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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."
That's why it's important to fire any contractors that you find out are using unionized employees. Obviously, any conscientious company will have a Just Say No attitude toward any attempts to unionize, but you gotta watch out for contractors too. If customers ever find out that your people are indirectly unionized, that's going to look really bad for your company, no matter how pristine your reputation otherwise might be.
This probably has you thinking: it just goes to show that we consumers need to be more vigilant about stamping out unions. That it's not as simple as merely boycotting companies with obviously ineffective/expensive labor; you have to actually look a little deeper.
But I disagree. I think it ought to merely come down to performance. If something is overpriced or sucks, don't buy it. Even if you can't directly attribute the defects to the presence of a union, it might still be there, lurking indirectly. And similarly, if a place has unions but the unions haven't destroyed the business and made their products uncompetitive, I think they ought to get cut some slack. Maybe they're handling the threat correctly.
Boycott suckiness and high prices. That'll get the unions, when they need getting. And they won't be able to hide behind a contractor, because you can't hide a high price; the high price is the unit of selection. And if the product is good or affordable, there's no need to boycott whatever union might be present, because they're relatively harmless.
And once everyone goes to school, and you have Ph.D.s working as janitors because there's far less demand in the world for Ph.D.s than janitors, what then will be your excuse for paying janitors shit wages?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you treat your every day rank and file service employees poorly and pay them less than a livable wage, then you can expect them to get angry and rise up. I am pro-union. As long as the upper echelon of companies are going to be greedy and expect slavery, then there has to be some checks and balances. And don't bother replying with some sarcastic response to pro-Union. Just go your own fucking way.
Let's be clear: Corporations are the aggregation of capital. Unions are the aggregation of labor. If you think one is a good thing, you have to accept the other as necessary.
In fact, as that famous socialist Abraham Lincoln said, "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm actually an advocate of companies retaining most of their employees as FTEs. Current accounting rules and tax law doesn't make this as appealing as it used to be. Too many companies pull a Pontias Pilate and wash their hands of any employee responsibility by hiring contracting firms to do things that aren't their "core competency." It's mainly these contracting firms that turn around and treat their employees like garbage to increase margin on their outsourcing deal. Living in a place like Silicon Valley and earning just over minimum wage as a cafeteria worker must require a huge sacrifice or a multi-hour commute to work a cafeteria job. If the contracting companies did a far superior job than FTEs would, I'd say they should definitely handle the work. But as we've seen in IT, contractors lowball salaries, bring in H-1Bs and offshore any work that doesn't require a physical presence. Services contractors like food service and janitorial companies will do the bare minimum required to make their employees not quit...and that bar is very low when you consider the exploitable nature of that workforce.
What I would like to see on the skilled side of the house is a guild system that replaces the patchwork of vendor certifications, for-profit schools and other training methods. A traditional union is great for commodity workers, but a guild or professional organization works best for workers that don't have uniform levels of experience and aren't doing a simple job. If a company knew the baseline quality of someone they hired, that sure beats having the hiring manager and the team the candidate would work with try to decipher what on their resume is a lie or exaggeration. Most IT interviews I've been on have had a quiz component, and I'm sure that's because the company has been burned by bullshitters too often. It's not enough to graduate with a CS degree, and the field of IT and development is gotten so huge that it's impossible to be great at everything. I'm a big-time generalist and advocate for more people being like this, but I simply have to choose what I'm good at this year and keep shifting focus to be useful in any one area.
Guilds and professional orgs would pretty much be the only thing that would work to organize technology workers. There are way too many prima donnas, "rockstars" and people who would never stoop to the level of a lower-skilled worker. This is why it works well for doctors, a group known for having egos that have an observable gravitational field. The organization is paid by its members to pay for laws that limit the ability to practice and keep the number of new entrants to a minimum. I'd actually like to see this because I really hate the fact that someone can be totally incompetent, get fired, then do the equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion and get hired somewhere else as if nothing happened.