How does a contract union even work? Isn’t the whole point of contractors that it’s a less binding temporary position that can be terminated if needed?
It works because a company far too transparently pretends that “contractors” aren’t employees. I also helps to prove to be BS when the “company being contracted to” sets the rules of employment and decides who is a suitable “contractor” and who is not.
“We had exercised our right to organize as members of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in order to bring both Google and Accenture, a Google subcontractor, to the bargaining table to negotiate on several key demands, including layoff protections.”
Google only started accepting contractors and recruiters because they were expanding before the pandemic. They probably wanted to get rid of both of those anyway.
They will show through internal communication that this was planned all along. Any retaliation protection this union thought they had doesn’t exist.
Accenture and Google’s relationship has changed throughout the years. They are partners in cloud services. I’m not sure what their role is in other divisions though.
I mean here in Argentina, we IT workers push against unions. When we have issues at work, be it salary or whatever, we just leave and jump ship into the next one Most work is remote and beyond junior positions, salaries are good. We don’t even have to worry about compliance with law because most work in IT has to be taxed.
Negotiations? We do that when the relationship between both parties begins. Firing? Sure go ahead and do it, we don’t give a shit.
I imagine IT workers in USA have even better salaries and benefits, so this measure makes no dent. Obvious even, given the size of the union, I mean 80 people come on.
I tell you, this isn’t the news item they are making it out to be
To afford good lawyers in order to fight back, unions need money, which requires more members to pay union dues.
To keep politicians honest and to credibly threaten their electibility, unions need more members that can be politically mobilized.
It’s a feedback loop. The more people unionize, the more powerful unions become and the more powerful unions become, the more they can protect people who unionize.
European companies somehow survive just fine with people being in unions. There are many strong protections in place, which is why we have 6 weeks vacations, maternal leave and so on.
You’re consuming too much American anti-labor propaganda.
I remember a propaganda a few years back that European countries with decent unemployment compensation made people leave their jobs to stay at home spending their welfare on cupcakes. But these American fake news don’t even try to hide their how American they are, because cupcakes aren’t a thing in many European countries.
I checked before posting, and yes, many European nations do have youth unemployment in the 20% range.
Which makes sense. Companies still need people, but if it’s more expensive to get low-end workers you just won’t hire entry level workers unless they’ve proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt.
@mrmanager was talking about European companies doing fine despite strong unions in Europe and there being a lack of companies toppling over due to the strong unions.
They actually undersold it, because in many Western-European countries everyone benefits from union negotiations, even people that aren’t members of a union because the collective bargaining agreements unions manage to negotiate will affect everyone working in the relevant industry by virtue of laws deferring to those collective bargaining agreements.
You in turn decided to reframe the discussion at hand from companies doing well to unemployment numbers and not just general unemployment numbers, but youth unemployment numbers because you felt it would serve your argument best.
But if you look at the trends for unemployment then the story isn’t as bleak as you’d make it out to be. For starters general unemployment averages under 6% with only two countries being above 10% (and below 15%).
Average youth unemployment sits at 13.9% with a hand full over 20%.
However, both general and youth unemployment are on a steady downwards trend since 2013.
One exception to this trend for general unemployment is during the pandemic, where it shows a bump and for youth unemployment there’s an additional minor bump in 2022, which suggests a correlation with the influx of refugees from Ukraine. This is the European source on these statistics.
There will always be a higher unemployment rate in the EU compared to the US, especially when it comes to youth unemployment.
This lies mainly in the fact that most European countries have a civil registry system that automatically keeps track of certain data, unemployment being one of them, whereas in the US this data is collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by conducting a survey of roughly 60,000 households.
Another factor is a difference in definitions. A good example is the one from the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Garrett is 16 years old, and he has no job from which he receives any pay or profit. However, Garrett does help with the regular chores around his parents’ farm and spends about 20 hours each week doing so.
Lisa spends most of her time taking care of her home and children, but she helps in her husband’s computer software business all day Friday and Saturday.
Both Garrett and Lisa are considered employed.
Neither of them would be considered employed in most European countries. There are other such discrepancies, for example the US doesn’t include people under 16, whereas Europe looks at 15-24 for youth unemployment.
And then there’s the cultural difference between the two markets about when people are expected to start working and subsequently the jobs that will be available.
Which makes sense. Companies still need people, but if it’s more expensive to get low-end workers you just won’t hire entry level workers unless they’ve proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Your hypothesis is quite lacking.
As stated, the trends have been going down for a decade now, if your hypothesis was true we’d see an upwards trend.
Additionally, these labor protections, including protections against being laid off, have been around for decades, your hypothesis doesn’t offer an explanation why, despite these protections, unemployment is going down.
Also, minimum wage, as is often paid for these kinds of jobs, is lower in most EU countries than in many US states, making it comparably cheaper to hire those kind of jobs in Europe than it is in the US, your hypothesis doesn’t explain why, despite this, the unemployment rate is higher in Europe than it is in the US.
In short, your hypothesis nor the unemployment rate is relevant to what @mrmanager was positing, so lets refocus to the topic at hand: the lack of companies toppling over like domino bricks despite the copious amounts of employee protection facilitated by strong unions.
Perhaps afterwards, we can talk about the lack of landlords, corporate or otherwise, going bankrupt despite the strong tenant protections as well as the lack of companies selling merchandise to consumers pulling out of the market despite the strong consumer protections, and so and so forth.
And then, maybe, just maybe, we can afterwards all come to the conclusion that these QoL improvements are attainable without some kind of economic doom scenario.
No offense, but it seems like a really dumb idea to unionize in the middle of mass industry layoffs.
Maybe you would do it when things are going good, but if everyone around you is getting laid off and you unionize, it almost seems self-evident who’s going to get laid off next.
Is it illegal? Probably. Are they going to get away with it? Probably.
Everyone should remember that big tech companies aren’t your friend.
In the fable of the and and the grasshopper the grasshopper needed food stored up more than ever when the winter came, but the time to be preparing for winter was the spring, summer, and fall when you plant, tend, and harvest. By the time winter comes it’s too late.
The best time for someone with a variable rate mortgage to refinance as fixed rate would have been 2020. You didn’t need a fixed rate back then because variable rate was in some cases less than 1%, but you need one now because mortgages are around 7%. If you refinance now it won’t help.
The time to unionize was when labor had power by being in demand. 2020 would have been a good time, but maybe even the mid 2010s.
The Fable of the ant and the grasshopper I’m referring to comes from Aesop’s fables, a work collected around between 500 and 600 BCE.
It’s been told and retold in many different languages around the world, and in virtually every example of the Fable being told, the story is basically the same: the ant works through the summer, and the grasshopper dances. Eventually the winter comes, and the ant survives and the grasshopper dies of starvation. For over 2,000 years the moral of the story has been but there’s a work time for work and there’s a time for play, that you need to work hard in the summer or you will starve in the winter.
It’s wonderful that somebody reinterpreted the Fable for a modern kid’s movie, but that does not change the original meaning of the fable. Aesop was a slave born in Greek society, a society that utilized slavery. It’s not likely that greek society would have been super into a slave teaching their kids that one day the slaves would overcome their Athenian masters.
Aristophanes wrote many plays criticizing greek society a few hundred years after Aesop. The following was from his play “Ekklesiazousai”, which was a comedy about what would happen if women took over the government. It’s a sort of hilarious example of the difference between greek society and modern society for many reasons, especially this exchange:
Praxagora: I want all to have a share of everything and all property to be in common; there will no longer be either rich or poor; […] I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. […]
Blepyrus: But who will till the soil?
Praxagora: The slaves.
In Orwell’s 1984, the main character’s job was in the ministry of truth, ironically changing history to better suit the party. In this sense, replacing a 2500 year old fable with a 25 year old movie sounds more like that 1984 than simply citing the original fable.
I hope that the discharged workers prevail. That much said, the monetary punishment meted out to Google won’t even amount to a mere fraction of Google’s profits. It’s ridiculous the power that the wealthy have over us.
Seriously. Fines against corporations need to be a significant percentage of their revenue. Also executives should face jail time when their corporation breaks the law.
The status quo of corporate fines is just the cost of doing business.
Completely agree. Higher fines, jail time, mandatory cancellation of executive bonuses/raises/stock options. And it starts at the top no throwing middle managers under the bus as sacrificial lambs.
I agree completely. It’s clearly retaliation. The fines should be presented as percentages of net revenue. Make it more painful to do this and it’ll stop. But right now, it’s cheaper just to pay the pittance that will be the settlement.
I mean, they kinda do? But they're also pretty outnumbered and no more resistant to baseball bats than the average bloke. Just throwing that out there.
The prohibition is not on speech. It’s on installing a specific piece of software on government-issued devices, when the government has determined that software is a security & privacy threat.
The professors could legally use a third-party client app (if one exists) to connect to the service.
One example cited by the plaintiffs is Jacqueline Vickery, Associate Professor in the Department of Media Arts at the University of North Texas, who studies and teaches how young people use social media for expression and political organizing. “The ban has forced her to suspend research projects and change her research agenda, alter her teaching methodology, and eliminate course materials,” the complaint reads. “It has also undermined her ability to respond to student questions and to review the work of other researchers, including as part of the peer-review process.”
This is literally preventing some profs from doing their jobs properly. There has to be a way to sandbox it to negate the threat while still allowing academic research and teaching.
The ban says they can't install the TikTok app on government-provided devices. I don't see why they can't have the TikTok app on their personal devices. Or if they have to visit it on a government device, why can't they use the web interface.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If blocking a website on government devices/networks is a violation of free speech why are you just now sounding the alarm? Why didn’t you sound the alarm when I wasn’t allowed to browse reddit on my government laptop? The government blocking access on personal devices/networks is a violation, blocking access on government networks/devices is business as usual.
TLDR: Farmer agrees to sell some flax in the future at a fixed price, by responding “👍” to “please confirm flax contract”. Later, as the market price of flax went up, the farmer demands more money. They buyer then goes to court to force the farmer to sell the flax at the agreed price, judge rules that the “👍” does count as agreement.
This is a contract that was made several times previously, with similar informal agreements like “ok”, but this time the farmer tried to get out.
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