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Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by ChuckMcM on Monday December 10, 2018 @05:57PM (#18651870)
I am impressed that these employees are able to talk about this stuff and not get managed out of the company :-).

Unionization itself though has had mixed effects in the US. From workers having their conditions and lives improved to city governments driven to bankruptcy. So it isn't all good or all bad.

Perhaps technology workers have reached critical mass at this point.

Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by Animats on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:24PM (#18652030)
I am impressed that these employees are able to talk about this stuff and not get managed out of the company.

Me too. I expect some people to be fired, but in some subtle way. "One out, all out". (Few today know what that means. Find out.)

If you want to see an effective union of creative and technical employees, see The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839.[1] They represent the major studio animators and some CGI people in Hollywood. They have about 2500 members.

A big advantage of being represented by IATSE is "crunch time = big overtime pay". Films do have scheduling crunches, and they come out of the production budget and the producer's cut. This is why film scheduling is a real thing and software scheduling is a joke.

[1] https://animationguild.org/

Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by nostrademons on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:52PM (#18652195)
> "One out, all out". (Few today know what that means. Find out.)

Could you link something, for the curious of us? I googled but the vast majority of results are scientific papers about the Water Framework Directive for assessing the health of bodies of water, plus a Wikipedia link to the "One in, one out policy" (not the same thing), plus a Guardian article that alluded to something about union-busting but never explained the history of the term.

Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by telotortium on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @07:04PM (#18660191)
I had trouble too - maybe there really is a capitalist conspiracy ;) The best references I could find are [1] and [2].

As far as I can tell, the point is solidarity - if one worker strikes, all workers must strike. Any scabs who go back to work will be ostracized by the loyal strikers.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=KUopAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA314&lpg=... [2] https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/one-out-all-out.9459...

Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by deogeo on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:06PM (#18651911)
> From workers having their conditions and lives improved

Like the 40-hour work week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by tptacek on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:30PM (#18652077)
It's straightforward to favor private-sector unions and oppose public-sector unions (and, for that matter, to have problems with particular private-sector unions as well). Public-sector unions have to contend with an incentive problem that other unions don't.
Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by CydeWeys on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:50PM (#18652181)
FYI, this would be illegal, which is probably at least one good reason Google isn't doing it. The right to organize is federally protected.

And there's very recent precedent on this front within the tech industry, too. Just look at what happened with Lanetix, which fired all of its software engineers after they started organizing, then lost the resultant NLRB case and now owe a substantial amount of money.

Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by epicureanideal on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:11PM (#18651940)
What's your opinion about why it hasn't worked out well for city governments?

Maybe a tragedy of the commons? "Well, it's not my money being spent, why not give the unions a bigger pension"? Whereas in a private company there is always someone who wants the company to continue to be profitable.

Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by physguy1123 on Monday December 10, 2018 @07:01PM (#18652238)
In New York at least, constructions unions extract large amounts of money from the government. Some examples that come to mind:

  * Lots of construction employees are mandated by unions to stay around (crane greasers I believe are an example) even though these employees do no work, and then managers have to be hired to manage more employees, etc.
  * Sometimes employees are hired to do no work at all
  * Highly experienced employees will be given menial jobs like coffee-fetcher sort of deal, but get paid very highly for it due to their experience.
  * The MTA has no negotiating power, the unions and the construction contractors agree on a price and then give it to the MTA
Why is it like this? I don't know, one could imagine all sorts of corruption, political plays to get the construction vote, political games to avoid seeming anti-union, who knows.
Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by manfredo on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:27PM (#18652058)
California has over a trillion dollars in pension obligations. Politicians make deals with unions that the government cannot afford because unions often become very politically powerful.
Re:Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Acr... by ChuckMcM on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:37PM (#18652113)
There are lots of opinions on this, and there are several cities in California who have gone through or started the Chapter 9 process[1]. When I read the material on these I see a fundamental tension between committing to planned future payments vs the ability to scale revenue to make those payments. As a result, any "baked in" payments, whether they are wage increases in union contracts or interest payments on general obligation bonds, can consume more than the available revenue. Bottom line is that things like pension obligations contribute to the problem but it takes a couple of things going south at the same time to drag a city under.

That said, responsible city management which is unable to arbitrarily change the tax rate by law (the fabled CA requirement of 2/3 majority vote) would not enter into contracts that would put the city's solvency at risk, and yet they still do.

[1] The factors contributing to a local government's decision to file for relief under Chapter 9 typically are varied and complex. From the information that has been made available to date, it appears that Stockton and San Bernardino's bankruptcy filings were driven by some similar factors including: long–term imbalances in revenues and spending, reduced tax revenues associated with the downturn in the economy, some constraints to reducing expenditures in the short term, and increasing costs to provide retiree benefits. Additionally, substantial borrowing appears to be a factor in Stockton's filing, and prior budgeting practices, such as borrowing from internal funds, appears to be a contributing factor in San Bernardino's case. By contrast, the bankruptcy filing by Mammoth Lakes appears to be driven by a single significant event—a recent legal judgment that required it to pay an amount more than twice its annual General Fund budget. -- https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2012/localgov/local-government-ba...