You're saying this like it's a bad thing. Why shouldn't employees expect, and get, better working conditions?

> engineers can "collectively bargain" with Google by simply leaving and working somewhere "better"

How is individuals leaving "collectively bargain", it's the complete opposite, it's individual bargaining, with all the perils that entails.

> Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options as there is a single or just a few employers (e.g. Hollywood, teachers, coal mining towns, hospital staff, etc.).

This is just a mis-conception, look at Germany where every industry has unions, regardless of size, and unions has a say in how companies are run, and what direction they head in. They make sure that shareholders and employees get input into the highest levels of leadership, ensuring that shareholders can't force decisions that benefit shareholders at the detriment of employees.

Finally Google looks like the perfect place for a union. Any company that rewards senior leadership for sexual harassment clearly doesn't consider it's employees important, and those employees should absolutely make it clear who generates most of the value in a company, and ensure they're treated fairly.

There are very few perils of leaving Google - a top tier company in an industry that is continuously struggling to hire enough people. If you are an engineer at Google and can't get a job somewhere else, I don't know what to tell you.

Comparing Germany to USA is pointless, very different government, history, culture, business climate, etc.

Employees pushing for change from the inside is probably the only thing that could ever make Google change, so this is absolutely a good thing.

If you are an engineer at Google and can't get a job somewhere else, I don't know what to tell you.

Something few people seem to understand about massive companies is that they employ some of the most niche specialists imaginable because they're literally the only business that needs those skills. Working you way up and getting more and more specialized can be very lucrative, but also very limiting in the number of employers who want your skillset. Leaving usually comes with a big step down in terms of money and title. You're essentially dropping back down to where you were before you specialized. It's not hard to imagine a lot of senior engineers at Google might feel a bit trapped there.

That’s not being trapped. That’s being greedy. There’s nothing wrong with trying to preserve massive TCs with the WLB of Google but let’s not pretend there is actually any plight here.

The truth is, many Google software engineers are unhappy with the political choices that Google are making. Yeah, they could vote with their feet and quit, but would you take a massive pay cut and financially destabilize your family as the first course of action? I wouldn't; I'd try to exact change from within, whilst protecting the benefits I'd earned in the workplace.

And all that's just looking at the individuals benefits. Unionising would mean that I, a straight white man, could help support policies that empower my minority co-workers.

This defense will be relatively easy for Google's leadership to counter. To the extent that it's used, the leadership will be able to say that the unionization effort isn't about working conditions. Instead, it's about political differences (and political differences that are distinct from what almost anyone thinks of as "working conditions").

I could be wrong, but "Google SWEs are unhappy with the leadership's political choices" doesn't sound like a winning rhetorical strategy.

It’s a classic principal agent problem. You want to take the voting power away from those with the financial stake and expect the people without a financial mistake to make good business decisions.

I'd say the second criteria is infinitely more useful, and empirically it works. The most stable bank in North America is democratically run by both customers and employees, I'm a very happy customer, and I know of many happy employees.

Tomato. Tomato. (This doesn't work on the internet.)

No doubt it's a trap of their own making but it is a trap nonetheless. The idea of giving up the fancy things that you've worked hard for, maybe having to sell your house, take your kids out of a school you pay for, etc just so you can leave the company you work for and go somewhere 'better' is a hard choice that no doubt feels selfish. The decision has a significant and material impact on other people after all.

Very few of us would prefer to earn a 250k salary that comes with the freedom to move to other companies, even though that's a lot, if there's a 600k job on offer instead. We'd all take the higher paying job and maybe regret it later. I don't think it's very fair to suggest those who are in that position are wrong or stupid to have put themselves there.

I had the good pay at Google and I left. I had to give up early retirement goals to do it but there are things more important than just money. You can still live a very comfortable upper middle class life in the Bay Area on 250k.

Additionally, most Google engineering positions are not that specialized and getting a position at another FAANG or hot startup with TC higher than 250k would not be very difficult.

I think what’s being stated is that if you can’t manage to be happy within the top 1% income bracket, maybe focusing on more wealth isn’t the way to find fulfillment. It’s not about being wrong or stupid, it’s about misunderstanding what needs to be optimized.

The only entity that stands to lose from their greed is one of the largest monopolies in the world. Why do you feel they need to be protected from greed?

Your responsibilities will be the same, though.

This phrasing is disingenuous. If you don't like what's going on you can stay and fight rather than giving up and leaving. The people unionizing are of the "stay and fight" variety. Where does this false dichotomy come from that your only options are to stay and shut up or leave and be vocal?

What if they don't have a shortage of labor but do employ a large number of people in a town?

Should the company continue to provide awful working conditions?

What should motivate the company to treat their employees better, if not the employees getting together collectively to say "we're not going to take this anymore"?

Are the employees dependent on their plight becoming a national scandal that shames their employer? Or should they be able to cause the change they need themselves?

See, for example, https://revealnews.org/article/how-amazon-hid-its-safety-cri...

Unions aren't just about wages and workloads, it's entirely possible that employees of tech companies (and shareholders of tech companies) that are unionized could be protected from the impact of shitty leaders through the power of collective bargaining and action that demands that abusive leaders and managers be held accountable.

I do think that unions are both the kind of mechanism that eliminates the worst workplace abuses ... but contributes to a workplace being policy driven and stifling.

There's already reasons why larger employers institute lots of policy and remove individual team, worker, and manager autonomy. But a counterparty demanding a lot of these to be committed to in contract forming its own parallel bureaucracy can multiply these effects.

(I've had that issue as well, where the people who managed the equipment were in a union)

Note: I think that's a misapplication of their grievances - it's one thing if your employer makes you move your office equipment to avoid hiring movers, a single person updating their desk or location should be an explicit exception

But I agree with you!! Unions can cause bad policy, and this is a reasonable example.

I keep everything on the table. If there are any benefits that they can provide me that are outside the scope of salary and workload, it's possible I'll be able to get something more valuable to me while being more favorable for my potential employer

Eg I might negotiate team size if I'm coming in to lead a team, I might negotiate benefits if I'm going to a sufficiently small company, I might negotiate how frequently I'm expected to travel for the company

Being able to negotiate quality of life is important because many employers offer _what looks like_ a generous package but then shove their employees into dangerous working conditions.

Remember that unions are always less powerful than your employer, and you can influence the union more easily than you can influence your employer (caveats on seniority in which case a union isn't for you), for better and worse

Why is it acceptable for the leaders of companies to subvert the company to serve the personal and ideological goals of the company leaders, but it's bad for the employees to do the same when they are often the ones who are called on to do the work for those goals, and are less likely to have the freedom to simply change jobs (especially during an economy melting pandemic).

I recognize that in general, the leaders of a company are the folks who are either selected by, or are the investors or founders, but at the end of the day, the impact that those investors or founders can have is strongly limited by the talent they can attract.

The entire tech industry is a shit show from a human rights perspective because of the ongoing imbalance between the folks who are making decisions, and the folks who are executing those decisions (see: the coinbase affair, the recent Uber ad spend revelations building off disclosures by other adtech researchers, the whole mess with Susan Fowler, the way Timnit Gebru was fired, and any number of issues that seem to come up on a weekly basis)

Unions can be problematic, but it is blatantly clear that tech investors and founders are basically the robber barons of our generation. In the pursuit of power and profit they have advanced us towards the type of cyberpunk dystopias most of the folks posting on this forum grew up reading, and most of the people posting here are the cogs that enable some of the atrocious privacy and human rights violations that are happening on the regular.

I am a strong believer in the role that unions play because I grew up in a community where unions literally saved lives because managers at a smelter wanted to maximize profits and workers didn't want to die from a massive cauldron of liquid copper or zinc exploding on them, or wanted effective safety gear when prying plates of zinc deposit from cathodes. It may not be quite the same degree of physical risk, but the folks who screen objectionable content on social media platforms certainly deserve protections. Gig economy workers deserve protections. Startup employees deserve protection. If government regulation isn't doing the job, then unions are the natural organizations to step in, as they have during some of the most prosperous times in history.

Virtually all of the concerns that folks have about shitty unions (and shitty leadership) can be solved through transparency, but it is incumbent on the leaders selected by constituents of those groups (union members and investors/founders/executives) to choose transparency.

My point is that your claim that "it's good for business" to treat employees so well they don't benefit from advocating for themselves is clearly false in one of the largest tech companies.

If you don't understand that, your view of corporations is rosy-eyed

Very few people would continue working their jobs if they didn't need to to survive. The legal, cultural, and competitive structure of corporations demands paying employees as little as possible for as much work as possible. Barring serious cultural and political change, I don't see how this could result in anything but adversarial employment for almost everyone.

Treating employees well is bad for business outside certain bubbles, and "the right thing to do" doesn't factor in to these decisions.

Sure, labour doesn't have to fight to reduce the pinching, but there's no benefit to the workers in thst

If the alternative is to sit down and shut up, I think it's time to be adversarial.

EDIT: just saw your reply to another commenter and it seems you are pro-union if needed. It didn't come across that way to me when I read your initial comment.

The company is not some helpless animal that just rolls over when a union appears. Especially if you regulate it well, like in Europe.

This is a statement made in ignorance.

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/mlb-mlbpa-reportedly-agre...

If we think unions are bad because they do bad things under certain circumstances then that should also apply to corporations, no? Worker exploitation, ignoring externalities and such?

So, we could get rid of corporations and unions? Or ... have both, since like any human institution, both are fallible.

so, what's your solution to the problem of fallible unions?

> Or ... have both, since like any human institution, both are fallible.

You are yet to prove that unions solve anything in the setting that you outlined.

How about just having corporations and a small government that doesn't prevent new players entering the market by restrictive laws and quotas, in place of those that fall prey to corruption, fraud, and short-sighted destructive practices? There's more than two options to consider.

Why not fallible corporations?

My point is simple. These are all human institutions. They're not "problems" with "solutions".

And, to answer your second question, I believe the scenario you idealize creates externalities like environmental pollutions which kills citizens, and creates conditions where companies exploit workers (consider what the food industry, meatpacking plants, etc, would look like without OHSA).

Precisely because you've added a redundant argument of fallible corporations to the thread that makes a case about corrupt unions that negatively impact law-abiding high-skilled professionals. This was the concern I initially raised.

> My point is simple. These are all human institutions. They're not "problems" with "solutions".

I think they are, unless these institutions have no purpose and do not set any goals.

> And, to answer your second question, I believe the scenario you idealize creates externalities like environmental pollutions which kills citizens

For that we've already got a court system that is capable, after a proper due process, of fining and criminally charging everyone who is proven to be guilty. I'm not advocating for dispersing them, I'm advocating for separating state affairs from economics, in the same manner and for the same reason why religion and church was separated from the state in the western world a few centuries ago.

> consider what the food industry, meatpacking plants, etc, would look like without OHSA

what responsibility do OSHA, FDA, SEC, etc inspectors and supervisors carry for regulatory failure? I know what happens to the producers and owners of those plants who fail to provide safe environment and products, or who commited fraud and got caught, I've never heard of government inspectors and commitee members going to jail for any of those cases that led to citizens' harm. At most, and in very rare cases with a lot of public pressure they get permanently banned from holding similar positions in the future.

Um it is the government that catches them and punishes them?

I had a difficult time understanding your comment - could you try expressing it another way?

Why allow yourself to be divided and conquered?

Most are convinced they are “special” or otherwise immune from anything that would warrant union representation.

At least until they maybe sustain an injury that makes them less productive, or even simply grow old enough to face age discrimination.

It’s always the privileged and somewhat myopic that discount the value of collective action. We act together to lift each other up. To extract the best conditions for our work and the most support from our employer because the ‘free market’ has given us coordinated wage suppression among tech giants and a mountain of sexual and racial discrimination in the workplace.

Together we are stronger. America used to get this more in the early 1900s. Then the ruling class got better at controlling the narrative and crushing class consciousness.

To the kids reading this who think they don’t need a union - nearly every positive workplace condition you have is a result of collective action in the past.

Entitlement?

You are entitled to what you can get the world to render for you. Not asking is allowing others to over entitle and enritch themselves at your loss.

Outside America it is obvious that billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs wield power in their own self-interest, and that workers benefit from collective action in their own self-interest.

But inside America the billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs are mythologized as benevolent actors, and workers should be thankful for the gifts graciously bestowed upon them.

No compensation is too high for billionaires, but if some workers make a good salary, that's seen as extravagant, and the workers should be extra grateful and stop asking for better working conditions, too.

It's bizarre how Americans celebrate ruthlessly competitive markets when workers compete against each other for food, shelter and medical care. But it's a cultural taboo to use those same competitive market forces for the benefit of workers.

It's what gives us advantages in areas like medical/technical research, powerful mega corporations that can effect global markets, and schooling. All at the cost of the lives of people that crank the cogs forward to maintain it all.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/07/covid-19-cr...

> “This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. “Shareholders get leftovers.”

Pretty amazing that someone could write this without a hint of irony.

[1] https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-ai...

...did you miss the first sentence?

>But inside America the billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs are mythologized as benevolent actors, and workers should be thankful for the gifts graciously bestowed upon them.

I've spent my life living in different parts of America, and this sounds very out of touch.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/03/02/most-america...

I've come across other polling that indicates similar trends.

Forming a union is not competitive, it’s the opposite. When you gather up all of the suppliers of something (in this case employees are supplying labor) and collectively fix a price that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.

It’s not a cultural taboo to be pro-union on the left because it’s not free market. It is a cultural taboo on the right precisely because they are seen as discouraging competition and rewarding tenure over competence.

Yes.

> that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.

This is so muddled.

Anti-trust and pro-labor policies are not at odds. Corporations and the people who do their work for them are not cut from the same cloth. When the owners of the world's productive capacity collude to fix prices, that's a trust. When laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity, it's not. It's a union. These are two different words for two different concepts about two fundamentally different kinds of entities (capital and labor).

Thinking of the wage relation as a bargain between equals is a cope. You're not as powerful as Google.

There is a reason we don't talk about employers (especially enormous ones Like Alphabet that are becoming so deeply integrated into modern life and politics that it's now difficult to fully conceive of) and individual working people as if they are the same kind of thing.

One is a supranational bohemoth that owns an enormous productive capacity, the other relies on wage labor to live. (That's not a sob story, just a true fact. You can rely on wage labor and still live pretty comfortably. I do.)

Is this really true for a job like SWE where all you need to do the job is a laptop and internet?

On top of that they have huge sway with governments and a hand in control of cultural production.

It's easier to start a software company than an oil company because it takes way less fixed capital but the same rules as the rest of political economy apply on the whole.

The feeling that tech work is mostly mental and somehow "immaterial," like we're just beyond all that concrete meatspace stuff, is really an illusion.

Edit: Downvotes are fine, but at least have the courtesy of adding to the discussion by explaining why the above point misses the mark

The whole point of a union is to eliminate competition on the labor side and ensure a given company is cornered into accepting the union’s conditions.

A company does not have to sign a union contract but those losses are part of the leverage unions use to balance the power structure

Following your logic, if your ISP has a total monopoly, and you sign a contract with them, that is pro-market transaction. Of course, we both know it isn't. Contracts aren't what makes a market. Competition is. And unions have no competition with each other.

Unions don’t have to compete with other unions to still have competition. They have to compete with non-union workers. There are laws prohibiting strike lines from allowing non-union workers through, for example

If the UAW went on a full strike tomorrow, GM and Ford would not be able to continue production. There just aren't enough non union auto workers. There is no real competition. This is the problem. It creates a situation that allows for rent seeking.

That’s...exactly the point. Collective bargaining (aka freedom of association) swings the balance between of power intentionally, but that doesn’t automatically make it anti-competition. That’s why it’s often in the company’s best interest to work with a union rather that not; they know there is a cost to bear for hiring and training new employees. There is the chance for rent-seeking, but it isn’t a forgone conclusion.

When rent-seeking does occur, it’s mitigated by mutually assured destruction. If unions get too greedy, they can drive the companies out of business so it’s in their best interest to renegotiate their contracts and pare back their demands. This is exactly what happened in Detroit after the 2007-2008 recession and why unions may have tiers of employee benefits.

To your point about it being a cartel, you’re right to a certain degree but I don’t think it has the distinction you think it does. Cartel, Co-op, Corporation, Cabal... they’re all groups working together for their own interest and there’s nothing inherently morally wrong with that as it derives from the individual right of association. The major distinction that makes one anti-competitive is when “the few” work to against “the many”. Unions are the direct inverse of that.

You can’t have it both ways. Either a single organization has the power to completely deprive a company of the labor supply it needs or it’s competitive.

If there are only a handful of people who intimately understand Microsofts kernel, it’s not anti-competitive for them to band together to ask for higher salaries because they aren’t actively prohibiting MSFT from hiring someone else. Having leverage due to a constrained supply of labor is not the same as being anti-competitive and not illegal except in a few edge cases (like what we saw with the air traffic controllers in the 1980s, for example)

Moreover, the free market still has checks and measures to ensure workers are treated fairly and equally. Unions are just another implementation of that - the only difference is that they're employee run not government run.

yep. Class consciousness exists in the US, but predominantly among billionaires and celebrities.

I've worked in a company with both union and non union staff and I believe the union benefited all of us without limiting the company in any meaningfully negative way.

Contrast this with shareholders and C level execs who have immense power and often world it to the detremen of the workers.

That same company was literally bought out and our office was shuttered.

Unionising allowed us to collectively bargain for better severance pay and allowed us to prioritize those of us who had additional family/visa considerations.

The union is (mostly) in place to work on ensuring benefits such as sick leave, parental leave top-ups, overtime limits, etc. They also are there to ensure that management respects the rules when dealing with the workforce.

Also, in Canada you are forced to pay union dues even if you choose not to join the Union, at least partially.

Unions are a way of balancing the power equation between companies and workers. Neither side should be in disadvantage.

If FAANGS were to unionize together the field would be even more imbalanced. For instance, Apple already makes US$ 1.9 million per employee [1] which is 19x its average worker salary [2]. Nothing wrong about that, it's a profitable company, but it doesn't strike me as if they're in a unfavorable position.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...

[2] https://www.zippia.com/apple-careers-825/salary/

Given that capital is overwhelmingly concentrated into a few hands, the job "market" is also a monopolization. You can get a different job but the owners are always the same

Yes they are. We're all individuals and have different goals, wear different clothes, read different books, code in different editors, whatever, but objectively we all have something in common by way of being workers in the first place: we rely on wage labor to live.

And crucially: we don't own the means of production (or we'd be owners and not workers).

Why should "that guy" have a voice? Because our fortunes rise and fall together.

Frankly it boggles my mind to no end that tech workers, just because they're contingently pretty comfortable while riding the wave of an advantageous labor market that gives them a lot of (contingent) leverage at the moment, don't understand that they (as single, individual people !) aren't standing as equals against like Alphabet, Inc. an institution that brings in double digit billions per year, increasingly has its hands on levers of policy and culture around the world, etc.

You're going to have to break that down for a 21st century software developer on a SV messageboard. Aren't the means of production increasingly our own brains? Can't computing resources be rented cheaply enough for the average person to bootstrap their own business ideas if they're worth pursuing? I'm puzzled to see stuff like this in the present day, I thought it had been discredited within Marx's own lifetime.

But whatever synonym we use for it, MoP is a concept that you can't really dispense with if you want to talk about this stuff productively. You don't have to buy into a Marxist worldview to use it.

I'll take a crack at a definition: The means of production is the conditions required for making the things that the economy makes, whatever that is. For oil production, it's land and mineral rights in oil rich areas, oil derricks, trucks, private roads, refineries, all the plant equipment to make a refinery work, tools, maintenance equipment, barrels..., I'm sure there's 65,000 more things...whatever happens to be required to convert dead dinosaurs into 10W30.

It sounds Marx-y, but it's a simple, straightforward idea.

In tech, MoP is things like intellectual property, data centers, etc. The lines are blurred a bit because when work takes place inside a worker's brain instead of in a mine or on a factory floor where workers push things around with brute physical force, it's not exactly clear who owns what. In my view that ambiguity is something employers have used to mystify the relationship between employer and worker. They try to convince us that we are all just working together to make the world better, and anyway, we're paid well enough so why complain and rock the boat?

But in the end the rules are the same. You can't make it in this system unless you own some means of production (or get access to them by starting a company of your own and becoming a capitalist yourself--which is fine, but by definition not everyone can do it), or you work for someone who has them.

A related point is tech production is not actually as ethereal and abstract as it sounds. Yes, code is just a bunch of immaterial mental abstractions, in some sense, but it's useless without a shockingly large array of computers, buildings, massive data centers which are expensive, difficult and labor intensive to secure and maintain. They suck up a ton of electricity and water and require armed guards, etc. There's a huge amount of hidden physical infrastructure and somebody is going to own it. Whoever does will wield a ton of power in our society, especially as we become increasingly reliant on tech in our everyday lives.

But the idea of MoP isn't even part of the controversial parts of Marx. It's just a description about how part of capitalism works, as he saw it. The ideas he draws on in that analysis come largely from Ricardo and Smith, hardly "discredited" radicals.

This is where I was disagreeing in the comment above; I think the barrier is now so low to entering certain markets (eg. SaaS) that it's meaningless to talk about some of these concepts in terms that are artefacts of the 19th century. I also think that there are far more people who don't want to do it than who want to do it but are prevented from pursuing a more entrepreneurial lifestyle by their economic circumstances.

Datacenters are complex and expensive, but it's now very cheap (in some cases free) to rent resources in them, because they have been commoditized, so I don't think it makes sense to talk about them as a "means of production" that the dispossessed masses have been alienated from achieving their productive desires through. Free Software is another area over the last few decades where barriers to entry in technology have been removed. I doubt that there are too many budding entrepreneurs who are put off solely by the fees to license certain non-free codecs of private datasets in cases where these are the only codecs or datasets that could be used for their business idea.

Exceptions to this that I see would include regulatory moats that big incumbents are happy to help build, and a more general tendency for governments to favour regulating private enterprise and then to show partiality towards larger businesses in an attempt to simplify the resulting administration.

Also, barrier to entry is a term that is also an artefact of the 19th century. Should we drop it? Of course not, it's useful. So is the distinction between owner and worker.

Empirically, for all this task about barriers to entry falling and everyone becoming an entrepreneur, the average size of a company has stayed about the same. Market and social forces are so that we will likely never have a society where everyone can be an entrepreneur. The reasons for this are complicated and go beyond "means of production", but it turns out those were also figured out somewhere in the 19th century, like many useful things.

This is such a strange neophilic reflex that people have. So the words are from the 1840s. Frankly a bunch of the concepts are even older than that. And yet other concepts that are still pretty useful--geometry, say--are even older. We don't need to re-invent language every decade, and thank God for that. No inherent virtue in novelty.

---

It's easier to start a software company now. No one will dispute this. But there is more to the world economy than SaaS entrepreneurship. Covid has provided us with a great unwanted, illustrative example here: capitalist production still works basically the same way in 2021 as it did in 1848. Some of our supply chains are extremely fragile now though, in part due to their computerization and "rationalization" over the last decades.

Suddenly we need thousands of masks and ventilators and they're nowhere to be found. What the hell happened!? Perhaps we just didn't have enough PPE SaaSes yet?

Now we have a few different vaccines (which is great!) but we're having trouble producing and distributing them fast enough in high enough quantities. There is a NYT article out today on this very problem that did well on HN.

How could our economy which is, on paper at least, vastly more productive than it was 50 or 100 years ago, fail us so badly? I mean look how many SaaS entrepreneurs we have! Look how low the barriers to entry are!

The point I'm trying to make here is that the basic relations of capitalist economy still hold despite all the changes between the 19th century and now, including any new developments in centralization of tech infrastructure (you can call cloud computing "democratizing" if you want, but it's really centralization). It's just easier and cheaper to become a small capitalist by renting some of the means of production (it's still MoP, still has the same economic function, even though the centuries have changed) from big capitalists. So what. If you're not a SaaS entrepreneur (and I keep saying this: not everyone can be) and you want a say in the workplace, you still need a union.

But again, the demand for SaaSes and SaaS entrepreneurs is, well, shockingly high, at least to me, as it turns out, but it's not infinity. If everyone could just become a SaaS entrepreneur and we didn't ever need any normal industries with normal employees anymore, you might have a point. But in the real world people still have jobs and still need unions to bargain with employers that would always rather pay them less and give them less say.

I agree with you that SaaS entrepreneurs are not the dispossessed masses. If I have seemed to make that argument at any point, I regret the error.

Just to clarify: I really don't mean to sound like a nihilistic radical by pointing this stuff out. Capitalism has given us a lot of good and a lot of bad. That it's way easier to start a software company today and make a good life for yourself really is great. It just doesn't mean that anything fundamental has changed about the system.

> You're going to have to break that down for a 21st century software developer on a SV messageboard.

I love Wendy Liu's explanation on this, it's the best I've found:

"The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation.

Consequently, fixing the problems with the tech industry requires revisiting the economic assumptions that underpin it. If technological development is to be truly liberating, it cannot be funded and developed by an imperial machine, driven by the hare-brained schemes of growth-hungry investors, and owned by a miniscule clique not accountable to broader society.

What’s needed instead is a movement to reclaim technology: to prevent its capture by capital, and direct it towards creating social value. Of course, the tech giants are not going to cede this ground easily. This is why the demand of the future will not be to tame or reform Silicon Valley, but to abolish it. For it to serve society, technology will have to be liberated from the constraints of corporate ownership and subjected to democracy.

If this is hard to imagine, it’s probably because we’re so used to the way technology works in today’s economy that most of us are unable to see beyond its horizons. But it’s time we started seeing Silicon Valley for what it really is: not separate from the economy, and not its saviour, but instead capitalism on steroids. All the negatives we associate with Silicon Valley — useless gadgets that no one needs, companies with billion-dollar valuations going up in smoke, exploitation of precarious workers — are a microcosm of a broader economic system. Abolishing Silicon Valley, then, means more than breaking up a few corporations; it’ll require a fundamental transformation of the economic structures that govern society.

Transformation

In the coming years you’ll read a lot of columns agonising over how to ‘fix’ Silicon Valley. Most will be technocratic, evacuating politics from the discussion. This is, after all, the framing that allowed Silicon Valley to grow so powerful in the first place: a binary choice between technological development on capital’s terms, or remaining stuck in the past. But structural problems require structural solutions. Rather than relying on ‘ethical’ founders or investors to change the system, we need collective action to challenge it.

This will mean undoing the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, which are intended to protect corporations and commodify information. It will mean revisiting the funding model that gave rise to the ‘go-big-or-go-home’ culture responsible for so many wasteful start-ups, shifting away from the return-driven venture capital model, and towards a state-backed social entrepreneurship with public responsibilities.

It will also mean building worker power, within the tech industry and beyond it. Within it, the long-term goal must be a union culture encompassing all workers involved in production. That means not just the highly-paid software engineers but contractors packing boxes for Amazon, or driving for Uber, or cleaning offices in Silicon Valley should all have representation in decision-making structures. And beyond the confines of the industry, a wider-organised labour movement needs to offer resistance to technology being used to facilitate increased worker exploitation through surveillance or regulatory arbitrage.

None of this will be easy, of course. Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles." [1]

[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

If I kind of saw myself as at-one with the basic Silicon Valley ethos, like I used to, this would definitely put me off before I fully ingested the argument.

I wish I had an example of an introductory text in the style I would like to see. I will try to find something like that. I'm sure it exists, given how much writing there has been on this topic over the last decade.

In that sense it gives voice to the anger of the oppressed, the downtrodden. It's pure solidarity. Marx' critique is ammunition. Ammunition to unshackle our chains and claim our communist freedom.

> If I kind of saw myself as at-one with the basic Silicon Valley ethos, like I used to, this would definitely put me off before I fully ingested the argument.

Would you be willing to share which bits speficifally put you off in this text(or would have before you didn't see yourself as at-one with the ethos)? Are there maybe any specific words or labels?

> I wish I had an example of an introductory text in the style I would like to see. I will try to find something like that. I'm sure it exists, given how much writing there has been on this topic over the last decade.

Yeah I would love to see that. Please do share if you want to and if you have it at hand.

I think being in the bourgeoisie sucks for the bourgeoisie, and I'm curious to what extent it is possible to describe the alienation experienced by the capitalists/dominators (who are consciously dehumanizing proletarians their whole lives). Class traitorism should always be encouraged (Engels, Geuvara, etc.), and I'm still exploring narratives that support it.

If you work in javascript, the javascript environment has given you your value, companies have bought into that talent pool and must court it to compete. Unless you provide value to the world without that ecosystem and without that company, your wage is necessarily impacted by those stakeholders.

You are free to press for your own goals, just dont be so sure those goals are divisible from your coworkers.

Google made something like 300,000 in profit per employee in 2019. There are regular complaints about benefits and pay multipliers being cut back. Why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible? People don't seem to complain when businesses do that.

Isn’t this roughly the same order of magnitude as many Google developer salaries? If so, how much more expensive can any employee be before he is too expensive to employ?

So the answer is they can afford to pay 300,000 more before the employee is too expensive (based on this comment anyway)

> Alphabet Inc's revenue per employee grew on trailing twelve months basis to a new company high of $ 2,143,353

[0] https://csimarket.com/stocks/GOOG-Revenue-per-Employee.html

Edit: Then you have to factor in the free breakfast/lunch/dinner, buses, electric car parking and the fact all my Google friends seem to rarely work > 40hrs per week.

That being said, all the 'grunt' work at Google is done by contractors, who are paid far less and while they get the free food they do without things like PTO and Sick time.

Yes. This is the correct way to look at it.

Another point I don't see so many people making here is it's about more than just raw compensation. A lot of people at Google don't like some of the things the company has sprawled out into doing now, e.g. war and surveillance tech.

A union is about creating some collective agency so labor can get what it wants, instead of being led around by the nose all the time by managers and owners who are motivated only by profit (or are at least not obliged to consider any interest, economic or moral, that laborers might have).

A union would give some strategic agency to labor--that is, the people who do all the work--at Google. If a majority does not want to make war robots anymore or whatever, they can assert their agency and get what they want, and stop making war robots or whatever.

I don't think the "earnings per employee" metric entitles employees to anything.

This is simply about improving the power differential between management and labor. If that means more money, so be it. It may well not. It might be more about working conditions or projects.

I guess my question to you is why do you demand democracy in government, but accept authoritarianism at work no questions asked?

I am not OP, but I’d say the reason authority is acceptable in a managed organization (not necessarily for profit - any managed organization whether the military, or NGO, or business, or charity) is because it ultimately has a narrow function: either fulfilling a mission, or increasing the wealth producing capacity of the organization.

Democracy at that granularity is somewhat irrelevant: either you’re doing the things (objectively measured), or you are not. Voting doesn’t lead to better policy decisions, just freer ones.

Of course the best performing companies aren’t managed in an “authoritarian” manner in the usual sense of strongman rule, because one person (or even a small group) doesn’t have all the answers. Labor/management collaboration and recognition of the importance of human capital is essential. This is why management doesn’t have as much power as it used to in modern industry: it is dependent on human capital retention in its labor force, which is very expensive to replace (far more than just skilled labor).

Collective bargaining becomes less about power disparity (when labor can make as much money elsewhere and management needs labor more) and more about pressure on systematic policies that are difficult to change without sustained external pressure: pay disparity, bonuses to sexual harassers, etc.)

At the bigger picture, life is a lot bigger than missions or profit, and democracy is essential. (Unless one’s mission is to own the libs, then I guess democracy isn’t so important)

For example, if we take this to it's logical conclusion and look a work culture where your co-workers decide how much you get paid, go look at Valve and see how that works out for them: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-v...

There's really no great solution to this problem as everyone wants more money. Either it's workers vs. management or workers vs. each other.

Employees can also vote with their feet, if they don't like their bosses, they can leave.

That's an absurd take because your boss suffers no consequences and you do.

It's not about fair, it's about exercising the power you have.

Besides, each part of the country is someone's property, but government gives you a say anyways. I would counter that the equivalent would be saying "why should anyone vote? why bother changing things? if you don't like your country why don't you go find a different one." We don't tend to accept that argument in government, why accept it in private enterprise?

Exercising one's power - sure, employees can do that, and I support that. I just don't think they should deserve special protections and rights for doing that.

If I had an employee and they would tell me "I think your management is shit and I want to make the rules now", I would like to be allowed to fire them.

Did you consider your management may be shit and maybe the person should make the rules now, not you? If you were harassing them, for instance, or bullying them, they may have a point and your single point of control over the enterprise may be harmful not just to the worker but to the company.

Just because you would like to fire them doesn't mean you should, as after all, the fiduciary duty is to the company and not to you personally.

That is specifically the value that the union would provide in this case.

If I had a company, I would like to have the right to make bad decisions. And who defines good and bad decisions.

With unions, in the end you have courts decide on economic decisions. That's bullshit.

Unilateral control over a business's destiny can doom it if the leadership is making poor decisions even when the rank-and-file oppose them. It's all easy to say the company should simply go to ruins but why should it? What if the good or service is solid, should the customers and the market suffer because the failing company has deprived them of it? Should the workers be punished because they had insufficient leverage to oppose those decisions? Should a ton of money and effort be wasted for an apparently pointless enterprise? If we live in a society that seeks to maximize life expectancy, and if corporations are people, why should we not seek also to prevent avoidable business failures, at least for those enterprises that are building useful products?

> If I had a company, I would like to have the right to make bad decisions. And who defines good and bad decisions.

Feel free to do that in a company of 1. As soon as your company exceeds 1 person, you lose the absolute right. You lose the right when your decisions impact the livelihood of those around you. It doesn't drop to zero instantly but it is attenuated as the company grows.

If you work for a company and you feel they are making bad decisions and perhaps your job is in peril (because the company may go down), it is high time to look for a new job.

And again, who then decides what is or is not a bad decision? Courts will get to decide on economic decisions. But lawyers have studied law, not economics. How does that make sense?

Someone you hire to redo your kitchen isn't employed by you, they're employed by their employer, where everything we talked about makes sense. That's why there's a distinction between an employer-employee relationship and a contracting relationship.

They of course get a say in how your kitchen is done: if it's not up to code, or dangerous, they absolutely have a say. And frequently. When I redid my kitchen my GC pointed out all these things to me and modified I my plans.

> If you work for a company and you feel they are making bad decisions and perhaps your job is in peril (because the company may go down), it is high time to look for a new job.

You're re-stating how it is today, but there's no reason it need to be this way, and it fails to meet the fiduciary duty to the company and its shareholders.

> And again, who then decides what is or is not a bad decision? Courts will get to decide on economic decisions. But lawyers have studied law, not economics. How does that make sense?

You don't need a law degree to know harassment is wrong. In fact mandatory training is part of your, wait for it, fiduciary duty. You don't need a degree to recognize bad management.

Of course they can have opinions or refuse to do things in certain ways. But they can't force you to have a pink wall color, or other things. At most, perhaps if the see something dangerous or illegal in your kitchen, they may have a duty to do something about it.

Likewise, an employee can refuse to do things by simply quitting the job.

Harassment: again, quit your job, apart from that, general laws about harassment should apply, independent from you being an employee or not.

"fiduciary duty" - where does that come from? Why does somebody suddenly have a duty to take care of you? I am self employed. Why do you get people to have the duty to take care of you, but I don't? Who should have the duty to take care of me?

Suppose you pay me to renovate your kitchen.

Now what is your duty towards me? Is it now your duty to see that I earn a living wage and have job security forever? All just because you simply wanted a new wall color in your kitchen?

> Of course they can have opinions or refuse to do things in certain ways. But they can't force you to have a pink wall color, or other things. At most, perhaps if the see something dangerous or illegal in your kitchen, they may have a duty to do something about it.

You're not their employer, you're contracting their employer.

> Harassment: again, quit your job, apart from that, general laws about harassment should apply, independent from you being an employee or not.

No thanks, that's an objectively worse world.

> Why do you get people to have the duty to take care of you, but I don't? Who should have the duty to take care of me?

Because that's what running a business is. Since you're self employed you have that responsibility to look after yourself.

> Now what is your duty towards me? Is it now your duty to see that I earn a living wage and have job security forever? All just because you simply wanted a new wall color in your kitchen?

Nope, that's their employers duty.

Unions are to protect the interests of employees that have no bargaining power. Big tech employees don’t need this. I can, however, see tech employees using their shares and influence to bargain for a board seat. I think Germany does this.

Ultimately it comes down to the relationship white-collar employees have with their employer. I work at a Big Tech co. I see myself as a hired-gun who is full-time because the taxes and benefits are easier to manage. I don’t care one bit about the company’s mission or values or whatever. I write code, they give me money. Either one of us can dissolve this contract anytime.

Because employment is a freely associated business relationship. I don’t demand democracy in my business relationship with in-n-out when I order a burger nor do I demand democracy when a company pays me for some software development.

I do demand democracy from a government that makes laws I cannot opt out of and controls the courts which enforce all disputes in my life.

Even the largest companies in the world can be avoided by someone who doesn’t want to do business with them. The same is not true of the government.

> Even the largest companies in the world can be avoided by someone who doesn’t want to do business with them. The same is not true of the government.

There's still the right of exit, as the libertarians call it. One can switch citizenships, or choose to relocate themselves to the few remaining frontiers where governance is minimal. Changing one's residence can be very difficult, but how is changing employment any less so?

I have no say in what’s on their menu. Contractors negotiate but I can’t force them to do anything with a vote like I can in a democracy.

> One can switch citizenships, or choose to relocate themselves to the few remaining frontiers where governance is minimal.

Not without moving and significant impact to life. In all but company towns (which are basically non existent now), it’s trivial to not have any meaningful relationship with a particular business.

Personally I think the category "employee" should be forbidden. It is a pure social construct. Why is anybody entitled to be an "employee" and bitch about "authoritarians"?

Everybody is an entrepreneur. If you have nothing, you sell your body and work hours. But that's just a contract like every other contract.

In any case, if those workers don't like the authoritarians, they are free to start their own companies. Then they get to call the shots.

Yup, and I don't think it's a bad thing, necessarily.

Of course they're authoritarians, you do what your boss says or you get out. That's authoritarianism. That doesn't mean it's wrong or bad or ill suited to the task, necessarily.

Singapore is authoritarian, and I'd say things are working pretty well there.

Don't know where you are, but in the US, the category of employee has different tax implications for both the individual and the employer. In addition, depending on the industry and role, employee status is often correlated with significantly better benefits.

So? Social constructs have a lot of teeth in the real world, and always have. Wishing them away won't have any effect.

> I'm saying there should be no special benefits for employees

So are you arguing that those benefits (i.e. health insurance) should be universal? Or are you making the argument that only those in a position to pay should have access to those things?

Laws and social constructs can be changed.

As for health insurance (as an example), how do you justify giving health insurance to employees, but not to other people, like self-employed people?

However, to address your question more directly, contractors are employees as well. It's not the job site's responsibility to provide health insurance, it's their employers. Contractors still have employers, you know.

This is true for vendors, but direct 1099 contractors are self employed.

In your terms then, just let everybody be self-employed and contract them, rather than employ them. That's the same result I want, that people are responsible for themselves and making a contract with somebody to do some work for you doesn't come with any additional baggage. Just plain money for work.

This is a fake world. In the real world there is history, capital and labor, and politics which is an expression of the unavoidable, built-in antagonism between the two. We don't all own an equal share of the means of production and just sit around issuing contracts to each other all day.

Do you understand that the econ 101 libertarian world of homo economicus rational agents is fake and we live instead in the real world with its institutions and conflicts?

Property that you can use to produce value beyond itself through workers' labor is capital.

Suppose you had a robot. Would that robot be labor or capital? Assume the robot has the same capability for work as you.

At the end of the day it is a machine, so "capital". Likewise you own your body, it is your capital.

Then I would be a laborer. The film company would be using my labor as well as the director's, in conjunction with all the capital they own (cameras, sets...) to generate a profit.

> they could really move your body around and position it in poses to take photographs.

Labor.

> I think your distinction of "capital" and "labor" is fake and completely useless

Ok.

It's not "mine" though, these are centuries old analytical concepts.

> unclear why you insist on it.

I insist on it because it's a sensible and already established way to talk about this stuff.

You guys are the ones making the weird nominal excursion by asserting that labor and capital are identical because you read in a Tim Ferris startup manual that "every man is his own capitalist!" or something.

You don't have to be a radical to just use these terms in their original way. I promise you that pro-capitalist theorists also talk about labor and capital as distinct.

Replacing your workforce is much harder than you make it out to be. All the institutional knowledge, the entire stack, how things fit together, how the tools are built, run, used. All that leaves with you.

You are likely right that this union, at this juncture doesn't have much say. I'm speaking more about unions in general, and this does feel like the thin edge.

IMO this isn't the highest value proposition place to unionize, that would be video games.

Absolutely correct.

This is an IS/OUGHT distinction. Who cares what labor "should" do under the employer's ideology. Not too surprising they want us to think of ourselves as equal players making fair contracts with each other, while one side holds the entire world in their hands.

Since we're not out in the streets starving we're supposed to shut up and be thankful, no matter what, because the ruling ideology says they've given us enough (money as a wage, though little other power). All the crying about "contracts," "greed," "entitlement," etc is just pure ideological smokescreen trying to get you not to notice the obvious, fundamental conflict between worker and owner. They want us to look at a long running historic power struggle and see something other than a power struggle so we won't fight for ourselves. Ridiculous.

It's hard to square that kind of return only benefitting shareholders. You'd be hard pressed as an employee to get a 3% raise or whatnot to keep up with inflation, or you'd have the call center people making pennies, or micromanaged down to the second, but over a milkion per employee was earned.

There is a certain point where one has to stop and reevaluate the nature of the value transfer going on. That same business ate years of my life keeping it afloat, but at the first opportunity for equity holders, dropped the floor out by sellout. Not that I'd want to go back given the business model but it does lead to somber reflection and a heartfelt contemplation of tge advantaged position held by the middle-man.

Presumably you were paid for your services. If you were unhappy with the pay, you should have renegotiated or changed jobs.

I hope you didn't intend it, but the comment comes across as critical and judgmental. The comment doesn't show that you are curious about the broader context.

Would you consider thinking about this from a different perspective? For example, try thinking and asking about what history and experience underlies this. In my view, someone who writes "That same business ate years of my life keeping it afloat" has a story to tell.

Think about this possibilities: comments are with real people, not abstractions. Every comment brings the opportunity to get to know someone's situation and experience.

I think unions exist specifically to help employees in their struggle to be greedy against a greedy boss or shareholders.

Do you work harder in a partnership where you get 50% or as an employee making 1% of your value?

Has corporate greed harmed its own profits and innovation by failing to adequately pay its employees?

I think greed is good to a point, then it becomes detrimental to self and society.

I mean it is possible that shareholders will work harder. But that is not an argument for unions.

Also, some employees are people like cooks or janitors. Will they really work harder, and what would that even mean? What if they just do their jobs? Does a janitor at Google really deserve more money than a janitor somewhere else? What makes them the "chosen ones"? Just lucky to work for a successful company?

Google makes a ton of money off of each employee, and could probably afford it.

https://csimarket.com/stocks/GOOG-Revenue-per-Employee.html

Google, like much of Silicon Valley, regularly puts forth the messaging that it represents the future, not only in terms of technology but in terms of society. ("Making the world a better place." "Don't be evil.") Forward-thinking often lends itself towards democratization, and of personal empowerment. So if Google wants to portray itself as futuristic, and its employees so lucky to be working for such a futuristic organization, then it would follow based on their own company line that janitors at Google might be entitled to more money at more traditional, hierarchical, less worker-empowering companies.

If Google didn't want their employees to set fires, then maybe they shouldn't taught them them the Promethean secret. Perhaps tech companies should cease pretending to be so much nobler than every other traditional form of business. The people running Google created this culture.

True about Google creating that culture themselves, I don't pity them. I just reject the sentiment in general.

Together they can get more of it.

Simple as that.

There is a point of view framed in things being equitable too. The motivations are more broad, balance of society, etc...

Then again, the members may simply need more too.

Costs and risks relative to income can change, or are not well balanced. This is a standard of living, needs argument.

What differentiates it from greed is the fact than an answer can come from either side of the equation. Lower costs and risks can work the same as more compensation does.

None of this, nor my earlier comment speaks to whether greed is good or bad. It can be, or not and context matters.

The problems with it become apparent when you realize that the standard isn't applied everywhere and is really impossible to evaluate fairly, so the conclusions are derived from personal ethics and concepts of "fairness" instead.

As an example, "they can afford it" is often used as an argument in favor of higher taxes on "the wealthy" (whatever that means), yet nobody says "you can afford to pay starbucks more for your coffee". You could have certainly afforded to pay more for your car or house or macbook, so why didn't you if "you can afford it" is the bar? Likewise many SV tech workers could "afford" to take pay cuts, but nobody's arguing that - why not, if "you can afford it" is the measure?

Depends on how you measure the profit. "Profit per employee" is an abstract measurement and for most people has little bearing to what they themselves do daily. Just because a company's profit per employee happens to be $x doesn't mean you personally generated $x - you could have generated a lot more, or perhaps been a net cost instead (projects fail and get cancelled all the time). You could make an argument that if you build a wildly successful feature you should get a big share of the profit, but only if you take a pay cut when things go poorly. Who wants that? This already happens to an extent in big companies btw, people on successful projects get promoted and more cash & stock so in a way they are sharing in the success.

> And since we're talking about immensely wealthy corporations, some of which have nice margins and billions of dollars of cash in reserve, it's a bit of an intuitive step.

This is just another way of saying "they can afford it", which I discussed previously.

Instead of:

>And since we're talking about immensely wealthy corporations, some of which have nice margins and billions of dollars of cash in reserve...

A majority of Americans face cost and risk exposure that exceeds their income. This state of affairs is unnecessary, and unacceptable. I would also argue it is lowering our general standard of living, ability to compete globally, and is expensive, due to the general savings associated with cost and risk prevention or management being significant compared to dealing with one or both post fact.

The discussion becomes about ending the unnecessary and undesirable mismatch between income and cost and risk exposure. It also centers on needs, leaving wants for a later time.

When this frame is in play, few people actually care how wealthy corporations are, margins, cash, or any of it really.

What they do care about is whether their income makes sense. Is the product of their labor, assuming they can even find jobs right now, appropriate given their cost and risk exposure?

It also becomes about "they can't afford it." And a majority of the nation can't. This is true for more Americans every year for decades now, and that all adds right up.

Today, the numbers are hard to ignore. COVID escalated things too. Not helpful.

No matter what any of us actually thinks is equitable, market rates, or any other thing, the hard fact is those costs and risks come due.

Someone pays or people die, suffer losses, harm. And those things happen because "They can't afford it." And for any given person, there are only so many labor hours available too.

Until trends change, and material improvements happen, the number of people as well as their zeal to improve will only grow.

People in this scenario really don't have options. If they did, we would not be having these kinds of discussions, nor see the ongoing escalation of them as we are today.

But we are having them, and they are escalating.

To be perfectly clear, some of this discussion is about people whose cost and risk exposure is well beneath their income. That is a wants discussion. Nothing wrong with wants, nor people getting after them however they can.

That is also not inclusive.

Very large numbers of people face costs and risks that exceed their income, and that is a needs discussion. There is a lot wrong with needs being unmet. That is the unacceptable and unnecessary part too.

Both should be represented in these labor discussions, and often they are not.

What remedy makes sense?

One idea was all this growth, innovation, wealth accumulation was supposed to make it cheaper to live, exist and show up for work.

That has not happened.

Cost and risk exposure exceeds income for most people. Sure, there are ways to manage it cost wise, but risks, and in particular, medical risks have grave consequences.

So how do we make it cheaper to live? How do we reduce risk exposure?

Or, maybe that is simply not possible to do.

How do we match income to costs and risks then?

Either will work. Higher income or lower costs and risks. Could be a combination too.

Which is it?

Notably, however it goes, success means far fewer people will actually care about wealthy corporations and such because they have a reasonable life to live and are quite happy to live it.

Ultimately, capitalism drives greedy behaviors in everyone either by choice or by necessity. At some point if you don’t adopt similar behaviors to the greedy, you will be taken advantage of, guaranteed. One of the flaws of this system is that competition is what props it up and gives it stability, so everyone has to play the optimization game as much as the most optimal are optimizing, otherwise they're 'losing' in our economic system, relatively speaking.

So yes, it's the same optimization like behaviors Google and other giant businesses in the capital ownership class are utilizing. Are the motives different (greed, survival, sense of 'fair' compensation)? Maybe, maybe not, but if you don't play the game it doesn't matter because you're being taken advantage of and the state will only decline.

I for one applaud Google employees pushing this and hope they can set a precedent for the entire industry. There is widespread rampant abuse in tech no one talks about or just ingore and it's often waved away because '...but money' and employment mobility. None of these fix the underlying problems and are often merely excuses made to allow abuse to grow and fester.

If a person is happy with their salary, are they really being taken advantage of? Just because they could perhaps get a better salary, doesn't mean they are forced to go for it. I suspect such cases are also rarer than one might think. I would expect most people to occasionally check their market value.

"greed" is just a negative way to frame it. Ultimately, striving for optimal outcomes is what stabilizes systems and makes them healthier and more efficient. Competition is the only known way to ensure fair prices. Every other approach can and will be gamed (corruption), but you can not fake prices.

It's also all nice to talk about being social, but I think many employees are less happy in reality when they find they have to compensate for their unproductive colleagues and even get less pay. That gets people riled up quickly in the real world.

Who cares what you think they're "entitled" to?

If workers simply choose to monopolize, of course they can do that. Of course laws against monopolies in general should then also be abolished, though.

You can not be in favor of unions, but opposed to monopolies, as unions are also monopolies.

In that sense, no, I don't care what they feel entitled to - there should just be no obligation to give them what they feel they are entitled to.

I'd wager that most unionization supporters at Google also support high taxes, a social safety net, and widespread unionization so other laborers can capture more of their own output.

I suppose they could try outsourcing again/more and see how that works out.

That is not a fair framing. Labor is not the sole cause of profit. Imagine a company that spent billions to automate every process requiring only a single human to push a button every 10 minutes to produce its output. This company would be making "billions per employee", but it wouldn't make sense to pay that employee billions for that job.

So it is absolutely a fair framing to state "why shouldn't workers seek to capture as much of their labor as possible?". If their labor produces capital which produces profits, why are those profits not fair game to bargain over?

In your example, it wouldn't make sense to pay the one remaining employee all of the profits, but it would have made perfect sense for all the employees who produced the perfectly automated factory to negotiate for a share of the profits.

if they were employees, they would've been paid compensation for making such automation. Unless they are a shareholder (either by investing initial capital, or by negotiated compensation in the form of equity), they are absolutely not entitled to any profit from their output.

We allow infinite returns to "shareholders" long after their risk has been reasonably rewarded. Why should we?

yes - because it didn't work any other way. Look at how communism fared? Tell me a way to incentivize people to invest their capital any other way?

Not all capital is the result of labor. Economists put around a third of modern capital to be the result of labor, around a third from leveraging capital, and around a third created by technology.

Labor, investment, and technology all drive new capital creation.

Labor. The labor of knowledge workers, which is what software engineers are called by economists ...

Where does Labor come from? From being taught skills - and that took capital to train someone before their labor could add value. All pieces are interrelated, and modern economies cannot work by ignoring that all pieces are needed.

>The labor of knowledge workers, which is what software engineers are called by economists

And those knowledge workers did their labor with zero capital investment before by an employer (or themselves)? Computers, tools, infrastructure all were provided so the knowledge worker could work, and those pieces required capital before the knowledge worker could produce labor.

I have hard time understanding why so many people cannot accept that capital is a valid and necessary input to creating things, including creating more capital, which can then be invested in yet further productive pursuits.

The first unit of technology was the product of labour and capital.

The first unit of capital was the product of land and labour.

If you operate recursively until the first unit of capital and the first unit of technology you end up finding that all value is the product of land and labour.

There are certainly a great many economists that agree with this definition. Actually, a famous economist gave a talk at Google that made this exact point!

That's simply untrue. When a stock tanks, billions in value is lost. When a stock surges, billions can be gained. That sudden change is not the product of labor, nor the destuction of labor, but a capital multiplier from belief.

Also, arguing that since the first of any process happened in some manner implies that everything later in the process is created the same way isn't true.

>There are certainly a great many economists that agree with this definition

A great many are Austrian school, and would argue things like this, but this is overall a tiny fraction, and none are among the world's top economists. Do you claim the majority or even more than a small fraction of economists would agree with this definition?

>Actually, a famous economist gave a talk at Google

Name?

If what you're arguing for is the Labor Theory of Value [1], which it sounds like, it's widely and almost universally discredited. Every model macro model I can think of creates value in the manner I described above. Some intro examples [2]

Here's another take hitting more modern economics [3]. The "land and labor" is an ancient and not very tenable argument from this modern viewpoint.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroeconomic_model

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production

But ultimately, that capital came solely from labour and natural resources. If you follow the chain of value, you invariantly end up at labour and nature, because those are the only two things that can actually create value from nothing else.

And no, this isn't the LTV. Read the comment carefully. Even if you admit that capital can create value, the capital still had to come from somewhere, and ultimately that somewhere is labour.

I think the argument can be boiled down to, “What is an army without soldiers? Or workers to maintain the robots?”

There are definitely sectors of the industry (such as manufacturing or insurance) where capital and automation drives value generation, but Google is in the business of writing software, which isn't really automatable.

I do think Google has good engineers, but they are really not that indispensable

I think this is a decent thought experiment for ownership of an AI sufficiently good at a hard and profitable problem. Should that company be able to collect those billions forever even if they no longer have to do any work?

All that money spent on automation paid for labor, who has an interest in the fruits of said labor.

Collective labor is one way to secure an equitable share of that fruit.

Also, someone has to pay for that output. How exactly does that happen when people lack income?

Fact is that company so automated needs sales, maintenance, innovation and all the stuff needed to endure and compete over time.

If they are not paying labor, their product would be devalued quickly, and or they would experience increasing trouble over time.

The ones who know how to deal with that have awesome position and would expect to be compensated handsomely.

which means more people can afford said product. Automation is increasing productivity and output efficiency.

There are two basic outcomes regarding labor:

One is to reduce labor and ride on productivity / efficiency.

The other is to work differently, better. Head count may or may not change.

In terms of which is better, there are strong arguments either way.

Everything costs something.

The first scenario is easy. Margins go up, labor costs go down. However, cost of change, maintenance, quality, business expansion may carry much higher costs and risks too.

In the second scenario, margins likely increase, but not as dramatically. People are free for other work, training, to innovate, etc...

Lots of ways this can all play out.

And that devaluation does mean NOT making billions per employee too.

Why not?

Why should it go into the shareholder's pockets instead of the people who actually do the work and create the value? What if the people actually working were to, I dunno, seize the means of production or something?

To be clear while I understand that there are many reasonable objections to socialism it bothers me that your comment presents capitalism as self-evident. Even if you believe that it's the best (or at least least worst) system, you should always question it.

If a company generates billions in profit the question of how this profit is divided among the owners and the workers should forever remain an open question I think.

Proponents of the shareholder value model would argue that the point of a business is to maximize that value, and that it's better to return that value to shareholders instead of giving it to employees.

In the case of the button pressing employee, if they can find someone that would press the same button for minimum wage instead of billions per year, with functionally equivalent output, then from that perspective it would make sense to replace that expensive employee with a cheaper one, as that would maximize shareholder value.

In practice, things aren't as simple, since value maximization can have all kinds of perverse effects (eg. in that model, dumping sewage into a lake is a great idea if the fine is smaller than the resulting shareholder value) and shareholder value is kind of detached nowadays with profitless companies and many companies not electing to pay dividends.

In a company like Google the argument that the workforce is effectively just a commodity that could be replaced easily and at will is obviously not applicable. Most of Google engineers are not button pushers.

This example is nonsensical as a bunch of behind the scenes contractors and management presumably set up the system. Except that as soon as the contractors leaves, you’ve lost your primary factor of production: the knowledge of how the whole thing works. the days where management doubles as knowledge workers are long gone.

As for profit sharing, that is a longer conversation, but most of the largest companies today do profit sharing in the form of stock grants, pension and share purchase programs.

One of the most depressing things about the US is the corporate authoritarianism that many employees seem to suffer from.

Of course shareholders should have priority over workers because... that's just the "natural" order of things?

If a company fails, shareholders risk some small percentage of capital they can mostly afford to lose, while workers risk poverty and homelessness?

It makes no sense at all to me. Not just from the point of view of comp, but from the point of view of democracy. Because you can't have a functioning democracy when you have huge power differentials between different castes.

Unions - including board representation for unions - are one way to shrink those power differentials. They're not the only way and they're not infallible, but when they do work they're guaranteed to better than nothing.

They not only redistribute income, but they also give individuals collective pushback against corporate bullying and abuse.

Or perhaps you'd rather continue to grumble that HR is always there to take the company's side, but do nothing about it?

The concern from people like myself is that another word for a union is a cartel. When companies form cartels and engage in anti-competitive behavior, we penalize them severely (in theory at least...but that's another issue). Yet when labor colludes, we simply call it a union.

Tech is especially interesting because the usual claims of "workers have less power individually" (which is always true in all industries) is really really not a great argument in tech. The labor market in tech is so unbelievably competitive, and the average worker has leverage that is only seen in the upper echelons of other industries.

This is a popular myth but if you do any research you’ll learn it’s not true. There’s no such requirement because there’s no way to reliably predict the future impact of decisions: for example, does paying “too much” for employees lower turnover and avoid them starting competitors? Skimping on maintenance, outsourcing jobs, or taking on debt will definitely “maximize” shareholder value for a little while, until the bill comes due.

Think for a minute about how you’d argue any of those points in court and you’ll understand why the real laws have significant deference to executives’ judgement. Neither side would have any trouble finding people to say their decision was best, and even after the fact there are inevitably many factors which people can point to when explaining whatever happened.

Seems far better to unionise and try to institutionalise and lock-in better pay and working conditions then to count on always having a hypercompetitive labor market and obscenely profitable employers.

That isn’t a cartel and there can be multiple, competing unions working for the same type of workers in the same industry.

That's the definition of cartel. Unions exist to maximize the amount they extract from buyers of labor. This is rent seeking plain and simple.

What's more, they don't compete with each other, which is what corporations must do. Why does the UAW get to enjoy a monopoly on the sale of autoworker labor? Should Ford and GM and Chrysler be able to unionize together to keep wage costs lower?

Why not? If you go talk to your manager and tell him "I have another offer at XXX, I want you to match it or I'm leaving" what is going to happen?

In the past, I've been quite open when I thought that I needed more money to my manager, and have even given specific ways of making me "not distracted by money concerns". Sometimes they can meet those goals, sometimes they can't.

Personally, the offer as you've given it is probably more adversarial than I'd prefer. Something like "I feel like I'm worth more to the company than X, I feel like I'm worth Y, and here is a list of reasons, here is my career goals, etc etc". Then if they don't match it, you can accept that other offer. But YMMV.

Oh how quickly we forget. It wasn't all that long ago that Google was involved in a massive wage fixing scandal (along with darn near every other major player in the "big tech").

This article (from 2015) "Apple Makes $407,000 Profit Per Employee, Walmart And Retail, $6,300: Who's The Exploiter?":

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/12/28/apple-ma...

So you missed the part of the article that explained they will commit a portion of their salary to fund the union?

They are working for a company known to hire union-busters, fire employees trying to unionize or point out issues, and you want to argue that this is the safe way to try to follow their ideals and principles? This doesn't make much sense.

What nonsense. Comparing two countries is not the same as equating them. Of course we can compare and contrast the two, taking into account the differences. To suggest we cannot compare two different things is to deny a crucial tool of abstract, critical thinking.

Alphabet makes $1.7 million per employee. Its clear that those employees don't necessarily individually have that level of contribution. Nor is it that the business model that sergey and larry made would necessarily be possible with any given number of people who aren't sergey and larry. Its much more about the ratio.

The business idea + investor money is the original capital for the business. Sergey/Larry and the investors deserve to be compensated, and are, wildly. No problem there. Basically everyone believes that inventors and creators have all sorts of rights to be compensated for that. The question is how much, since they utilize the labor of others to realize their goals.

The smart move is to have a contract that addresses various aspects of work.

Collectively bargaining for hundreds or thousands of employees is obviously more powerful then a single individual bargaining against the same employer, especially when you factor in the information and resource asymmetry that exists in the latter situation.

Or not join at all, which is fine, but punching down and across at your coworkers comes across as not being a team player.

Why shouldn't Googlers be entitled to more of what they produce?

If you're a talented professional at Google, and want to make a positive impact in the world, join a company that cares about making a positive impact in the world.

Eg. Google workers don't like the facial recognition or censoring search results in China.

Getting a new job isn't going to change that, nor is closing down orgs going to be part of your job offer negotiation

You're entitled to as much as you can negotiate. Isn't this a founding principle of capitalism?

If collective bargaining allows employees to negotiate more, then shouldn't they negotiate more?

This mindset in the US that workforce empowerment is bad has to stop. It feels like the middle class in the US is fighting ferociously alongside the mega-corporations in obliterating the middle class. Corporations are not your friends. The C-suite at corporations, and the shareholders are not your friends. They are not enemies, but because they are more like an amoral hivemind than a single benevolent entity, they'll naturally gravitate towards maximizing their payoff, even if this is at the expense of the workforce. Again, I'm not saying there is outright malice there, it's just the natural optimum state for the a group of entities who currently hold most of the power.

The US is basically a feudal society in everything but the name. If the Google employees manage to get traction and their efforts spread to the other parts of the industry, and perhaps even other industries, and the balance of power tips even just slightly back towards equality, that's already a win in my book.

The difference is that people associate a union with forced membership; people who wanted to work at Google and to negotiate directly with Google, rather than accepting what the union negotiated for them, wouldn't be allowed to. If the union membership was entirely voluntary I imagine most people wouldn't object.

The other aspect (and I'm not trying to make a strawman here), is I'm getting the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" vibe from your post. People would object to a collective under the pretext that they are special among the 120k googlers and would somehow be able to negotiate a higher comp than what a hypothetical collective agreement would force on them.

What I found downright comical is this objection comes before the union is formed, before any details about how compensation would be handled is even discussed. So again, it feels like the very people who would be empowered by this move (since it is them who the collective would represent), object to the concept before even discussing the details. All under this uninformed notion that they'll be prevented from partaking in outsized compensation in the future when they inevitably rise to the top echelons of Google.

I call this uninformed, because unless any of these objectors have information, they can't know what the comps would be, since it was not discussed to the best of my knowledge. Nevermind the fact that by definition, most Googlers will not rise to the very top echelons because space there is naturally limited.

In addition, even assuming someone is a good negotiator, they generally can live without work for far less time than a particular employer can live without an employee filling a particular role. So people will often take a less-than-optimal compensation package because a job today that pays the bills is far more valuable than a job tomorrow that has the "best" compensation package.

I'm not saying collective bargaining is the only -- or even the best -- solution to this, but it's not as simple as just saying people should negotiate more.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Good thing patio11 doesn't demand a percentage for the millions and millions of dollars he is responsible for people collectively getting in increased salary/comp.

Winking, but not in the least bit a joke.

It is not clear whether these employees are actually in a good position for negotiating. The idea behind unions is that an employer is not willing to lay off all the employees that are unionized (because this would lead to a sharp decline in productivity and thus KPIs). I consider how many products were scrapped by Google as quite some evidence that Google would be nearly as successful if it fired the unionized employees and continued working with some "core team".

This does, of course, not mean that I endorse this reality, but when you negotiate, you better know what leverage you actually have.

I think this is a slight perversion of the truth. A union that relies entirely on industrial action (a.k.a. strikes) to get a company to change, isn't a good union. If a union walks into every negotiation with just an ultimatum, then very quickly the otherside is going to get fed up of their bullshit.

Ideally a union should be working closely with senior leaders to find win-win situations for both employer and employee. An an obvious example would be preventing Andy Rubin from getting a $90mil payday for sexually harassing people. Clearly that's not only a serious injustice, but was ultimately always going to end up public and damaging Google brand.

A union could help senior leaders find a better solution, part of that would be providing representation to those sexually harassed so they could bring a stronger case, and make it much easier for other senior leaders to throw Andy Rubin to the wolves.

If the solution is already of economic advantage for Google itself, you simply don't need a union since it is already in the economic self-interest of Google to apply the solution. Employees unionize to have leverage against the employee for topics that employees have an interest in, but are of economic disadvantage for the employer (historically in particular salaries)

Doing crime, cheating, being abusive, generally are more profitable than not doing it, in the absence of consequence. 'The economic self-interest' of Google is to be absolutely monstrous, if and only if it can get away with it.

And since it can…

If those unionized googlers are worth their salt, can't they use more aggressive negotiation tactics, at least like a DDOS?

You must have not met the publicly employed unions we have in other countries. Teachers, nurses unions in my country for ex. threaten (and sometimes they do) all the time to down their tools to relative success. Sometimes the only way to get a point across your deaf employer is the way of the iron fist.

It's also illegal.

Then you find another pretense for firing many of them.

Addendum: There exist so many oblique "performance metrics" you can apply on the employee to find such a pretense.

I think one important aspect is this union includes their contractor workers, which are treated far worse than Google SWE's, this allows the union to do collective bargaining on their behalf. Which I do think is a pretty worthwhile goal.

Entitled? Who's talking about entitled? I thought we were talking about negotiation and leverage, since, you know, corporations are all about money and profit.

Is there some theoretical upper limit on what employees are entitled to?

Ah there it is. The libertarian's go to when one compares the US to any country with better institutions such as universal healthcare, unions, etc. We couldn't possibly do that here, no, American 'exceptionalism' only goes so far it seems.

With unions it will get harder to fire them and at the same time they will need to be compensated equally.

Software is not a profession where output is proportional to work hours like blue collar jobs. This will demoralize engineers to work smarter & harder.

There's a good argument to be made that a big chunk of the value of an engineer to Google is strategic, simply that they are locked up and aren't working at FB, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft. I was never at a high enough level to have a view into the data that would confirm that, but it certainly felt like even if you weren't particularly productive in the environment everyone up the ladder was perfectly happy to let you malinger on the payroll forever, as long as you weren't so bad that you did damage to someone's pristine art project of a codebase. So maybe inability to fire isn't really such an issue - even now, seeing anyone fired at Google, let alone an old timer, is extraordinarily rare.

This is, of course, why Germany is famously an engineering wasteland with no notable impact on the global economy.

In reality, it all comes down to contracts: union employees can have performance incentives just like everyone else. The primary difference is that they’re above board and consistent because they come from a legal agreement rather than private negotiations between individuals and companies.

I suppose you're only referring to _software engineering_?

Because in traditional engineering Germany is a powerhouse, with countless market leaders in their individual niches, plus the ubiquitous car and machinery industries.

Either way their holding will be miniscule, even in aggregate, compared to other shareholders. Even if it wasn't miniscule, they would still need to organise, maybe form some sort of coalition, or "union", in order to leverage their collective voting power against other large, unified, shareholders.

Even were they, the voting capability of such a share is ineffectually small; this is the "why you can just not spend money at MegaMart if you care so much" [because singular action doesn't work but we can make it sound just viable enough that you go away] argument tilted a little.

And talking of employees shares lobbying for changes to the taxation of those to make it fairer would be an good thing for unions to lobby for

Are employees complaining/concerned about working conditions here?

I'm trying to imagine how Google would be a terrible or dangerous place to work.. especially after working from home for ~10 months now.

Well, well... Germany it's far from being true unions working. They are more like "labor rights consultant company".

Edit:

To all the skeptics, look, out of all the thousands of tech companies, how but one of you just try it. Can we just try it? Like, all of you join it, and just try it out, so we can actually have one real world example to discuss in this fantasy ‘to union or not to union’ debate.

I’d like to at least see one attempt, one example, that way we can all point to and say ‘oh shit, google sucks now’, or ‘oh wait, it’s still a multi billion dollar company and the world didn’t end, here are the pros and cons and the overall conclusion’.

We can’t even do that because the damn thing doesn’t even really exist for any of us. This actually working out means it spreads industry wide, the implications are bigger. So could we try it? Just try, nothing more. Please? Pretty please?

I wanted to be civil, but I just have to ask, are you fucking stupid or something?

Oh wow, you’re right, that is abuse! You poor thing!

> I wanted to be civil, but I have to ask, are you fucking stupid or something?

I’m not offended, but it doesn’t look good when you completely fail to read the question, answer a different question, and then call the other person “fucking stupid.”

It sounds like the answer to the question that I actually asked you would be “No, absolutely not.” Otherwise, you wouldn’t make the laughable suggestion that lack of a 401k is in any way abusive.

And obviously the experience of blue collar workers is going to be different. This is a thread about tech companies like Google.

See you on the other side of the shuffle.

Edit: Read the other fucking sentences in the response. I’m take the holistic approach you selfish twat. It’s not all about what happened to me.

P.S - I hope we can still be friends, sincerely.

And the Companies in Germany pushes more and more the workforce to outside of Germany. The company that I work for has moving massively the workforce to Czech republic, China and since 2019, Bulgaria. I could imagine Google doing the same.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25635380

Citing German unionization as support for unions doesn’t help your case.

have their cake and eat it too is absolutely correct. And the reason why we want to keep it the way it has been, is that the status quo productivity maximization is what has resulted in our current high pay and quality of life.

> individuals leaving "collectively bargain", it's the complete opposite, it's individual bargaining, with all the perils that entails.

The benefit of market rate is that it's fundamentally sustainable, and fair. When businesses collectively bargain, we call them "cartels"

>look at Germany where every industry has unions, regardless of size, and unions has a say in how companies are run, and what direction they head in. They make sure that shareholders and employees get input into the highest levels of leadership, ensuring that shareholders can't force decisions that benefit shareholders at the detriment of employees.

Because shareholder need to make decisions to improve shareholder value even if it means it's going to suck for employees. That's an important part of the system. You need to let go of deadbeats. Go ahead look at Germany. All their companies are very old. There's no room for startups. The only halfway relevant company they've produced in decades was a complete fraud. If the USA was like that, Google wouldn't even exist.

Shareholders provide real value. For the most part from the fact that the business wouldn't even exist without them. How much they provide is supposed to be determined by the cost to replace them, the shareholders, by starting a new company and competing with the old one.

> employees should absolutely make it clear who generates most of the value in a company,

This would be hilarious. Only a tiny fraction of Google employees work on a part of the business that actually makes money.

Most of the value google generates comes from their monopoly on search, not from workers. It would be trivially easy for google to crush the unionization efforts, sack more than half their employees, and increase theor profits.

Leaving changes nothing, it just accelerates the bad behaviour because the obstacle to the bad behaviour removed itself. A single person, even a team of engineers, leaving a FAANG company will have near-zero impact on the behaviour, functioning or profitability of that company. The action will not change management or ownership's perspectives on anything. They'll simply hire someone else, and promote internally if they need too. Even when you have a celebrity engineer like Tim Brey leave Amazon, publicly explaining why, outright slamming some of their behaviour, nothing will change. Mozilla seems to think it can function exactly the same as it did before (in terms of mindset) having let go of 25% of its staff. In the UK we recently had several politicians leave their senior positions within government or their party over disagreements in policy... and nothing meaningful has changed.

Unions are not just for protecting jobs, they're much more about staff having a voice, if not a seat, at the executive table. Unions can help influence senior decision-making. Most of that is about job protection, pay, quality of life issues because in blue-collar jobs those are the key issues. But in white-collar jobs a union can represent the opinion and aims of staff in a way that isn't obvious without them.

Leaving improves conditions for the worker and that’s the biggest thing for me, the worker.

This is a huge change, the biggest I think, as I can change all of my conditions by finding a company that gives me what I want.

I think to a lesser extent since I’ve frequently seen that smart people leaving for specific reasons changes company policy.

I was just trying to show a simple contra to parent’s comment saying that leaving changes nothing as that seems simply false to me.

As they leave for, perhaps, a unionized job?

I was with you on the parent comment, but then had a think about it and I agree above, someone who leaves the company is a non-worker for the purposes of this argument

Thinking that benefit to employees isn’t relevant because they don’t exist for purposes of the argument will leave out many interesting possible solutions.

I don’t think the goal is to maximize for a single company as it’s possible to maximize for the system that has both the company, other companies, and other workers.

But it’s not reasonable for me to assume that readers would get that from my quip.

I think that I try this to try to break out of the paths where we inappropriately limit the scope to the point we can be sound in designing a solution that fits our narrowed scope but missed the goal that we were trying to achieve. I think in this case that the assumption that the goal is to fix google leaves out the individual who has mixed duties to the organization and themself. I probably get too emotional when I frequently see discussions that try to box me into being part of the solution and I see this quite a bit in product design. I see discussions around products where a complaint is met with discussion around the need to provide a solution. So the discussion spirals around kind of assuming the only options for users are: 1) propose solutions, 2) keep using. But there are three options: 1) propose solutions, 2) keep using, 3) stop using. And assuming that all users operate with only the first two options makes it more likely to only design around those two.

Personally, I would feel obligated to make right something I did that I thought wasn't good for the world at large.

Relatedly, this is why I pick my employers (and, when consulting, my clients) very carefully.

So I don’t think I am responsible, but do feel guilt or pride based on organization actions. For a historical example, even if I’m not building the slave ships, I wouldn’t want to work on building them. Depending on the particulars I would either try to change the firm to stop this practice, or leave the firm for another job and then use other legal actions to stop this practice.

You have two incorrect assumptions here:

1. Non-union filmmaking is absolutely a common thing. Most crew members start their careers on nonunion shoots. Further, not all filmmaking related unions prevent their members from participating in non-union shoots (though some do and others will encourage you to call the shoot in if the budget is high enough to justify union participation).

2. Most crew on a film are not working for a specific employer on an ongoing basis. Generally, crew are hired on a contract basis for individual projects.

And there are some phenomenal teachers out there. There are teachers that change lives profoundly. But they don't need the unions, and the terrible teachers who should be fired /are/ protected. It's really messed up, most people have first-hand experience with it, and they are a corrosive factor in the end.

Public schools, police departments, etc., are usually "political" entities, run by elected officials such as school boards and city councils. I would say there's no guarantee whatsoever in these cases that the leadership of those entities are even interested in compensating/promoting the "top performers" among teachers, or police. There's no direct financial incentive. The "outcomes" of a school — student education — don't provide much of a feedback mechanism to the financial performance or governance of the school. Likewise with police departments, etc. If anything, poor performance by these public entities may lead to calls for increased funding, standing the incentives on their heads.

Part of the reason for public employee unions is to protect the members specifically from political interference. The alternative is not necessarily "merit" based compensation but rather political favoritism and retribution.

And yet all forms of public sector employment, regardless of union status, are treated as staffing agencies who's hiring can be manipulated by those who traditionally hold the power of political interference. The best way to step up your career as a teacher, cop or other bureaucrat is to know a guy who knows a guy who's owed a favor by a politician who can write a recommendation on your behalf to an open position that you want to step up to. This is how people move from line level positions to administrative positions. (And before anyone says "but the police", they are somewhat insulated because they have strict traditions in their industry that have sway over career advancement.)

If the purpose of unions is to insulate the labor pool from political meddling then they have done an incredibly poor job at it.

I'm much more inclined to believe that the purpose of unions is to extract maximum concessions from the employer(s) for the benefit of the people they control while ignoring any externalities. In settings where labor is interchangeable and employed privately the benefits are clear and the downsides are very limited. But when you start talking about the police and teachers unions circling the wagons to protect people who behave badly while simultaneously attempting to extract maximum money from society it becomes much less clear whether the unions in question are an overall good thing. It's one thing for the union to try and extract more concessions from a corporation that would otherwise pocket the money and supposedly has competition to keep them from just passing on the cost without pressure to reduce margins. It's a whole different ethical ballgame when society will be footing the bill and there is no competition to keep downward pressure on costs.

I agree that this is one purpose of unions. I just disagree that it's the only purpose. Unions have multiple purposes, and it's a common misconception that there's only one specific type of benefit to them. This is why I intentionally phrased my comment with "Part of the reason for public employee unions is..."

How is that a surprise, of course politicians give public sector unions what they want -- they hold the cards, a huge voting block and cause problems. Most of the tradeoffs are passed down the line so the politician doesn't care either.

That's not what I said? I said the general public (who are unorganized) have a great deal of deference for police officers, and the power of police unions is merely a consequence of the public's deference to police.

> How is that a surprise, of course politicians give public sector unions what they want -- they hold the cards, a huge voting block and cause problems.

It's not a huge voting block. Union membership is much lower now than it was, say, 50 years ago. Moreover, politicians don't give public sector unions what they want. Here in Wisconsin, the state legislature stripped public employee unions of collective bargaining rights. There were massive protests at the state capitol about this, but in the end it didn't matter. Afterward there was recall campaign and election against the Governor, but the Governor won the recall election.

It feels to me like many people still have a 1960s conception of labor unions and their power, but empirically speaking, labor unions have been on the decline for decades, perhaps starting with the Reagan years. Now is not the Jimmy Hoffa era anymore.

That’s one side of the coin. The other side is to be a large enough entity to influence elections and then “negotiate” with those you helped get elected. Is it any wonder that states with large public service unions are in debt (even with high taxes) and have unsustainable pension obligations?

I’m not blaming a party here either. Democrats and Republicans tend to align with teachers and police respectively here and it creates the same problem.

It’s why public employees should never be allowed to unionize. FDR himself expressed this of all people. It’s an inevitable path to corruption. We can’t expect a reasonable “collective bargaining” when both sides of the negotiations are in bed.

That's the nature of politics. Businesses and business leaders lobby politicians and donate to their political campaigns too. It's strange to single out unions when there are so many different kinds of political interest groups, often with much more money than unions.

Public employee unions are bad, but the Tavern League, for example (I'm from Wisconsin), is ok? The National Rifle Association is ok? The National Landlord Association? Businesses and interest groups of every kind are donating money to the politicians who will directly regulate them. Why specifically exclude public employees from that?

Private money has major issues too but it doesn’t have a direct influence on votes. A company can lobby all day and give money and that might get you more ads. But aligning with a union gets you votes and will continue to.

Police unions do this with Republicans as Teachers do with Democrats.

For another example look at police unions.

So in my opinion, these two examples of toxic public unions shouldn’t be applied to private unions.

What better way to consolidate power than by aligning with a public service union and “bargain” with them while being incentivized to grow membership in that union to further consolidate power.

If anything I’d support public sector unions if members were not allowed to vote for offices that represent their “management” or control their budgets.

Could you imagine a private sector union appointing the management of the company they negotiate with?

Republicans in Wisconsin abolished public unions back in 2011 (though admittedly they had exemptions for police and firefighters) and there was nationwide outrage from the left about it. There have been recent calls from the left to abolish police unions but those seem almost exclusively about police unions' ability to protect corrupt/brutal/racist cops and not about their ability to bilk taxpayers.

So while it's not completely clearcut, the right has a much better record for opposing public unions than the left.

You have begun to see labor movements distance themselves from police unions. I’d expect at some point it will be politically acceptable for Democrats in places like Wisconsin to strike back at them, which I’d support. So long as the other unions in the public sector are broken too.

No public sector should be able to unionize. If these groups want to lobby then fine. Lobbying, although corrupt in many ways, does not beholden tax payers to corrupt contracts.

There are a lot of potential reasons:

- The pay is crap

- The "prestige" is crap

- The barrier to entry is low

In Finland, for example, there are excellent teachers because the profession is treated as on par with doctors. I don't think it's fair to blame unions for this difference in culture.

The third reason I don’t think is true. Teaching is in the class of occupations that require government certification.

A popular propaganda claim is that teachers work fewer hours based on the hope that reader doesn’t know teaching includes more than direct instructional time. Summer breaks are shorter now and have things like mandatory training for required professional development, and the few weeks most teachers have off are not enough to make up for the long hours during the school year and inability to take time off when school is in session.

For me, the biggest push here is that we've had a generation or so of our society collectively telling everyone that the future for good jobs is STEM, STEM, STEM or maybe STEM. If we actually believe that, we should be paying and treating teachers well because we are targeting education-intensive subjects and because we need to hire teachers who have an understanding of subjects which pay well. Teaching shop was a great job option for a contractor who was getting older and needed the benefits but that dynamic doesn't apply to someone who can teach most STEM subjects can often get comparable benefits and likely better pay, and enjoying teaching only goes so far to compensate the various drawbacks.

I agree that teachers should be paid more, particularly newer ones, but I blame the unions for this. So much money gets funneled into pensions, which only a small fraction of teachers ever get.

Yes, they don’t get paid for not working, but can usually have their employer stretch the 9 month salary to cover all 12.

There are a lot of reasons I wouldn’t want to be a modern American teacher, but the time-off schedule is not one of them.

I looked at the data and stand by my assessment.

> Teaching requires a master’s degree in most cases

It does not. Most teachers get masters degree because pay schedule pays extra for master degree holders. Master degrees are less prevalent in private schools, because private schools are not typically so dumb to have rigid pay schedules that pay extra for degrees, regardless of whether these degrees are actually useful.

> that’s only getting you pay in the $40-50k range

That’s already above median wage. It’s slightly below median wage of all workers with a university degree, but once you take into account hours actually worked and non-wage benefits, this is actually significantly above average pay of workers with university degrees.

> A popular propaganda claim is that teachers work fewer hours based on the hope that reader doesn’t know teaching includes more than direct instructional time.

A popular propaganda claim is also that non-instructional time is a lot. It might be for some teachers, especially younger ones fresh into their careers who need more time to prepare for their classes. The non-instructional work sometimes is also pretty concentrated, making some weeks very busy and requiring hard work in those. However, most weeks are not busy, and most teachers do not spend more than a handful of hours each week on non-teaching work.

The very existence of teachers unions has probably kept tens or even hundreds of thousands of people from being out of work without healthcare during a global pandemic.

In my experience, having a teacher as a spouse, discipline of even union employees is not rare when warranted.

The best teachers have to fight for the resources they need to do their job well.

Most teachers are being asked to do unreasonable and unsafe things during COVID.

This "if you don't like it here, go work somewhere else" kind of reasoning disproportionately balances the power towards the employer. Instead of fixing problems, it leads to removing those that are affected. This is exactly what unions are for.

While I generally agree with the sentiment of your comment, I would like to point out that the above is only true for green card holders. There are a lot of H1B/L1B workers stuck at bad teams with high amounts of pressure/stress and incompetent or downright abusive managers.

For them, leaving the company isn't an option because it means leaving the country and leaving a life-changing amount of money on the table and denying their children the advantage of growing up in the US.

You might argue they can switch teams, which is technically true, but this can complicate and delay the green card process, and vindictive managers often smear engineers with HR because people bailing on them makes them look bad. At Amazon for example, particularly bad managers will PIP an engineer to block them from transferring teams.

So while in general engineers are treated well and can choose where they want to work, I think we should also show some solidarity with our friends who don't have the same options that we do.

I.e. not collectively bargaining, instead hoping that enough other people will individually decide put their livelihood on the line to give employers the impression that things should change up, after which they will not be able to enjoy the changes because they switched job (which can be a pain in the ass regardless of opportunities).

> The reality is that Google is an easy place to work relative to how much people get paid. People don't want to leave a cushy job for one where they would have to work harder for their money, so instead, they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too.

The relationship between an employer and employee is naturally adversarial in that there's a fundamental conflict between their interests. As an employee, I want to be paid as much as possible for my work (indeed as little work as possible), and I want it to be as pleasant as possible. The employer on the other hand will want me to do as much work as possible at as little cost as possible. Of course I want to provide value to my employer, and my employer wants to provide value to me, but that's because we both have my employment as a bargaining chip. That's my only chip, but it's only one of Google's ~100000.

In those terms, if you can approach having the cake and eating it, why not? Why should only my employer organize and use their massive resources to achieve their goals to the greatest extent possible, while workers should willfully stay disorganized and never utilize their collective influence like a corporation will? Because having two cakes is bad? There's certainly more than enough cake to go around in FAANG.

You say this like it's a bad thing. Instead, we've just been conditioned as "professional" employees to not talk politics in the one place where we have a modicum of control over how resources are allocated in society.

I don't believe that you can argue in good faith that unions will somehow be the first to introduce political schisms within Google.

First of, yeah, you could "just go" if you don't like what the company is offering. But it is not a reality for a lot of people, even in the tech industry. Leaving your job is not that easy. And it encourage a race to the bottom. With no union to negotiate, the negotiation will always be unbalanced in the favour of the employee since you are negotiating as an individual vs. a organization. Its way, way easier for company to scare you and keep wage low when their is no union to back you up.

Also, union can help you when you have a manager or any higher-up that makes your work life hard. I know a lot of company who try to sweep complain under the rug for one reason or another. But when the union get involved, they just can't, they have to deal with it.

Finally, employee are stake holder in a company. A lot feel involved and responsible in the company direction and future. You can't just excluded them because they are not shareholder. I mean, you can, but that will lead to a strong feeling of alienation. Union help with that, and I know some people who are part of a union just for this: They love their job and the company they work for, so they want to have a say in where the company is going.

I have friends in the visual effects industry (which has never been unionized) and their lives are full of stuff like effects houses that did work on award-winning films with huge budgets closing up without paying people because the studio skipped out on payments.

These are very similar fields in terms of skills. Both are mostly based in the same place. Both involve a lot of long hours working on stuff that flashes by in seconds. One has a union, one doesn’t. One is better off than the other.

For example, Titmouse was the first studio in Canada to unionize and that was just in mid 2020.

The Bay area studios like Pixar aren't unionized either, even though their sister studio WDAS in LA is unionized.

I find the analogy very close to the stories I hear about coders in the game industry.

Google unionizing might sound odd to your ears, Electronics Arts programmers unionizing sounds like something that should have happened a decade ago.

That's only collective bargaining if a lot of them leave en masse (ie. collectively), and for the same issue(s). To do that effectively they'd need to organize, coordinate their efforts, and speak as one voice: in other words, they'd need to unionize.

Leaving one at a time, for different issues is not collective bargaining, it's individual bargaining, so not at all comparable to a union.

I can only think of a handful that pay as well and even less if you consider corporate mission and culture.

Is this a bad thing?

They already have a very well defined leveling system. The promotion and hiring system - people hate - but it is as un-nepotistic as possible and (I think) fairer than pretty much anywhere else.

The compensation is already higher than basically everywhere - as you mentioned - ESPECIALLY considering expectations for your work.

And, sure, I think no one in America gets enough time off. We could maybe squeeze out 5 weeks of PTO for all employees.

Originally, I thought, is that worth unionizing for? I didn't think so.

HOWEVER, Googlers have since convinced me that this is more about employees having a voice in corporate decisions than compensation. For example (and I don't really agree with this) - most Googlers are VERY much against Google working with the DoD. They want to be able to use unions to block that. Others want to use unions to force Google to be more transparent about what it's doing with data and so on. Others want a better way for employees to speak up when we do things that seem illegal (breaking GDPR rules) or extremely unethical (hypnotizing babies on YouTube for ad-money). Currently, as with most companies, Google is a company that really cares only about maximizing shareholder value. Most Googlers were hired when the Google slogan was "Do no evil" and they really took that to heart. And for a long time, that WAS true. Now, a lot of them (and current employees) feel differently. And they think unions can bring "Do no evil" back to our main corporate guideline.

I'm not sure I'm convinced this is worth it or possible, but (to me) it's DEFINITELY more convincing than the compensation / working conditions argument.

If we unionizing and employees get a stronger corporate voice AND 5+ weeks PTO, I'll be very happy. But it seems like a pipe dream to me.

It is purely a hard-left power grab, just like at Kickstarter when they unionised for the pure, noble purpose of forcing their employer to allow fundraisers that were threatening violence against conservatives (and thus had been taken down as a ToS violation).

As a former Googler myself (not for quite some years), I see this as the inevitable end result of always kowtowing and giving in to ever more radical left extremism. It started with nice but trivial sounding language about how there should be more women in tech, and it ends with hiring endless full time activists like Timnit Gebru.

If Google is ever to regain its former glory, it needs a serious purge. There won't be one: instead I suspect it will become a cautionary tale spoken about quietly throughout the world, for many decades to come. The lesson drawn will be: don't hire SJWs or else you might end up like Google did, with managers being deposed by a unionised mob demanding endless and ever-spiralling purity warns.

Should your waiter, your dentist, your auto mechanic, your daycare worker, your landscaper, etc. have a say in your decisions? They're your employees, albeit temporarily, so why not?

The shareholders are the owners of the company, not employees. The right to set the direction of the company belongs to its owners. The profits belong its owners, just as your paycheck and what to do with it belongs solely to you.

(As an aside on shareholders and compensation, considering how many FAANG people have huge chunks of their compensation in stock, people are well aware unionizing at a FAANG is basically people attempting to pick their own pockets since increasing employee compensation (themselves) is taken from shareholders (themselves).)

Unless employees make up 100% of the shareholders that is trivially not true.

I don’t know that you’ve put forth a convincing argument here. There is no defining union industry in principle, only in past embodiment. The intent of a union is to balance the leverage of workers compared to management via collective bargaining. So a union is valid anywhere there is a real or perceived imbalance of leverage.

Claiming one can go get a job anywhere else only balances the leverage when certain assumptions are met (e.g., symmetry of information, no conspiracies to suppress wages or prevent hiring etc.) Considering the tech industry hasn’t always met these assumptions, I don’t know that your claim proves true

But I'm not sure what that has to do with the question anyway. Unions aren't "intended" only for certain industries or market conditions. They are a means of balancing the power difference between workers and employers. And we see evidence every day that Google and most other large tech employers in the area are abusing the power they have over their workers on a regular basis. "Just get a new job" is not a solution for the vast majority of people who work at Google et al.

Most people in tech, and especially so at places like google don't feel like they have low bargaining power. So I think the perception is, not only is there not much to be gained by unionizing, there is potentially more to lose by giving up individual bargaining power to the union. So basically losing autonomy and control for some unknown and fuzzy benefit.

Unions serve a purpose of being able to collectively bargain, regardles off how many "options" there are.

Employers and corporations always have bargaining power and are basically collective establishments themselves. Individuals rarely have any negotiating power for better conditions, wages, treatment, etc...

And we have court cases documenting that Google, Apple, etc. will do their worst to collectively reduce job mobility and artificially reduce wages. You can't use a better paying position at Apple to bargain for better wages at Google because they (and dozens others) agreed not to hire each others workers.

I feel like this is only half of the truth. They also help employees increase negotiating power as a counter to employers working together to increase their negotiating power (colluding on wages).

>The reality is that Google is an easy place to work relative to how much people get paid. People don't want to leave a cushy job for one where they would have to work harder for their money, so instead, they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too.

If by taking some action they get a bigger slice of cake, why shouldn't they take that action? Our economy is built off the idea of rational actors acting in their own self interest, so doing something to get you a bigger slice of cake at a lower (or equal) price fits the expected behavior of actors in such a system.

Wouldn’t Google workers collectively bargaining with Google using the threat of leaving to work at another tech company be, like, a union?

> they are trying other means to have their cake and eat it too.

I think you're basically correct but are making multiple slightly incorrect assumptions:

- That working at Google is comparable to any other tech company in terms of benefits and stability. In reality, only a few companies could compare. (Not everyone can work at a startup, etc.)

- That tech companies are wildly different in terms of culture and philosophy. In my experience, tech industry culture is hyper normalized and you see the same problems everywhere.

So it's not like a selfish "have their cake and eat it too", but more like they actually can't gain what they want by moving, so the remaining path is change from the inside.

> Unions are intended for industries where a worker doesn't have a marketplace of options as there is a single or just a few employers (e.g. Hollywood, teachers, coal mining towns, hospital staff, etc.).

Unions are for all workers in all industries and sectors. Unions protect workers rights through collective action and ensure the work force isn't marginalized, mismanaged or abused.

A worker has a right to a voice. Unions are the body of that voice.

That is literally the opposite of what "collective" means. You seem to be trying to argue against unionization by circular logic, by claiming that it doesn't work because market forces do the same thing because unionization isn't necessary.

I mean, it's easy to do that in the case of FAANG employers who already pay very high salaries. But they make outrageous profits too. What's the argument that the already-highly-paid engineers shouldn't get a bigger share?

A moderately well run union is useful for the employer as a way to consult, defuse and get sentiment for changes.

Unions have nothing to do with employability, its about making the conditions better for the workers, and not because that's what other companies do.

Employees leaving doesn't mean the place changes, especially if there is a limitless supply of keen, naive and cheap labour out there. The VFX industry is a prime example of this.

I'm not sure the cause and effect work that way, at least not entirely.

Unions do restrain roles of workers and structure compensation to particular patterns. It seems plausible to me that those sorts of restrictions are in some ways detrimental to companies that wish to (or need to) disrupt incumbents. It's plausible that they function as a sort of regulatory capture. In some cases, as with unions of government workers, literal regulator capture enters the picture too.

I'd just say that there are more reasons to unionize than just local monopolies. You unionize whenever there's a major disparity between cooperate profits and worker benefits. You unionize when work conditions are bad and management doesn't care. You unionize when you feel you are being treated unfairly.

For example, construction companies are often places where there's both lots of work available and union outfits doing a lot of good.

To do this as a group you will still benefit from an organization to manage it. Its a lot more effective to say, "Stop doing this or we 1500 engineers are all leaving on Feb 1" versus a bunch of engineers seemingly random quitting (although for similar reasons).

While there maybe isn't yet a definitive "Hollywood East" or "Hollywood South" etc yet, the desire to find/build an alternative to Hollywood proper seems clear.

https://deadline.com/2020/08/vancouver-production-to-restart...

https://deadline.com/2020/11/election-2020-entertainment-ind...

And as always, there's an HBO's Silicon Valley for everything:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDzTKI9a78k

Um it's called looking at the past? Making reasonable inferences?