Unionism in Silicon Valley - called it

Back in January I made the following prediction:

What do I think? Twitter, Facebook and Google offices in the USA are going to be hit with unionization efforts in the next 12 months, initially as a trial in the most favorable locations but if they succeed then this will be ramped up quickly nationwide. This will be framed as a push to align the companies to approved socially just policies - which their boards mostly favor already - but will be used to leapfrog the activist employees into union-endorsed and -funded positions of influence.

Sure enough, a bunch of Google staff walked out of work today, nominally to protest at ex-Android head Andy Rubin getting a cool $90M in severance after being accused of dubious behaviour with someone in a hotel room, which he denies:

Rubin said in a two-part tweet: “The New York Times story contains numerous inaccuracies about my employment at Google and wild exaggerations about my compensation. Specifically, I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room. These false allegations are part of a smear campaign to disparage me during a divorce and custody battle. Also, I am deeply troubled that anonymous Google executives are commenting about my personnel file and misrepresenting the facts.”

For the record, Rubin sounds a bit sleazy even if you apply a high degree of scepticism to the exact circumstances of the event.

Let's look at the "official" walkout Twitter account, and wonder who's actually driving this organisation:

We, Google employees and contractors, will walkout on November 1 at 11:10am to demand these five real changes. #googlewalkout pic.twitter.com/amgTxK3IYw

— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) November 1, 2018

For posterity, the "demands" are:

1. An end to Forced Arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination for all current and future employees.
2. A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity.
3. A publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report.
4. A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously.
5. Elevate the Chief Diversity Officer to answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations directly to the Board of Directors. Appoint an Employee Rep to the Board.

Points 1-4 seem pretty reasonable - but what does point 5 have to do with the rest of the list? And who would this "Employee Rep" be - a unionisation activist, perchance? $10 says I'm right. This is a classic tactic: take a reasonable area of complaint and use it as a Trojan Horse to sneak in the early stages of unionisation to the company.

Google allegedly employs very smart people. If only they exercised their critical faculties half as well as their intellects, they might be asking uncomfortable questions of the protest organisers about where point 5 came from and who the organisers have in mind to take on "employee rep" duties. I guarantee you that it's not Rob Pike or Jeff Dean.

Minimum wage, maximum unemployment

Following the previously-blogged move by SeaTac to up its minimum wage to $15/hour, this campaign seems to be going national in the USA, heavily backed by unions such as SEIU:

Organisers hope workers in as many as 100 cities will participate in what is the latest in a series of such actions.
Unions want a $15-an-hour (£9.19) federal minimum wage. The current one, set in 2009, is $7.25 per hour.

Oh dear. Where to start? Well, $15/hour in NYC is very different from $15/hour in rural Kansas in terms of buying power. In the latter, you'll be lumping a huge range of jobs together with the same wage. I don't know what socioeconomic effect this is going to have, but it's not going to be pretty.

There's also the small matter of unemployment. Some businesses won't be economic to operate with a doubled wage bill. They'll either have to get more productivity out of their existing workers, or do without them all together. This is where the much-famed robot burger flipper comes in - for a fast food establishment you shrink your workforce to a small number of managers and technicians who deliver $15+/hour of organisational value, and then steadily replace the servers and burger flippers with machines. This is more likely for larger businesses since they can more easily amortise the costs of integrating the machine with their menu and kitchen layouts. Once the principle of robotic food preparation (and self-cleaning bathrooms) is established, there will be a lively market in the associated hardware and software. Meanwhile the number of jobs for relatively unskilled workers plummets, with the most likely unreplaceable jobs involving customer interactions like waitressing and more skilled cooking - and if you don't have great people skills or a trade skill, you're screwed because there's a much larger pool of people competing with you.

Given all the likely and very visible negative effects of a doubled minimum wage, I'm desperately curious why the major unions are pursuing it. They're not stupid, after all. It would seem that they're making a massive millstone for their own necks, and those of the politicians they own, when the wage goes up and unemployment shoots up to match. Are they that confident in the media carrying water for them and blaming the unemployment effects on "the rich", and panning the opposition when they proposed lowering the minimum wage back to something like $8/hour?

"What we need is a social movement in this country that says enough is enough," said David Rolf, the president of the local Service Employees International Union.

Yes, enough with employment for many - let's restrict it to the elite. Doesn't seem like a very progressive message to me, but what do I know?

Atlas Shrugged - part 2

Nearly a year after watching Atlas Shrugged part 1 I finally got around to watching part 2 - "The Strike". I knew going into it that the cast would change completely, so was expecting a certain amount of dissonance. In the even it wasn't noticeable, perhaps because it had been so long since I saw part 1. So how did part 2 stack up?

The cast changes from part 1 were a mixed bag:

• Paul McCrane as Wesley Mouch: an improvement, a much better weasel.
• Samantha Mathis made a better Dagney, older and more world-weary. Compared to Mathis, the deficiencies of the youth of Taylor Schilling in the role were more obvious, despite Schilling being very easy on the eye.
• Esai Morales: very smooth as Francisco d'Anconia. He was used to narrate Randian opinions in a couple of scenes but did so without being too hammy.
• The nerd in me applauded Robert Picardo as Dr. Robert Stadler, the head of the SSI.
• The main disappointment was Jason Beghe as Hank Rearden: Grant Bowler was far better in part 1, the Baghe character was more smirking and annoying.
• I was in two minds about Patrick Fabian as James Taggart; he was too young in my mind for the role, but he did get the playboy attitude right.

Where I thought the film succeeded, more so than part 1, was in making the subtle nods to popular culture today so that it could be seen as a warning of an (unlikely) very near future. This was exemplified by including a Fox News deconstruction of the Fair Share Law, with Sean Hannity facing off against Juan Willians and Bob Beckel. I nearly laughed my socks off. It was no doubt a good marketing gag - after all, I'd imagine Fox viewers are over-represented in the likely film audience. Indeed, Bob's brother Graham played Ellis Wyatt in part 1 which may have persuaded Bob to come on board for part 2. Also, plaudits are due to whoever came up with the "We are the 99.98%" protest signs waved at Dagney - genius. The use of protestors and their signs in a couple of the scenes to indicate changing public attitudes was clever.

The film itself felt a little rushed, which is not surprising considering how much they had to cram in to 111 minutes, less a couple of minutes of the flight sequence duplicated at the start and end. I will be fascinated to see what they do in part 3 about the 80+ page radio monologue - maybe they'll stick it on a separate DVD... It was not quite stand-alone as a film, but made a stab at it. You needed some context from part 1 or from the book in order to make more sense of the situation and the relationship between Mouch, the Taggarts and the rest of the industrialists, but the film makers did do a creditable job in minimising this. Where it fell down was in explaining Hank Rearden's attitude - why he was refusing to roll over to the government, and why he then changed his mind so quickly when his affair with Dagney was threatened to be exposed. The film makers could have done a better job of repeating his obsession with his firm, but I suppose they were relying on part 1 to have done that.

I can recommend Atlas Shrugged part 2, on balance. You don't need to read the book for it to make sense, as long as you've seen part 1. It was engaging and cleverly pitched. I'm not sure what Rand would have made of it, but I think the tie-ins to modern society would have amused her.

Striving for mediocrity

Via Longrider who spent some time in National/Network Rail and has some more depth on the matter, the Scottish railway signallers are striking for 72 hours because they don't like a proposed change to promotions. Let's leave aside the cynicism of choosing 3 days across Christmas as the strike dates, and look at the underlying grievance.

Contrast the Guardian's take on the reason for the strike, which is far from clear:

The Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union claims Network Rail managers have ripped up an arrangement which had been in place for more than 30 years where staff were "slotted" into a post when it became vacant.
Network Rail said the union wanted a signaller removed from his post before it would negotiate. It said resolving a dispute before the Christmas rush was made "impossible" by the stance of the RMT.

with Longrider's much clearer explanation, that currently promotion is based on seniority and that Network Rail have the temerity to demand that some measure of competence be substituted for this:

The unions didn’t much like the idea of competence based promotion back in 1994 and it seems they still don’t. It does surprise me that there is still dispute about it getting on for twenty years later, though.

What's really concerning about this is that there is nominally no financial impact on the union membership as a result of this policy change - the same posts exist for the same salaries, and union members occupy them. One union member's loss is another's gain? So why strike? It seems pretty clear that the union is very sensitive about any toe-in-the-door relating to paying or promoting people based on any form of measured performance. Heaven forbid that any unionised workforce should be paid by result.

Sauce for the goose

A heartwarming Christmas tale in the DT of striking Unilever workers going without their Christmas hampers.

Approximate sequence of events:

1. Unilever finds £680m hole in its final salary pension scheme
2. Unions and Unilever have 8 months of talks about terminating the scheme
3. Unilever ends talks, axes scheme (which, let's face it, was the inevitable conclusion)
4. Unions protest, ballot, strike
5. Unilever cancels traditional (discretionary!) Christmas hampers, parties and bonuses for strikers
6. Strikers whine "it's not fair!"

Unite national officer, Jennie Formby, said it was "spiteful" of the company to cancel Christmas perks for staff on strike. She said: "First Unilever slash pensions, now they're cancelling Christmas celebrations."

This, Jenny my love, is the downside of strike action. You did realise that there was a downside when you were encouraging your workers to strike? If you remove goodwill from the worker side (an absolute right, along with the absolute right to withdraw one's labour) then you don't have room to complain when the employer withdraws their goodwill too.

Fortunately, there are still winners:

Unilever has chosen to cancel striking workers' Christmas parties, hampers and bonuses, instead opting to give away thousands of hampers to charity, along with £15 gift vouchers.

What's wrong Jenny, do you feel your members are more deserving of the hampers and money than charities? Whatever happened to concern for the poor?

Unilever, I like your style - if not your Marmite.