Union Power Is Putting Pressure on Silicon Valley's Tech Giants (bloomberg.com) 116
An anonymous reader writes: Organized labor doesn't rack up a lot of wins these days, and Silicon Valley isn't most people's idea of a union hotbed. Nonetheless, in the past three years unions have organized 5,000 people who work on Valley campuses. Among others, they've unionized shuttle drivers at Apple, Tesla, Twitter, LinkedIn, EBay, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, Cisco, and Facebook; security guards at Adobe, IBM, Cisco, and Facebook; and cafeteria workers at Cisco, Intel, and, earlier this summer, Facebook. The workers aren't technically employed by any of those companies. Like many businesses, Valley giants hire contractors that typically offer much less in the way of pay and benefits than the tech companies' direct employees get. Among other things, such arrangements help companies distance themselves from the way their cafeteria workers and security guards are treated, because somebody else is cutting the checks. Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition of unions and civil rights, community, and clergy groups heading the organizing campaign, says its successes have come largely from puncturing that veneer of plausible deniability. That means directing political pressure, media scrutiny, and protests toward the tech companies themselves. "Everybody knows that the contractors will do what the tech companies say, so we're focused on the big guys," says Ben Field, a co-founder of the coalition who heads the AFL-CIO's South Bay Labor Council. Labor leaders say their efforts have gotten some tech companies to cut ties with an anti-union contractor, intervene with others to ease unionization drives, and subsidize better pay for contract workers. "If you want to get people to buy your product, you don't want them to feel that buying your product is contributing to the evils of the world," says Silicon Valley Rising co-founder Derecka Mehrens, who directs Working Partnerships USA, a California nonprofit that advocates for workers. Tech companies have been image-conscious and closely watched of late, she says, and the coalition is "being opportunistic."
Left Wing (Score:5, Insightful)
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San Francisco loves its left wingers, but somehow the economic side of that is left in the dust.
California in general, and SF in particular, have very pro-union laws snd policies, so I don't think there is any hypocrisy there.
If you want to see hypocrisy, look at how prosperous urban California uses exclusionary zoning [brookings.edu] to keep the poor out of their cities.
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California's political establishment is fueled by Unions, the worst part is that the primary Union powers are public worker unions who are basically funded by the same government they have control over. Result = obscene pension plans and benefits that burden the entire state.
Re:Left Wing (Score:5, Insightful)
California in general, and SF in particular, have very pro-union laws snd policies,
The unions where also very powerful in Detroit. That did not work out too well ultimately now, did it?
As with everything, there has to be a balance. I don't like powerful unions. I don't like unions that have obtained the right to grab money from my paycheck as they wish. I don't like unions dictating how a business should be run.
I also don't like businesses like early Ford, peeping into people's windows to see if they adhere to Ford's personal morals. Or businesses that abuse workers like the truck companies that force their employees into leasing trucks. That's when unions are needed, to correct the imbalance.
Unions and corporations are always playing a game of rope-pulling, and it is in everyones interest to maintain a healthy balance. You give some, you lose some. If one of either sides is able to "defeat" the opponent, everybody loses.
Re:Left Wing (Score:4, Insightful)
Unions and corporations are always playing a game of rope-pulling, and it is in everyones interest to maintain a healthy balance. You give some, you lose some. If one of either sides is able to "defeat" the opponent, everybody loses.
The best non-idiot post of the month!
Um... the manufacturing base collapsed (Score:2)
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Eh union power has nothing on 'em. They've got plenty of brain power [youtube.com].
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San Francisco loves its left wingers ... wielding identity politics
Right. Sure, buddy.
"The other group is always othering other groups. It's outrageous! We would never other others. That other group is scum."
Honestly, I had to read your comment three times before I figured out that it was the tech companies that you were labeling as "left wing."
This demonstrates the article about libertarians (Score:2, Insightful)
See, the tech execs? They're not libertarians, they're greedy douchebags who expect to find cheap labor they can exploit while making shitloads of money.
Let's not pretend that Silicon valley is some bastion of moral virtue. It's full of nouveau riche assholes who write op-ed pieces about how the poor and homeless are ruining the view for nouveau riche assholes.
It's a fucking bro culture of self entitled pricks who might have some vestigial decency from a normal upbringing, but who are now cut throat busin
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They're not libertarians
None of the CEOs mentioned in TFA claim to be libertarians. Of those that have taken public political positions, most of the are liberals/progressives.
they're greedy douchebags who expect to find cheap labor they can exploit
They have located their companies in the World's most expensive labor market, and they have agreed to accommodate the unions and raise pay despite no legal obligation to do so.
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Some have, others, maybe. While Microsoft is not in Silly Valley, they do reside in near-equally-liberal SeaTac... yet technically, their corporate headquarters is in Delaware (for tax purposes). Come to think of it, so is Intel, Google, Apple... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
(note, info is a bit old, but I believe still accurate).
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their corporate headquarters is in Delaware
Most big American companies incorporate in Delaware. Delaware corporate law is considered "standard" and is by far the most well known by lawyers and financiers. There is rarely a sensible reason to incorporate in another state, unless you are so small that the $100 annual fee is significant.
I once saw a presentation by Kleiner Perkins on "How to get VC funding". This was the first item on their list:
1. Incorporate in Delaware
If you are too boneheaded to get that right, they consider you too clueless to
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I think anyone allowing Kleiner Perkins to get their claws into them is the bonehead.
Perhaps. But if you ever want to do an IPO, issue stock options, sell corporate bonds, or even take out a sizable bank loan, then the process will be faster and cheaper for a Delaware corp.
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MIcrosoft is not located in SeaTac, SeaTac is a city where the airport is located. Mircosoft is located in Redmond Washington, which is a suburb of Seattle. Many microsoft offices are also in Bellevue, but little of Microsoft is in Seattle.
That being said, the whole area is liberal, but Redmond and Bellevue don't put up with the homeless nearly as much as Seattle does (at least from what I can see driving around and reading the newspapers).
Re: This demonstrates the article about libertaria (Score:3)
Shut up, you with your stupid.... facts. Your ruining a perfectly good jealous rant!
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It would be nice if... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Note that most of those manager types tend to not last very long (and if they run the company, neither does their company.)
Re:It would be nice if... (Score:4, Funny)
Note that most of those manager types tend to not last very long
Real world calling Penguinisto. Real world calling Penguinisto. Come in Penguinisto.
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I don't know dude. I purposefully came out there because I like the insane pressure, impossible timelines, and general feverishness of the culture. I like that I can routinely do what others cannot or will not do. That's appealing. Build this by tomorrow? Sure. I'll microdose on some lsd then intersperse micro bumps of cocaine with a little liquor and get it done if it takes me working through the night. But that's not for everyone and in the long term is probably poor for my health. That being said, it's what gets me in to work every day and I wouldn't trade it for an easy 3 month timetable desk jocky job.
I would assume you're making a joke but either way, here's the rub. Whatever the product of your efforts is, it all disappears into ancient history over time sometimes remarkably fast. So much in fact, it's as if it never happened at all. No one remembers you or what you did regardless of the level of persistence and wizardry. Usually along this path, you sacrifice important relationships and other things that may have lasted up until your final hours. I suppose everyone gets the choice but remember wh
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We live for the thrill, the pressure, and the insanity of it all.
If insanity is what you seek, there are far more effective ways to pursue that end result than what you're doing.
SEIU (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't want to hitch my horse to SEIU's tactics; I imagine eventually it is going to backfire.
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“If you dance with the devil, then you haven’t got a clue, for you think you’ll change the devil, but the devil changes you.”
-- J. M. Smith
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...and quickly backfire all the way to Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai...
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The creative types and superstars *DO NOT WANT* standardized hours. They don't want a job where you *have* to get in at 9am and *have* to leave at 5pm. They want the flexibility to get in at 8am and leave at 4pm, or maybe drift in at 10am and work until 6pm. Or perhaps work 10 hours for four days and take three days off.
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and the boss wants some to have in office face time 9-5 + on call 24/7
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Most creative types who have lives outside of work also DO NOT WANT constant 100-hour weeks and deathmarches. Other than people working for "all inclusive" employers like Microsoft or Google, I don't know anyone over 25 who desperately wants more time at work. Most people get that out of their system after their first employer that takes advantage of them.
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Just because you did good things in the past doesn't mean you're doing good things now, and nobody has to keep liking you just because yo
Re:Contracts (Score:5, Interesting)
And once everyone goes to school, and you have Ph.D.s working as janitors because there's far less demand in the world for Ph.D.s than janitors, what then will be your excuse for paying janitors shit wages?
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Supply and demand dictates what people are paid. At the moment, a PHD typically makes more than a janitor because it's much easier to find someone to be a janitor. You can't simply be a PHD although I know some who would have a tough time figuring out which end of a toilet brush to use. When everyone has a PHD and there are no janitors and trash is piling up and restrooms need cleaning, then the PHD holding janitors will make an appropriate wage.
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And the appropriate wage will be exactly the same, because it hasn't gotten any more difficult to find someone qualified to do the job. All you've changed is the number of people who are also now qualified to do more skilled jobs. But demand for those skills doesn't increase, so now those skilled jobs *also* pay shit wages, because there's a long line of janitors wo will be happy do those jobs rather than cleaning toilets.
Devaluing useful barriers (Score:3)
Janitor used to be a totally legitimate career, senior janitors used to be a jack of all trades handyman.
You went to school to assure yourself a life with dignity and this new breed of minimum wage janitor can go do that as well.
So.
You'll now be working with that janitor once he's done with school.
I personally can't stand working with warehouse managers who became IT managers, military sigint who are now network security, and of course the classic h1b who hates tech work and only does it because his mother
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Used to be. Now it's getting increasingly difficult to find non-contract janitorial work that offers basic benefits, much less a career path.
Besides, you only need one senior janitor, maybe a handful for a sufficiently large facility, so it's still not a general solution. Which was my original point - there's very limited room at the top, and even the middle class is shrinking rapidly. If your answer to people wanting a decent wage is "climb the ladder", then you're implicitly saying that it's right and
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I mostly agree with you but my post may have been hard to parse
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If anyone is given a Ph.D then a Ph.D obviously has no value. Welcome to the world of participation trophies where giving degrees out to anyone with a pulse and the ability to get a student loan turns out to be a bad idea. This will always happen when standards are lowered so people can feel good about themselves.
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Because the federal government spent the last 40 years skewing lower the standards of higher education by flooding the market with what is essentially free money:
A college loan from the government is an unsecured subsidized loan that you need not have any credit history to get and absolutely no burden to prove that you are going to do something, anything that will give you the opportunity to pay it back at literally any point in your life. And if you default, the government picks up the tab, so who really f
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It costs more because the government began subsidizing/guaranteeing student loans. Then you have some states giving "free" tuition to anyone with a C average. The price has grown exponentially ever since now that taxpayers are on the hook.
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"For the moment, you're still cheaper than a robot." the remaining excuse for paying janitors anything at all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic. It's just you can't expect much if you leave these sorts of things to market forces. When the market decides you're cheap, you may have agency (unlike other commodities) to increase your value. Desire is insufficient however, you must also have the resolve the follow through... and often the money to get the ball rolling.
It may also require you to have some fores
Janitors then/now (Score:2)
It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't program a robot to do all the work of a janitor. All the fixing pipes, vacuum cleaners, running cable... a good career janitor was the jack of all trades.
Of course some fuckface couldn't understand why they were paying someone 30 - 60k a year to empty garbage cans and sweep so now we have the janitor contractor. Costs less than the janitor's salary and the worker gets even less.. and couldn't give a fuck less if you don't want your desk touched or if your wastebas
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Wages are still commensurate to skill and experience, and demand will only go so high for the job. Janitorial work, while needed and necessary, is not a job that requires a lot of knowledge, expertise, and/or skill. Literally anybody with a modern 6th-grade level of education can be a janitor, and do so with less than a day's worth of training.
Mind, this is not an excuse to treat a janitor like some sort of subhuman, but it doesn't require you to pay him the same as you would pay a developer, sysadmin, etc.
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>Wages are still commensurate to skill and experience
That's a comforting thought if you're making decent money, the only problem is it's not true. Wages also don't depend on the value your provide.
The *only* thing that determines your wages in a free market economy, is how expensive you are to replace. i.e. the number of viable job candidates, versus the number of jobs that need to be filled.
Nothing to do with skills. (Score:2)
The tech companies addressed here contract because they lack skills to do whatever it is the contractor does ....
It's about having a much more "flexible" (can them when not needed) workforce. It's about saving money on the overall cost of the worker. Contractors are cheaper than regular employees. You don't have to give health insurance to contractors, pay social security, workers comp, or provide any other benefits. And they work you to death. It's always crunch time.
Hiring contractors is all about the money and being able to abuse folks who are not employees.
And when I contracted, when I added up the extra costs
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"Today's union is all about promising workers the moon while skirting the reality that is unskilled labor will never make a living wage."
Actually, it's the only way an unskilled worker will make a living wage, especially now. If you're approaching this from the position of being a skilled worker, change your perspective a little. Suppose you lost the IQ lottery, or had a crappy home life that interfered with your education, and didn't have employers and recruiters beating down your door begging you to come
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That would be somewhere in China. Good luck with that.
Nothing wrong with Unions but... (Score:2)
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You're essentially trading advancement opportunity and part of your pay for security of a job. State laws, especially in CA, cover the vast majority of why Unions used to need to exist; now it's more about the bottom finding a way closer to the middle by forcing others there as well.
Actually, to be blunt, what unions are about nowadays is simply existing as a business. They expand by finding new revenue streams, which are workers. So they find people that might not be happy with their work and convince them to joint he union to make things better. Then the union gets recurring revenue.
I have no problems with unions, but if these folks want to unionize they should join together and do so. No need to send a big part of your check to the AFL-CIO or whoever each month.
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Ah, yes, the other purpose of unions - to capture part of a company's revenue stream for use by the Democrat party.
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Another /. Rubbish Post (Score:1)
"... such arrangements help companies distance themselves from the way their cafeteria workers and security guards are treated."
What a load of rubbish. Companies outsource these things because it makes sense. Apple isn't in the restaurant industry. Facebook isn't in the Corporate Security industry. Cisco isn't in the cleaning industry. Smart business outsource what they aren't good at or capabilities they don't have expertise in, and insource those critical differentiators that provide them with competitive
No surprises (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No surprises (Score:4, Insightful)
don't bother replying with some sarcastic response to pro-Union. Just go your own fucking way.
This comes across as pre-emptively shouting down dissent, rather than engaging... which is exactly what drives people away from unions.
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"This comes across as preemptively shouting down dissent, rather than engaging"
There's not much to engage, the business class preaches free market for the masses but secretly loves state subsidy.
Energy subsidies
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2015/NEW070215A.htm [imf.org]
Science on reasoning, your brain does not see the world as it is, see the science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.
https://www.youtube.com/ [youtube.com]
Defining terms (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's be clear: Corporations are the aggregation of capital. Unions are the aggregation of labor. If you think one is a good thing, you have to accept the other as necessary.
In fact, as that famous socialist Abraham Lincoln said, "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
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Sure, but we have plenty of historical precedence for why only one or the other creates a very bad situation.
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Well, not every aggregation of capital is a corporation; corporations are a specific kind of aggregation of capital which are created in law.
So it's possible to draw distinctions between the two.
Another way of looking at this is what is the market function of the thing you're talking about? Companies (whether corporations or something else) exist primarily to reduce transaction costs. Rather than negotiate with you on every task I want you to perform, I *hire* you with a broad job description. Corporate
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Generally good principles, yes. Of course, it was mostly a fabric of lies, because the Nazis didn't believe in what Goebbels said.
Looks like Goebbels the master propagandist found yet another person to believe him.
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You will find lots of things you and I agree with Nazis on. Breathing and eating are good things to be able to do. Agreeing with the lies of Nazis is far from agreeing with Nazis, BTW. Study a bit of logic sometime.
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No, it's a corporation with a bunch of individual workers.
There are only two checks on corporate power: the government or labor unions. We have historical data on what happens when corporate power is unchecked by either. It was sarcastically referred to as the "Gilded Age".
Silicon Valley is a meritocracy run by VCs (Score:2)
VC funded Union (Score:2)
Here's a business Idea. Lets create a Mobile App to social and geo enable Unionization. Have it funded by VCs.
Revenue Model is that Big companies like Google will fund Series A or else their unionized employees on the app will strike.
Profit!!!
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Actually you're the one paying for that unfunded largesse spent decades ago. Enjoy paying that bill for the rest of your life. But hey, grandpa enjoyed spending your future money so that makes it OK.
Hire FTEs for service positions (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm actually an advocate of companies retaining most of their employees as FTEs. Current accounting rules and tax law doesn't make this as appealing as it used to be. Too many companies pull a Pontias Pilate and wash their hands of any employee responsibility by hiring contracting firms to do things that aren't their "core competency." It's mainly these contracting firms that turn around and treat their employees like garbage to increase margin on their outsourcing deal. Living in a place like Silicon Valley and earning just over minimum wage as a cafeteria worker must require a huge sacrifice or a multi-hour commute to work a cafeteria job. If the contracting companies did a far superior job than FTEs would, I'd say they should definitely handle the work. But as we've seen in IT, contractors lowball salaries, bring in H-1Bs and offshore any work that doesn't require a physical presence. Services contractors like food service and janitorial companies will do the bare minimum required to make their employees not quit...and that bar is very low when you consider the exploitable nature of that workforce.
What I would like to see on the skilled side of the house is a guild system that replaces the patchwork of vendor certifications, for-profit schools and other training methods. A traditional union is great for commodity workers, but a guild or professional organization works best for workers that don't have uniform levels of experience and aren't doing a simple job. If a company knew the baseline quality of someone they hired, that sure beats having the hiring manager and the team the candidate would work with try to decipher what on their resume is a lie or exaggeration. Most IT interviews I've been on have had a quiz component, and I'm sure that's because the company has been burned by bullshitters too often. It's not enough to graduate with a CS degree, and the field of IT and development is gotten so huge that it's impossible to be great at everything. I'm a big-time generalist and advocate for more people being like this, but I simply have to choose what I'm good at this year and keep shifting focus to be useful in any one area.
Guilds and professional orgs would pretty much be the only thing that would work to organize technology workers. There are way too many prima donnas, "rockstars" and people who would never stoop to the level of a lower-skilled worker. This is why it works well for doctors, a group known for having egos that have an observable gravitational field. The organization is paid by its members to pay for laws that limit the ability to practice and keep the number of new entrants to a minimum. I'd actually like to see this because I really hate the fact that someone can be totally incompetent, get fired, then do the equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion and get hired somewhere else as if nothing happened.
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Guilds mean the exploitation of the young by the old. When the young agreed to Social Security and paying for the elder's retirements they also expected the old to get out of their way. So you want guilds? Lets cancel social security and Medicare and use the corpus to pay off college loans of everyone below 35.
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I'm actually an advocate of companies retaining most of their employees as FTEs. Current accounting rules and tax law doesn't make this as appealing as it used to be.
I think that's an understatement.
Let me note at the outset that what I'm going to say is thirdhand information which may not be correct. I'd appreciate correction from someone who actually does know. In fact, the potential to provoke such a correction is 80% of the reason I'm posting.
I've been told by people who I expect should know that federal labor law restricts corporations to having no more than two classifications of full-time employees with respect to benefits packages. The two levels allow compa
Contributing to the evils of the world (Score:2)
Just watched 'On the Waterfront' again. Not all evils are corporate.
Collectivism is the evil (Score:2)
Which is why I make a point to avoid anything marked with "Fair Trade" and similar Leftist labels...
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