I disagree that a Union will protect them from anything. As I understand it, the power of a union is that the collective group will strike if they don't get the results they want. Would a few hundreds Google employees striking make that much of a difference? I don't think so. More importantly, I don't think Google is going to allow such a threat to its business to grow.
Unions only have power when they are the majority in an organization and can do collective bargaining. There is simply zero utility to be had from that in tech industries as these folk are already paid too much and can walk elsewhere for opportunities.
Contract bargaining for the members is not the only thing a union usually does. There are loads more to it, great starting point to learn more about unions would be to read through the Wikipedia page before dismissing the idea, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
If it wasn't clear to people working at Google before, if the company moves somewhere in order to lessen the power of their employees, I sure hope the employees start waking up to how their company treats them. My guess is that Google doesn't want to actually show that face though, so unlikely to happen.
I've asked before and no one seems to know: what is unionising meant to achieve for these workers? Are they under compensated? Are they getting fired for unfair reasons? I thought big tech had the opposite problem: everyone gets 6 figures, no one gets fired you just get moved to a do nothing team...
Most union power comes from solidarity. If the Google people feel they don’t need unions, then all other lower unions are weaker. The power comes from the industry wide union. People at small startups can stand up for something because even the Google people stand up for it. Otherwise we’re divided and carry out the dog eat dog world.
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?
Can you imagine the bargaining power that tech workers would have if they unionized? Our industry relies on tech workers for training and hiring, so hiring scabs during a strike would be basically impossible.
If they ever did decide to hire union workers for whatever reason it would just be another layer of bureaucracy killing the company and stressing out employees.
If Twitter had unionized they could have protected themselves from the whims of Musk. It's still likely Musk would have massacred the company, but maybe people wouldn't be getting fired the day before Thanksgiving.
How any engineer looks at Twitter and doesn't say, "We should consider a union..." is beyond me.
While not union myself watching how IBEW (international brotherhood of electrical workers) works, it ends up working well for all involved parties. For workers pay is kept higher, benefits stay active between jobs, and benefits stay unchanged between jobs at different companies. Companies also gain the ability to support surges/drops in manning requirements (without ruining life's of workers), and know workers have a minimum level of training (along with that training not leaving workers a debt addled depressive). I also see the best workers rising through the ranks, and bad ones either never actually entering the union or quitting when they realize they're not going anywhere.
Not every union strangles their company like automotive unions. Though those unions start to look better looking at nonunion companies like Tesla which somehow manages to pay their workers less, in one of the most expensive areas in the world, and maintaining an accident rate that would shut a union shop down.
Also it makes sense that Google would fight unions. Since the current implementation of unions for SV companies has been Kickstarter. And that union mostly exists to drive profit to their competitors by choosing what is allowed on Kickstarter. Something like that for Google would just end up making an easy paper trail for a prosecutor to follow for SV platform bias.
Also, unions are about balance of power. Giving more bargaining power (collectively) to people that otherwise don't have much bargaining power.
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.
everyone benefits from Tesla's progress [0], they may be an outlier but I think they are leading the way. More importantly, the progress helps society as a whole. I see their progress as directly benefiting every human and the planet.
you have changed your original comment a few times so it is difficult to respond to, but I'm not sure large tech companies would succeed with unions, people need to educate themselves and learn how to negotiate in highly skilled areas, I look at a local railroad company near me that employs a lot of people and does not invest money in improvements because they cannot afford due to how the union has negotiated, it has stopped innovation entirely. Engineers are still learning light switches, this should be completely automated so we stop having mistakes of train engineers texting people and causing accidents... what a shameful loss of life.
There's no reason they have to be structured this way, but unions usually work through voting, and the tech sector has a LOT of pretty shitty people coasting, and they'll get a vote that's worth the same as anyone else's. They'll vote to protect their coasting.
True, but this is, again, why unions exist. Because then the union can decide to strike, everyone in the union is expected to participate, and the outcome is successful and people's jobs are protected. If engineers at Google want to be taken seriously, they should unionize.
I have to wonder. What percent of Tesla's success is attributable to not having legacy union baggage. Unions are the tech debt of the manufacturing world.
It starts with a good idea, but if you let it fester, then it quickly becomes more of a drag than a productive addition to your organization.
This is a small Union but Unions in general are a political tool and not for the good of their members. In Italy we had a Union outraged that Tech Employees ere not joining it that it "negotiated"(forced) the government to automatically enroll them (meaning they take a fee from the salaries as a tax) if they did not opt-out.
that shows you who the unions are working for and their power.
Situations like this present another potential advantage of organized labor. Beyond guaranteeing benefits and reasonable wages, it can also allow workers to throw a wrench into the gears of whatever evil shit their company might be complicit in. Aviation and dock workers have used their collective muscle to undermine the likes of Pinochet and Israel, and there's a lot of possibilities for tech people to do something similar. It's probably why a company as vile as Google is fighting unionization so hard. Best to keep your employees limited to writing easily-ignored petitions.
Imagine they all join a union... And they are all very unhappy and vote to go on strike... And they strike for many months...
Tesla will just send their data labelling workload to Mechanical Turk and it'll be done by people in India...
A union only has power if the company is hurt by a strike. And in this case, there is nothing beyond minor inconvenience.
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