<story><title>Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/2/22047383/google-spied-workers-before-firing-labor-complaint</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>renewiltord</author><text>People should be allowed to unionize but I&amp;#x27;ll oppose it at every front. Because mass power means mass power that can be turned against me. 2016 taught me something. There are a large contingent of anti-immigrants out there. Should you allow the creation of a mob, a day will come when the populists will take control of it.&lt;p&gt;In moments, the mob can break generations of integration. The best defence against it is prevention of its formation.&lt;p&gt;No, should you gain any appreciable fraction of power to unionize, I think there&amp;#x27;s a lot of my money I would throw into the opposite effort. No populist mobs. Never again. No group should have that power.</text></item><item><author>black_puppydog</author><text>The whole thread here seems to revolve around whether or not Spiers should have been fired for what she did.
And while I have a clear opinion on that and had fun sparring with y&amp;#x27;all here about it, can we also talk about how unionization is actually something that we need to think about as a profession &amp;#x2F; group of professions?&lt;p&gt;The days where &amp;quot;being in IT&amp;quot; made you a rockstar that could command a premium in individual negotiations are, best I can tell, way in the past.
Open source frameworks and industry standards, while certainly excellent from a standpoint of work de-duplication and stability, have made it much easier (at least for bigger corps) to replace engineers, or to simply hire someone who&amp;#x27;s cheaper and less likely to make trouble (read: people more vulnerable to exploitation).&lt;p&gt;There are certainly still exceptions to this, and there will continue to be. For example, the mythical 10x people among you will never have to worry about this, because they&amp;#x27;re simply &lt;i&gt;that good&lt;/i&gt;. Or if you happen to be working on rust for a year before it breaks into the mainstream, then you&amp;#x27;ll have a head start for a while. But don&amp;#x27;t expect that to last.&lt;p&gt;Overall: we will either realize and act on the fact that we are now for the most part a skilled labor like any other, or we will see our precious privileges erode and our incomes and work conditions deteriorate. And like it or not, but for many among us who are not &amp;quot;the gift of god to coding&amp;quot; the rational strategy will be to not fight on our own.&lt;p&gt;To bring this back to the current case: the NLRB decided that Spiers got illegally spied on. Whatever your take on her actions before that: illegal stays illegal, and as such don&amp;#x27;t blame her for it &amp;quot;because she had it coming.&amp;quot; Blame google, for blatantly pushing against workers knowing and demanding their rights. If you see what they did here, and the context of this whole story, can you really take their argument at face value that she got fired for misappropriating company property or some such? Doesn&amp;#x27;t it seem much more likely that they simply made an example of her for &lt;i&gt;informing&lt;/i&gt; her co-workers of their rights?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madeofpalk</author><text>The problem is there already is a single &amp;quot;mob of power&amp;quot;, and that’s the employer. If your employer decides it’s anti-immigrant, that’s bad for you.&lt;p&gt;Unions are an attempt to create a &amp;quot;mob&amp;quot; to counter the &amp;quot;mob&amp;quot; of the employer.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/2/22047383/google-spied-workers-before-firing-labor-complaint</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>renewiltord</author><text>People should be allowed to unionize but I&amp;#x27;ll oppose it at every front. Because mass power means mass power that can be turned against me. 2016 taught me something. There are a large contingent of anti-immigrants out there. Should you allow the creation of a mob, a day will come when the populists will take control of it.&lt;p&gt;In moments, the mob can break generations of integration. The best defence against it is prevention of its formation.&lt;p&gt;No, should you gain any appreciable fraction of power to unionize, I think there&amp;#x27;s a lot of my money I would throw into the opposite effort. No populist mobs. Never again. No group should have that power.</text></item><item><author>black_puppydog</author><text>The whole thread here seems to revolve around whether or not Spiers should have been fired for what she did.
And while I have a clear opinion on that and had fun sparring with y&amp;#x27;all here about it, can we also talk about how unionization is actually something that we need to think about as a profession &amp;#x2F; group of professions?&lt;p&gt;The days where &amp;quot;being in IT&amp;quot; made you a rockstar that could command a premium in individual negotiations are, best I can tell, way in the past.
Open source frameworks and industry standards, while certainly excellent from a standpoint of work de-duplication and stability, have made it much easier (at least for bigger corps) to replace engineers, or to simply hire someone who&amp;#x27;s cheaper and less likely to make trouble (read: people more vulnerable to exploitation).&lt;p&gt;There are certainly still exceptions to this, and there will continue to be. For example, the mythical 10x people among you will never have to worry about this, because they&amp;#x27;re simply &lt;i&gt;that good&lt;/i&gt;. Or if you happen to be working on rust for a year before it breaks into the mainstream, then you&amp;#x27;ll have a head start for a while. But don&amp;#x27;t expect that to last.&lt;p&gt;Overall: we will either realize and act on the fact that we are now for the most part a skilled labor like any other, or we will see our precious privileges erode and our incomes and work conditions deteriorate. And like it or not, but for many among us who are not &amp;quot;the gift of god to coding&amp;quot; the rational strategy will be to not fight on our own.&lt;p&gt;To bring this back to the current case: the NLRB decided that Spiers got illegally spied on. Whatever your take on her actions before that: illegal stays illegal, and as such don&amp;#x27;t blame her for it &amp;quot;because she had it coming.&amp;quot; Blame google, for blatantly pushing against workers knowing and demanding their rights. If you see what they did here, and the context of this whole story, can you really take their argument at face value that she got fired for misappropriating company property or some such? Doesn&amp;#x27;t it seem much more likely that they simply made an example of her for &lt;i&gt;informing&lt;/i&gt; her co-workers of their rights?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>postingpals</author><text>I was planning to argue with this, but I only feel sorry that you see something as historically useful as unionising in such a light.</text></comment>