Good for them. As for the tech workers, they need something like a guild with membership fees and staff lawyers that would sue the state for allowing binding arbitration and non compete agreements (i.e. do what California did).
they need something like a guild with membership fees and staff lawyers that would sue the state for allowing binding arbitration and non compete agreements
Serious question: How is this kind of a guild different from a union in your view?
The Newspaper Guild (TNG, now part of the Communications Workers of America) represents a lot of journalists. But indeed most of us have heard the names of far more members of SAG-AFTRA than of TNG.
Afaik, a union can tell you what you can and cannot do, while I only want a team of well funded lawyers to change some laws. And the u word attracts unnecessary attention. Let's call it a club, actually.
Professional organisations are middle class, while unions are working class.
(Per downthread, the dividing line is really "if your organisation comes into conflict with the state, does the fight happen in a courtroom or on the street?")
> Professional organisations are middle class, while unions are working class.
I see a lot of hemming and hawing about "the middle class," but I don't think it has any real meaning. What defines the middle class and how is the working class excluded from it? Are you using "the middle class," as a substitute for a professional/managerial class?
Sue the state for allowing it? Honest question— Is that a legal argument? If laws don’t exist, how can you sue the state for not enacting them if it doesn’t violate a constitutional right...
Good for them. I mostly ate at their Mexican cafe and Authentic Asian Cafe (I forget the exact name), but sampled many others. The cafeteria workers would remember me, be friendly and helpful, and certainly deserve to make a good living.
I used to be ambivalent about labor unions but in modern times when corporations act as all powerful gods, hell yes, unionize.
Yeah, and there will be some noisy exits while people say "man Google has really lost its way" and they will open up the hiring spigot a bit and replace all of those exits with new employees for whom Google has always had a pay per meal policy (or no cafes in the satellite offices) or what ever method Google used to prevent the hit to their profitability.
After a few years nearly everyone will think this is the 'regular' Google and won't know anything about the 'old' Google way.
When I was working there, there was a tool called 'percent' that would tell you what percent of the employees were newer than you were. What astonished me was how rapidly one became an 'old timer' in the sense that > 50% of the employees had arrived after you had[1]. I watched this process in real time as people got fed up and left because they felt that the company had "let them down" or "failed to meet their commitments." It was a lot like university where every 4 or 5 years its an entirely different set of undergraduates. You tell them "how it was" and they believe you because, you are there and they just arrived.
[1] That particular astonishment, combined with the reported employee numbers, led to another investigation which was how Google could replace 50% of the staff without anyone noticing, and discovered that churn was a pretty big thing.
If you work in a tech company, you'll quickly realize that the food is something everyone focuses on to a disproportionate degree. This guy knows what he is talking about.
Simple perks like free coffee are a canary for the corporate coal mine.
When you look at the cost of coffee or soda, providing it free may cost the company in the ballpark of $500 a year per employee (though often less) which is minuscule in the total annual cost of an employee. Taken in a vacuum however, the number looks big. We spent how much on Coffee last quarter! When companies get to the mostly investor owned squeezing for growth stage, it's almost always among the first thing that gets cut. This is then usually followed by other more important quality of life cuts like training, equipment, and bonuses. Many companies hit this stage and start increasing margins by letting inflation eat their employee's high salaries over time for instance.
For coffee especially it’s a big waste of time for me to leave the premises to go buy some coffee every time I want coffee. Even in the crappiest workplaces I have worked in - like the torn-up remnants of a Charles Schwab office that they had vacated, without removing all the trash, and some dubious middleman re-rented single rooms to startups - the inhabitants would informally band together to provide free coffee.
Yup, my employer would often host big celebrations throughout the year. I’d much rather have a $500 bonus for each one of them (or whatever it cost them).
Paying for perks is a great way to avoid paying a higher salary.
> Personally, I'd rather earn an extra $25k and buy a few cups of coffee with it than get "free coffee".
That deal is not on the table, though. For practical purposes, there are few places that someone can work that pay better than Google for a given dev, and those places all probably have free coffee as well.
I know a QA ex Google engineer that refused to ever work for a company with a cafeteria again solely because he got tired of people complaining about food that was free. It annoyed him that much.
I see the general principle guiding this and agree with it, but "free" food from an employer is just another form of comp and complaining about it's no more ungrateful than complaining about health benefits or salary. It's not like complaining about a Christmas gift or something.
You're not wrong, it was more complaints about food he saw as objectively delicious. His go to would be him clowning around like "wah they had this cut of steak but I like filet more."
Many moons ago, Microsoft’s cafeterias were subsidized. And then they weren’t. Remember that mass exodus from Microsoft in the 90s over the cafeteria stink? Neither does anyone else, because what noise there was didn’t amount to much.
Especially considering that the recent tax law changes are phasing out some fringe benefits that corporations could previously deduct. Regular meals provided for employees on site is one of the deductions that has been nixed.
Obviously, the kitchen salaries will be deductible. But none of the food cost and other ongoing expenditures related to providing that food.
Imagine a gigantic apartment building in San Francisco. Let's say some 400-unit monster. Then picture a campus with four of those buildings.
Then realize that such a campus could not house all the Google employees in the area. Then realize that such a campus could not house just the Google cafeteria workers in the area.
To make this clear, you are suggesting that having just those 4 buildings won’t solve the issue completely, despite making it better, so it isn’t worth doing?
No. I didn't suggest that. Not even remotely. I am not aware of any such undertaking and did not state any opinion on the worthiness of such an undertaking.
I was just a bit stunned by the sheer number of people that work in the cafeteria. I make no judgement here about those people, their abilities, working conditions, living conditions, or anything else except their quantity.
A great book is No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey[1]. She specifically goes over history, organizing tactics, analysis about why some unions succeed vs others that don't, as well as how to transition from a bad/no union to one that is representative. Each have examples of recent strikes and efforts in the last decade.
Here's a quote that jumped out at me.
> According to Buffkin's congressional testimony, it was the [Smithfield Foods'] intent to replace blacks with Latinos with two objectives in mind: to keep the workforce divided through both instigation of racial conflict and overt segregation, and to create an undocumented immigrant workforce that the employer believed they could more easily control.
> [Key to success was] first earning legitimacy with each major constituency in the plant, and then bridging the divisions between them, creating unity and solidarity despite the extraordinary efforts by the boss to systematically pit worker against worker.
Just want to second this. It's a great read and McAlevy is a smart and experienced strategist and scholar. You can find her talking about her ideas in old episodes of the New York radio show Behind the News, all of which are online.
Jacobin magazine, In These Times, Labor Notes and other publications like that cover contemporary union movements thoroughly, and it's pretty much light reading imo.
I'd really like a good book on the legal basis and evolution of unions in different countries. My sense is that there's a lot about US versus, say, Danish unions that works differently and Japanese unions are generally specific to a given company making them something else again.
There isn't anything really neutral to recommend. People are pretty adamant about "the right way". Start with ABCs of Socialism[0] and take a look at the texts they recommend. You'll have to come to your own conclusion about what you like and dislike about what it says.
The problem with this stuff is that the left is extremely sectarian so I might have someone jumping down my throat for recommending something published by Jacobin.
I really liked that series! While you can get into sectarian arguments and Jacobin is electoralist, the ABCs series is wonderful for someone new to this material imo.
Unions are a hot-fix to problems with capitalism, but they are also something greater: the seed of a more democratic society that should be nourished and grown.
I dunno why you are down voted. It seems that many people see the word communist and have an emotional reaction. If you take the time to read this masterpiece you will soon realise that Marx knew more about capitalism than most of us who live it.
I have mixed feelings about unions, but I'm OK with this move.
Cafeteria workers need unions. The maids who muck out hotel room toilets need unions. Coal miners who work in horrific conditions for little pay need unions.
You know who doesn't need unions? Millionaire TV anchors. Millionaire movie studio execs and actors. Anyone who makes six figures, which includes a hell of a lot of union members. In those cases the unions need the members, not the other way 'round, and it leads to greed and corruption because all both sides can see is dollar signs.
So, again. I think it's good that the caf workers got some protection. I'm still on the fence about computer programmers, though.
All workers can be abused regardless of their salary.
Examples for programmers that come to mind:
- Companies that require workers to enter arbitration and give up their right to sue.
- Companies that force workers to give up IP generated in their free time (not using company resources)
- Companies that require programmers to work 12 hour days, "crunch times", minimal paid leave (game dev industry, VFX industry comes to mind.)
Unions collectively negotiate with employers to reduce or eliminate these abuses. Some unions have poor leadership, which is to be expected. Some companies have poor leadership. Not everyone is good at negotiating, which can create power imbalances on either end of the table. But on the whole, unions are a Good Thing, even for IT folk.
We need a stronger law: any employee should be able to choose how many hours or days per week to work AND work for any other company at the same time (NDA applies, but non compete bs doesn't). Execs do this all the time: they can be on boards in multiple companies, run other companies, while possessing material information about them all.
The way I see it's working is the total comp negotiation goes as usual, but the employer isn't allowed to ask how much time the employee indends to work and whether one works for other companies. The salary and other comp is paid bi weekly as usual, but is pro rated to the number of hours or days worked. All the machinery is already in place: big corps have very detailed per minutes compensation for vacations, various on call duties and so on.
This will be strictly better for the IRS, because more competition means more taxes, but much worse for the dividend seeking investors.
Obviously, this will be a decade long legal battle with tens of millions in expenses, and it can't be done without a full time team of motivated and very expensive lawyers. However if 100k engineers spend 1k/year as membership fees, this organization will have a 100m/year budget and can keep courts busy forever.
Entertainment unions handle such things like health insurance and retirement funds. Most actors aren't millionaires. Having the few millionaires in the same union is good for the non-millionaires. Because it means that studios only get the in-demand millionaires if they provide okay conditions for everybody else as well.
Which is why I specified millionaires. Let the actors who are working paycheck to paycheck or earning a middle-class wage, or working second jobs as waiters or whatever join a union. But when an actor is making $10 million for a movie, they don't need a union. They have an accountant and an agent who take care of them.
Are you saying after a certain earning threshold actors would have to drop from the union / guild? And if they hit a dry spell, they can come back? Maybe is it better to base it on wealth?
Don’t you think the paycheck to paycheck actors like to know even the super successful are part of their group? Maybe the strength that emanates from the group and what binds them is the profession and the craft, not the earnings? Is a highly paid actor, a better actor than someone who makes 1 cents less then the threshold?
Seems very arbitrary and not something that creates group cohesion.
Problem with actors union is that they strike if the highly paid actors doesn't join the union, because they refuse contracts where non-union actors are present. Actors union also has progressive fees, so the rich actors pays a lot more than the poor ones. So I don't think the rich actors really want to be in a union, they are just forced to be and pay the cost if they want to work.
> Cafeteria workers need unions. The maids who muck out hotel room toilets need unions. Coal miners who work in horrific conditions for little pay need unions.
aren't all those jobs ripe for automating? unions feel like an intermediary measure to the end goal: no more humans in shitty jobs.
In tech we talk about automation like it’s an inevitable thing but for as long as the cost of developing robots to do all of these jobs is much more than hiring humans it’s not happening. Even that stupid pizza oven Zune is all about won’t replace workers anytime soon.
i think very few are the kind of workers that need unions. and the numbers are falling constantly. more workers than ever before are independent human beings, fully able to take care of their own interests. even more so in our field of software development, where the pay is monstrous, the hours very low, and everyone's a contractor.
i'd rather have my freedom both from a worker's pov and from an employer's.
The story about these is interesting. Because for every millionaire actor there are hundreds/thousands of wannabe actors. Who may or may not one day become a millionaire actor.
Not to mention all the rest of the TV/movie production chain: writers, directors, cinematographers, gaffers, production assistants, stunts professionals, etc, etc, etc
The "over-unionization" of that sector ensures fair pay and conditions (which sometimes are already grueling) for the professionals involved in this area of business. What happens without unions? Check the VFX companies for an example.
Sounds like this isn't the first time this has happened and won't be the last. Both Compass (the firm that employs these cafeteria workers) and Google both have experience working with unions and are committed to working through this. Happy that these employees are getting the representation they deserve. I hope this means that these people will get better benefits that Google FTEs enjoy and stronger protections.
As a FTE at Verily (an Alphabet subsidiary), the management's priorities are very clearly not focused on challenging the status quo in these areas -- they are focused on running the "core business". I can only guess the sentiment is similar within Google.
I look forward to seeing this issue continue to get light and hope that business priorities evolve to incorporate the more humanistic aspects of running a business instead of simply focusing on the bottom line all the time.
> Google [has] experience working with unions and [is] committed to working through this.
My impression is that Google's experience is mostly in seemingly illegal union-busting (well, preventing) efforts. Then again, my impression is wholly based on reading HN articles on the topic, generally related only to engineers.
But I suppose they'll do what they're legally forced to do, more or less.
“Look forward to seeing the issue continue to get light”
“Business priorities evolve”
You didn’t say anything particularly disagreeable but I wonder if you realize how this kind of language comes across- this is the way people talk to you right before they fire you or take away your healthcare or something. This kind of business speak just screams, I’m someone who cannot be trusted. It’s the language of power. We all cringe and grimace when the boss talks like this. It’s why you’re getting downvoted, I’d guess.
Guess I've worked in the corporate machine for too long...
Thanks for keeping me in check. I didn't mean any harm from my comment but I can see where you're coming from, just wanted to give a summary of what the article seems to imply and a bit of perspective from the inside.
To me this whole thing feels like a complex issue with a lot of nuance, varying perspectives and information asymmetry, so downvotes don't surprise me.
> I look forward to seeing this issue continue to get light and hope that business priorities evolve to incorporate the more humanistic aspects of running a business instead of simply focusing on the bottom line all the time.
Do you really? Because the next step is automating the cafeteria.
When was the last time business priorities evolved to become more expensive?
The corporation can only do things like automate away the cafeteria if its employees let it. The point of a union is that workers - the people who do all the work and keep the profits rolling in - take back some control and decide things like this for themselves.
It's defeatist, and extremely unrealistic, to think we just have to roll over and let the bosses do whatever they want just because that's what we've always done up til now.
There's not some deterministic invisible power that says immiseration via automation is inevitable. It's just a matter of collective will as to whether we accept or reject power's desire to screw us over in that particular way.
This was a really great Twitter thread about how capitalism isn't really about meritocracy but about bargaining power and by implication how necessary unions are for workers to be treated humanely and paid more than the bare minimum for survival:
However technology is at a point where large enough companies can simply engineer around the human resources problem if they want to.
So bringing a company like Google's feet to the fire will only make them want to cut you out of their supply chain. Your "bargaining power" is short term. Merely until Google can find another way to subvert you with technology.
In the industrial revolution Unions had bargaining power because they offered a valuable service that you couldn't live without. Today there is no problem that technology can't solve with the right amount of funding.
Your last line writes the whole enterprise off, because politics and bureaucracy is a very real challenge. Google can automate away service workers in the same way they can fix their product organization issues, reduce fragmentation of Android, improve their hardware offerings, stop the endless churn of their products ending up in the Google Graveyard, etc.
That is, you can say they can do anything with their resources, but it’s a paper tiger because the organization simply does not have the will nor interest to engage in such efforts, not when they have other priorities they’re focused on. So perhaps they’ll simply pay their workers.
That's why Google is alphabet now. So they can absorb and develop different liabilities at once.
Android isn't broken because Google doesn't care. It's broken because the team is fatigued. They reached their max potential. It will take a new team with new ideas for significant iteration. You can't add a junior dev to the android team and expect massive improvements anymore.
That being said, there isn't a lot of low hanging fruit left in android. But the cafeteria, I'm sure, has a long way to go and a lot that could be reduced.
> It's broken because the team is fatigued. They reached their max potential. It will take a new team with new ideas for significant iteration. You can't add a junior dev to the android team and expect massive improvements anymore.
Hm, but I thought that today technology can solve any problem so long as we gave it the right amount of funding? Including human resources problems?
> IF the costs continue to rise, that is.
As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, a megacorp with Alphabet's net income can surely swallow the cost. They have bigger things to fund.
The only reason labor unions are legal is that certain unions have outsized political clout, in a perfect world labor unions would be illegal under antitrust laws as forcing companies to pay workers more than what a free market dictates inevitably increases prices.
Well the high labor-rate negotiating power, relative to individuals, of corporations—legal entities created by our government(s)—is why we need unions, so I figure if we ditch one we can/should ditch the other, too.
Sure, then we can keep corporations around as long as we balance their government-enabled incredible labor rate negotiating position with something comparably effective for workers.
Glad you acknowledge that labor conditions (including salary) are a market.
As we know, there is a price floor and a price ceiling in a market, represented by the buyer and seller.
What we also know is that the price does not fall perfectly in the middle of that floor and ceiling - it benefits the person with more bargaining power.
A corporation has more bargaining power because it is a massive financial entity comprised of sometimes tens of thousands of people. Non unionized workers show up during a salary negotiation against that? One person with a family to feed and enough savings to survive maybe another 2 months without a job? Gee I wonder how imbalanced the bargaining power is there.
We allowed corporations to incorporate because of the advantages of doing so. We should allow the other half of the labor market-transaction to do the same, not only because it's fair, but because the union side reprents humans, while the corporate side reprents companies, which are not humans. It's kinda insane to want to give these non human conglomerates more power but hey vote with your values.
Cool then we can stop providing structures that make the demand side of labor much stronger at the negotiating table than the supply side. I'm in, let's do it.
Management is the parasite sucking up the benefits produced by the masses of workers. If employees owned the corporations, things would be very different.
Sure. In a perfect world labor unions wouldn't need to exist because government regulations would make sure employees didn't abuse employees and employees have protections.
Unions are the logical outcome of lax labor regulations.
The minimum wage is a burden for companies. Walmart having to pay their employees in USD and not Walmart credit is a burden. Workers having a lunch break and bathroom breaks are "burdens" as well.
If you're presenting the argument that cheap products of slave labor is a good thing, then... I'll pray for you.
A union is just the free market at work. Much as a business is a collection of individuals working toward the common goal of supplying a product, a union is a collection of individuals working toward the common goal of supplying a product (labor). If you believe a union is a cartel that squeezes money from consumers, you must necessarily believe that a company is the same thing.
That's not the case. A union is an organization for extracting rents above those the market would ordinarily bear. Rent-seeking activity --- no matter who does it --- makes society as a whole worse off. Bastiat showed that a long time ago.
When corporations organize to extract rents, we call them cartels and apply strict penalties under the law. Why should employees have a right to use these same tactics? The market for thee, but not for me?
> A union is an organization for extracting rents above those the market would ordinarily bear.
The operative word there is "normally", which makes your claim tautalogical. Unions do increase the cost of labor compared to a market without unions, but this is simply relative. You haven't (and I claim that you cannot) provide a reason that the cost of labor without unions is more natural, and isn't simply unnaturally suppressed by an imbalance in market power between job seekers and providers.
> You haven't (and I claim that you cannot) provide a reason that the cost of labor without unions is more natural
I reject the premise of your claim. The market price isn't just one of many prices from which we should choose arbitrarily. The emergent market price is special. It's the privileged result of price discovery via distributed transactions. Every time in history someone tries to conform the market into an unnatural shape using wage and price controls, the result is shortages and other dysfunctions. The burden of proof isn't on me to show that the market price is the natural one: it's on you to show that in the case of labor we shouldn't have a free market.
Doesn't the practice of minimum wage and labor rights also allow the worker to "extract rents above those the market would ordinarily bear"? Do those practices make society as a whole worse off?
The libertarian or whatever this person identifies as will claim yes, which kind of goes to show that we should reject these anti-human economic philosophies, never mind the fact that they're economically unsound anyway.
Explain to me why region controls exist on digital products and then let's talk about "extracting rents above what the market would ordinarily bear". This is how markets function, and in our current state of affairs we need to benefit the lives of ordinary people that exist within a completely marketized existence.
Do you have an argument other than that I've called bad things bad? Rent seeking is discouraged in economic policy for a reason (a reason I mentioned above), not because economists dislike how the word "rent" sounds or some other arbitrary reason.
A union is a group of people saying pay us more it give us better benefits, otherwise we will go elsewhere.
Most of the power is in the employer. A single individual didn't have much power. And it isn't quite the same as choosing to purchase a loaf of bread from a different store.
You keep claiming that a union extracts rents above those the market would ordinarily best. But I don't think you've given any evidence that that is the case.
This isn't the case where someone thinks that salaries are too low, so they'll open a new business and pay more.
> A union is a group of people saying pay us more it give us better benefits, otherwise we will go elsewhere.
No. A union is a group of people saying "pay us more or we'll shut down your business". That's why unions have traditionally had picket lines and why they've historically used violence against "scabs".
Corporations are capitalists performing collective action. Our governments not only allow this, but provide special provisions in the law to support and encourage it.
We can get rid of collective action for workers when we get rid of it for capital. Until then, if anything we need a shift away from enthusiastically encouraging collective capital while barely tolerating collective labor, to something more equitable and beneficial to the individuals whose government suffers those corporations to exist in the first place, whose interests lie overwhelmingly on the side of labor.
Why can't I democratically decide to associate with and democratically negotiate in a group and freely enter a contract with a third party? Isn't that what a free market is all about?
And unions should be free to go to the negotiating table. But it should be just that. A negotiation. They should offer something of value in exchange for more compensation other than "give us X or we shut down the business".
That's a cartel. Imagine if businesses organized themselves into employers unions and refused to hire anyone above a certain wage?
What's the alternative? An individual employee negotiates one on one with... an entire company? The companies have all the power, unions are an attempt to not be completely trodden upon.
In a perfect world, unions would be unnecessary. I think that would be a less controversial opinion. Wanting them to be illegal is more a moralization of your economic ideology - it would not be compatible with a belief that “labor is entitled to all it creates”. And stating it as matter of fact rather than as an opinion is kind of lame
I don't buy for a second that the wages absent a union are what a free market would predict. A free market requires freedom to participate, and most individuals are forced to sell their labor in exchange for food and shelter, let alone necessities like healthcare. Unions provide a framework where something closer to a free market wage (note: this is to say nothing of the morality of using markets for these purposes, a separate question) can be negotiated. Maybe in a world where people had a UBI they could live off of this could be argued, but that's not the world of today. You're cherry picking free market economics only where it suits you.
Your assessment of antitrust law is also pretty far removed from reality. By that logic, mergers and acquisitions would be illegal in every instance. Or, for that matter, standards bodies. Corporations band together to increase profits all the damn time, and the overwhelming majority of this activity is legal.
Well, all of Google's shareholders are banding together against thousands of individual workers. We don't penalize them banding together. We just call it "a company". Why is it any different when some of the workers band together to be on equal footing?
Google has net income of almost $30.7 billion and payed only $4.2 billion in tax. If they gave all 2,300 cafeteria workers a raise of $25,000 that would reduce their net income from $30.7 billion to $30.64 billion.
Google has become a social parasite - one that propels greater and greater wealth inequality. The parasite profits tremendously from public infrastructure and open source - while giving nothing back.
I daily chafe under the yoke of a government that restricts my right to sell myself into slavery. And they enforce that onerous infringement of my rights, ultimately, by threat of violence! Which clearly makes government the slavers, actually, the same way taxation makes them identical to muggers.
I probably shouldn't say this here, but I'm a bit confused about child labor. The phrase brings to mind images of a crowd of muddy children sewing cheap shirts long after dark, and I strongly agree with regulations to prohibit that.
At the same time, why is it a problem for children to work? I grew up helping my dad out in his job as a handyman. [To be clear, this is legal and not what I'm arguing about.] Not every parent has a job where that makes sense, so working for someone else who does makes sense to me. Sure, there need to be regulations to prevent it from being exploitative and harmful. But right now, the state says that children must be in school x>0 hours a day and working y=0 hours a day. Is that really the right answer for everyone's situation?
Personally, I've decided that the value of x should be smaller and y higher (I'm homeschooling my kids, though admittedly we haven't figured out how to get them meaningful employment.) The idea is not to make them into better pawns of the capitalist state, it's kind of the opposite. I see value in work for making learning more meaningful, for teaching values well beyond what the artificial construct of "allowance" can support, among other things. I haven't actually run up against minimum employment age laws, and don't expect to for a while, but it does seem like a clumsy tool for preventing a variety of harms.
Government is still ahead of you (or maybe lobbyists?)
> Fourteen and 15-year-olds, however, may be employed in approved school-administered and school-supervised Work Experience and Career Exploration Programs (WECEP) or Work Study Programs (WSP). Such programs allow variations in the rules and permit employment during school hours. WECEP participants may also be employed in otherwise prohibited occupations for which an official exception has been authorized by the Department of Labor.
Four hours a day won't be a problem
> WECEP permits the employment of 14- and 15-year-old youth during school hours and for up to 23 hours per week when school is in session. These rules are more lenient than those permitted by the Fair Labor Standards Act for other similar aged youth not enrolled in WECEP. WECEP also permits variances, on a limited basis, from certain child labor hazardous occupation standards. These variances are approved by the Wage and Hour Administrator on a case by case basis.
(See my sibling comment to yours and the link on that page labelled with the name of this program for citations)
Government is way ahead of you there. The law may be flawed, but not for a lack of thinking about if children should get work experience.
For example, should you have always wanted your children to learn how to build gazebos, all they have to do is be excused from highschool
> FLSA Section 13(c)(7) creates a limited exemption from the youth employment provisions for certain minors 14 through 17 years of age who are excused from compulsory school attendance beyond the eighth grade. This exemption allows eligible youth to be employed inside and outside of businesses that use machinery to process wood products (such as sawmills, furniture manufacturers, garden shed and gazebo manufacturers, cabinet makers and pallet shops) with some restrictions, but does not allow them to operate or assist in the operation of power-driven woodworking machinery.
In addition to the working for parents exception
> The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) provides for certain exemptions. Minors under age 16 working in a business solely owned or operated by their parents or by persons standing in place of their parents, can work any time of day and for any number of hours. However, parents are prohibited from employing their child in manufacturing or mining or in any of the occupations declared hazardous by the Secretary of Labor. Other exemptions to the FLSA are detailed in the links listed below.
There are also many special cases for other traditional occupations of children
> Employment as motion picture, theater, radio, or television actors, working at home in the making of evergreen wreaths, and delivering newspapers are among the jobs exempted from FLSA child labor provisions.
Those do get oddly specific...
> - Youth employed as actors or performers in motion pictures, theatrical, radio, or television productions;
> - Youth engaged in the delivery of newspapers to consumers;
> - Youth working at home in the making of wreaths composed of natural holly, pine, cedar, or other evergreens (including the harvesting of the evergreens).
There are also exceptions to the exceptions...
> Limited exemptions from some of the hazardous occupations rules allow 16- and 17- year-old apprentices and student-learners to perform otherwise prohibited work (hazardous jobs) under certain conditions. The hazardous occupations in which youth may work if the those conditions are met are: HO #5 Power-driven woodworking machines; HO #8 Power-driven metal-forming, punching and shearing machines; ...
Regardless, labor unions would be a feature of any conceptualization of free markets I’ve ever heard of. In what sense is cooperation and organization not compatible with a free market?
If an employer could negotiate with unions competing for a contract, the outcome might be a market-clearing price for labor. Enforce a monopoly for a single union, and the only possible responses are capitulate or leave, with outcomes that look like Detroit.
That's a valid argument against "closed shop" unions, which is a reasonable discussion to have; but we started this thread with banning unions tout court.
Market-based opposition to unionization is a perfectly reasonable and very common opinion. Looking at how our industry treats people who express this opinion, though, I don't blame the OP for using an alt. Our industry really needs to work on tolerating a wider band of worldviews.
> The only reason labor unions are legal is that certain unions have outsized political clout
That assertion, at least, sits somewhere between tautology ("sufficiently-powerful interest group is the only reason sufficiently-powerful-interest group's interests are advanced!" I mean, yes, that's... true) and blatant trololololing. Perhaps well-expressed "wrong think" would also have been punished, but this ain't that.
> In a perfect world labor unions would be illegal is not a market-based opposition.
Why not? It's perfectly reasonable to say in a perfect world, X would be illegal if you think that X is harmful enough for the state to act. I bet there are things you wish the state would ban. You don't have to agree with the OP, but he's not expressing anything wacky or bizarre. He just doesn't see unionization as some kind of unquestionable moral good.
The reaction this guy is getting really highlights how tech has become intellectually intolerant. It seems that everyone is treating what he said as some kind of blasphemy and is personally offended that he's opposed to unionization and wants to use the state to ban the practice, as if you're not allowed to think those thoughts and remain a person in good standing. You, in fact, are allowed to think those thoughts.
Your appealing to the big bad state to solve some problem is anything but market-based. If you don't like unions, compete against them with a better idea.
In the West we tend to believe in free association and the right of people to perform political activity without being beaten up by the police, at least most of the time.
Wow. I myself hail for your fabled "west", and I'm not suggesting that free association should be scrapped nor that violence be committed against its practitioners.
You literally started this thread by demanding that a policital association be banned. History tells us what that looks like in practice, and how much violence is involved in having the police break a strike.
As in workers can't legally demand higher wages as a group, as in those negotiations won't be legally binding and fines would be imposed on strikers, no need to hit anyone.
Laborers can't collectivize as soon as capital can't collectivize (incorporate). I'm on board this train, let's do it. Ban collective action in the economy, especially that supported and enabled by the government. In all its forms. Where's the petition I can sign?
ppl also talk a lot about union for tech workers. Its not feasible in tech because a sizable majority of tech workers are on various visa's that precludes them from joining a strike, making the union essentially ineffective. This needs to be addressed first.
Chicago has teachers union but filipino teachers on J1 cannot participate in a strike, it works for CTU because there are only a tiny fraction on J1 visa.
You can strike if you're on a visa, but it does put you at enhanced risk of retaliation. You can strike even if it is illegal. The question is the balance of power.
For example, if the company retaliates against visa workers, and the other workers strike in protest, the company will probably not continue to try that. This is why solidarity between workers of different dispositions is so important.
IANAL but when I had H1B visa it was for working for a particular company, not striking. I don't know if it's been tested yet but not working definitely had and it is a violation of H1B status. Google for "h1b bench NOIR".
I’m glad they were able to unionize but why should they deserve to have similar or same benefits as Google workers? Sorry to be blunt but they are cafeteria workers working for Bon Appetit. If I were Google I would just close all the cafeterias in order to avoid further precedent setting actions. The meals are going to get taxed by IRS anyway so might as well bite the bullet now and get rid of free food entirely.
"Deserve" and "should" hasn't got shit to do with it. Are we going to start policing sales and contracts corporations make to ensure the value they deliver "deserves" the compensation they're receiving? You get what you can get. If they can get more, good for them.
Google would be pretty unique among high tech companies and large companies in general if it didn't have cafeterias at all. I doubt they would close the cafeterias. If Compass is unable to negotiate a cost effective labor contract, the more likely outcome would be google switching to another provider. But that in itself doesn't seem very likely considering the optics, and the relatively small cost of this labor.
But, for the sake of argument, can you imagine what the lunch rush hour would look like in downtown mountain view and Sunnyvale if Google didn't have cafeterias at all? It was already pretty bananas when I left the Bay Area three years ago. Google's headcount on the peninsula was much lower then. And they did have cafeterias. Now it would be totally insane.
Or it would be a renaissance for urban restaurateurs and workers, who could afford the city again. Some of these tech areas are surrounded by dead zones.
In an alternate reality where there was a bunch of unused land and commercial real estate for lease in MTV and Sunnyvale, and/or where their city councils were open to building more, I agree. However, that's not the world we live in, so the situation you describe would be an unlikely result.
The consequence of this means rights for union organizers to be on the job sites and access to other workers. There is a thin edge of the wedge strategy at play here. It's not just the cafeteria workers.
The opposition I have to unions at companies like Google is that the companies themselves are too politically powerful to have staff who in effect must to behave criminally to be terminated. When you look at the impact of unions in law enforcement and national security, they are almost universally recognized as the main enabler for the social problems bad individuals in these fields cause.
The amount of social harm a malicious Google (twitter, facebook, reddit, pornhub, etc) employee can cause is astronomical and the main thing keeping the worst %10 in check is the likelihood of losing their job. Literally thousands of people who can divert or sabotage the lives of others without accountability.
They already have enough privacy and political problems, but I would predict unionization spreading to their tech workforce would trigger divestment and a general market reduction of risk exposure to their businesses.
These companies are different, and a political artifact of the industrial revolution will have disproportionate unintended consequences.
I'm much more concerned about executive accountability than I am about individual employee accountability at a company with as much political power as, say, Google.
Unions are a way of balancing executive power. (I don't think they're a panacea though! All I hope for in this case is that it is able to improve the lives and working conditions of Google's cafeteria workers)
There are at least 10x the number of employees to executives who have access to your email contents and browsing history. Using the worst %3 of individuals as a baseline, the executives are the people you have the very least to worry about.
Access to individual personal data is only one small point of power. Billions of dollars for lobbying and the ability to set policy and make sweeping changes is a much larger power.
Elections at all levels are won and lost on candidate email dumps and internet activity. Blackmail always works better than lobbying, and this is what protecting the worst actors will enable.
If you somehow don't think there will be accountability for an individual employee who misuses PII, we are living in two very different worlds.
You must understand that even a single employee doing this is such a breech of brand trust that Google would deal with it swiftly.
OTOH, it is quite clear to me that Google executives are allowed to make virtually unchecked and wide-reaching decisions that impact many and have negative consequences. A simple, unambiguous example is "the YouTube recommendation algorithm is bad for kids and seems to cause their exploitation" [1]
To be very clear: executives have the power to change the recommendation engine. To demonetize children's YouTube videos. They choose to be wreckless specifically out of greed.
You make an interesting point. It remains to be seen whether Googlers will form a union in which members that share differing viewpoints will feel more empowered to express their views without fear of losing their jobs.
