<story><title>Apple banned a pay equity Slack channel</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22650751/apple-bans-pay-equity-slack-channel</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Kinrany</author><text>Why is being adversarial a problem?</text></item><item><author>tibbetts</author><text>Not starting out adversarial with management is a big part of it. Unions in the US feel like they need to have strict rules because otherwise management will take advantage. Management in the US is often very strongly anti-union. This is a situation where social conventions and government regulation could yield better outcomes than an adversarial system. But Americans love adversarial systems.</text></item><item><author>diebeforei485</author><text>The works council system in Germany and Switzerland (and some other countries) works a lot better than American unions. I&amp;#x27;m not sure why. It seems they are more co-operative and have fewer BS rules.</text></item><item><author>foepys</author><text>Meanwhile in Germany an employer has to provide rooms and resources for a works council (Betriebsrat) to meet and organize, and has to pay all necessary trainings, including all related travel expenses.</text></item><item><author>advisedwang</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a long case history in front on the NRLB about whether or not employees can use employer&amp;#x27;s resource (ie notice boards, email system, slack) for organizing. In general the rule has been that if employees can use something for general non-work purposes (e.g. setting up a baseball game on the weekend) then the company can&amp;#x27;t stop them from  using it for organizing.&lt;p&gt;However the specifics (e.g. what if there is a policy about what topics are OK, but some OK topics are non-work, or what if there is a general work-only policy that is selectively enforced against organizing) have gone back and forth depending on the administration.&lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#x27;s behaviour is probably a result of a 2019 ruling [1] which opend the door to this kind of thing. Given that the administration has swung back to being fairly labor friendly, it&amp;#x27;ll be interesting if this gets to the NRLB to see if they find a way to make this illegal.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.bloomberglaw.com&amp;#x2F;daily-labor-report&amp;#x2F;labor-board-paves-way-for-employers-to-ward-off-union-emails&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.bloomberglaw.com&amp;#x2F;daily-labor-report&amp;#x2F;labor-board...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>topkai22</author><text>You can end up with insane rules that ultimately benefit no one. An old boss of mine told me about a time he was working for a big auto manufacturer. They were rolling an update to a major system. It looked like everything went well, so people started to go home.&lt;p&gt;Pretty soon though, the team started to see issues with the update, up to and including a major LoB system going down. They immediately rolled back the update but found they had a problem- they needed some servers restarted to pick up the update, and the sole person who by union rules could restart the server had left for the day and wasn&amp;#x27;t picking up the phone.&lt;p&gt;Now there were people who technically had permissions to restart the server, but they couldn&amp;#x27;t cross the union rules. They spent over an hour (with the major LoB, business critical system down) trying to get in touch with the people who were allowed to restart the server until they finally convinced the physically datacenter ops people (who were still on duty) go physically unplug and replug the servers in question.&lt;p&gt;He couldn&amp;#x27;t disclose the total cost of the outage, but I was lead to believe it was in the millions of dollars.&lt;p&gt;A functioning owner&amp;#x2F;management&amp;#x2F;worker relationship might fight over how the earnings of a company might be split, and even how or what to invest in, but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole. An adversarial relationship prevents the sort of cooperation and good-faith assumptions that allow the different parties to collaborate and work to everyone&amp;#x27;s benefit.&lt;p&gt;That being said, that non-adversarial relationship is a two way street, and ownership+management need to be participating in good-faith as well.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple banned a pay equity Slack channel</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22650751/apple-bans-pay-equity-slack-channel</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Kinrany</author><text>Why is being adversarial a problem?</text></item><item><author>tibbetts</author><text>Not starting out adversarial with management is a big part of it. Unions in the US feel like they need to have strict rules because otherwise management will take advantage. Management in the US is often very strongly anti-union. This is a situation where social conventions and government regulation could yield better outcomes than an adversarial system. But Americans love adversarial systems.</text></item><item><author>diebeforei485</author><text>The works council system in Germany and Switzerland (and some other countries) works a lot better than American unions. I&amp;#x27;m not sure why. It seems they are more co-operative and have fewer BS rules.</text></item><item><author>foepys</author><text>Meanwhile in Germany an employer has to provide rooms and resources for a works council (Betriebsrat) to meet and organize, and has to pay all necessary trainings, including all related travel expenses.</text></item><item><author>advisedwang</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a long case history in front on the NRLB about whether or not employees can use employer&amp;#x27;s resource (ie notice boards, email system, slack) for organizing. In general the rule has been that if employees can use something for general non-work purposes (e.g. setting up a baseball game on the weekend) then the company can&amp;#x27;t stop them from  using it for organizing.&lt;p&gt;However the specifics (e.g. what if there is a policy about what topics are OK, but some OK topics are non-work, or what if there is a general work-only policy that is selectively enforced against organizing) have gone back and forth depending on the administration.&lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#x27;s behaviour is probably a result of a 2019 ruling [1] which opend the door to this kind of thing. Given that the administration has swung back to being fairly labor friendly, it&amp;#x27;ll be interesting if this gets to the NRLB to see if they find a way to make this illegal.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.bloomberglaw.com&amp;#x2F;daily-labor-report&amp;#x2F;labor-board-paves-way-for-employers-to-ward-off-union-emails&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.bloomberglaw.com&amp;#x2F;daily-labor-report&amp;#x2F;labor-board...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdavis703</author><text>I’ve heard union leaders say getting workers to “hate the boss” is an important part of organizing. Entering in to negotiations where the goal is to punish the boss as opposed to getting the best deal for the workers is toxic.</text></comment>