[avianlyric]

> I'm not sure what more you are entitled to.

You're entitled to as much as you can negotiate. Isn't this a founding principle of capitalism?

If collective bargaining allows employees to negotiate more, then shouldn't they negotiate more?

[short_sells_poo]

This is exactly the point, I really don't know what is the parent arguing for here. Companies try to maximize the profit they can extract from employees. Why does parent try to paint employees doing the same in a negative light? We see that big corporations will not shy away from outright law breaking behavior if the payoff is likely to be greater than the fine. When the employees exercise wholly lawful means to maximize their payoff that somehow becomes icky?

This mindset in the US that workforce empowerment is bad has to stop. It feels like the middle class in the US is fighting ferociously alongside the mega-corporations in obliterating the middle class. Corporations are not your friends. The C-suite at corporations, and the shareholders are not your friends. They are not enemies, but because they are more like an amoral hivemind than a single benevolent entity, they'll naturally gravitate towards maximizing their payoff, even if this is at the expense of the workforce. Again, I'm not saying there is outright malice there, it's just the natural optimum state for the a group of entities who currently hold most of the power.

The US is basically a feudal society in everything but the name. If the Google employees manage to get traction and their efforts spread to the other parts of the industry, and perhaps even other industries, and the balance of power tips even just slightly back towards equality, that's already a win in my book.

[logicchains]

>This is exactly the point, I really don't know what is the parent arguing for here. Companies try to maximize the profit they can extract from employees. Why does parent try to paint employees doing the same in a negative light?

The difference is that people associate a union with forced membership; people who wanted to work at Google and to negotiate directly with Google, rather than accepting what the union negotiated for them, wouldn't be allowed to. If the union membership was entirely voluntary I imagine most people wouldn't object.

[short_sells_poo]

That's fair, but if such a union does not represent the will of the majority of Googlers, it's a bad union. It doesn't mean that unions are unconditionally bad. I'd even posit that such a union is unlikely to arise if indeed this is against the will of the majority of Googlers, since the union members would vote against such a mandate.

The other aspect (and I'm not trying to make a strawman here), is I'm getting the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" vibe from your post. People would object to a collective under the pretext that they are special among the 120k googlers and would somehow be able to negotiate a higher comp than what a hypothetical collective agreement would force on them.

What I found downright comical is this objection comes before the union is formed, before any details about how compensation would be handled is even discussed. So again, it feels like the very people who would be empowered by this move (since it is them who the collective would represent), object to the concept before even discussing the details. All under this uninformed notion that they'll be prevented from partaking in outsized compensation in the future when they inevitably rise to the top echelons of Google.

I call this uninformed, because unless any of these objectors have information, they can't know what the comps would be, since it was not discussed to the best of my knowledge. Nevermind the fact that by definition, most Googlers will not rise to the very top echelons because space there is naturally limited.

[SpicyLemonZest]

The article mentions that the union membership will be entirely voluntary. I don't think there's much reason to be concerned about this changing; they'd need a majority of employees to establish a mandatory union, and their initial organizing efforts didn't get very close to that.

[twh270]

Many people don't know how to negotiate (well), so they are at a disadvantage when entering compensation negotiations with a prospective employer who has HR/management that have the knowledge/skills to be able to negotiate lower compensation.

In addition, even assuming someone is a good negotiator, they generally can live without work for far less time than a particular employer can live without an employee filling a particular role. So people will often take a less-than-optimal compensation package because a job today that pays the bills is far more valuable than a job tomorrow that has the "best" compensation package.

I'm not saying collective bargaining is the only -- or even the best -- solution to this, but it's not as simple as just saying people should negotiate more.

[collyw]

Being someone who is likely closer to bad negotiator than good negotiator, this is something that can be learned. I am pretty sure there are hundreds or thousands of books on the subject.

[pclmulqdq]

I would assume that based on the amount of money that is at stake, most software engineers would try to become extremely good negotiators. A 1% improvement in salary for a SWE could easily be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over 10 years, so it is really silly to not try to understand how to get that money.

[travisoneill1]

The only way to get good is practice, and as an employee you only do this once every couple years or so. The company has people who do it every day.

[sumeno]

You would assume wrong

[Afton]

Yup. This seems like the right spot to plug this excellent article that has made me many 10s of thousands of dollars over my career:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Good thing patio11 doesn't demand a percentage for the millions and millions of dollars he is responsible for people collectively getting in increased salary/comp.

[patio11]

The great thing about my business model, such that it is, is that if I keep pushing that number higher I won't have to demand anything.

Winking, but not in the least bit a joke.

[q-big]

> If collective bargaining allows employees to negotiate more, then shouldn't they negotiate more?

It is not clear whether these employees are actually in a good position for negotiating. The idea behind unions is that an employer is not willing to lay off all the employees that are unionized (because this would lead to a sharp decline in productivity and thus KPIs). I consider how many products were scrapped by Google as quite some evidence that Google would be nearly as successful if it fired the unionized employees and continued working with some "core team".

This does, of course, not mean that I endorse this reality, but when you negotiate, you better know what leverage you actually have.

[avianlyric]

> The idea behind unions is that an employer is not willing to lay off all the employees that are unionized

I think this is a slight perversion of the truth. A union that relies entirely on industrial action (a.k.a. strikes) to get a company to change, isn't a good union. If a union walks into every negotiation with just an ultimatum, then very quickly the otherside is going to get fed up of their bullshit.

Ideally a union should be working closely with senior leaders to find win-win situations for both employer and employee. An an obvious example would be preventing Andy Rubin from getting a $90mil payday for sexually harassing people. Clearly that's not only a serious injustice, but was ultimately always going to end up public and damaging Google brand.

A union could help senior leaders find a better solution, part of that would be providing representation to those sexually harassed so they could bring a stronger case, and make it much easier for other senior leaders to throw Andy Rubin to the wolves.

[q-big]

> Ideally a union should be working closely with senior leaders to find win-win situations for both employer and employee. An an obvious example would be preventing Andy Rubin from getting a $90mil payday for sexually harassing people. Clearly that's not only a serious injustice, but was ultimately always going to end up public and damaging Google brand.

If the solution is already of economic advantage for Google itself, you simply don't need a union since it is already in the economic self-interest of Google to apply the solution. Employees unionize to have leverage against the employee for topics that employees have an interest in, but are of economic disadvantage for the employer (historically in particular salaries)

[Anderkent]

This assumes that leadership has perfect knowledge of the situation, which is just never the case. Unions can be an additional source of information about the state of the company, for things that are not being communicated via the usual management structure.

[acdha]

That last point is key: a union exists outside the management hierarchy. There are countless examples of situations which are well known but ignored for political reasons because everyone involved reports to someone with a vested interest in the status quo. A union can be extremely useful for forcing things into the open and doing so in a context where people feel safer commenting because they’re not the only one drawing attention.

[Applejinx]

How are moral, ethical or legal quandaries EVER of economic advantage to resolve?

Doing crime, cheating, being abusive, generally are more profitable than not doing it, in the absence of consequence. 'The economic self-interest' of Google is to be absolutely monstrous, if and only if it can get away with it.

And since it can…

[throwaway80332]

> I think this is a slight perversion of the truth. A union that relies entirely on industrial action (a.k.a. strikes) to get a company to change, isn't a good union. If a union walks into every negotiation with just an ultimatum, then very quickly the otherside is going to get fed up of their bullshit.

If those unionized googlers are worth their salt, can't they use more aggressive negotiation tactics, at least like a DDOS?

[freebuju]

> A union that relies entirely on industrial action (a.k.a. strikes) to get a company to change, isn't a good union. If a union walks into every negotiation with just an ultimatum, then very quickly the otherside is going to get fed up of their bullshit.

You must have not met the publicly employed unions we have in other countries. Teachers, nurses unions in my country for ex. threaten (and sometimes they do) all the time to down their tools to relative success. Sometimes the only way to get a point across your deaf employer is the way of the iron fist.

[CydeWeys]

> The idea behind unions is that an employer is not willing to lay off all the employees that are unionized (because this would lead to a sharp decline in productivity and thus KPIs).

It's also illegal.

[q-big]

> It's also illegal.

Then you find another pretense for firing many of them.

Addendum: There exist so many oblique "performance metrics" you can apply on the employee to find such a pretense.

[CydeWeys]

It's super obvious if the unionized employees have a much higher firing rate than the non-unionized employees.

[0x445442]

What if you're a candidate for employment and can negotiate more individually, as a non-union member?