If I cancel a contract with an external party with immediate effect it's fair to say I 'fired' them. I have taken the decision to end their job working in my company. That's true even if they continue to be employed by the company I've contracted them from.
If Google specifically cancelled the contract for this team from Cognizant because the team unionized it's fair to say that Google fired them. The only way it isn't fair to say that is if Cognizant fired them without Google's input. Knowing contracting companies though, I'm fairly sure that didn't happen. Cognizant wouldn't jeopardize their relationship with Google like that.
My friend owns a security guard company - he employs about a dozen guards and takes on contracts that last anywhere from a day to a few years. When a guard quits or gets fired he has another one on the bench that goes and fills that role. If a guard is assigned to a construction site to watch it for a month, he isn't "fired" by the construction company when the work is done. Instead he goes back on the bench or is moved immediately to another job site.
Cognizant, Google, and the workers all knew the contract was ending today. By their own admission they had been training other people to take over the work in anticipation of the end of the contract. This was theatre.
The only way it gets even close to “fired” is if you had a month contract for the construction site, and the company cut it short and banned you from the property.
A contract expiring is not being fired. Maybe - maybe - a contract that has been renewed repeatedly being not renewed is similar, but it still really isn’t.
Unless the guards employed by your friend's company are also jointly employed by the places where they work, the two situations are not directly comparable.
"Considering indirect control prevents an entity that has an employment relationship with employees from avoiding joint-employer status—and the bargaining obligation that goes with it—by using an intermediary to implement decisions about essential terms and conditions of employment."
The title here says "laid off". This is definitely not the case if they're a third party whose contract was cancelled. If the Cognizant team unionised, it will have done so as part of Cognizant, I assume, so I'm still a bit confused.
How does the legal definition of firing compare to the legal definition of canceling a contract? I would imagine that the outcome depends on exactly what was specified in the contract itself. While I might feel sympathy for the former employees of Google, without knowing the exact conditions under which they were employed at (not by) Google, I can only sympathize and not much else.
The whole concept of collective bargaining kinda evaporates when the collective is small enough, and the company large enough, that the company is be able to not give a duck about the entire collective and their collective actions. In this case they can just fire them all on the spot ("can" as in are able to, not as in have a legal right to) and it evidently doesn't cause any large enough issues for them.
I sympathize with the workers, but they clearly overplayed their hand.
It's odd to use dock workers as a contrast, since their heavy unionization has led to very high pay rates (which, for the record, I think are deserved):
"Full-time dock foremen earned 24% more than the average CEO’s base salary in 2022 and 20% more than neurologists. ILWU clerks earned just $5,600 per year less than airline pilots. Full-time dockworkers came in 21% higher than lawyers and 9% above dentists.
Average earnings in 2022 for all full-time ILWU registrants — $211,000 — were 3.4 times higher than the average wage for all professions calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics."[1]
Meanwhile the "Google employees" referenced in this story are contractors who are paid ~$19/hr, or ~$40k/year at full time pay.
Whether or not you intended it, this reads as a bad faith response: you’re claiming those are “the same group of people” as if we haven’t had more than a decade of commentary about the difference between the best paid FAANG employees and contractors working at the same place, or even awareness that those companies hire more than one role. For example, during the recent thread about Google closing a daycare there were many people saying only the executives could afford that and even fairly highly-ranked SREs struggled.
A far more likely explanation is that your memory is grouping everyone who works at a FAANG in the same bucket rather than recognizing that there are multiple groups and the people who are doing well brag while the ones who aren’t complain.
So compensation is high but if you look at profits of the companies many workers actually aren't capturing much of the value they are generating. So yeah the people unionizing are getting paid like 200+ thousand a year but when corporate profits are 400+ thousand a year per person there's a good argument that they should be making more.
Also this is assuming that the only point of unionization is pay and that's just not true. My experience is that pro-union people have a variety of things. One example is that I once worked at a place where they initially denied an exception to return to office rules to someone who had an immunocompromised family member. A union allows workers to collectively put their foot down on policies that are unacceptable. Honestly tech workers are often paid well but very stressed out.
This is an aside but overall I've found the anti-union sentiment in tech to be weird in that they view standing up to management as some sort of weakness. To me the real cowards are the people who will watch an asshole in a 200 million dollar house dictate policies without ever even considering fighting back. I don't get how people have made continuously rolling over in front of management a virtue, it's just silly.
Edit: to be fair maybe the anti-union people have never had management do stupid or unfair policies and maybe they haven't seen their company laying people off while announcing tens of billions in stock buy backs but too many people in this industry have and it doesn't make them a "snowflake" to want to fight.
> many workers actually aren't capturing much of the value they are generating
That's not what happens when you're an employee. You exchange a guaranteed salary, sick leave, holiday, etc, for your time and expertise. "Capturing value" isn't part of the agreement, any more than a third party toilet cleaner, who also is a vital member of an organisation, doesn't get to "capture" the value that's derived from their work.
This is a very odd stance to take. If we can agree unions are a good thing then both the high and low paying employees should have access to and use unions.
I would argue that Google staff unionising is a good thing for everyone. It shows even high paid tech workers deserve protection. Google has demonstrated this exactly. They just fired everyone in the team!
> No, living on minimum wage doing shitwork is not the same as high paid pampered worker.
Where do you see that these union members are "high paid pampered workers" who are "delicate snowflakes with countless perks and baristas at their service"?
"We are so proud to stand together to demand that our employers give us the basic dignity of a living wage, so that we can continue to enjoy living and working in our community that has become nearly impossible to afford–due in part to big technology companies relocating their headquarters here."
I don't think high paid pampered workers would call for a living wage, so I don't think you are talking about these employees.
You can't really believe that if you employer pays you well that means you employer gets to break the law, do you?
It also points out
"Currently, 10% of the YouTube Music Content Operations Team has COVID. Yet, in the midst of this outbreak, Cognizant and Google are denying workers access to COVID tests, paid COVID leave or even the flexibility to safely work from home. This is counter to the policies Google sets for its main office buildings."
suggesting that your views about how Google employees are treated aren't relevant to these union members, who are treated different than the highly-paid engineers at the Googleplex.
>living on minimum wage doing shitwork is not the same as high paid pampered worker.
I don't see anyone claiming they are the same.
Parent says both deserve the same rights, including the right to enter a union. Granted, there is a clear disparity in what either group can potentially gain from it.
This kind of mentality does someone in the tougher position no good. Higher paid or more established employees joining a union will likely be making sacrifices to help more vulnerable colleagues in the name of solidarity. The alternative is division which an employer (or group of employers) will take with open arms.
Sometimes trying to find patterns in the past and apply them to modern day situations can lead to absurd results, and I think your comment shows that perfectly.
I'm open to the idea of unionization or a guild for SWEs but being beat to death by Pinkertons we are not.
This argument is not one that union advocates would make. Indeed, the separation of blue collar and white collar work is a problem that gets in the way of goals of union advocates.
There may not be guns pointed at programmers, but there are long hours expectations. The perks you're talking about tech workers being pampered with are there to keep workers there longer. The land wealthy companies have been buying to get cheap housing for employees echo company towns but legal.
I recommend reading books like "Brave New World" to highlight how being 'pampered' doesn't mean you're not in a distopia.
In any case, you don't have to like unions, just understand that tech isn't an exception.
> There may not be guns pointed at programmers, but there are long hours expectations. The perks you're talking about tech workers being pampered with are there to keep workers there longer.
I’d also add things like ageism to the mix. It’s not hard to find people who thought this was great when they were 25 but now a couple decades later are noticing that it kind of sucks when they have family responsibilities and also the people their age or older are increasingly laid off or pushed to leave.
The more I think about this the less I understand what the employees were trying to accomplish. Let's say that somehow they somehow get the government (whichever level of it) to force Google to sit at the table with them.
The union states their terms. Google just says 'no'.
"Uh.. then we'll all quit!"
"ok"
I guess they could go on a strike so Google would still be on the hook for paying them? A strike has to be disruptive to the company to have any effect though... they'd all just be made redundant and let go anyway.
Seems to me like they didn't really have a viable end game.
In a "closed shop", which is sometimes mandated by law, all replacement employees would still be in the union, so the work would never get done until an agreement formed or some other loophole was found, like management doing the work.
The company can always say no forever. It's just that doing so normally causes major disruptions in operation and so isn't really an option at companies where a critical chunk of the labor force is unionized. If it's just 10 out of 100,000 employees participating and they can be easily fired and replaced then the union is always going to be toothless. For example I am a union of 1 at my company and can try to negotiate "collectively" but the company can also say no and fire me.
There was a tacit agreement between big tech to engage in wage suppression and no poaching agreements. This is why unions exist -- to protect workers and their rights. It doesn't matter what kind of wages are in play.
In a business with so many opportunities, it makes little sense to organize. I've met a few Software Engineers here in the US who talked about unionization, including some who were actually in one of the minor Software Engineering unions, but they were invariably among the bottom performers.
For the top 50%, unionization would mean lower wages and benefits; for lower income workers in fields without well-established pay-for-performance policies, that's a different story.
What you describe is class warfare of mass workers and elite. I would say high performers are also more easy to switch to another place, and more importantly, they may/should have stronger morals to not give in to company demands, make some temporary sacrifices, and generally to do the right thing. That's how a healthy society should function.
Weird how people who anonymously comment on behalf of tech bosses claim "pay-per-performance" policies while most high-performing developers report it being easier to get a raise by being poached than within their extant tenure
Your comment feels like a regurgitation of the lie propagated by employers to discourage people from forming unions. Employers spread these lies because they know they only stand to lose from unions.
Top performers won’t lose anything after unionizing. That’s the entire point of a union - to provide employees with leverage to not only keep their current incentives, but to expand them.
The important thing to realize here is that companies are not our friends. Not even if we are top performers. The reason why top performers feel like they don’t need a union is because they have the illusion of leverage. Unions grant real and greater leverage by default, to all employees.
Older workers will have to face this more often. Younger generation, coddled on campuses and not used to be told "no" to will cause absolute havoc in the workplace.
They don't know how to politely say "maybe don't use the phrase 'you guys'" - they just right away accuse you of assault. Who can work like that?
What's unclear here is what exactly these people were told by Cognizant and Google when their employment at Cognizant started, and when their work at Google started. Also if this work is still being done by other employees.
If you don't have a closed shop, you need everyone to join the union, including potential future workers (and they won't agree to that unless they get paid, either by having jobs somewhere, or being paid to be in the bench).
A union has to be big. That's why AFL-CIO is a huge conglomerate and SEIU and Teamsters too, even though they separated back into 3, each still large.
Nowadays an information workers union especially has to be international, since there is little value to a specific location.
Multinational companies call for multinational unions. Citizens across the world should stand up to force their national governments to form international labor agreements.
Unsurprising that this comment is written in American English.All this’d do is further show how far behind the rest of the world the US is. In reality the rest of the world will be have to sit and wait while the Americans caught up.
I don't understand US laws nearly enough to form an informed opinion, but it just seems odd that a city council would or should play a role in an employment dispute.
There was nothing “dehumanizing” in her comment. She said she feels bad for the people who were laid off, but it is not the role of a city council to intervene in these kind of disputes. It is a perfectly valid position.
What exactly is private about Google? That trading and ownership by the public creates an overarching obligation for public governance (eg accounting, written justifications, the board, etc). Google has a larger bureaucracy than the typical municipal government, likely surpassing even some state governments. Its employees aren't a tight knit private club where everyone knows everyone, but well over Dunbar's number. Google has been granted a liability shield by the public, presumably because doing so serves the public interest. Market wise, Google provides its products and services to the public. And for surveillance companies like Google, one can't even say that the majority of what we'd traditionally consider customers (but now: data subjects) have private relationships based on voluntary association!
It seems this word "private" gets bandied about as an ideological assertion - insisting that we should treat this company as if it were private, completely rejecting the fact that its current form has vanishingly few private qualities.
Private is used in opposition to public, as in 'private sector' and 'public sector', where public sector is ran and funded by the government, which means public finances, which mainly means taxes - people cant pick and choose which taxes they pay and what the money is put towards. In private sector on the other hand, people can privately decide what to invest their money in.
Sure, when you put subsidies and tax breaks into the mix the line gets a bit more blurry, but legally speaking its a well defined concept, even if not all private companies match the intuitive meaning of the phrase. And yeah, Google is a very specific case, which is why there is always some level of debate about whether it (and other similar companies) should be forced to split up, and some of the resulting parts turned into a public utility service.
I'd argue that's ultimately still a political usage, to create a motte-and-bailey arrangement whereby large corporations with more bureaucracy and less accountability than most governments are given a pass based on the merits of small nimble actually-private companies.
Google was for sure a creation of that private sector and its virtues. And even though it had some public handouts (like university research funding and the corporate liability shield), it had many private aspects - actively involved owners, a small number of employees, who were in touch with the mission, having to compete for customers, etc. But applying that term to the modern day Google as if there is a strict dichotomy of public-private seems like whitewashing the actual reality of large corporations having much more in common with government than with small businesses.
Is it actually required that an employer “come to the table” at all? Presumably they could say no, and if employees don’t like it they go on strike, but then wouldn’t they all be let go anyway?
Yes, and then the employer has no employees, no business and no profits. Employers tend not to want to drive themselves out of business, which is why they come to the table. Not because they choose to out of a sense of personal generosity, but because employees acting as a collective have leverage over management.
Also, in the US, employers are required under the National Labor Relations Act to bargain in good faith with union membership. It is also illegal to fire employees for organizing into a union.
This Tweet suggest that these folks are employees of Cognizant, which provides services to Google:
https://twitter.com/busterfestus/status/1763610215402873000?...