How many unionized companies pay higher salaries than Google?
Almost every single company in the country pays less than Google. So you could say the same about any non-unionized company too.
If unions arose out of poor working conditions then it probably follows that salaries for that work were poor.
Just because you make a lot of money, doesn't mean you're not being underpaid or exploited. These software companies aren't some of the most profitable companies in the world for no reason.
If you are a Google engineer, you can go work for literally anyone else if you feel you are underpaid and exploited. It isn’t like Google is the only buyer of labor in that market. Some chicken processing plant in Iowa — that might be a different conversation, but this is Google. If you feel you are underpaid, then leave. Go work for Netflix, I hear they pay a lot. Don’t like Netflix? Try Apple, LinkedIn, or start your own company. Plenty of money out there for an “ex-Google engineer” with an idea.
And, yes, one answer is "if there are no reasonable demands to be made, the union will make unreasonable ones," and sure, that's possible. Maybe newly-unionized employees will suddenly demand double bonuses, three months' paid vacation a year, and free ice cream for life. But I'm not convinced that's the real worry.
Because the point of a union isn't to do what's fair but to extract maximum benefits for the union. What do they have to lose by NOT pushing for every single possible benefit?
>But I'm not convinced that's the real worry.
Why? What incentive does a union member have to not vote in union leadership that promises to give them more?
That's all fine except unions push for these benefits for existing members equally and only existing members. That leads to pushes for things like seniority based pay, indifference to those who are better at their jobs, certifications, pointless bureaucracy to prevent moving jobs away from the union, etc. Personally, I don't like those things.
> Because the point of a union isn't to do what's fair but to extract maximum benefits for the union. What do they have to lose by NOT pushing for every single possible benefit?
By this logic every union pushes for every possible benefit. That doesn't seem to be the reality though (at least in the cases I've read, there are often concessions from both sides of th bargaining table).
Why assume that unions in tech, an industry that has had little to no experience with unions, is composed primarily (at least in Silicon Valley) of those who are often interested in recreating things from first principles, and claims to embody a spirit of invention, will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? I thought our whole shtick was about innovating things for the better?
Well, even though some labor cost-cutting is helpful to them, at some point that stops being the rational choice, right? At some point they're not going to be able to attract talented workers. Likewise, it's not in a union's best interest to demand so much they drive a company into bankruptcy, whether directly or indirectly. They might do it anyway -- just like there are, in fact, examples of companies driving good employees away through bad management practices -- but that's not a rational choice.
Must be a recent development if this[1] story is true. It only took a few lawsuits too and far from the first problematic agreement they had to end, so very employee friendly and free market oriented.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/google-ends...
If the software industry were to unionize, the union would want to collectively bargain for seniority-based job security rules and other schemes to prevent lower-paid new-hires (people not YET in the union) from taking work from existing union members. Other versions of this effect come in the form of union-imposed certification schemes in the trades, "tenure" rules in education, seniority precedence in picking hours in healthcare, etc. The net effect is that the experienced and powerful members make it hard for the young to get into the profession.
I have a problem with that, ideologically. But, in more practical terms: collective bargaining only works to increase wages when the counterparty has no other option. This works when you're talking about workers at the docks: the docks are not going anywhere, the ships need to be unloaded, and you can't exactly bus in some scabs and expect it to work out. With software, what do you think will happen if a union somehow manages, via Swiss law, to unionize one Google office? It's software. Google will leave and hire elsewhere.
This is exactly why Subaru and Toyota builds cars in the southern U.S. while Ford builds in Mexico, and why industries are flocking to non-union states, and why the people are going with them.
Wow, I didn't know the Writer's Guild and Actor's Guild in Hollywood had seniority-based positions.
The Writer’s Guild doesn’t have seniority based positions but it does have seniority based pay. That’s why after you get enough years experience in a writer’s room for tv shows work starts to dry up unless you become a show runner. So after ten or fifteen years of working in tv you have to do something else for many years until your awesome pension kicks in.
The Actor’s Guild does work very hard to dualise acting, black listing anyone who works with non-members. The median member of the SAG doesn’t make much off it but the minimum rates the SAG negotiates mean if you have steady work you’re making a solid living. Without them many more people would be actors and fewer would make decent money at it.
> With software, what do you think will happen if a union somehow manages, via Swiss law, to unionize one Google office? It's software. Google will leave and hire elsewhere.
Does Google hire the best people, or is it a "body shop"? If they just shut down their Swiss office and fire everyone, I'd imagine there would be some impact on whatever projects those people were working on. There's a gradient here... if they demand 10x higher salaries, then yeah it's probably not going to work out. But maybe 10% higher salaries would actually be cheaper for Google than shutting everything down and starting over.
Precisely because unions are set up to treat members equally they negotiate for the benefit of the median member. Individual unions can fight against the incentives for a while, sure, but first in last out, seniority based pat and restricting entry to keep benefits concentrated among current members crop up everywhere. Yugoslav employee owned companies, the kibbutzim and universities all show the same behaviors because they all face the same incentives. If you think some particular union will be different from the norm provide some argument as to why.
A year of qualifying membership in another union, or 1-3 days of work in a movie. The $3,000 initiation fee is mostly to make sure that people are serious about joining and is not inherently required - the union makes almost all of its money from dues. That would also not be a high bar for most Google employees to clear.
> In normal industries you don’t see a bunch of twenty and thirty year olds, many fewer forty and fifty year olds and very, very few people in their sixties.
Isn't that how the tech industry works?
> to make sure people are serious about joining and not inherently required
that rather supports them restricting entry doesn’t it?
The tech industry does have a reasonably similar age structure but it’s because of decades of sustained rapid growth more than pushing people out. If your industry grows 100% a decade in employment in year 30 with perfect retention you have 25% of staff with 20 years experience. That’s quite different from static or falling numbers of jobs and getting priced out of working because you’re too expensive.