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Union Power Is Putting Pressure on Silicon Valley's Tech Giants (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Organized labor doesn't rack up a lot of wins these days, and Silicon Valley isn't most people's idea of a union hotbed. Nonetheless, in the past three years unions have organized 5,000 people who work on Valley campuses. Among others, they've unionized shuttle drivers at Apple, Tesla, Twitter, LinkedIn, EBay, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, Cisco, and Facebook; security guards at Adobe, IBM, Cisco, and Facebook; and cafeteria workers at Cisco, Intel, and, earlier this summer, Facebook. The workers aren't technically employed by any of those companies. Like many businesses, Valley giants hire contractors that typically offer much less in the way of pay and benefits than the tech companies' direct employees get. Among other things, such arrangements help companies distance themselves from the way their cafeteria workers and security guards are treated, because somebody else is cutting the checks. Silicon Valley Rising, a coalition of unions and civil rights, community, and clergy groups heading the organizing campaign, says its successes have come largely from puncturing that veneer of plausible deniability. That means directing political pressure, media scrutiny, and protests toward the tech companies themselves. "Everybody knows that the contractors will do what the tech companies say, so we're focused on the big guys," says Ben Field, a co-founder of the coalition who heads the AFL-CIO's South Bay Labor Council. Labor leaders say their efforts have gotten some tech companies to cut ties with an anti-union contractor, intervene with others to ease unionization drives, and subsidize better pay for contract workers. "If you want to get people to buy your product, you don't want them to feel that buying your product is contributing to the evils of the world," says Silicon Valley Rising co-founder Derecka Mehrens, who directs Working Partnerships USA, a California nonprofit that advocates for workers. Tech companies have been image-conscious and closely watched of late, she says, and the coalition is "being opportunistic."
San Francisco loves its left wingers, but somehow the economic side of that is left in the dust. It almost seems like they're authoritarian corporatists wielding identity politics as a pathetic fig leaf.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
See, the tech execs? They're not libertarians, they're greedy douchebags who expect to find cheap labor they can exploit while making shitloads of money.
Let's not pretend that Silicon valley is some bastion of moral virtue. It's full of nouveau riche assholes who write op-ed pieces about how the poor and homeless are ruining the view for nouveau riche assholes.
It's a fucking bro culture of self entitled pricks who might have some vestigial decency from a normal upbringing, but who are now cut throat business people who are more than willing to shit on the menial laborers while trying to give the illusion that the coddled tech workers are being cared for out of a sense of duty.
But let's stop pretending like they're actually concerned with anything but their own bottom line.
... you didn't get assign projects that are due tomorrow that have ZERO requirements and then if you question where the requirements are you get labelled as being "negative". This is why we actually need representation unfortunately. Many tech company managers to do the equivalent of finding a corner in a circular room because that's "what we need" and then act surprised when you can't do it and say "What's your problem?"
We'll make great pets
I wouldn't want to hitch my horse to SEIU's tactics; I imagine eventually it is going to backfire.
don't bother replying with some sarcastic response to pro-Union. Just go your own fucking way.
This comes across as pre-emptively shouting down dissent, rather than engaging... which is exactly what drives people away from unions.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!