[knuththetruth]

I hope that between this and the defeat of Project Maven, Google employees are waking up to how much power they have when act collectively. Hopefully, more formal labor organization follows, so there can be an ongoing check on the poor, executive-level decision-making that keeps pushing the company into these unethical pursuits.

[prolikewh0a]

Not sure why you're being downvoted. This seems like an extremely reasonable statement to me. Ethics seem to not really be valued in many large tech companies anymore, as long as employee's can make large sums of money.

[knuththetruth]

I’m not sure that ethics aren’t valued on an individual-level by tech employees, so much as they’re denied opportunities to coordinate and express them.

Google, because of historical quirks with its culture, has provided employees a platform to do this, if only in a limited form. And what we see there is workers using it to organize and impose change from the bottom-up.

They’ll probably soon realize the limits of acting without a parallel power structure, such as a union, when executive power crashes down on them to curb this growing rebellion. But like I said, I’m hopeful that all the very smart people at Google will come to understand their true class position as labor relative to management and build something more durable that can help put the company back on a better, more ethical track.

[plainOldText]

I’ll tell you why: because the op suggested labor unions. They are considered harmful because it’s switching to a centralized decision making process. Perhaps unions were beneficial in the past for workers with little to no education, but for the “highly educated” software engineers living in an age where information is easily available, maybe not so much.

[knuththetruth]

How are unions a centralized decision-making process relative to companies that are ran like dictatorships by unelected executives? If anything, labor organization decentralizes decision-making and power within a company.

[plainOldText]

For one labor unions represent people across all companies, whereas without it, one can deal/negotiate directly with companies individually.

Also, nothing is preventing one from founding a startup which elects its leaders democratically.

[prolikewh0a]

>For one labor unions represent people across all companies.

Not true, you can have a labor union for one company.

>one can deal/negotiate directly with companies individually.

Also not true, I have zero ability to deal/negotiate with my company and I'd say this is a period where workers actually have less rights and less ability to negotiate other than simply quitting which isn't really sustainable for many people since 80% of the country is living paycheck to paycheck [1]. As we approach full employment workers should be gaining more ability to negotiate, but it's not happening.

>Also, nothing is preventing one from founding a startup which elects its leaders democratically.

Lack of funding, lack of credit. This is always the 'easy answer' for capitalists 'just start your own company', but it's really not that easy.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

[plainOldText]

> Not true, you can have a labor union for one company.

Yes, you can, but for all practical purposes I believe this would never happen, as it’s unsustainable. I mean, can you imagine every little startup or small company having their own union? I think the whole point of a union is to represent workers across the industry, unless you’re tied to a huge corporation, in which case it would make sense to have its own.

> Lack of funding, ...

So if starting a company ‘is not that easy’, why do people complain about companies being ran like dictatorships?

It seems that, despite the hardship, these “dictators” have managed to successfully bring something into existence and ought to exert more control over a company’s fate, don’t you think?

And for the sake of clarity, I’m not denying the huge contribution of early employees, just to be clear. I think they’re instrumental to any successful venture.