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[Unions] Time to get Fired...up?
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The question is "how many angry parents does it take to make him break" isn't it?
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Hugely late response since this is a slow moving thread, but it's worth noting that this is the international that's up to this shit, so far as we've heard. (My understanding is that it involves the reclassification of certain types of positions in the bargaining unit in order to reduce it to uselessness.)
Not that the locals don't have their staff union dust-ups, but SEIU is not a monolith, and folks should be careful that they don't conflate something crappy with SEIU somewhere into SEIU overall.
It's CUNY, so colleges. And more non-traditional/ first gen students, so.. who knows. Adjuncts are getting a really raw deal, though.
From what I understand that's just adjuncts in general. I have a friend with a genetics PhD who is looking for the exit because of trends in college employment. Which is a shame because he's a good teacher but I suspect he'd like to someday own a house or something like that.
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And in unsurprising follow-up, Google has fired four employees involved in organizing recent employee action, trying to dump it in the Thanksgiving week news void.
There are rules about when you can conduct/discuss union business at work. You need to keep that stuff off the clock and super low key if it comes up at a break or lunch.
It can be difficult to get people to keep from getting worked up about organizing. The enthusiasm is fantastic but if it interrupts work you can face discipline just like anything else. If you're trying to organize and it's known, it's really easy to be put under a microscope.
If people are standing around talking about the latest episode of Game of Thrones instead of doing their job or arguing about politics and taking too long on breaks it's the same deal. The difference is in the incentive the employer has in discouraging the discussion. As a practical matter it's best done off the clock and with discretion until you can get a vote.
Yeah, you should be able to do whatever you want on a break. There's no real reason talking about a union while still performing whatever task you have should be actionable but this is still the United States and labor just isn't that strong. In many work environments managers are encouraged to have some disciplinary action documented for every employee, no matter how insignificant just so they can threaten termination and avoid giving a raise. Google doing what they're doing should only be a surprise to people who were naive enough to think big tech was somehow not a standard business.
If you are thinking of organizing, do it outside of work and keep your head down. That's all I'm saying.
Yup, and adjuncts make up the majority of the college teaching workforce, so educators in general are getting shitted on. I could teach 11 classes a year and not take home 30k. To put it into perspective, most "full time" professors complain when they get a 3/2 workload, i.e. 5 classes a year. This is pretty normal if you want to survive as an adjunct and I'm glad I'm finally on my way out in January.
On the other, the Google union organizers were harvesting proprietary data and leaking it to the press because Google previously made work info very open to anyone. So they were shipping trade secrets to the press on work time with almost no control.
And then there's the whole Google employees being some of the most highly compensated in tech with extremely low involuntary separation. Making unionization still important, but not a dire situation.
It seems like a both sides the asshole moment, and it looks real bad for Google but I'm honestly not surprised based on what I'm reading that those four got fired.
Heh the irony though
Uh, let's remember that Google was one of the many members of the Silicon Valley "don't poach other people's employees" cartel that was suppressing these people's wages for years. These people likely got fucked by their employer just like everyone else.
The bolded second paragraph is very very not proven, just FYI.
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They weren't just a member, but one of the founders.
In addition, these people had been organizing over the culture of sexual harassment at Google, where the company routinely covered up the abuses of executives.
Which seems like bullshit, since management can do all their stuff on company time. It'll probably never happen, but there should probably be an hour or so a week guaranteed paid (not from other break time) for any worker to discuss/handle union level type activities.
There actually is steward time generally and if there are any disciplinary or contract related events then it's nearly always required that representation is made aware and can be present while on the clock.
The issue is that people get very worked up and talking about a union can result in one huge complainathon that has people standing around and talking about how shitty management or the union is. It's a lot like watching a live-action version of the YouTube comments section.
I've been going to union staffing meetings for 4 months twice a week to resolve some safe staffing issues. Every single meeting someone decides to just rant about completely off topic subjects because that's what angry people do. If it were happening during the workday while on the surgical floor I'd definitely want them disciplined and I'm pro-union. Does some patient rolling into an operating room really need to overhear that at the charge desk as they roll by? People get loud.
Yeah, asking someone to come to a meeting or reminding them to vote on a contract issue or something shouldn't be a big deal and usually isn't. Some topics definitely aren't mid-workday appropriate though.
This is all after you have a Union. The hard part is getting to that point. Until then it really is important to be discreet. Busting a union is hard, preventing one from ever being established is much easier.
Edit: For some reason all posts seem like quadruple spaced now when I use my phone to make them.
It took a few months but they got their back pay.
I especially like the "dues are for the gym" one, because when I was working in a union shop I got gym membership ridiculously cheap. Back before Unions were de-empowered, unions ran their own free-to-members gyms.