Google contractor accused of offshoring jobs in retaliation for union campaign:
Google contractors who recently unionized say their jobs are being slowly shipped to Poland. On Thursday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint laying out the allegations against HCL America, an engineering and IT contractor that works with Google in Pittsburgh.
Obtained by Motherboard, the complaint argues the jobs are being outsourced in retaliation for legitimate union activity. In particular, the NLRB says the conduct took place "because employees formed, joined and assisted the Union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities."
[Ed Note: Have any of you who work in the IT field been involved with or heard discussions about unionizing?]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 16 2020, @10:34PM (2 children)
All the smartest Polacks emigrated to the US about 100 years ago. Now, those who were left behind are stealing our jobs. We need to nuke Poland along with China, North Korea, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. MAGA people!! Some Slovaks are more equal than others after all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday October 16 2020, @10:55PM
Where's my "-1 Lame" mod when I need it?
Hey, Runaway, don't waste your time, you don't have enough lifetime ahead of you to catch up with Eth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @11:50PM
dupa yash
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday October 16 2020, @11:20PM (1 child)
They should make "Running a profitable unionized technology company" a research project. I mean, they've got the braintrust and resources to build and run a simulation for it. If nothing else, it might produce *something* useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @06:54PM
Then one year down, they cancel it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday October 16 2020, @11:26PM (6 children)
Political Compass on an internal and informal slack channel we're using at the (Melb) office: left with various levels of libertarianism.
Conjecture: highly skilled knowledge workers are likely to be left-libertarians. They need to share their effort and work together to solve complex problems (thus, team-spirit => left), while they need to have a good amount of independence from the business to solve them as properly as they can inside the (mainly technical) constraints.
Which places the business in a tight corner: any attempt to switch to authoritarianism or right will be resented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @12:09AM (5 children)
Don't tell aristarchus; individualist, civil libertarians are collectivist nazis or something... Also welcome to side of "alt-right", "nazi" "deplorables". Richard Spencer is voting for Biden but we have memes, memes and cookies.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Saturday October 17 2020, @12:27AM (4 children)
What in the "team spirit/sharing" did you fail to understand?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 17 2020, @02:42AM (3 children)
He didn't misunderstand anything, you misunderstand libertarianism. Intentionally most likely, because if people ever catch on to what we're really like, you guys are just fucked.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @04:43AM (1 child)
For someone who prides himself with a high IQ, you're quite an idiot sometime (this on including). I suspect it's your compulsion to parade your vanity.
You deliberately misrepresented my position as "anti-libertarian" (fyi my political compass shows me 2/3 into libertarian territory) when I was addressing the "individualist" (none as such in our team).
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 17 2020, @11:08AM
There is still no conflict. Individualists are quite capable of seeing the benefit of teamwork, even of helping others without immediate benefit to themselves.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 17 2020, @06:08AM
Rrright. Including "Richard Spencer is a Zionist"? ... err, sorry, upon rechecking, this time is "Richard Spencer is voting for Biden".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @11:35PM
What on earth does this have to do with retaliation? What on earth makes them think that HCL wouldn't have done this on a clear, blue, union-free sunny day?
Seriously, if I were the arbiter in this case I would start with that question. What makes them think that this wouldn't have happened in the absence of the union?
Now the other elements, the stalling/refusal to comply, that's shitty behaviour, and actionable, but the outsourcing isn't inherently bad. In fact, it's not even as straightforward as firing people, and backfilling in Poland. Based on the article it's people leaving, and then not being replaced with new hires in the US, as opposed to Poland.
Evidently, they should be organising the polish office instead.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @11:37PM (2 children)
> [Ed Note: Have any of you who work in the IT field been involved with or heard discussions about unionizing?]
Only in the public sector.
From experience with a union in the public sector, I'd caution anyone wanting to unionize to choose their union wisely. Our parent union is a corporate union that couldn't give a shit less about the membership other than to collect dues. Our parent union's CEO has a chauffeur and has never worked a day in her life. Our local always allows a no strike clause into our contracts which makes the union powerless against the administration, "If you do not give us a cost of living allowance for the 5th year running, we will... um be really mad. But, since we can't strike I guess you'll ignore us like usual."
A real union like IWW (no parasite managerial types running it) would be wonderful, though.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 17 2020, @12:27AM
What you just described is the difference between unions run by Italians, and unions run by Jews. Italians for all their faults actually pretended to give a damn about the rank-and-file and pushed back against the employers and their scabs. Even Al Capone knew who the biggest Jews of them all were, as he learned Yiddish to communicate with the real money-changers of the underground.
That being said, in America, even mentioning the U-word as a joke in a non-union shop will get your whole department laid off on the spot and you harassed on a daily basis every second leading up to that layoff. Here even mentioning the U-word as a joke is worse than slapping the ass of your boss's wife or leaving a turd in the janitor sink.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 17 2020, @12:40AM
Telecom [theverge.com] and gaming [wikipedia.org] too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @12:28AM
We looked at the union, and then asked some hard questions:
The union's track record on negotiations, complaints and responses. Percentage success, percentage failure. Dues rates. Options if the union doesn't live up to standards.
Answers mostly came down to boilerplate, how shiny their brochures were, and relying on war stories about the 5 day work week.
Actual union understanding of our concerns and involvement was nil.
We passed.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Saturday October 17 2020, @02:25AM (6 children)
The idea behind unions is that the workers united have bargaining power. If their jobs just get shipping to Poland, then it doesn't seem that they had any bargaining power to begin with. Unionizing wouldn't have helped them anyway.
Consider: even if their jobs weren't offshored when they formed the union, what's stopping them from getting offshored the first time they try to negotiate as a union?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 17 2020, @02:44AM
Bingo. If you're not difficult to replace and you make yourself into a pain in the ass, you will be replaced.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday October 17 2020, @04:08AM (1 child)
Well, Poland is being protected by the US military funded by taxes on American workers. Remove this, and the company will ship all those jobs right back as Russian tanks enter Poland
If on the other hand Poland were to take fair defense expenses, labor over there would not be cheap and the outsourcing would not happen to begin with.
Corporations are just having a free ride on our expense both ways.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 17 2020, @06:45AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/us-army-e2-80-99s-v-corps-reactivated-at-fort-knox/ar-BB1a6J3n [msn.com]
The Fifth Corps is being reactivated for the purpose of "defending" Poland.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Saturday October 17 2020, @05:19AM
That's why unionization in the US has shifted so heavily towards jobs that can't be outsourced. The biggest union presence these days seems to be found in police, firefighting, nurses, teachers, hotel workers, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. All of these jobs share a common factor of not being possible to do remotely, although teaching has at least temporarily become remote due to Covid.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lizardloop on Saturday October 17 2020, @08:25AM (1 child)
Exactly. I worked for a firm that supplied software to Directv. About six months after I joined they opened an office in Poland and began filling it with bright young people. By the time I left most of the "old timers" were British people. Nearly everyone under 35 in the company was from a former soviet block country. They were smart, hard working and willing to be paid less than the English. Was a no brainer really.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @01:51PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Saturday October 17 2020, @02:38AM (13 children)
Couple monopolistic corporate power and a government with a penchant against the American worker, and we can expect poverty. The white collar class should look to what happened to the blue collar workers in the past several decades for a vision of our own future, and do some self-reflection regarding those decades we've spent contemptuously looking down on blue collar workers. If anything, white collar jobs are easier to export than factory jobs -- all it takes is a $300 laptop, a cheap IP phone, and an ethernet connection. There's no factory to rebuild and re-equip.
In any event, what America needs is a Teddy Roosevelt type, without the foreign adventures, to break out that big old monopoly busting stick. Be good to get some labor protections as well. One of the most interesting things I've heard recently is Eric Weinstein's notion that the greatest asset any American has, is asymmetric access to the labor market. There are forces in business and government which would take that asset without compensating those from they take it, and concentrate that wealth in their own pocket. We should oppose this as much as we would oppose unfair dispossession of hard property, and opposition starts with breaking up monopolies and protecting American workers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 17 2020, @02:46AM (5 children)
If the people you're working for are your enemies, you're fucked from start to finish.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Informative) by hemocyanin on Saturday October 17 2020, @03:17AM (1 child)
This is true -- one reason I work for myself. But it is also historically true that one's employer can often be one's greatest threat. Mine collapses immediately spring to mind. In any event, we are talking about a tech monopoly and from an employment perspective as well as a consumer perspective, monopolies are a poison to competitive markets. If you get black balled by a monopoly power, your ability to earn can be impacted. You don't even have to be blackballed -- look at how the big players colluded to keep tech salaries low in only the recent past.
So yes, your own monopolistic employer can very well be your greatest enemy.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 17 2020, @11:19AM
I don't disagree that monopolies are harmful but there isn't even close to a monopoly on tech employment. It just seems so to folks who for some insane reason want to be wage slaves for big corporations. There are plenty of other options, even entirely excluding folks like us who do our own thing. It's really not difficult at all to give a shitty employer a bit of the ole Johnny Paycheck [youtube.com], just scary if you've never done it before.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @03:19AM (2 children)
... unless you join a union.
One-on-one employer/employee negotiations are naturally unbalanced, and do not resemble fair bargaining between equals. I have seen very few employers able to resist the urge to make unfair offers that are bordering on impossible.
Someone with a kid to feed cannot turn down an unfair offer if it keeps their kid fed.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @03:58AM
... and someone with a business to run cannot turn down an unfair offer if it keeps the business running. Or do you think businesses going bust is victimless?
Oh, I know, I know, we'll all shed a tear for multibazijillionaire stockholders lighting their capitalistic SEE-gars with the dessicated scrotums of their chattel slaves, but you know what happens when businesses go down? Hundreds, thousands of people - ACTUAL people, with soft flesh and everything, and even kids to feed themselves - find themselves on Jobless Ave.
So how about making sure that unions also have to negotiate with the workers - against other unions. Let workers move from union to union, let employers deal with multiple unions. Why should unions get the uniquely untouchable slot in the whole business?
Oh, wait, the nation is gradually voting for the None of the Above option, as in right-to-work. Looks like the workers are getting pretty sick of union-label fatcats too. In fact, people are even kicking back (and winning in the courts) against agency rules.
Maybe letting organised crime and career leeches run unions was a bad idea, too. Maybe when we have sensible regulations around unions, they'll step up their game and union membership will once more be worth it.
Think about it - joining a union because it would make sense!
Naaah, crazy dreams ... impossible ...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 17 2020, @11:21AM
No, even being unionized and working for an employer you view as the enemy is still a shitty, shitty situation to be in. Go work somewhere you actually care if the company succeeds and they return the same consideration. You'll enjoy life a lot more and you'll be a much better employee.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @02:53AM (6 children)
"Couple monopolistic corporate power and a government with a penchant against the American worker, and we can expect poverty."
Hasn't happened yet. In fact, the trend over the last fifty years has been moving people out of the lower economic bracket, into middle and higher.
If that's failure, sign me up for more failure.
"We should oppose this as much as we would oppose unfair dispossession of hard property, and opposition starts with breaking up monopolies and protecting American workers."
Define "unfair". Let's get specific here. What's unfair about the way property is currently handled? How can we tell that it's unfair? How will we know when it's no longer unfair? Because a very, very wide range of people have opinions on what's unfair, and they disagree massively with each other.
I mean, sure, let's break up monopolies, but it's quite possible to do so without spending a moment worrying about fairness, and instead founding it in empirical, results-driven decisions.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Saturday October 17 2020, @03:09AM (5 children)
What data are you looking at?
https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/productivity-vs-real-earnings-in-the-us-what-happened-ca-1974 [stackexchange.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @03:23AM (4 children)
http://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/256/table3.xls [census.gov]
Straight from the government, hot off those tax-paid presses. Or computers. Whatever.
Short version: economic "lower" class cohort shrinking over time. Long version: Google it yourself.
(Score: 5, Touché) by helel on Saturday October 17 2020, @05:43AM (3 children)
There are an average of 2.63 persons per household which gives us an estimated $42,127 minimum to be considered a middle class household today. That gives us about 38.1% of the population falling below that, according to the spreadsheet you linked.
Adjusting for inflation that would set the modern definition of middle class in 1967 starting at at $5,425 per household. According to your data that would give us about 5.8% of the population falling below middle class.
Shall we now look at the upper class? An upper class household makes $126,381 or more a year. That’s about 19% of the population today.
Rewind to to 1967 again. $126,381 becomes $16,275 giving us about 82.6% of the population living in what we would now consider the upper class.
A little subtraction and we see that the middle class, as defined by current income definitions, used to consist 11.6% of the population. Now you’re right that its grown to 42.9% of the population but its grown only because the upper class has contracted by 63.6% while the poor have grown by a mere 32.3%.
Please explain again how this is is moving people out of the lower economic bracket?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @04:46PM (2 children)
You appear to have missed the line that says: Income in 2015 CPI-U-RS adjusted dollars.
You should have been able to smell how bad your analysis was from the idea that 1967 had over 80% upper class.
Try again.
Given that you want to use $42,127 as your magic number, and thus using the bottom four brackets as a proxy (topping out at $49,999), it goes from 58.2% of the population in 1967 down to 44.8% in 2015. That's 13.4% of the population moving from the lower brackets to the upper.
... and that crap was rated +5? Does nobody actually check this shit for first-run plausibility before hitting that upvote button?
(Score: 4, Touché) by helel on Saturday October 17 2020, @05:43PM (1 child)
I must guiltily confess that I indeed did miss that little line.
As for your complaints about the moderation, your argument was "google it yourself", mine was an actual argument. One of those if much more convincing than the other. If you don't like it put some effort in and write your own argument outlining your point of view.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @06:47PM
I gave you the direct source for the fucking numbers.
You couldn't even get THAT part right.
Now you want to bitch about being told to go search for publically available, taxpayer-provided data so that you can do the analysis yourself because god forbid anybody trust what's provided to them on a platter ...
You're right. Evidently that sort of assumption of intellectual competence was a bridge too far.
The US of A is clearly not getting value for its education dollar.