There are a lot of countries in EU which have, IMO, better work culture and fairness of negotiation as the guiding philosophies behind the work.
If Google did this in the USA, it wouldn't be seen as much. However, they have strong laws against this in EU, and this incident would not portray Google in favorable light, IMO.
I also feel that it is high time engineers realized that fairness in work is something we'd all love to have, and historically, skilled people have kept unions to ensure that they don't get screwed over.
I believe that at the end of the day, if you need fairness in negotiation, you need to have a way to express it, especially if it isn't supply driven.
I'd vote for everyone who has a reasonable plan of more scrutiny towards 40 hour work weeks.
This may reduce salaries but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow. Let's have a life now! When are you going to enjoy life, after retirement? Would you wait with sex till after retirement, too, if that offered a salary increase?
Is that a startup thing, because i've only worked for the big 5 (GAFAM) and I've always worked 40 hours a week. Add in the way higher comp, and I don't know why anyone outside of founders work at startups.
This sounds crazy to me. If you're a funder / owner, sure, you don't count hours and it can get crazy. But if you're an employee... Most of my hires now are 30 hours a week, a few at 35h. I don't have anyone at 39h anymore, although that was still the norm a few years ago. Paid stayed the same, just reduced the hours. People are just way more productive that way, and they have two half day free on top of the normal Saturday Sunday.
Probably doesn't work for all position, and in fact the worse the job the more likely it doesn't work for it, but uh yeah you can totally reduce to 40h...
(France, 35h is the legal work time for a full time contract here, but you can absolutely have a contract with more or less hours, you just pay extra social charges for hours above the 35th)
You can not reduce your 40 hour week? I know of at least two companies in Berlin, one of it is the one i work in, that are pretty flexible regarding the 40 hour week.
Outside the US there tends to be free choice of union. E.g. in Nordic countries Germany etc you normally have multiple unions to choose from and you don’t have to be member if you don’t have to.
It is the US and Anglo-Saxon countries were unions tend to be a binary thing. Germanic countries tend to follow a different union system: sector wise unions rather than company specific unions. Different types of employees will typically join a different union depending on the type of work and interests they have.
Well, good luck finding alumni as good as the ones from ETH Zürich anywhere else. Not counting the MIT, Stanford, Harvard, UOT etc. that they have to compete with other FAANG for graduates.
Better workplace protection for whistleblowers and protection from sexism and company retaliation seems like a good thing for google. There have been a stream of these court cases. I think this is actually something that would also benefit google - they seem to constantly struggle with this. I think google is no worse than other tech companies and based on my time there I think the company is well intentioned. They are just so large, a little more structure could help them.
Of course, union members with workplace protections don't usually get stock grants, free food, and a free gym. Google needs to address these problems themselves, but of course it's so hard for big companies not to just try to stop unions.
Instead of stopping unions, work on those workplace protections. Stop hiding problems and paying off executives with tons of sexual harassment claims to go away.
Was the unionization for Google employees or for their contractors? In the case of contractors Google doesn't have direct control over their compensation or perks (except that they must be excluded from some perks to still be legally considered contractors).
The whole contractors vs employee distinction is rather sketchy and I think this is yet another symptom of that problem. Google wants contractors instead of employees (because reasons). They hire a contracting company to get workers. The contracting company treats the workers badly, but Google is legally and contractually bound in how it can interfere with workings of the contracting company. If Google just fires the contracting company, I'm not sure anyone would be better off.
Reminds me of a government job I had. We were required to have contractors for some portion of the workforce. The contracting company some co-workers worked for went bust and they had to shop around to find a new agency to work through. They ended up in a good bargaining position since they effectively already had placement. They ended up better off than the direct employees (stupid government pay grade scale).
They probably could have done better if they were allowed to create their own contacting agency, but they couldn't because it wouldn't have been on the government's whitelist.
>Of course, union members with workplace protections don't usually get stock grants, free food, and a free gym.
The reason Google provides those things is because someone crunched the numbers and determined that it was a cheaper way to get employees to work free overtime compared to higher salaries.
> Better workplace protection for whistleblowers and protection from sexism and company retaliation seems like a good thing for google.
You're delusional if you think these are a "good thing" for the people who are in control of the organization. There's a reason they are anti-unions. Unions are effective and will reduce their profits by enfranchising their workers.
Free food, gym memberships, and stock options have nothing to do with Google workers being unionized. If you believe that you're just eating the propaganda the ownership class is pushing.
Unions work and are desperately needed. Google will never let it happen, and the US government is happy to stand by and let these sorts of blatantly illegal anti-union tactics keep taking place... because surprise, the same ones collecting Google's profits are the same people who control the government. (and yes, I realize this is in Zurich, which is not in the US, but pretty much all western governments bow to the US so it's irrelevant really)
To those reading the article from America: whatever is mentioned here about Europe or unions, please note that Switzerland is a planet on its own in Europe,with completely different mentality,laws and is hardly comparable with any other country. Also, the entire tech sector in there is more of a high end because of the costs.
I'm by no means familiar with labor law, but are companies (in Switzerland or the US) required to actively support unionization? It seems like it would be one thing to actively oppose unionization, and another thing to require the organizers to provide their own meeting rooms, space, etc. Looking at the article, it seems like this is the latter.
Can only answer for Germany, but yes, here the employer is required to provide for the initial meeting where the first employee committee (Betriebsrat) is elected. This includes rooms, paper etc but in particular informing all employees about the initiative as well as freeing people up during their paid work time so they can attend.
US- No, they're not required (or expected) to support unionization. There are specifics about how they're allowed to oppose it (saying "unions will hurt the company" is fine, saying "if you organize we will fire you" is not).
That said, it's still newsworthy. Forming a union is usually a battle of public opinion. As an organizer, it's likely in your best interest to say "hey, look your company only wants to explain unionization if they can help sculpt the message" as exactly the sort of behavior that would drive you towards having a union.
TL;dr- Unionization is frequently about optics, and these aren't great optics for Google.
This is a company that dedicates office space and employee time to massage, coffee bars, LAN party rooms, rock climbing walls, bowling alley, all manner of perks, but not one hour per ever of discuss of employee rights.
I've been thinking lately that we, as people working in the tech industry, especially in places like London, NY, SF, are in a unique position to self organize in a way no other group of workers is.
We are fortunate enough to live in a period that our skills are extremely sought for, we tend to work and specialize in code bases or technologies specific to a company, but we at any time we can take these skills and move away.~
The atmosphere and the general consensus in most companies tends to be that "no one is irreplaceable" which is true but it doesn't seem to take into account the cost to replace someone: You will need to find the right person, which means that some engineers' time will be spent on interviews, either phone ones or face to face, and not delivering "value" for the company; once you find the right person, you will then need to spend at least an extra month where that person is getting up to speed with "how things work" (paired with another person probably, even more time spent not delivering "value"), plus some more time for that person to actually become productive, and eventually after a few months, get in the position of the person that left.
Now, think in your immediate team, what is your bus factor? How many people would need to leave before it's going to be unsustainable for the feature/project/company to continue?
The usual counter-argument is that "it's easy to leave if you're young, but when you have family, you have to think more than just yourself" and I can totally sympathize with this. But as I said in the beginning, especially if you work for in one of the big hubs, and/or in one of the FAANGs, you could probably be in a new place within a week's time.
We don't need to "unionize" in the traditional term. The companies don't even have to
"acknowledge" a union. As long as we keep in mind how fortunate we are to working in tech
now, and we are determined to just walk away from places that we are not happy at, they
will come to us.
Until you compare your salary and expenses to that of someone who was working blue collar 40 years ago.
My dad made enough to support a family of four as an appliance repair man. He got a new car every so often, built a shop and had a home mostly paid for and we went on vacations. Going to the doctor wasnt a big deal and no one worried about being bankrupt from a hospital stay/
I am supporting a family of four and we get by. My car is 18 years old with 260k miles on it and I am hoping to get another 3-4 years out of it so the kids finish college. (community college, I am not rich and cannot afford anything else). The family is one major medical incident away from bankruptcy and I have good insurance
You tell me how good you have it and I will reply that is because you dont know how good it could be.
> In the email, Google said it was canceling the meeting because the company prefers to only host events on the topic organized in partnership with Google’s site leadership team.
So this was a meeting organized solely by employees, using company property, on the company campus, on a workday, with the only speakers allowed being the union reps?
I’m not surprised management would try to cancel that, it sounds like a pro-union propaganda party at Google’s expense.
It’s amazing to me how much Americans have swallowed this kind of “they deserve it,” management line. People seem to immediately imagine themselves as executives in the boardroom, quashing the rebellion before it begins.
As others have pointed out, protections for organizing at workplace sites are common through out Europe. Google employees built Google into what it is, not their senior management (especially given what has come to light). And the company would be better off if workers co-determined its future.
It's amazing to me how much Europeans do not identify with management, as if management is a class separate from them and not just people who were like them before getting promoted. Do Europeans see themselves as confined in their careers to a "class," and not invested in the competitiveness and profitability of the company they've voluntarily joined?
I'm sure these sorts of things are more common in Europe, and it's amazing to me how Europeans don't independently realize that it's not a coincidence that the battle lines are about trying to exact concessions from American companies, since there aren't really any relevant European tech companies anyway.
I don't know about Switzerland, but most European countries have laws that explicitly require companies to permit unions to operate on company property.
Many countries even mandate that stewards (union representatives) must be allowed to spend part of their working time on union work.
>So this was a meeting organized solely by employees, using company property, on the company campus, on a workday, with the only speakers allowed being the union reps?
Having worked at many large companies, I can honestly say that Google was the best behaved company of all of them, by far.
I think the difference is that Google has a relatively large contingent of "activist" type employees, and they're given a lot of latitude to speak their mind. When something bad happens, everybody hears about it because the employees are the ones shouting it loudest from the rooftops.
Their track record isn't perfect, and Dragonfly particularly strikes a chord with me. But other companies do worse, and you're just much less likely to hear about it.
> I think the difference is that Google has a relatively large contingent of "activist" type employees
Yes, I believe also this is the case. This is also in my opinion the biggest issue with Google nowadays and what makes it extra garbage. They seem to be caught again and again to use their large size to surpress and censor people and companies.
I feel hitting Google with monopoly lawsuits without going after the others would just make it worst.
Atleast Google somehow competes with the Facebook and Amazon which in my view are "more evil".
My other concern is, big co can resist stupid stuff government agencies want, they failed on PRISM but I feel they might have a better chance next time around as employees unionise and demand the company drop supporting unethical contract such as Googles' search engine for China (Project Dragonfly) case etc.
Readit News
There are a lot of countries in EU which have, IMO, better work culture and fairness of negotiation as the guiding philosophies behind the work.
If Google did this in the USA, it wouldn't be seen as much. However, they have strong laws against this in EU, and this incident would not portray Google in favorable light, IMO.
I also feel that it is high time engineers realized that fairness in work is something we'd all love to have, and historically, skilled people have kept unions to ensure that they don't get screwed over.
I believe that at the end of the day, if you need fairness in negotiation, you need to have a way to express it, especially if it isn't supply driven.
* "Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture" https://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8974435/switzerland-work-life-...
I can attest to the European side of comparison, they do value work but they also value the resting and recovering part.
This may reduce salaries but oh God most of us make too much money anyhow. Let's have a life now! When are you going to enjoy life, after retirement? Would you wait with sex till after retirement, too, if that offered a salary increase?
Nope, that's just in the USA, us in Europe not at all.
And I'm not even comparing EU salaries vs US salaries just tech salaries/property prices ratios for each location.
You're not overpaid, it's us that are severely underpaid in comparison.
Probably doesn't work for all position, and in fact the worse the job the more likely it doesn't work for it, but uh yeah you can totally reduce to 40h...
(France, 35h is the legal work time for a full time contract here, but you can absolutely have a contract with more or less hours, you just pay extra social charges for hours above the 35th)
Deleted Comment
It is the US and Anglo-Saxon countries were unions tend to be a binary thing. Germanic countries tend to follow a different union system: sector wise unions rather than company specific unions. Different types of employees will typically join a different union depending on the type of work and interests they have.
What's the issue?
If my company goes union, I'll go work somewhere else.
Of course, union members with workplace protections don't usually get stock grants, free food, and a free gym. Google needs to address these problems themselves, but of course it's so hard for big companies not to just try to stop unions.
Instead of stopping unions, work on those workplace protections. Stop hiding problems and paying off executives with tons of sexual harassment claims to go away.
The whole contractors vs employee distinction is rather sketchy and I think this is yet another symptom of that problem. Google wants contractors instead of employees (because reasons). They hire a contracting company to get workers. The contracting company treats the workers badly, but Google is legally and contractually bound in how it can interfere with workings of the contracting company. If Google just fires the contracting company, I'm not sure anyone would be better off.
Reminds me of a government job I had. We were required to have contractors for some portion of the workforce. The contracting company some co-workers worked for went bust and they had to shop around to find a new agency to work through. They ended up in a good bargaining position since they effectively already had placement. They ended up better off than the direct employees (stupid government pay grade scale).
They probably could have done better if they were allowed to create their own contacting agency, but they couldn't because it wouldn't have been on the government's whitelist.
Deleted Comment
The reason Google provides those things is because someone crunched the numbers and determined that it was a cheaper way to get employees to work free overtime compared to higher salaries.
You're delusional if you think these are a "good thing" for the people who are in control of the organization. There's a reason they are anti-unions. Unions are effective and will reduce their profits by enfranchising their workers.
Free food, gym memberships, and stock options have nothing to do with Google workers being unionized. If you believe that you're just eating the propaganda the ownership class is pushing.
Unions work and are desperately needed. Google will never let it happen, and the US government is happy to stand by and let these sorts of blatantly illegal anti-union tactics keep taking place... because surprise, the same ones collecting Google's profits are the same people who control the government. (and yes, I realize this is in Zurich, which is not in the US, but pretty much all western governments bow to the US so it's irrelevant really)
And Google Et Al only give "free" food as the IRS doesn't tax it as a benefit in kind - quite why they don't as it would be an easy tax to collect.
Bummed me out, since I love it as a perk.
https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...
Deleted Comment
That said, it's still newsworthy. Forming a union is usually a battle of public opinion. As an organizer, it's likely in your best interest to say "hey, look your company only wants to explain unionization if they can help sculpt the message" as exactly the sort of behavior that would drive you towards having a union.
TL;dr- Unionization is frequently about optics, and these aren't great optics for Google.
We are fortunate enough to live in a period that our skills are extremely sought for, we tend to work and specialize in code bases or technologies specific to a company, but we at any time we can take these skills and move away.~
The atmosphere and the general consensus in most companies tends to be that "no one is irreplaceable" which is true but it doesn't seem to take into account the cost to replace someone: You will need to find the right person, which means that some engineers' time will be spent on interviews, either phone ones or face to face, and not delivering "value" for the company; once you find the right person, you will then need to spend at least an extra month where that person is getting up to speed with "how things work" (paired with another person probably, even more time spent not delivering "value"), plus some more time for that person to actually become productive, and eventually after a few months, get in the position of the person that left.
Now, think in your immediate team, what is your bus factor? How many people would need to leave before it's going to be unsustainable for the feature/project/company to continue?
The usual counter-argument is that "it's easy to leave if you're young, but when you have family, you have to think more than just yourself" and I can totally sympathize with this. But as I said in the beginning, especially if you work for in one of the big hubs, and/or in one of the FAANGs, you could probably be in a new place within a week's time.
We don't need to "unionize" in the traditional term. The companies don't even have to "acknowledge" a union. As long as we keep in mind how fortunate we are to working in tech now, and we are determined to just walk away from places that we are not happy at, they will come to us.
My dad made enough to support a family of four as an appliance repair man. He got a new car every so often, built a shop and had a home mostly paid for and we went on vacations. Going to the doctor wasnt a big deal and no one worried about being bankrupt from a hospital stay/
I am supporting a family of four and we get by. My car is 18 years old with 260k miles on it and I am hoping to get another 3-4 years out of it so the kids finish college. (community college, I am not rich and cannot afford anything else). The family is one major medical incident away from bankruptcy and I have good insurance
You tell me how good you have it and I will reply that is because you dont know how good it could be.
Here is a link by no other than the IMF: https://blogs.imf.org/2017/04/12/drivers-of-declining-labor-...
So this was a meeting organized solely by employees, using company property, on the company campus, on a workday, with the only speakers allowed being the union reps?
I’m not surprised management would try to cancel that, it sounds like a pro-union propaganda party at Google’s expense.
As others have pointed out, protections for organizing at workplace sites are common through out Europe. Google employees built Google into what it is, not their senior management (especially given what has come to light). And the company would be better off if workers co-determined its future.
I'm sure these sorts of things are more common in Europe, and it's amazing to me how Europeans don't independently realize that it's not a coincidence that the battle lines are about trying to exact concessions from American companies, since there aren't really any relevant European tech companies anyway.
Many countries even mandate that stewards (union representatives) must be allowed to spend part of their working time on union work.
Typically you just say "organizing".
Dead Comment
As required by the law.
I think Google heavily needs to be split up.
I think the difference is that Google has a relatively large contingent of "activist" type employees, and they're given a lot of latitude to speak their mind. When something bad happens, everybody hears about it because the employees are the ones shouting it loudest from the rooftops.
Their track record isn't perfect, and Dragonfly particularly strikes a chord with me. But other companies do worse, and you're just much less likely to hear about it.
Yes, I believe also this is the case. This is also in my opinion the biggest issue with Google nowadays and what makes it extra garbage. They seem to be caught again and again to use their large size to surpress and censor people and companies.
I have worked there myself in the past and it was very pleasant.
Atleast Google somehow competes with the Facebook and Amazon which in my view are "more evil".
My other concern is, big co can resist stupid stuff government agencies want, they failed on PRISM but I feel they might have a better chance next time around as employees unionise and demand the company drop supporting unethical contract such as Googles' search engine for China (Project Dragonfly) case etc.