Google Workers Protest Plans to Reduce Compensation in Three Cities in North Carolina, Texas, and Iowa (protocol.com) 65
Protocol reports that Google "plans to reduce the equity packages for Durham, North Carolina; Des Moines, Iowa; and Houston, Texas, in January 2022, according to an Alphabet Workers Union petition circulating today that demands a reversion to pay and equity cuts." The Washington Post notes that "For some employees, that means their stock grants could be 25 percent lower than if they worked at other Google offices, like in Atlanta, the workers said in the letter."
With over 800 members the Alphabet Workers Union is part of a larger effort to organize workers at tech companies. Protocol writes: The Research Triangle area, where the Durham, North Carolina, office is located, was also moved from the "National" pay band to a "Discount" pay band in late 2020, according to the Amazon Workers Union petition. The union said it would affect 300 workers there, but that Google plans to expand to 1,000 employees in the coming years....
Many workers relocated there before the changes in pay and equity were made, the union wrote.
With over 800 members the Alphabet Workers Union is part of a larger effort to organize workers at tech companies. Protocol writes: The Research Triangle area, where the Durham, North Carolina, office is located, was also moved from the "National" pay band to a "Discount" pay band in late 2020, according to the Amazon Workers Union petition. The union said it would affect 300 workers there, but that Google plans to expand to 1,000 employees in the coming years....
Many workers relocated there before the changes in pay and equity were made, the union wrote.
Easier to replace at lower cost? (Score:3)
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Re: Get woke and go broke. (Score:2)
Funny, last I checked Brave was mostly Chromium, and Google does at least 90% of the work on Chromium. Google pays for Chromium. Ads pay for publishers to run websites.
If you don't want ads or tracking, that fine. Put up the cash and pay for content that's useful. Otherwise you're just a leech living off the contributions of society, just waiting until the tragedy of Commons kicks in and destroys what's left of the free (as in speech) and open Internet.
As for DuckDuckBing....er...DuckDuckGo, with the kinds
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If you don't want ads or tracking, that fine. Put up the cash and pay for content that's useful. Otherwise you're just a leech living off the contributions of society...
How much per add does a site make? $0.000000001? $0.00000005? If someone implemented a good micropayment system where I'd be spending less than* $10.00 a month for casual browsing, I'd be up for that. They could have a pop-up telling me how much my current visit would cost, and let me choose if I think it's worth it or not. Advertising, as it's been since the beginning, is nothing but a scam developed by the advertising industry to milk money out of corporations, and it's gotten worse since the developme
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How much per add does a site make? $0.000000001? $0.00000005? If someone implemented a good micropayment system where I'd be spending less than* $10.00 a month for casual browsing, I'd be up for that.
That's part of the problem. To run a good micropayment system you'd need volume, so probably result in one or two and high fees relative to the payout.
In addition, I would think visits would drop since they now have to pay for what was free, resulting in higher charges to view since you need to recoup the lost add revenue over fewer viewers.
I visit a few sites where I make an annual voluntary donation to help keep them running because I value their content. I wonder how many I'd truly pay for?
They could have a pop-up telling me how much my current visit would cost, and let me choose if I think it's worth it or not.
That would
In these places (Score:3)
Many companies do this in those places. Where I work, if you move to one of the "cheaper" places, you do not get wage adjustments until your wage level lowers to what they believe the average wage in that area is.
And this is a shock to Google employees. (Score:5, Insightful)
They started off hiring the best and brightest - and they got what they paid for. Now, they're big enough to survive on inertia. It may have taken a brilliant bunch of guys to create what Alphabet has become; they obviously don't feel like that's necessary anymore. Google may have ceased being non-evil a while back, now they're jumping the shark.
Re: And this is a shock to Google employees. (Score:2)
It is not a shock to employees (Score:2)
Silly valley finally has competition.
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Just a modern variation on graylining. It's not the age, it's the money.
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So, they're not hiring the best and brightest after all, are they?
Why do you say that? Based on their decision to retroactively reduce compensation for workers in certain areas?
You are just jumping at any excuse to try and either tear-down Alphabet employees or build yourself up by comparison.
Let's see if any of the other employers in NC decide to "snap-up" these soon to be under-paid employees, or will they simply stay at Alphabet and whine about how their peers in more expensive locations are better compensated.
The obvious solution, if they are concerned about their com
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Unfortunately for IBM, I'm not especially connected to a dot on the map. I go where the money is. I'm a rolling stone; most people are not. Once [insert large corporation name here] manages to get high-dollar employees into a low-dollar economy, that's where they mean to keep them. IBM in Dubuque, Iowa is not the only example. This is n
Addendum: (Score:2)
Not just making this up, I've been there. I calls 'em like I sees 'em.
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Just the most desperate and most cliquish, which their HR department interprets as "the best". I went through their interview process twice, for two distinct roles. The HR description of the jobs did not match what the interviewere had. The department members loved me, and many knew my work in my fields. They then called six months later to offer me distinct jobs, in different cities, after I'd said "we stay here, I support my wife's career".
Every competent gets hired at least 3 months before they get an o
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So, they're not hiring the best and brightest after all, are they?
Statistics prevents a company with tens of thousands of engineers cannot hire the best and brightest. That only happens at the start, and that ship sailed decades ago.
Nevertheless, Google will hire (and hoard) above average talent and will not recycle the lower quartiles of incompetence (*). And that's good enough, more than enough for a company like Google.
(*) When I say "incompetence", I don't mean it just for being mean or just to throw a pejorative. There's a lot of people in software and IT that sh
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Google/Alphabet is obviously struggling (Score:1)
Union (Score:5, Insightful)
Any company that has a union deserves a union. Keep your employees happy and they won't have to organize on you.
You need the unionize (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: You need the unionize (Score:2)
The people that run the union come out very well. Itâ(TM)s good to create those high paying jobs.
Re:You need the unionize (Score:4, Insightful)
With all those new voters suppression laws
There are no "voter suppression laws". There are some laws designed to ensure that only actual voters, you know, vote.
If your party can't survive with just real actual voters ... well, nuff said.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I see your sweeping generalities, and raise you specific cases.
There are some laws designed to ensure that only actual voters, you know, vote.
There is a LOT of law designed to ensure that only actual voters vote. There is a lot of other law designed to ensure the validity and regularity of voting. So you are correct, but trite. What we're talking about here is not "law in general", we're talking "bills recently passed".
There are no "voter suppression laws".
Only in the sense that they are not titled "voter suppression law". Many provisions will sound good on paper, but will in practice discriminate. Many provisions wi
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Typical left-wing propaganda. It was already illegal to give free stuff to voters. HB 531 does not only "not suppress voting" here, it changes nothing.
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-Why did a Democrat go to the cementary?
-To thank his voters.
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English much?
I welcome Alphabet employees unionizing, think that will make the stock price go up or down? As this article noted, the complaints about reduced compensation in NC (and presumably other locations) revolve around stock option values. Unionize to get higher stock options, only to watch the value of your stock options drop as the stock goes down in value.
I've never seen a company's stock go up because of their workers unionizing - it may have happened, not saying it's impossible - but Investors te
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Spoken like a true MAGAt. (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure it's the same at US Steel, Ford, Union Pacific, . . . . Now, it's a shame that the unions are (for the most part) fundamentally corrupt, but the b
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Are you really that ignorant?
The vast majority of jobs are for small employers, companies with under 100 workers, and precious few of them are union shops.
Yes, century-old corporations, especially those that actually manufacture a product, are union shops, as ar city, state, and federal workers, but they are a very small percentage of workers in America.
Unions represent just over 11% of workers in America [bls.gov]
Collective bargaining is good capitalism (Score:2)
Working for a company is a form of investment with an expected level of return. As an employee, you pay your union leader to enhance your ROI and
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When companies spend capital on outside marketing firms, law firms, and the like, are the guaranteeing a return on the companies' investment? No?
The idea that you spend money only on things that guarantee a positive return on investme
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No, marketing and law firms do *not* guarantee results. They'll point to their track record to be suggestive of likelihood of success, but they don't guarantee success.
The notion that unions depress wages across the board is laughable. It may depress certain individual wages, so if you are in the top 10% of the workforce in a competitive context, you might individually be limited, but not across the board. If it were true that unions keep the average wage down, then companies would *love* unionization, as
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If execs do not like it, they are free to fire everyone and start anew as everybody is replaceable [...]
Doing that would be illegal under US law (the National Labor Relations Act [nlrb.gov]). Firing people to bust a union -- or to otherwise punish or deter organized activity that is protected by the NLRA -- is called an "unfair labor practice" under the act, and the employer can be forced to reverse the employer's action(s).
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Though of course, depending on how ballsy the company is, they may find some excuse and point to that as the cause for termination.
On the other hand, I once worked for a fairly layoff happy company, and one of the most unimpressive workers consistently kept his job. Why? He would spend 30 minutes after work every day holding a sign at the entrance calling for unionization and the company was terrified of NLRA consequences if they hit him.
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Unionisation is usually good.
Teachers unions treat every teacher as equal, and actively denies any teacher a bonus or pay raise unless every other teachers gets the same treatment. Teacher unions protect incompetent, unprofessional teachers - See the famous "rubber Room" in NYC [nypost.com]. Teacher Unions don't go on strike to raise academic standards, extend the school day or extend the school year, they focus exclusively on the needs of the teachers, the students are just a means to an end.
I'm sure there are good unions, but teacher unions are b
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Of course. They're the teacher's union, not the good education union. If students want to collectively organize to try to push for better education, they should form a student's union.
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Just like collective investment makes a company. Unions are not a form of social democracy, they are simply capitalism from the other perspective. If execs do not like it, they are free to fire everyone and start anew as everybody is replaceable and if they compensate the next bunch of people well enough, they might not choose to engage in collective bargaining. Working for a company is a form of investment with an expected level of return. As an employee, you pay your union leader to enhance your ROI and they take a cut of your money in exchange for helping you to get better conditions and more riches. In many cases, either your employer takes a cut (from what you did not get) or the union takes a cut of what you did. If your union doesn’t deliver enough value for money, they will not be around for long, so you can guarantee they will regularly encourage renegotiation in a way which does not harm your professional standing. Unionisation is usually good.
BS. Competition is the heart of capitalism. On both sides. And cartels, on both sides, destroy it. That's why you need antitrust laws (and vigorous enforcement thereof) on the company side, and that is why unions are bad on the employee side. Or do you also think that the informal "no employee poaching" agreements that Big Tech had/has are also good for everyone? And employees are "free to choose to work for different companies if they don't like it", and that's all there needs to be done?
Unions compete though (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
Not enough tech workers? (Score:2)
no duh (Score:2)
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If they're working remotely, then what "company in those areas" do really don't make any difference. There are SV companies willing to pay SV prices regardless of where those employees live.
Fed Employees have had this for decades (Score:2)
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I'd love to see a $500K house in Silicon Valley, LOL.
The problem Alphabet has is they started everyone at SV-level pay, now that their workforce is so dispersed, they want to reconsider that idea. The obvious solution is that Alphabet only employ workers in high cost of living cities, but that gets expensive.
Re: Fed Employees have had this for decades (Score:2)
Google already had different pay brackets for different regions, so moving could raise or lower your pay.
The issue here is that people transferred with the promise of a certain amount of pay/equity and then Google changed the policy after they've moved. I don't think they got pay cuts, but I've heard that annual raises and equity refreshes were well below inflation for such people
If you combine this with everyone working from home and the continued deferrals on return to office, many people are finding that