Re:Google union in turmoil following global alliance announc...
by walshemj on Sunday January 31, 2021 @05:26PM
(#25983206)
Actually all of those issues are exactly what Unions representing mangers and professionals do in the UK work on.
I have seen a lot of cases relating to "PRP" and Performance reviews.
- Employees are regularly screwed on misrepresented equity compensation
- Employees are expected to work uncompensated on-call shifts which vary from "doesn't affect me" to "impossible to function on" such as being paged once per hour for 1 week with the expectation to do it again in a weeks time.
- Employees are subject to highly opaque performance review processes that take into account employee performance, as well as what work they happened to be assigned - Some assignments may be incompatible with the companies expectation for a given role e.g. Software Engineers assigned to put together excel reports
- Employees may be asked to perform ethically or legally dubious activities where they may be held criminally liable ( see dieselgate, and to a lesser extent the 737 max ).
- Employees may be asked to work 80+ hours to hit goals which were underfunded or poorly planned (see CDPR and every other software project which misses a deadline)
This is a small list of reasons an industry employee group such as a guild/union/certification board/association could be a good idea. However very few of these items relate to traditional union activities. The thought of pulling in specific hires with specific union skills seems like either forcing a square peg through a round hole or just paying to support someone who will fill their time with activities related to "unions" to little employee benefit.