Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-)
I'm really glad to hear that Google made this step, now if they would drop the overly expansive ownership claim in their employment agreement and the right to surveillance on personal property it would be a much more employee friendly place.
I also hope that it gives them an edge in hiring which would encourage other employers to follow suit in order to be competitive.
Yeah, that particular clause gave me a looong pause before signing their contract, in fact I even seriously considered taking one of the other offers I had. This is why you see all those "happens to be owned by Google" disclaimers on open source projects. This means the person wrote this code on their own time, yet it's owned by Google anyway, which IMO is total employee-hostile bullshit.
I would not sign something like that contract today. At the time, though, the money differential and the allure of having Google on my resume outweighed the concerns. I have since discovered other companies can be a lot less possessive of the stuff I build on my own time and dime.
> I would not sign something like that contract today.
I've been seeing wording to that effect in nearly every contract I've been presented with for years now. Every time, I speak up and suggest replacing it with wording that is much more restrictive (they can own anything I make using their resources or intellectual property, otherwise I own it).
I have yet to have a company not agree to this change.
An acquaintance of mine who was given an offer by Google, and arrived on the appointed day, brought the agreement, a red line, and a clean copy. They refused to make any change in their wording even though they said their intent was not to enforce the wording as written. They said that they couldn't sign it unless Google's intent was actually in the writing as well. That afternoon, Google asked for all the gear they had been issued back and rescinded their offer of employment.
Google's statement was that Google would not make any changes in the employment agreement and signing the agreement was a condition of employment, thus by refusing to sign the agreement, this person had 'voluntarily' chosen not to work at Google.
Google will flat out refuse. In their view they own the entirety of your intellectual output for the duration, whether or not it's done on your own time and resources, and whether or not it's in any way related to your day job.
I mean I get it (sort of), early on there wasn't really any "moat" to protect the business, so they had to put shit like this in their contracts lest someone goes off and upends their entire business model. But that's no longer the case. Their moat is _insanely_ wide. They don't have to worry about employees' side projects anymore, and they haven't had to worry about that for about a decade and a half now.
Likewise, their trading windows for RSUs are bullshit. There aren't (or at least weren't when I was there) any trading windows for employees below director level at MS, and I knew more about what's going on there than I ever did at Google. There's this illusion of internal transparency (created mostly by weekly TGIF where people get to pat themselves on the back for projects that will soon be canceled, but in the meanwhile can be used to get a promo), but nobody really knows anything material for real. The only exception I can recall is the TPU which was announced internally about 1.5 years before anybody outside Google knew anything about it. And it didn't move the stock one bit as far as I can tell. In fact, TechCrunch had the "internal" announcements before TGIF 90% of the time.
Fair enough, they can decide their terms. Honestly, I wouldn't be interested in working for Google in the first place, but if I were, that would put an immediate end to my interest.
Google can be fun if you make it a point to work on stuff that actually matters and not just rest and vest. But I do wish they'd reconsider their abusive IP clauses. Which they won't until they begin to struggle with hiring good people.
Not necessarily but somewhat practically. I've applied internally at 2 of the big 5 companies for outside activity projects and 1 was denied and the other was approved. It definitely blacklists a ton of ideas which sucks but it is possible (my side project which got approved has a main competitor which sold for over a billion USD).
Some states have laws that prohibit employers from claiming ownership over what the employee does with their own time as long as it is unrelated to the work of the business... but not much is unrelated to Google.
Doesn't California law protect people from employers stealing code you write on your own time?
I recently turned down an offer in CA despite thinking I read something along those lines taking it as a sign of toxic culture. Another place had such a policy but gladly agreed to drop it.
It says that if you do the work on your own time, with your own equipment, and without using any of your employer's trade secrets, the employer can't claim ownership of it unless it relates to the their business or R&D.
I think the issue is that large companies like Google do so many things that almost anything involving software or the internet would relate to their business and not be covered by the law.
The clause in CA 2870(a)(1), "relate ... to the employer’s business," gives an exception to the protection when it's related to the Company's business. The problem is Google is doing so many things that some area will overlap with your idea ever if you were not directly working on it in Google, and Google can go after that.
I had a conversation with a CEO once on this very topic and he said, "Remember, it doesn't matter whether the suit has merit or not as long as the company is willing to sue you. The company has the money and resource to drag it out in the court to force you to sign over the IP."
I agreed to that contract and open sourced many thousands of lines of code owned by Google, but still available to me and the rest of the world via github. I don't see the problem. If you could demonstrate your project didn't overlap google business then you could do your own project.
I wrote a project at Google that had nothing to do with Google's business, in fact, they explicitly had chosen to not get involved with that whole area at all (Bitcoin). I applied for ability to open source it under the Google name and was denied, I asked for a copyright release back to me and was also denied. The open source programmes office had decided they wanted my project dead and preventing me from doing anything with it was their tool.
Eventually I was able to get these decisions overridden by escalating up (way up) the management chain, but it was a huge pain and the OSPO decided that the exemption applied only to me, not other Googlers, so of course the moment the company hired someone else who happened to be involved with writing the "Bitcoin Core" software already, they tried to force him to exit the project and the same fight had to happen all over again (with more escalations to top management).
The whole nonsense with someone in middle management (who shall remain nameless) deciding to kill spare time projects because they personally didn't like the idea really turned me off to these clauses. Google doesn't need them, they aren't threatened by side projects of employees and the whole thing causes far, far more drama than it can possibly ever avoid.
Note that the OSPO policies have largely changed since you've left Google. What you describe was definitely the situation as of 3-4 years ago, but don't describe how open sourcing code or contributing to FOSS projects works these days.
People seem to not quite get this, so I'll try to be as clear as I can.
Google should not have the ability to claim ownership on unrelated work that does not use company time or resources unless _I_ _voluntarily_ relinquish such ownership. Google should have no business whatsoever interfering with what I do on my own personal time. Nor should I have to make anything open source. Nor should I need to ask anyone's _permission_ to utilize my own time as I see fit. You can get these terms with other companies, if you ask for them.
The only exception I think is reasonable is if my project discloses Google proprietary information in any way, or directly competes with Google, in which case Google should be able to terminate my employment.
This would be fair. What Google is doing now is slimy AF.
The key point is "if you can demonstrate that your project doesn't compete with Google's business" IARC is really easy. I was approved for a couple projects, including one that absolutely could be considered to be competing with Google's business if they wanted, in like a week.
You aren't actually legally required to go through IARC. The contract isn't enforcible in CA if you really don't compete, but I have prewritten verification of that now, and it was painless.
IME, Google's earned the benefit of the doubt in this context.
If it's not enforceable, why is it in the contract? They obviously intend to try to enforce it in cases where they can, which makes claims about "don't worry about it, its not enforceable" even more shady.
I take issue with the very idea that anything I do in my personal, uncompensated time is required to be vetted or approved by anybody. Google's "earned" a swift kick in the rear in this context.
You might "think" but that's how Anglo Saxon employment law (UK USA Some Commonwealth countries) works.
There is literally hundreds of years of case law on this - you may not know that modern employment law descends from acts like the "masters and servants act" - guess which one we are.
But that is absolutely useless rule to use when the whole point of determining if work is done on your own time is to determine if the work done is legally your work or company work, since it becomes a circular argument.
You don't understand. Google claims ownership even on the stuff that you do on _your own_ time, like nights and weekends, without using _any_ Google resources. Even if this stuff is in no way related to what you do at work.
Disclaimer, I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice. I've dealt with this part of the code as both an employee and an employer.
California labor law section 2870
(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except ...[1]
It then goes on to carve out some exceptions. The one that Google leans on is this one:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer;
Google argues that they anticipate researching and developing anything you might be interested in working on so its theirs. In my case I pushed legal to say, in writing, that even if I wrote an iOS kitchen timer application on my own time with my own equipment, then Google would own that app. My attorney suggested that if I sued them they would likely lose, but if I sued them they would stop employing me anyway, so if I really wanted to go into the Kitchen Timer app business I should just quit rather than risk Google making a claim to my IP that I would have to pay expensive legal fees to get invalidated.
This section of the code has been litigated many times and the general consensus is time that you are both not at work, and you aren't required to be at work, can be considered "your own time" by this statute.
There is an argument (and 'dragonwriter, if I have the measure of him, is illustrating it rather than advocating it) that a salaried employee has no "own time" except insofar as their time is not required by the employer.
They can quit if they want time that the employer does not deign to grant them.
In my more cynical moments I think this is the prevailing view in American tech.
Well, I'm somewhere in between illustrating and advocating (EDIT: “advocating” here as “advocating as legally true” rather than “advocating as desirable”); I'm generally dubious that there is a meaningful legally cognizable boundary of “own time vs. work time” as opposed to “own activity vs. work activity” for salaried employees paid for work product, as opposed to employees paid for hours of work. If you are working on something within the scope of what you are contracted to do for your employer, it would seem to be, ipso facto, work time.
EDIT: Moreover, I think that essentially what Google is doing here is having you sign away things which they otherwise could, and would were the assignment provision not permitted to them, simply prohibit outright via a during-employment non-compete, which even California (with it's unusually firm stance against post-employment non-compete) is generally fine with.
Sure, and employers actively (and probably to our, as workers, detriment) cause that conflation to make it harder to understand what that worker is allowed to do with their lives.
Criticizing the notion of "own time" when the people who effectively have the power, and the greater share of organization (both extant and allowed), perpetuate that notion seems like a less-than-useful use of time.
Your description of how intellectual property works is untrue.
In the state of California, there very much is strong protections for workers intellectual property.
And the courts do not share your opinion on what is someone's "own time" or not. The courts instead protect workers.
It is possible that Google has made its employees sign some illegal contracts, that aren't enforceable in court. But if this stuff theoretical went to court, the law sides with workers.
> Google claims ownership even on the stuff that you do on _your own_ time, like nights and weekend
On what basis, as a salaried employee paid for work output and not time-at-a-place, are evenings and weekends described as “your own time” any more than any other time?
Don't have one on hand but I have seen quite a few. I have heard that they are mostly 20% time projects though I'm not sure if they try to take code written on your own time but it looks like they do (and anything else you have written before working there) from this:
> As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google.
Just to be clear, it says "new" development while you're employed by Google, they don't claim to retroactively own your prior works pre-employment. I'm sure they ask you to declare it though so it's clear what you built before joining.
Perkeep is written/founded by Brad Fitzpatrick (google/golang engineer) and you have to sign a google CLA to contribute to it: https://perkeep.org/code#contributing
It’s not just the programming companies that have clauses or practices about stuff like that, many companies in different industries do too.
It just blows me away how lazy or thoughtless most people are. It’s the company’s network or machine or both. The business done on there should be for work for them and nothing more. You breach ethical lines when you start doing personal stuff unless stated otherwise in your contract/agreement with them.
If I gave you my laptop to borrow for a day, you bet I’ll be making sure you didn’t do something funky to it. I’ll also be making sure you didn’t do something to get me on a government watch list. If there’s a reason to try to get statistical data from your usage, I might check that out too.
To me, it’s common sense, it’s not yours so respect it for the reason it was given to you to use. Period.
For your personal stuff: don’t trust it on their network or with their software. You exist to make them money regardless of whether you get paid directly for it. Assume 0 privacy on the clock and that your device might be compromised if used on their network, so just don’t do it.
It does not seem to make sense. Google has access to each and any Gmail account, and it does not matter whether you login in from your home machine, or do this at work (on Google's premises).
Well, I can't quote my copy as I'm under NDA from sharing it, however if you have a copy that you signed then carefully read the section about "equipment that you use to access your google work account".
Isn't there something similar in all Terms when loading something like Outlook Exchange etc. onto your personal phone with your work email? You basically sign over all privacy and content for them to do as they please with no granularity.
Pretty common in general. I recently saw a lawyer provide a template independent contractor agreement which had such a provision in the boilerplate, entirely unrelated to Google or any other huge company.
I agree it's shady, but I suspect it's there so that they don't have to specifically negotiate to add it when a special-case deal is agreed to. (They may say they don't negotiate, but there are exceptions at any company.)
They can't seriously expect their standard form agreement to stay NDA-confidential when they've had 6 to 8 figures of people sign versions of it, regardless of what the agreement requires. If there has ever been litigation over Google's legalese - even a dispute over whether forced arbitration applies - the copy in the court record is probably either public or unsealable upon request to the court.
(I'm a former Google employee, didn't have any role related to employee contract language, not a lawyer, certainly not speaking for them.)
> I agree it's shady, but I suspect it's there so that they don't have to specifically negotiate to add it when a special-case deal is agreed to... They can't seriously expect their standard form agreement to stay NDA-confidential
Yep. Basically the same logic as companies with competitive salaries trying to keep wage info quiet, even in the age of Glassdoor. It's not that there's something to hide about the standard version, and it's not that the terms or even text will stay private. But it adds a hurdle to people comparing notes on exactly what they signed, and when somebody does get a special exemption, it stops them putting up a point-by-point guide for everyone else.
> They may say they don't negotiate, but there are exceptions at any company.
Presumably Google is big enough to have standards and make case-by-case decisions, but it's sort of horrifying how many smaller companies approach contracts as an exercise in seeing what they can get away with. Employment-prohibiting noncompetes and personal-time invention assignment clauses get casually tossed in, then pulled back out after no greater negotiation than bothering to ask.
It's not hard to see why contracts are under NDA when so many companies pretend their ridiculous terms are a standard form that everyone else signed.
> But it adds a hurdle to people comparing notes on exactly what they signed, and when somebody does get a special exemption, it stops them putting up a point-by-point guide for everyone else.
So to make it harder for labor to organize, basically.
It's not as directly defensive as salary hiding, which can obviously help conceal everything from wage collusion to Ledbetter v. Goodyear style inequities. But it still stops labor from sharing information and helping to share in concessions.
I didn't include it above, but a related part is that layering on NDAs makes it harder for non-employees to get involved. If you post your whole contract online, a random employment lawyer might happen by and go "hey, you're getting screwed, 3.A.ii is non-standard and probably illegal". But if you restrict it to employee viewing and low-specificity discussions, you're less likely to have lawyers or activists get involved unprompted.
You mean the companies equipment - that's fairly normal I have worked for companies that recognised unions in the UK and that clause never raised any issues.
There where agreements about what sort of offence justified monitoring at work it had to be a serious offence for example.
Not sure why you had a down vote, but to be clear the contract I have makes no limitation on who "owns" the equipment. Nor does it limit how such verification might be done. And since, at the time, all Google employee services could be accessed through a browser to employee specific URLs, it could be pretty much anything.
+1. Google gives you a corp phone and computer (even multiple ones, if needed); why the heck you'd want to use your personal devices? Plus using a personal device is strongly discouraged.
Also, all the companies I've worked before had similar clauses, and would always push iOS or Android certificates into your phone, so they can remote wipe the device when you leave company.
Seems fairly standard thing to me: no company would want their confidential information lying around in a bunch of personal devices. Calling it "Personal surveillance" seems ridiculous.
We are not supplied with a corp phone, they're only for people with a 'business need.' Been @ Google 7 years and never had one given to me other than holiday gift phones.
Now, some of the nooglers sitting near me seem to think they're entitled to one, so maybe the messaging has changed. but I just looked it up and the language is: "Full-time Googlers with a business need are eligible for one Google-paid mobile phone and SIM"
Many Googlers I know have Corp set up on their personal phone.
No one is going to give you anything. Have you ever asked your manager?
If you ever have had an on-call shift, or had to log in remotely to perform some work function? If so, then you qualify. You probably also qualify for them to pay for your home internet.
> Many Googlers I know have Corp set up on their personal phone.
That's stupid. Seems like a good way to get all of your data wiped off of your personal phone.
What is the company cost of the average engineer at google? It must be like...at least $300k or $400k/yr. They will pay another $600/yr for a phone and service for you if they think it will improve your productivity.
Tell your manager you wont check any work stuff on your personal devices anymore, because your worried about security, etc. The problem will either be resolved fairly quickly, or you will have better work life balance.
I never had a corp phone at Google and was never offered one. As far as I know they weren't available to me. It wasn't usually a problem but there were definitely cases where if I had a corp phone it would've made things easier - not like I was going to sync my personal phone up to corp and get it remote wiped.
They do hand out corp laptops like candy, which is great, but if you need to test software you're developing on a specific configuration, you basically have no choice but to use personal hardware. So let's say you're developing graphics code for Chrome, and there's a bug that only reproduces on a specific GPU - and you've got one at home. By doing that on your home PC have you now technically tainted it as a work machine even if you never checked out corp code onto it?
I guess alternately you just get your boss to expense a GPU and a PC and get all that set up and you can actually repro the bug like 4 weeks later once the purchases go through. Maybe corp purchasing is faster now than it used to be.
Couldn't you just buy the card yourself on amazon or whatever and expense it?
If you brought your own GPU in to do debugging for work, and you end up frying it(lets say from the bug), would you expect google to reimburse you for it?
With any company that I've experienced, there is pretty much never a need to use personal stuff for work reasons.
If corp purchasing is interfering with your ability to do your work, that's the corp's problem, not yours. If you choose to make it your problem and choose to solve that problem by using your own hardware, well, you made that choice.
On a throwaway for obvious reasons, but this is from an employment contract I've seen in the past:
"I acknowledge that I have no reasonable expectation of privacy in any computer, technology system, email, handheld device, telephone, or documents that are used to conduct the business of the Company. As such, the Company has the right to audit and search all such items and systems, without further notice to me, to ensure that the Company is licensed to use the software on the Company’s devices in compliance with the Company’s software licensing policies, to ensure compliance with the Company’s policies, and for any other business-related purposes in the Company’s sole discretion. I understand that I am not permitted to add any unlicensed, unauthorized, or non-compliant applications to the Company’s technology systems and that I shall refrain from copying unlicensed software onto the Company’s technology systems or using non-licensed software or web sites. I understand that it is my responsibility to comply with the Company’s policies governing use of the Company’s documents and the internet, email, telephone, and technology systems to which I will have access in connection with my employment."
tl;dr: Any device you so much as check your work email on (which taints it as a device "used to conduct the business of the Company"), is subject to search by the Company "for any ... business-related purposes in the Company’s sole discretion" (meaning the stuff about software licensing is superfluous). So ultimately the employee has, as stated, "no reasonable expectation of privacy".
This is a case of reach-as-far-as-you-can lawyer'ing in a setting where there's likely to be little push-back from most job candidates. Takeaway: Go over this stuff with a fine-tooth comb and threaten to turn down offers from companies who try to pull this. Then if you _have_ to take the job, keep a hard boundary between your work and personal systems.
This all sounds completely normal. Do people actually imagine that the hardware they use at work is somehow theirs, and not their employer's?
"Keep a hard boundary between your work and personal systems" has always been the right answer. I am surprised that this does not seem obvious to everyone.
That's the employee's choice, though. I log in to my @google.com account with my personal phone, but I don't have to. If I'd rather keep personal and work totally separate, I can request a Google-issued phone to carry alongside my personal one. I have teammates who do this.
I agree that this doesn't seem odd in general. After the recent Facebook security team news, though, I'd want to be very careful about the exact definition of 'company systems' at Google.
I'm sure the standard usage is only about job-related hardware and accounts, but if my employer's product was my source for personal driving directions, email, and web searches, I'd want a contract that didn't transform those into employment-related activities.
I fail to see the issue. Hell my company went further: only their registered devices can even login to access company emails (including via web!) and other services.
Not only it protects them, it enforces the work/personal hardware separation for me, which is good. My work hardware (which is pretty much a laptop and a phone) has no traces of my personal stuff and my personal has no traces of my work stuff and can't even it I wanted it to.
I genuinely don't understand the mixing of personal and work environments. Why would anyone possibly be interested in carrying their work phones with them after their done with work?
I genuinely don't understand the mixing of personal and work environments.
Convenience. I access my work calendar from my personal phone so I can check my calendar first thing in the morning. And avoid carrying/caring for a company-issued phone.
Meeting with Indian teams are rare, but when they happen, I have to be at the office an hour or two before normal. I'm always awake in time to get in, but generally have a relaxed morning - long dog walk, cooked breakfast, walk to work. If I have a 7am meeting, I have to grab a muffin and drive to work.
I had a contract with something like that in it. I told him "this says you can spy on my computer" and he was quite surprised. He had received the document from a lawyer and truly had no idea it was in there. So when I told him we had to remove the section there was no problem.
I work at Google and have absolutely no clue what he's referring to.
My best guess is that it has something to do with the permissions you give Google if you add a work profile/account to your phone. But that isn't required.
You can imagine different tiers of security, where a work profile gives you minimal access to corp while a fully managed setup gives you more substantive access to corp resources and allows a company to enforce more security and visibility into the client device.
That makes a lot of sense, and a legitimately personal decision. Some people don't want to share root access on the personal phone with their employer. Other people don't want to carry a separate phone for work.
> collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors?
I'm all for balancing the employer<->employee interaction, but is this truly something that works for most industries? Google cares about it's reputation among potential tech employees. Other areas (say, Amazon warehouses) probably have a lot less trouble finding people desperate for work and willing to put up with crap because they need the jobs.
As good as this news is, is this really a template that we can expect much to build from? (as opposed to organized unions with legally protected ability to strike, for example)
I think that was the point. The original parent was making a tongue-in-cheek reference to how tech workers seem to resist the idea of forming a union, but occasionally band together to do union-like things informally, in an ad-hoc, not-particularly-reliable fashion.
Do unions allow competition among union members? It’s always seemed to me that they work in jobs where the people are replaceable.
In Google one could work to make 2x to 3x more than the next person - is that will possible with a union?
Seems like in jobs where individual talent / skills matter, a union is by definition harmful (unless you’re in the lower 50%).
Collective action / protest works fine, though, for establishing baselines. If giving employees what they want is cheaper than firing all of them and hiring a fresh batch, it should always work fine.
> Seems like in jobs where individual talent / skills matter, a union is by definition harmful (unless you’re in the lower 50%).
Professional athlete unions would be a counterexample, I believe. It really depends on how the union is structured. I doubt a union for high paid tech workers would be structured the same way as one for blue collar labourers.
Unions allow whatever they want to allow, and block whatever they want to block. So if Google employees wanted to form a very light touch union they could do exactly that.
I took a glance at the constitution of the Screen Actors Guild recently as part of a discussion on this topic elsewhere. It's interesting how it features very strong supermajority requirements for going on strike, for imposing a salary cap, and for amending the constitution to remove the supermajority condition.
I wouldn't be surprised to see similar clauses in other union constitutions for fields in which, like tech, there's a large and obvious talent dispersion. I think a majority-rule approach would inevitably lead to the anti-meritocratic policies you're imagining.
Rephrasing from my original comment: Because Google worried about a very supply-limited audience (tech workers, including related non-programmers). Most fields, the ones paying their employees far less and with far fewer perks, don't share that restraint. If these other fields had their current crop of (non-unionized) workers get disgusted, the companies would just get different employees.
There's no shortage of companies with various abusive practices that remain in business. Arbitration agreements, micro-management, strict controls over things as simple as bathroom breaks, even riding the line on wage-theft. I'm very glad to see this particular change, but to say "Google's programmers demanded change and got it, why don't you get with it, un-unionized cashiers at S-Mart!" overestimates the influence of those workers.
So, would you say it is particularly repeatable in this industry? I.e. that while those other industries need unions due to lack of leverage, this one may be different?
(of course one instance is too small of a sample size to support either direction on its own)
I'm hardly qualified to have anything but the most grossly informed of opinions, but yeah, I'd expect that in the current environment most tech-area (i.e. Seattle, SF, etc) devs can and should demand improvements and be able to get them without requiring unions (which is not the same as saying unions aren't needed. Look to games dev for examples).
Reputation has a lot of hidden costs. Simply having a smaller pool of applicants means they need to either pay more or accept what they consider worse employees. Similarly, high turnover means the loss of skills and the inability to underpay highly valued workers.
Both of these directly impact the bottom line and in competitive markets can and has killed companies.
From what I understand, Amazon actually has trouble recruiting and retaining enough warehouse workers (especially during peak seasons). This is evident by them having a starting wage ($15/hr) that is more than double the minimum wage in many parts of the country
Glassdoor says the average was only $12 but in October they raised it to $15 minimum. Walmart’s low end is about $13 but the average is $17 an hour. Walmart has 1.5 million workers in the US, over 2 million worldwide.
The goods news is Amazon’s pay raise has made Walmart and Target increase their minimum wages as well.
> Wow, you mean collective employee action can be used to force an employer to stop exploitative behaviors? Who knew? :-)
I think part of the problem is that we non-organized workers (i.e. most tech workers and our similar peers) have accepted the unfortunate media-fueled trope that collective worker action equates to organized-crime connected unions like those of the Hoffa-period Teamsters.
Unfortunately, many white collar workers also don't want to be associated with the image of people in hard hats, even though their power relationship with their employers is not that different from those of blue collar workers. Acknowledging this would mean acknowledging the existence structural impediments to their career advancement that make the chances of their entering the C-suite very low, and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
The vast majority of worker unions (nurses, teachers, international brotherhood of X, etc, etc) are completely above-board organizations.
Also, this outcome demonstrates that there are many forms of collective action that are not full unions. The degree of organization needed depends on the circumstances (The early strong manufacturing labor unions emerged partially as a result of violent repression of worker protests by companies).
One could even argue that the anti-poaching class-action lawsuit against large SV companies many years ago was itself a form of collective action.
> The degree of organization needed depends on the circumstances
Not as much as you might think. Militant labor unions are still extremely beneficial despite the lack of Pinkerton assassins. The hardest part in organizing is going from 0 to 1. Once you've gotten to the point of collective action, the idea that you don't then go on to form a union is as wild as a startup building an MVP, getting funding, and then just disbanding.
Fun fact: Pinkerton is still around and is "the world's leading provider of corporate risk management solutions" [0]. Companies regularly hire Pinkerton muscle to handle "security threats" related to union organizing.
Interestingly, even Google retains Pinkerton to investigate internal leaks [1].
All you have to do is try to run a conference in Chicago to see how bad unions can make things though. Sorry, you can’t plug that in, only a card-carrying electrician is allowed to do that! And he’s on break.
My point here is that unions have done plenty to make a bad name for themselves, blaming everything on the media is simplistic.
>only a card-carrying electrician is allowed to do that!
Had I not experienced it directly (multiple times!), I would 100% think it was hyperbole.
My first 'real' job was flying around and recording conferences for a little shop. Chicago and Philly were by far the worst places to work. I was literally not allowed to plug my little hand held recorder into the wall without paying for a qualified union electrician to come in and oversee me.
Ignoring the over absurdity of it, on a personal level, how is it not completely embarrassing and demeaning for the electrician that gets called in? Is watching somebody plug in a cell phone charger fulfilling? I mean, I guess getting paid is getting paid, but damn, it just felt Kafkaesque every time. You take someone with talent and an actually useful trade, and then you make them watch other people plug things into wall sockets.
:-) wonder what would have happened if that happened when I worked at BT "sorry comrade, that is telecommunications equipment can I see your CWA card, oh and did I mention that I am branch secretary (president) of my branch.
Its more the rip off prices for lighting and network service that piss me off
You're talking about being "simplistic", yet you want to reduce all unions to one bad example (which seems to protect the members of the union) from a city nicknamed in part due to its overall political corruption[0]?
Plus, if you read more than one sentence of the parent post, you'll see it blames than just the media.
A few days after Kent State a group of construction workers head into a protest against Vietnam and pretty viciously attack a crowd of 1000 college students. There is plenty of blame to go around for this event (like any occurrence of mob action) and many sociological trends that led to this, but historians tend to mark this event as the “beginning of the end” for Union influence in the US.
You ignore the non-union organizations that also protect their own. ABA, AMA, etc. control the supply of doctors/lawyers and accomplish the same end result as unions: higher wages and less competition.
Most unions and guilds do this. I don’t find it unreasonable, and would still sign on to a technology workers union, dues and all. Credentialing? I’d be okay with that, otherwise if everyone can “be an engineer” just by saying so, no one is (and credentialing would be superior to the white board gauntlet mess tech interviews currently are).
Collective action is the only way to improve working conditions and dissuade abusive employer practices.
With the current hiring process mess I'm a strong proponent of more universal credentials. I would happily pay and test through some licensing option once than invest similar time for some of the current interview processes at each company. My time is more important than playing continual ambiguious and inaccurate qualification games.
And this shows exactly why many oppose unions in the tech industry, despite the incredulity of union supporters: they make it easier to impose rules which many of us profoundly disagree with.
AIUI, unions represent employees, guilds represent independent members of a profession or vocation. Said another way, neither the AMA nor ABA negotiates compensation for their members.
But that's horrible. I don't want to throw up barriers to entry, in order to keep out new comers.
There are many great engineers that I know who would have been barred from the industry, if we had anything at all similar to the barriers to entry in the medical or "real" engineering industries.
It is because of this that if there is ever a software union, I am going choose "defect" every single time.
I am not going to let these new-comers, that I know, be barred from the amazing jobs in tech, just because they didn't get a degree or pass a test or whatever.
When it comes to development and security engineering a certain demonstrated base qualification might not be a bad thing. It's pretty unbelieveable how quality is handled in software engineering...
When I think about self driving cars I can't help but think about the Therac-25.
Software bugs kill people. Not all software bugs, and not all software, but the lines are getting blurrier. It's not just medical equipment. Phones explode. A connected coffeepot could burn a house down.
The Toyota acceleration bug (where cars would accelerate uncontrollably) was preventable if industry standards were followed. These aren't things you'll find in a Martin Fowler book, there are specific best practices for reliable embedded systems.
If you want to say that people working in self driving cars should have to pass qualification tests or whatever, I don't care about that.
That is a small amount of people though. The vast majority of people are not working on anything at all to do with self driving cars or medical equipment or space X.
Instead, what I care about preventing, and will fight extremely hard to stop, is barriers to entry for the most common software out there.
This most common job being the web developer.
We do. It need Industry standards in order to stop people from making website or apps. If a button doesn't work, in some dumb app, it does not matter. At all.
You might come up with some weird edge case, but we both know that whatever example you come up with is going to be the exception, and not the rule.
The reality is that for the vast majority of software engineering jobs out there, the stakes and consequence of failure are very low.
Anyone handling PII is dealing with high stakes. That's not my opinion, that's the post GDPR world we live in. And that's pretty much everyone in the B2C space.
In America nobody cares about that. This isn't going to effect any of the major companies that matter, and is already causing companies to merely stop doing business in countries that have bad laws like this.
But also, I don't care. I will defect and fight every step of the way any of your efforts to keep out people from non-traditional backgrounds. (regardless of whatever misguided reasons you have to keeping people from non-traditional backgrounds out of the industry)
Your only options are to try to make some sort of law, which is extremely unlikely to happen in the US, or form some sort of union. And I will defect that union hard. Along with a whole lot of other people who do not want to see this industry destroyed. We will defect and sabotage any attempts to do this any way.
Fortunately for me, though, the anti barriers to entry side of the debate and anti union side of the debate is currently massively winning, and the people who are trying to throw up barriers to entry are losing.
All I have to do stop by the nearest tech bootcamp to see just how much the pro barriers to entry side of the debate has lost this war. And those barriers to entry are only continuing to be lowered.
It has never been easier to become a professional programmer. And it is only getting easier.
There have always been barriers to entry to be a programmer. For every self-taught coder, from both the pre-CS as a degree days to the modern day bootcamp devs, there several times as many employers who only want graduates from top-league schools or FAANG experience. Credentialism is not being advocated for by employees, but by employers. If anything, a union could be useful to combat restrictive hiring practices.
The tech world has changed a whole lot in the last 10 years. I know many people who got into the industry by merely going to a tech bootcamp, which got them into a junior engineering position.
Yes, there are still barriers to entry. But the barriers to entry have been massively reduced over the last 10 years. Going to a bootcamp, and getting a job within a couple months used to be unheard of.
Your opinions on what a union "could" be are vastly different than the opinions of what other people want. This whole thread is me responding to a person who literally wants to raise the barrier to entry to tech.
Credentialism is very much being advocated for, by many pro-union/pro-guild people. And history has shown that whenever a union, in every single industry in the world, gets enacted, the result is higher barriers to entry.
Go look at the American Medical Association. Go look at the American Bar Association. Go look at the actor's guild. Screen writers guild. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Pick any high skilled labor union/guild and you will see an organization that is creating barriers left and right, and making it harder for people to get into the industry.
Yes, the current tech industry could be better. But the pro-union people are the ones who are most advocating in favor of keeping out competition/newbies/immigrants, you name it.
The way of "getting around it" is to block all traffic coming from certain countries.
Sure, they might sue you anyway, but just imagine how many tens of billions of dollars in damages would be caused to European countries if Google or Facebook started blocking all traffic going into and out of these countries.
There would be huge negative political consequences, that the citizens of these countries would not stand for.
Also, it doesn't matter if they sue you, if your company is entirely based in the US. american companies don't worry that it is illegal to be gay in Saudi Arabia, so I see little reason why they would worry about bad laws in Europe.
But anyway this is completely irrelevant to the topic of conversation, which is barriers to entry in the tech industry.
And in order to fight these barriers to entry, I will defect, and sabotage any unions that try to do this, at every step of the way.
Security is an economic choice of the producing firm for the most part, and there are plenty of certifications and degrees that employers can discriminate on but do not. They even might have the security training and still fuck up.
Reality is, most customers do not want to pay the price for extra security, other than the CYA (Cover Your Ass) kind and it shows.
There need be no credentialing or collusion or universal contract requirements or wage demands. Credentialing/licensing would be particularly ridiculous. A tiny organization with just a lawyer, phone and a website to share info would likely be completely adequate. After all, we are not a group as vulnerable to abuse as coal miners etc.
This is the thing. I'm never going to be stopped from working with a guy who wants me to work with him simply because some moron in an ivory tower thinks I don't have the credentials. This is good. I won't accept the alternative.
The way quality assurance works in software engineering is way below any other industry - so I wouldn't be surprised if at one point some base qualifications are needed, much like a doctor, architect, nurse or teacher...
Oh I'm of the opinion that it will happen. But I aim to delay it as long as possible until my career ends. After that y'all can turn into a super-IBM. Be my guest.
I don't build things that will kill people if they're wrong. If I get this slightly wrong, the wrong people will be advertised the wrong car. The world won't end.
There's a new story about passwords getting hacked and leaked every month, if not every week. This industry needs stronger standards, and if the industry doesn't come up with it ourselves, the law will.
Don't complain to me, complain to all of the Facebooks that resell data to third parties, and all of the Googles who store that so that the NSA can tap into it, and all of the Equifaxes that leak all the data so the criminals can make use of it.
> many white collar workers also don't want to be associated with the image of people in hard hats, even though their power relationship with their employers is not that different from those of blue collar workers
I'm not sure that it's reasonable to bucket the bargaining position of all white-collar workers together. The negotiating strength of an employee is strongly tied to the supply and demand of other workers with a similar skillset, which varies widely within "white collar" industries.
> Acknowledging this would mean acknowledging the existence structural impediments to their career advancement that make the chances of their entering the C-suite very low, and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
No amount of collective action is going to significantly increase an individual worker's chance of making it into the C-suite. It's a simple question of numbers.
Also, tech workers willingly buy into a very harsh libertarian ideology. It is hard to accept that as an employee in a company, we are more likely the blue-collar Joe Six-Packs, not the John Galts.
I'm really glad to hear that Google made this step, now if they would drop the overly expansive ownership claim in their employment agreement and the right to surveillance on personal property it would be a much more employee friendly place.
I also hope that it gives them an edge in hiring which would encourage other employers to follow suit in order to be competitive.