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Google Contractors In Pittsburgh Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union (vice.com) 89

Posted by BeauHD from the shadow-work-force dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Contract workers at Google's office in Pittsburgh have just announced their intention to unionize. 66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they're asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a vote on union representation. The PATP is a project sponsored by the union aimed at "helping Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania workers in high-tech fields organize and bargain collectively."

"Workers at HCL deserve far more than they have received in terms of compensation, transparency and consideration, and it has gone on like this for much too long," HCL worker Renata Nelson said in a press release. "While on-site management tries to do what they can, where they can, their hands are often tied by arbitrary corporate policy." The vote for union representation is an important step, necessary to empower a union to exclusively represent employees and negotiate on their behalf for a collective bargaining agreement. The move also represents an important step in the small but growing movement to unionize Silicon Valley's workforce. The press release explains that HCL's 90 employees "work side-by-side with those of the giant corporation for far less compensation and few, if any, of the perks."
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Google Contractors In Pittsburgh Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union More

Google Contractors In Pittsburgh Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union

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  • as part of the membership, then this would be a good idea. If it is just a play to increase union membership without that aspect, it is a lost opportunity.

    • Re:If the union provides training and certificatio (Score:5, Interesting)

      by talldean ( 1038514 ) on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:35AM (#59143606) Homepage

      What would you expect them to train or certify *in*? Like, the contractors are working at Google; how much more training do you want them to have?

      (Explicitly, I used to work there; no amount of training short of going back to college for years is going to change the roles they're in.)

      Like, this pretty clearly seems like a push towards collective bargaining for better compensation and/or benefits. That's probably a good thing.

      • I thought unions were ONLY for W2 employees.

        Exactly how would an union work for an independent contractor, who negotiates their own bill rate and terms of the contract ?

        • They're not independent contractors, but full-time employees of a contracting company.

          • They're not independent contractors, but full-time employees of a contracting company.

            Until, of course, they hit the time limit for working as a contractor at Google, when they will be rotated out to bring in new workers.

            I believe it was Microsoft that got burned keeping contractors on the payroll too long and was forced to treat them as MS employees... I think the court said 2-3 years was as long as an employer could keep a contractor on site before they were to be considered an employee. (Think 'common law marriage.')

            Employees can unionize HCL, Google can switch contractor firms at will.

            • I think the court said 2-3 years was as long as an employer could keep a contractor on site before they were to be considered an employee.

              18 weeks in the UK, 12 weeks in most of Europe.

              It must be hell being an American. Had a mass-shooting yet today?

    • Training and certification are the least useful things unions do. These workers need collective bargaining way more than those things.

    • they're among the best. There's nothing for them to train on. And why would a _Union_ do training? Isn't that a job for our school system and maybe the employer? The Union's job is to bargain for better wages and benefits. Training might be a benefit to bargain for, but it's not the role of the Union.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Who is leaning to code?
      The union? The workers? Is someone offering someone "free" education?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ''If the union provides training and certification''

      There aren't untrained or unqualified people working for companies that Google contracts. Those that don't meet quality standards, [easily measured by metrics] are no longer employed. Those that are, are constantly striving for higher quality. If a union would do anything more than steal those employee's money to line their pockets, I'd be all for it. In the end, how much increase of compensation has a union ever provided to those that mine the salt?

      • "how much increase of compensation has a union ever provided to those that mine the salt?"

        You may be unaware of this, but there was a time when America was a prosperous country where ordinary workers were well paid. That period coincided with the period where our companies were heavily unionized.

    • If you think that training is the only benefit a union can provide you have some serious lack of knowledge of what the benefits of a union are. And as others have pointed out, technical training is not necessarily something that makes sense for a union to be involved with, it tends to be more "soft skills" like how to apply for a job when you are unemployed etc. I have barely participated in any training from my union over the years, but I did actually attend an afternoon workshop on Getting things done [wikipedia.org] not

  • Did they think this through? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:28AM (#59143586) Homepage

    These contractors cannot collectively bargain with Google, because Google is not their employer. The employees of this contractor could establish a collective bargaining relationship with HCL. Google could then decline to renew the contract with HCL.

    • That assumes that it's easy to replace those contractors, en masse/all at once, and not take a pretty massive hit to the business.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        Google does not have to replace them all at once -- the contract would not dissolve just because the contractors certified a union to collectively bargain for them. If they walked off the job early in union/employer negotiations, it would suggest bad faith on their part; and the longer those negotiations continue, the easier it is for Google to bring on other contract labor.

        If the 90 contractors were that critical to Google's business, I am almost certain that Google would hire them directly rather than ha

        • I worked there, in that building, and was one of the interviewers for some of the contractors on that site a few years back. I'm not nearly as certain as you are. Google hires contractors when it can, including in business-critical roles, especially if the roles aren't perceived as long-term/permanent. My bet is that it's either cheaper or more flexible for the business, albeit probably worse for the staff.

          • I work with HCL all the time. They are a subcontinent company. They buy other companies tech workers some of which are top notch. However the majority of workers I have met at HCL are subpar and they a good idea to unionize. However the result will more likely be dropping HCL for another vendor rather that getting more benefits or just hiring instead. There are hundreds of qualified people who could do HCL's job better than they do if they have one of the unqualified people. If they have a decent HCLe

    • They are unionizing at HCL, not at Google.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        Yes, and my point is that HCL probably has extremely limited scope to grant better salary, more benefits, prospects of continued employment, or anything like that. Contractors like HCL typically operate on much slimmer profit margins than Google (making it up in volume), and Google can probably easily break their contract with HCL. These workers could succeed in gaining an exclusive collective bargaining agent in the form of a union, and still quickly end up without jobs.

      • I worked for HCL in the Dallas Tx area, is a typical Indian company that has some US employees and a very deep bench of H1-B’s. If this group unionizes, HCL will move the US people to a different contract or they can walk. For the H1-B group, they will have HCL remove there sponsorship on their way back to India. Once back in India, HCL could prevent them from changing jobs for a year or more. It would also be known who tried to unionize and that person would not get picked by any other outsourcer. H

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It does raise the question though, of how much Google is paying HCL, and how much of that passes through to HCL's employees.

      If HCL got a lucrative contract and is paying its employees crap, and/or crap benefits, then I can't say I blame the employees.

      And did Google grant the lucrative contract in the expectation that the employees would be fairly compensated? Or did Goodle turn a blind eye and decide it wasn't its business whether HCL's profits went to buying its CEO another mansion in Palm Beach?*

      And
    • Google is using a contracting agency (IMO illegally) to avoid paying the full cost of employees, but these are people doing day to day work essential to the operation of google. These are not people doing a one time job.

      If we were enforcing laws in this bloody country the IRS and various labor boards would slap Google (and every other damn tech company doing this crap) down hard.

      So yeah, they should be bargaining with Google. First to get them to follow the damn law and hire them properly and next f

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      Don't get hung up on the crappy click-tastic headline - these are, as you say, HCL employees working under contract at Google, so they will be unionizing HCL, not Google. When the union demands higher wages, and the contractor can't provide them, since Google won't likely start paying more to HCL to accomplish the same tasks, their employer, HCL, will lose the Google contract and those new union workers will be out of a job.

  • Interesting partnership choice (Score:4, Informative)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:32AM (#59143596) Homepage Journal
    Amongst construction workers, the Steel Workers are held in high regard for being particularly tough individuals. While union clout has been on the decline for decades across the country, the Steel Workers have managed to stick together fairly well and keep some amount of power. Hopefully that pans out well for the google contractors as well.

    • Both work on a series of tubes

    • Steel Workers have managed to stick together fairly well and keep some amount of power.

      Since the 1970s, employment in the American steel industry has declined by 75%.

      • The word for this is "deindustrialization", and it was the result of public policy.

      • Steel Workers have managed to stick together fairly well and keep some amount of power.

        Since the 1970s, employment in the American steel industry has declined by 75%.

        Steel industry largely refers to the people who produce steel.

        Steelworkers are generally the people who work with steel

        That's an important difference. The latter group are the people who build the buildings and bridges that make modern society possible. They're not doing great but they're doing better than the people who used to work in the foundries.

    • Wrong, steelworkers are going extinct, industry going extinct in USA. What romantic bullshit you spew.

  • If Google was really the best place to work ever, the workers wouldn't need to go out of their way to join a union.
  • If you have a single employer and many employers then a union makes sense. The employer has a huge advantage and the employees have no bargaining position other than unemployment. We see this in mining towns where once the miners are there they have no choice but to accept the wage and working conditions the mine imposes. We also see it in jobs that require highly specialized skills for which there is only one employer. This happens in the health field with national health care or in professional sports
  • Google and other California tech corps will just keep claiming that there is a labor shortage in tech (there isn't: https://www.cnbc.com/id/100674... [cnbc.com] ; https://cis.org/Report/There-N... [cis.org]) and fill the ranks with a steady stream of temporary H-1B workers. After all, they have as many demands as Union workers and will gladly accept lower wages, because they want to stay in the US to eventually become eligible for a Green Card (yes, you can get a Green Card if you stay in the US long enough on H-1B). Businesse

  • Smart (Score:3, Informative)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:59AM (#59143664)
    I wish all IT workers would. Solidarity isn't just a pretty word. The idea is that when you strike there's money for you to pay the bills and vice versa. For that you need to go national and across lines of business

    • I.T. workers have resisted unionization ever since it was brought up in the mid 1980's.... The idea rears its head over and over, every time a group at one or two big companies gets mad about all the outsourcing going on, or because they feel like they're second-class as contractors.

      I've actually worked in I.T. at several different companies that used union steel workers, so I'm pretty familiar with the other side of that coin.

      The bottom line, though? Most I.T. work requires a lot of mental ability and ab

      • first, the boom times of the 80s and 90s meant there really was no need. Before H1-Bs we were essential, and could write our own ticket. The suits didn't understand us and hadn't yet started doing things like Dev-Ops and Agile to break our work down into manageable chunks.

        These days an endless supply of cheap foreign labor means we're not essential. And those suits realized there were a few of us who were. They've been spending money to lobby for education programs to flood the market. They also have be

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

          These days an endless supply of cheap foreign labor means we're not essential.

          It's not endless at all. If you're talking about tech support specifically, then there's a lot of work that must be done in person. Remote troubleshooting doesn't work when the office has a network problem. As for software devs, there's a huge pool of them who can't fizzbuzz. The remainder is a minuscule fraction of the population in every country (see the salary growth in China [nikkei.com]).

          And those suits realized there were a few of us who were. They've been spending money to lobby for education programs to flood the market.

          That isn't doing anything. Education opportunities existed long before those programs, people just weren't interested in them. No

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by AHuxley ( 892839 )
            Re "Not to mention those programs are mired in SJW thinking"
            Wait until needed computer related work is reduced by 20% to get into education. Under SJW non academic considerations.
            An entire generation of SJW approved professionals who can't code much will have been granted full "qualifications".
            Will people who passed due to non academic considerations and who got cant code still get the same high salaries?
            Can unions make a company accept expert staff who cant code?
            Will any such SJW created qualificat
      • Nurses and teachers are also often unionized. These jobs are traditionally "pink collar," so the union arose probably less out of harsh working conditions than the employer thinking "This is the best job a woman can get, I don't need to pay her more." Nonetheless, even dumb teachers got through college, and the few nursing students I've met all took OChem. So the cognitive requirements/abilities are not a bar to unionization.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        By contrast, a job in a typical steel fabrication shop or finisher involves having some basic knowledge related to working on any factory floor (ability to follow safety precautions, for example), and skills doing a fairly specific task or tasks. If you're good at working a saw and cutting steel I-beams, for example? You only have a limited number of places needing someone to do that work for them.

        Some people probably do work on production lines where they can only do the one specific task that their station requires, but I would not consider that the norm. The people I know who work in metal shops can generally do all or most of the jobs interchangeably. They can cut, weld, press, finish - basically do any part of the production process that is required of them, even if they spend most of their days only doing one of the above.

        I've seen plenty of people in IT who have less diversity in their skill

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        Re "By contrast, a job in a typical steel fabrication shop or finisher involves having some basic knowledge related to working on any factory floor"
        Ask that to nations who failed to keep up with their education for one generation.
        Gone are the trusted workers who can do jet, rocket, nuclear, mil, design work.
        A nation is left to fully import turn key projects within decades of skills seen lost.

  • HCL America (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Its a subsidiary of the body-shop HCL Inc., the huge Indian outsourcing company.

    Let me get into a rant mode.

    The Hindu's running these companies (even if some companies are owned by minorities, Wipro - Azim Premji a Muslim and TCS - group headed by Ratan Tata who's a Parsi) are the greediest of the bunch. They will wear suit and a tie but their robber baron instincts will be sharper than the usual gang of white men in suits with MBAs.

    In addition they are supporters and well wishers of the xenophobic

  • I think it's a great idea.
    Google is so intent on virtue-signaling its leftist/liberal credentials, they should certainly put their money where their mouth is. It's a no lose proposition: either its proved to be unsustainable even for a ridiculously profitable business like Google's, or their employees generally get a better quality of life.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mi ( 197448 )

      or their employees generally get a better quality of life

      If that were the actual upside of a union-membership, who'd ever object to joining one!

  • I grew up outside of Pittsburgh when the steel industry collapsed. There were many factors for this, but a large part was the absurdly large salaries that the steel workers were making made the price of US steel completely uncompetitive. It was a case of the unions being too strong, and demanding too much money. All things in life need a balance. No worker protection does not lead to paradise, no matter how much a libertarian thinks so. Too much worker protection also does not lead to paradise, no matter ho

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by zixxt ( 1547061 )

      I grew up outside of Pittsburgh when the steel industry collapsed. There were many factors for this, but a large part was the absurdly large salaries that the steel workers were making made the price of US steel completely uncompetitive. It was a case of the unions being too strong, and demanding too much money. All things in life need a balance..

      Tell that to the CEO's and board members making too much money and being too strong first before you rant against the workers.

  • Do whatever you want to do

  • HCL is a hack shop just like every other Indian turd company.

    I feel for these contractors because frankly working for any asian company absolutely sucks.

  • It sounds like they bypassed Google's rigorous employee screening process and found temporary work at Google coming in as a contractor for HCL.

    Are these visa workers or citizens?

    Are these programmers or people helping to train Artificial Intelligence by reviewing transcripts of audio recordings?

    How hard would it be to replace these 90 workers when they 'demand' wages that exceed what HCL is getting for the positions?

    If they want to share in Google's successes, they shouldn't have taken jobs working as contr

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