[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.