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Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by tyingq on Saturday September 21, 2019 @11:40AM (#21035965)
"HCL employee and union organizer Ben Gwin says HCL workers make between $30,000-60,000 a year, and it varies widely."

That's really low. I wonder what kind of work they do for Google.

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by pcnix on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:15PM (#21036176)
For Indian developers that's above average pay, and HCL has a heavy Indian presence.

Prices for developers outside of the US and Europe are actually quite low, and part of the reason is the low costs in other countries that let companies get away with paying less, and another part is that there's a lot of engineers available.

Even if the average engineer is not as good, there's so many engineers in India that companies have a huge candidate pool from just the above average ones.

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by rtempaccount1 on Saturday September 21, 2019 @02:06PM (#21036892)
I'd say it's mainly just the US, from my experience (UK outside of london) developer salaries in Europe are much lower than the US.

For one example https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Software_Developer/...

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by rocqua on Saturday September 21, 2019 @04:28PM (#21037738)
This is, in large part, because the cry of "fine I'll go work in silicon valley" doesn't work in Europe (because H1B visas are a bitch to get).
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by benologist on Saturday September 21, 2019 @11:43AM (#21035987)
I think the important thing is they contribute to Google's wealth, which includes over $100 billion in savings.
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by Operyl on Saturday September 21, 2019 @11:47AM (#21036004)
If I recall correctly, generally janitorial, stuff like that now.

EDIT: geez, sorry guys, I already admitted I misremembered down below. Sorry :/

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by danans on Saturday September 21, 2019 @11:58AM (#21036082)
According to their website, they are an India-based IT services contractor. Not janitorial.
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by rudiv on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:04PM (#21036121)
Yes, HCL is one of the oldest Indian IT companies, the name stands for Hindustan Computers Limited. It would be very unlikely that they were contracting for janitorial services.
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by Operyl on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:35PM (#21036292)
My bad! I got my wires crossed there.
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by dev_dull on Saturday September 21, 2019 @11:57AM (#21036065)
The painfully obvious answer is that the work is low skill. Why? Because the job market in the Bay Area is such that high skilled labor can easily and quickly find more gainful employment.

It doesn’t make it better for them to earn less, and a union is one way to group high and low skill labor pool such as the whole can have a better quality of life.

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by youeseh on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:07PM (#21036141)
This is not true. There are a large number of contractors working at Google, Facebook and other companies in engineering and other skilled roles. Their contracts are from 3 to 6 months long.

If you're in a bind and need a job, you get placed quickly by one of the firms supplying contractors to the large companies. Since you're in a bind, you accept making a lower salary, which ends up being around 60-75% of the base salary of a full-time employee without any of the other benefits of being full-time.

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by denormalfloat on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:12PM (#21036164)
There are more than 100k TVCs at Google. I don't think you can speak generally about them, because there is high diversity in their job roles.
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by 0xffff2 on Saturday September 21, 2019 @09:55PM (#21039146)
I mean this in the least pejorative way possible, but not all software engineering positions are skilled labor, especially at Google’s scale.
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by skwirl on Saturday September 21, 2019 @01:05PM (#21036483)
>It doesn’t make it better for them to earn less, and a union is one way to group high and low skill labor pool such as the whole can have a better quality of life.

It is definitely better for some workers to make more than other workers. Is this really part of the argument in favor of unions? I always thought this was an anti-union straw man argument.

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by goatinaboat on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:04PM (#21036125)
The painfully obvious answer is that the work is low skill

No, that isn’t obvious at all. Well it probably is relatively low skill for programming - because it’s HCL - but the reason it’s that low because this is indentured labour. Wipro, Tata even IBM are all in the same game.

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by tyingq on Saturday September 21, 2019 @12:09PM (#21036150)
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Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by freyr on Saturday September 21, 2019 @02:11PM (#21036918)
We've been hearing this same argument for twenty years.

It scared me away from the industry, back when I was in college and the scaremongers claimed that all the software jobs would move to India and the U.S. programmers would be laid off en masse. It never happened, and in fact, many programmers got quite rich shortly thereafter. The tech companies play a significant enough role in the U.S. economy that I can't see the money disappearing "soon," short of Elizabeth Warren dismantling them.

Also, having worked for an old-school tech company that refused to pay its engineers competitively, I've seen firsthand how a strong engineering culture can crumble overnight. The good engineers migrated to better paying jobs and couldn't be replaced. The company dug its heels into the ground, and put more arrows behind marketing and middle management and low-cost contract engineering labor. And that went as well as you might expect. I'd be surprised if they're still around in a few years.

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by jkp56 on Saturday September 21, 2019 @04:21PM (#21037695)
Software, unlike food or hardware, has a unique property: it can be replicated for free. Chefs have influence only on the meal they prepare now, while a software dev makes a "meal prototype" that's instantly replicated into every restaurant on the planet. When an airline chef makes a mistake, some passengers of that flight have to spend extra 30 mins more in a restroom. When a Boeing software engineer makes a mistake, all airplanes inherit this mistake and start crashing. When a neurosurgeon makes a mistake, one patient dies, but when a software dev who writes the software for x-ray machines makes a mistake, millions of people get cancer.
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Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by stjohnswarts on Saturday September 21, 2019 @02:33PM (#21037055)
Your statement right there is racist as it assumes a general trait across all white men, not just the ones guilty of it. It's the same as saying all black men are bad fathers (because stereotype). Both are hideously racist statements.
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Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by jkp56 on Saturday September 21, 2019 @04:27PM (#21037735)
It's a futile excercise because these tech people aren't the decision makers. You're blaming a waiter for how the restaurant is running its business. Those who make decisions are the big VCs (Sequioa capital and the co).
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by burntoutfire on Saturday September 21, 2019 @02:29PM (#21037036)
Isn't any blanket (and negative) statement about any race racist?
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Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by burntoutfire on Saturday September 21, 2019 @03:47PM (#21037482)
Who are those "white people" specifically? Can you talk about specific persons? For example, I'm white and I don't "use my whiteness to preserve my exclusive access to money" (would be nice to have such "exclusive access" though).
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by jkp56 on Saturday September 21, 2019 @04:29PM (#21037746)
You could also critize red cars for upholding the high price tags on fast cars.
Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by SturgeonsLaw on Saturday September 21, 2019 @07:50PM (#21038674)
Try substituting "white" for another race in your sentence and see how that sounds:

> Criticizing how Jewish men use their Jewishness to preserve their exclusive access to money and power isn't racist

If the sentence sounds bad, and that most certainly does, then the original is racist.

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by wind0w on Saturday September 21, 2019 @09:36PM (#21039081)
Yeah because anti semitism has long and violent history. White people have not been on the receiving end of systemic violence because of their whiteness -- they have perpetrated in and benefited from it.

Yours is a bizarre liberal conception of racism that totally ignores historical and material context, where you can just replace words in a sentence to prove it's racist. If you replace the word white in that sentence with another race, it has a totally different meaning, because the context is totally different.

White men DO have disproportionate access to money and power in the US, are you disputing that?

Re:Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contrac... by erikpukinskis on Saturday September 21, 2019 @04:09PM (#21037637)
What's racist about it? I chose my language pretty carefully.