyramid being non-basic needs.
- olliej 3y ago
  If you were hired while working remotely, and were doing your job, how is mandatory RTO reasonable? Mandatory RTO is uncompensated time for the employer in the form of commute hours. It's paying for gas. It's mandatory child care payments for people with children. I have yet to hear of a single mandatory RTO policy that compensated people or that provided any compensation at all for any of the incurred time or financial costs that mandatory RTO forces onto employees. If you were doing your job effectively without having to be in the office, mandatory RTO is unreasonable. If you were originally hired under remote work conditions, it's also a clear change to the employment conditions you agreed to. Mandatory RTO costs me between 12 and 15 hours of time and around $70 in gas, and that's only 3 days a week. So these aren't irrelevant sums of time or money, especially given that these are contractors at the low end of the pay scale.
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    > If you were hired while working remotely, and were doing your job, how is mandatory RTO reasonable? It really depends what your employment contract said, but the smart assumption (and these workers are in Texas, mind you), is that covid WFH was a temporary situation. RTO wasn't a given, but no one should be surprised if an employer asks for it. If you're actually remote and hired during covid by a previously non-remote company, you went into it knowing the company might change its mind, and you could be easily laid off. > Mandatory RTO costs me between 12 and 15 hours of time and around $70 in gas, and that's only 3 days a week. You signed up knowing there was a possibility of a 2-hour commute. You balanced how much your time is worth, the likelihood of mandatory RTO, and where you want to live. Suppose you want to live on a ranch a few hours from the office in a city. Asking the company to pay for your commute and commute time is the company subsidizing your ranch lifestyle. That's a choice you made, but it makes others pay for it.
    - olliej 3y ago
      > You signed up knowing there was a possibility of a 2-hour commute. You balanced how much your time is worth, the likelihood of mandatory RTO, and where you want to live. low and minimum wage workers don't get to choose short commutes. But you also came into this with the claim that RTO was "reasonable", and if you've had multiple years demonstrating there is no need to be in an office, and multiple years for the details of your life to change, and I would argue that mandatory RTO given that is not "reasonable". It is clear that you are of the opinion that it is reasonable to force employees into a less productive, less safe, and more generally unpleasant environment for no reason other than "because you can". History is littered with things that were legal at the time, that we look back at and say "wow, that's f'd up".
- Jon_Lowtek 3y ago
  It looks like union busting, when the workers filing to unionize get an RTO for what was, in practice, a remote job, and a threat that failure to show up would be seen as "job abandonment" and "voluntary termination". The cherry on top: According to the filing with NLRB [1] the employer allegedly offered a "work from home option" to the workers should they decide not to unionize. Data is scarce, but from media coverage [2] it seems many were hired during covid and some have been clocking in from Florida and Chicago, for a position that is, only on paper, in Austin, Texas. 1: https://foiaonline.gov/foiaonline/action/public/submissionDetails?trackingNumber=NLRB-2023-000923&type=Request https://foiaonline.gov/foiaonline/action/public/submissionDe... 2: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-02-10/youtube-music-workers-call-strike-against-local-contractor/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-02-10/youtube-musi...
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > Cognizant changed its return-to-office policy and moved work to other offices, the complaint says. > Cognizant allegedly told workers that failure to move to and work from the Austin office would be treated as “job abandonment” and a “voluntary termination.” When a company moves your office and revokes your ability to work from home in response to a unionizing effort, that pretty clearly counts as trying to force you to quit.
whatgoodisaroad 3y ago
I would imagine RTO/co-working to be more of a benefit to union efforts, since organizing in non official channels is so greatly simplified.
- klyrs 3y ago
  Not if you can't afford to take the job because of commute/daycare/etc...
- Spooky23 3y ago
  It’s a double edged sword. It’s difficult to organize without using the employers resources. Some companies aggressively police lots of behavior. Walmart considers outside contact with other employees as potential off clock work and will terminate if discovered. The hyper-insanity over unions is really stupid. It’s really all about power and accountability. The inconvenience of having employees who can tell the emperor that he’s naked is drives the attitude. This is especially true at retail - lots of regional supermarkets are unionized and successfully compete with Walmart, despite Walmart’s advantage in purchase power and their carousel of the cheapest employees available.

1over137 3y ago

The current Canadian federal government worker strike is big on keeping work-from home (temporary pandemic policy): https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6822467 https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6822467

domador 3y ago

What kind of union victories would you prefer to see more of?

bugglebeetle 3y ago

>"fake" grievances such as the end to temporary pandemic policies This is why American workers need unions so badly. Disease that overwhelming killed low wage workers relative to other cohorts and is still killing over 1000 people per week, disabling countless more. Workers organize to protect their own health and people describe this as a “fake grievance.” Incredible…

giraffe_lady 3y ago
look man this boot doesn't lick itself ok