It isn’t useful at lower levels. It’s pretty much the definition of senior management. I wouldn’t have wanted to discuss replacing a senior person, whom I found to be ineffective, on corporate Zoom, for example. That said, temporary hierarchical rigidity and some people explicitly opting out of the promotion race isn’t a bad thing.
How do you arrange something like that behind your boss's back if you can only communicate with your colleagues via corporate-approved communication channels?
It's dangerous for practical purposes, because that law is not well enforced.
I use my work communications devices to communicate with colleagues when communicating in a work context.
I suppose some people may have employers that prohibit them from having personal communication devices in their place of residence, but that's going to be a very different high-security type environment anyway.
I don't have a problem with asking a colleague to give me their personal cell number on a work communications channel. I don't think I'd want to work in a place where doing so was prohibited.
I'm a Betriebsrat, a Germany-specific "workers council", member at my employer. By law, the company is mandated to provide us with the resources we need (e.g. access to company wide email distribution lists, a private MS Teams channel, private folders on the file servers, a locked office for personal meetings of the council and with staff members) and is prohibited from interfering with all our duties. Any form of censorship or surveillance would be a big no-no which could even land our execs behind bars.
Believing second-hand rumours on the internet would be less intellectually honest than believing my anecdotal evidence.
Wild.
As a non-American non-employer, my current job is unionized, and I believe that union to be a major factor in the rampant dysfunction, though probably not the driving factor.
I think that every time I've had a friend or family member working in a union environment that wasn't more-or-less minimum wage (e.g. unionized Starbucks workers are a counter-example to the pattern I'm describing) they've had similar observations.
I'm still very hesitant to attack unions in general, because as a student of history it's pretty clear that the situation we have now is better than the situation without unions. So I'd rather live in a unionized society than a non-unionized society, but I'd rather work for a non-unionized employer than a unionized employer.
Well, that's what I would expect to see in US too, but it's a survivorship bias at work. Obviously, in country which is (quite commendably, in my opinion) anti-union, only capable unions would be able to survive.
> that's an inversion of the power dynamics a union is meant to promote
Power dynamics that you are talking about are pieces of fiction, which oversimplify reality in order to boost one or another political viewpoint. It's a very popular piece of fiction, too: paint one side as "the ordinary people", the underdog, morally superior, and thus taken advantage of. And the other side is, obviously, the devil.
Anyone sees these stories quite for what they are when it's the story from the other side of political spectrum. For example, if anyone would come here to HN and tell the story of immigrants taking "our jobs", it would be dead in 5 minutes, and all the logical inconsistencies and fallacies in it would be split open. And, just to be clear about my personal political opinions — this takedown would be completely correct.
But it works for both sides. "The people" are often not much of an underdog, as are "the workers". I know quite a lot of real businesses, even in IT, where "the man", the business owner, takes home less money than he pays his senior engineers. The situation with police unions just highlights this disparity between the story in a way that you can't just sweep under the rug — but it's always there, even if less apparent.
? That's not what I mean at all. Think of Uber; the drivers don't have much control over when they work, if they want to afford to live in a building. The people in charge of Uber, however, do have control over when the drivers work.
In a school, the teachers have more power than the children – but oftentimes when that power is exercised, it's in dealing with bullying or classroom disruption.
Acknowledging that some people have more power than others is not the same thing as declaring the powerful evil.
> "The people" are often not much of an underdog, as are "the workers".
But in this particular instance, they are.
Right?! They suck for everyone else, but as far as looking out for their members' interests, they're pretty much the gold standard.
This is another positive.
> So any gossip or informal catch up, or sharing real “corporate incorrect” opinion is out of the door (if you work for any large organisation).
I'm not sure what "corporate incorrect" means here, but gossip is generally a net negative in the workplace that tends to build cliques and factions that often manifest in a bigger problem.
Assuredly there are other non-company channels to do those things, but the question is ... why?