Yeah, we’ve just barely started the bargaining process, so I will be able to speak to it later with more experience, but the union members decide what our priorities are, we discuss as a group what specific articles we think would benefit us, and a final contract requires our approval–all done democratically. So if the majority of my fellow members feel strongly about something that I don’t care for, I could get outvoted. But I want my colleagues to get the things they feel strongly about!
Does that get complicated when your organization is 120 people or 1200 people instead of 12? For sure. But at the end of the day, there’s no contract that gets written for us, there are no terms enforced on us from the larger union (CWA) we’re associated with. So far, they just want to understand our industry and understand what is important to us, and they they share their expertise (and legal resources, if needed) to help make it happen.
It’s an organization for people made by people to deal with other people, all of which expanding and contracting; I don’t think we’ve cracked how to infallibly prevent that from ever going wrong.
This is called “solidarity” and it’s a good thing.
You can go to the Alphabet Workers Union website to get at least a general idea of what they are organizing for. It doesn’t have to be to get better snacks in the breakroom; maybe Google’s got that covered. But Google certainly has its own issues, which might be pretty unique.
The one that stands out to me here is the freedom to not have to work on a project that contradicts your values. Not every business has the opportunity to undermine or reinforce the power of, say, the Chinese Communist Party. If workers want to be able to opt out of projects they object to without fearing for their jobs, then that’s a great thing for a union to use its influence to secure for them.
Yeah, it’s conceivable. They’re a large and diverse organization; they have bylaws and standard operating procedures. So far, in the couple of cases where they have said “We usually do X” and we’ve said “We’d like to do Y,” they’ve said, “Then let’s do Y.”
And we are associated with them by choice. If our union wanted to join a different organization, or be unaffiliated or start a brand new nascent umbrella organization (which is what Amazon workers just did), we are free to do that. Working with CWA gets us expertise and advice in areas we are not equipped for at the moment; they’ll pay for legal consultation if we need it; and they can amplify our voice if we ask for it.
I don’t really know what you’re trying to argue and how it relates to the conversation about unions at all. I know a guy that I think is irreplaceable and that gives him bargaining power is not a solution to the problem of labor exploitation. I know some people who work at Google and they seem petty happy isn’t actually an evaluation of labor practices at Google.
You should ask yourself that question, about your Google friends and irreplaceable engineers.
In the WTF category, the NYT (insert obligatory fuck the NYT) has an article this morning about an assistance adjunct professor teaching position at UCLA where the advertised pay is… $0.
This reminds me of those assholes in the early 2000s who would ask people to build websites for free since it would “build your portfolio.”
We’ve essentially registered them as the union that does the collective bargaining on our behalf (we’re involved at every step and have representatives in the process). Yes, we’d have to vote to change that, and, I expect, refile with the NLRB. We have no other obligations at the moment. We don’t pay dues currently, and the topic has barely even come up. I assume it will at some point, likely after our first contract negotiations are complete.
There have been lots of stories about e.g. Amazon and Starbucks holding a series of mandatory employee meetings to talk down unions. I think we saw a video some months ago from one of those meetings, where an employee who wasn’t part of the invited group for that particular session refused to leave, despite being ‘ordered’ to leave multiple times. She was a union effort organizer trying to attend to counter management claims, and they did not want her there.
I’m certain companies I’ve worked for in the past did this sort of thing. I just never participated in planning them or attended any of them.
