It’s not just wage-fixing, tech companies wield an absurd amount of power in other aspects of people’s lives.
I was once let go due for “performance” reasons that involved major company politics behind the scenes. I’d just gotten my annual review from my boss emailed to my work email about a week before my termination, which showed stellar performance across the board.
When I looked into filing for unemployment, I discovered that I needed to dispute the reason for my dismissal since I was let go for cause, which required me to submit evidence. Who doesn’t have access to work emails? Fired people don’t.
My employment agreement stipulated that the employer maintained all rights to my emails, so I was completely SOL.
Being let go for "performance" reasons is not "for cause" in CA. For cause means something serious that violates the employment agreement, like criminal behavior or sexual harassment.
Companies generally don't fire people "for cause" absent cause because that's the best way to guarantee a lawsuit (because as you've pointed out, it has financial repercussions like cutting off the availability of unemployment, and reputational damage to the former employee).
You should be able to subpoena those e-mails and other documents. Depending on your municipality, there is usually a court/tribunal process just for unemployment claims, or you could get an employment lawyer. It is going to eat up some of that unemployment, but it's worth it to not let a company get away with that kind of shit.
Is it, though? I chose to focus on finding the next gig and luckily got one in a couple weeks. The emotional toll of subjecting yourself to the legal system against an entity with a team of lawyers sounds absolutely horrible.
It's worth it. If there is an actual violation, the company didn't just steal money from you. They defrauded the state labor board and the taxpayers of the state. And that's the sort of thing that government lawyers are very interested pursuing.
For future reference, being fired because of performance or incompetency is unlikely to be a valid "for cause" firing that disqualifies one from unemployment benefits. If a person is fired because the employer claims they suck at the job (whether its true or not), they still get unemployment.
Your mileage may vary depending on local laws or recent changes to employment law.
If this was in California, you absolutely could have filed for unemployment, even if you were unemployed for performance reasons. Worst that could've happened is that the unemployment office could've rejected the application. In this case, they likely would've called to interview you and get a statement on why you were terminated, in which case a verbal description would do the trick (mentioning that you had received an excellent performance review just the week before would've been enough for the interviewer).
Source: I've been fired (for "performance") once and laid off twice, for all of which I've applied for unemployment benefits (approved the first two times; rejected the third because I was a contractor and not eligible to be treated as employee-equivalent). I didn't have any written evidence for the "performance" one; I just told the interviewer that after I was terminated my former supervisor had to hire multiple people in my place (which was true).
Long story short: always file for unemployment, even if the chances of approval are slim. The worst they can do is say no.
Leave money negotiations off the table, and you could have a union establish a single consistent process for firing practices that'd protect someone like James Damore from being arbitrarily fired.
I don't agree with what Damore had to say, but that shouldn't matter! I would absolutely support a union-backed fair process for evaluating his or anyone's continued employment, whatever controversial things they write about.
"Union stops arbitrary firing of controversial high-performer Damore" would bring a tear to my eye, no matter who it is.
James Damore was fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes, which he agreed he wouldn't do in the Google code of conduct. Even Damore confirmed this with the press. How would being unionized change that?
AIUI, failing to represent a union member would be a short, fast path to getting a union decertified.
This is one of the major differences between the US and say Germany. There, the union can decide someone is a butthead and decline to help. US unions have no such flexibility. This is down to shenanigans in the 50s involving racial discrimination.
This is an excellent example, because the key thing is: the companies involved weren't even thinking of it as wage-fixing. They were thinking of it as avoiding disruption to launch schedules by not churning people with low bus-factor.
Employees and management have different perspectives on the work agreement and management's is over-represented because they set most of the company policy. An amplified employee voice can lead to better workplace design in general.
The companies can call it whatever they want, but it reflects the power imbalance between worker and employer that unions exist solely to re-balance.
Some managers in a board room somewhere made a decision that depressed the wages for how many thousands of workers, and what can those workers do about it? Jump ship to...the other companies that colluded to depress their wages?
This whole "you're paid enough so don't unionize" thing is so weak, when obviously people could be paid a lot more, but aren't, because, surprise, the companies still hold all the cards.
I dunno... I was a victim of this wage-fixing scheme, as were all of my coworkers at the time. And I don't know of a single one who would have preferred to have a union collectively negotiating wages.
The whole scheme was that the companies stopped their recruiters from cold-calling each others' employees. That kept wages down by reducing the opportunities for people to get a better salary by moving between companies (or threatening to). If wages were collectively negotiated, those opportunities would not exist in the first place.
Why do you think that strong unions will fight for collective negotiation of wages?
Sweden has one of the strongest union system in the world and at the same time is one of the most entrepreneurial nations with high wages and lots of billionaires, salaries are lower than the US but they are still negotiated and not fixed by the union. The minimum wage for a specific job might be but apart from that I'm free to negotiate my salary. At the same time I have more days of vacation than the minimum 25 because of collective bargaining. I have requirements for minimum amount of natural light by my desk while at the same time can negotiate bonuses, shares, stock options or whatever because those aren't regulated by a collective agreement.
Kollektivavtal[0] are one of the backbone of how Swedish entrepreneurship works, to help society as whole and to give power to the weak link of the chain, it's an interesting model and one of the reasons why I chose to live here.
One of the ways it work is that by covering so many people the few companies that aren't covered by a collective agreement are naturally forced by the labour market to match the minimum, be it wages or benefits. Because unemployment is low people can shop around if there are better places to work.
It's very difficult to actually grow a company in a country like Sweden because of the regulations and taxes you are required to pay after a certain amount of employees.
I would rather pay employees a living wage as part of a sustainable business than deal with the hypergrowth VC bullshit that destroys entire market segments with nothing to show for it except ruined lives after the startups finally implode.
There will be no sustainable business. Regulations and taxes strangle your business before it gets to that point.
If you look at the business landscape of Sweden, it mostly consists of large multinational corporations with bases outside of Sweden (IKEA is a good example of this) and government jobs.
It doesn't leave much room for individuals wanting to start a business and actually having an chance at success.
It's a country of 10 millions that builds jet fighters (Gripen), 5G technology with Ericsson, Minecraft, etc.
The current NASDAQ trading platform was also developed in Sweden.
I would say they're doing very well when it comes to business and technology.
All government funded operations except Minecraft..which is now owned by Microsoft.
Funny..the Original owner of Minecraft never stayed in Sweden with his billion dollars.
My point still stands: you can start a company in Sweden, but will never be able to grow it to sustainable levels unless you incorporate elsewhere (or get purchased).
All examples I've seen so far have only helped prove my point.
King.com is incorporated in Malta. Presumably to get around taxes in Sweden and Spotify is incorporated in Luxomburg. Stop changing the topic.
My point is that you can't grow a company in Sweden and every single example you have just given me are companies that left Sweden after growing to a certain stage.
I think I'm done arguing my point because facts and data dont seem to matter here and it's funny how such a seemingly intelligent community can be utterly blinded by politics.
The reality is that I would never incorporate a company in Sweden and incorporating pretty much anywhere else on earth would give me an advantage.
Again: as ANY big company looking to evade taxes, this is not a fault of Sweden.
Why are most SV tech companies in the US incorporated in Delaware? Is it because California sucks and should lower their tax rates or employer obligations to the bottom of the pit that Delaware created?
You never replied my other comment about companies that are still incorporated in Sweden such as Volvo, Electrolux, etc., so you can be done as much as you want peddling your point of view, it doesn't make it right.
Edit: checking your comment history tells me that you call what Bernie Sanders is pushing for as "socialism" and you use that as an excuse to vote for Trump 2020, come on.
You made my point again. If you look at the wikipedia page, it's not incorporated in Sweden. It's a multinational corporation with an office in Sweden.
It's literally headquartered in Stockholm. That's like saying a Silicon Valley startup isn't actually in California or subject to California's laws solely because it incorporated in Delaware.
So are many multinationals, for tax reasons (not labor law reasons) related to something called IP migration that let corporations evade taxes on local income.
Labor laws affect a company if they have employees in that jurisdiction. It doesn't matter if your HQ is somewhere else.
HQ is still here in Stockholm, it grew from Sweden up to the point it was incorporated outside of Sweden to go public, because shareholders will be moaning about it. It is still a very Swedish company, paying taxes in Sweden.
Incorporated outside of Sweden is the key here. It seems people are downvoting me because they dont want to hear the truth...but other commenters keep making my point quite nicely.
Incorporating outside of Sweden allows big companies to enjoy tax benefits and then hire Engineers from Sweden at an average of 50,000USD to 68,0000USD (these numbers can easily be found on Google).
They get lower taxes, a cheap labor pool, and the company isn't limited through draconian taxes and regulations, it only has to deal with it at a satellite office. It's a win-win.
Now show me a company that's large, started in Sweden, and is still in Sweden many years later.
But it's the same exact thing that any larger Western corporation do when they become multinational, be it an American, British, Australian, they go out and create multiple tax schemes to avoid their duties, it's not a matter of Sweden specifically having high taxes or not, it's a matter of a systemic issue for tax evasion that large corporations can afford to abuse.
Electrolux, Ericsson and Volvo are still incorporated and have their HQs in Sweden.
Now, by moving the goalposts, you lost your initial argument. Sure it might be the case that Swedish companies, at some stage of their growth, tend to incorporate in another country.
Still the benefits Swedish employees experience don't seem to be in the way of getting a startup successfully up and running in Sweden.
This was my point all along. You might be able to start a company in Sweden, but you won't be able to grow it there because of taxes and regulations.
It's funny how it took so long for someone to finally admit that I'm correct instead of being willfully ignorant about the realities of a socialist country like Sweden.
Spotify still pays taxes in Sweden. Incorporating doesn't let you avoid income taxes in your HQ country or avoid labor laws, it just lets you play around with the taxes you pay on your foreign income.
No, it is because tax evasion using international ports to hoard wealth is a thing, because other countries don't have any will to disallow that when they can earn free tax money from companies trying to evade their duties.
It is a race to the bottom with tax schemes, not the fault of Sweden to try to uphold its values and ways of living. So far it has worked pretty well, tell me more how it can be improved because as a country of 10m people I'd say it is pretty impressive.
Even more if your whining about taxes is so real, then you should come teach the Swedish government how to do it right and better because we are losing a lot of money it seems...
The Screen Actors Guild, and the players unions for most professional sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc). They recognize that their members have different levels of talent, and allow the stars to make more, while still ensuring basic rights for every member.
Presumably a maximum pay is set with the intention of allowing that money to go elsewhere in the sport? The NBA knows stars will get paid very well, but they want to ensure not all the money is spent on them so that lesser known players are fairly compensated as well. It seems a smart idea especially because an instituted max is still allowing stars to be paid 8 figures a year.
IMO, the maximum pay/salary caps are set to promote competition across the league. As an entertainment product provided by a monopoly supplier, that's exactly the right thing to do. As a (clearly hypothetical if you'd ever met me) top talented employee under such a scheme, it's terribly counter-productive to my individual situation.
You can't get a job in a SAG affiliated production until enough SAG members are hired, but you can't become a SAG member until you've been in a SAG affiliated production.
I'm not an actor, but on the outside that Catch 22 stinks of Old Boy Network tactics.
And how's that working out for them? The median SAG/AFTRA member makes less than $1,000 per year from acting. And the pro sports players associations are tiny -- they exclude the much larger group of athletes who try to make a living playing sports but don't make the big leagues.
SAG/AFTRA is a large union that represents actors in TV/film, as well as actors in theater, who generally make diddly squat because not many people watch theater performances in the US.
By way of comparison, the rate for a single background-role (i.e., as an extra) in a commercial at SAG rates is more than 3x the non-SAG rate for the same time. ($630 vs $200). If you live in a city like LA or NY, you could make a living wage working (as a background actor) just 45 days a year.
SAG's hourly rates are great on paper - well above market, in fact. The net result of this is that your typical SAG member who doesn't have the power to demand higher rates anyway based on their own reputation ends up with almost no work because so few productions can afford to hire them, which is why their actual income is so low. The way SAG maintains its power despite this is by requiring productions that want to hire more in-demand actors to only employ SAG actors, forcing everyone to sign up to SAG and commit to waiting tables rather than acting most of the time.
If you cast your mind back to the video game voice actor strike a few years ago, for example, you may recall that one of the justifications for that was that they needed more money because many of them were only getting something like one day's work a month on average. Mostly because no-one outside of the big triple-AAA games could afford to hire union voice actors. Back in the day, a lot of video game and anime voice acting was apparently done by union members under pseudonyms so the union didn't find out; that's probably harder to get away with these days.
The net result of this is that your typical SAG member who doesn't have the power to demand higher rates anyway based on their own reputation ends up with almost no work because so few productions can afford to hire them,
This is false. Pretty much every theatrical film, broadcast or cable TV show, and nationally aired commercial in the US is subject to union/guild scales (and even Netflix has begun negotiating with the unions and guilds.)
If you have a "reputation" in Hollywood then you are making above scale because your agent has the leverage to demand above scale. And if you don't, that generally means you are a background player and you're making minimum scale. And at that level, you have trouble finding work because there are hundreds of thousands of other actors competing for the same roles, not because the productions can't afford you.
If you cast your mind back to the video game voice actor strike a few years ago, for example, you may recall that one of the justifications for that was that they needed more money because many of them were only getting something like one day's work a month on average
Yes, because there isn't that much voice over work in video games, and AAA studios were paying minimum scale for games that ultimately grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mostly because no-one outside of the big triple-AAA games could afford to hire union voice actors.
This is false. The union scale for video game voiceover work was $825/session, no residuals no benefits. It usually takes less than 3 sessions to record all of an actor's lines, so you're looking at a total net outlay of less than $2500 for an actor's voiceover work in a video game. If your studio can't afford that for a game in which voiceover work is important enough to justify 3 sessions of recording, then you're not a studio, you're a hobby. (But on that note, a different, lower scale applies to low-budget games, just like it does to low-budget film and TV productions.)
Why can't we have any other organization to which we delegate our power, but which then does exactly what we want it to do?
Because with the power comes an opinion on how to best wield it — maybe entirely for the good of the community, but often not limited by that. People why strive to be in control most often have their own axe to grind, too.
But a larger problem is the "they want". "They" are many people, and their opinions on a particular topic are "mostly aligned" at best. This is not a single opinion or want. This is why any collective action of this sort can be "mostly satisfactory" for the participants at best, and often quite disliked by some minor fraction of them.
> did exactly what they wanted and none of what they didn't want?
Unfortunately, many workers want to do horrible things, such as to make it illegal for someone to work in engineering of they don't have a CS degree, or if they came out of a bootcamp, or the like.
Workers voting to put up barriers to entry, and keep out the competition, is both rational, democratic, common in unions, and also a completely horrible thing to do.
Because it results in a parasite effect.
The union uses its power to negotiate a pay rise for its members.
The business then gives the pay rise to all the employees.
Each employee thinks “Well I would have got the benefit if I was a union member or not, so I’ll stop paying my union fees”
> A final approval hearing was held on July 9, 2015.[22] On Wednesday September 2, 2015, Judge Lucy H. Koh signed an order granting Motion for Final Approval of Class Action Settlement. The settlement website stated that Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel has reached a settlement of $415 million and other companies settled for $20 million.
> In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement may not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the [previous] settlement is unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded.
Historically, unions have largely been responsible for advancing the state of labor laws. Individuals can't afford the legal representation to win precedent-setting cases against large corporations. By pooling their resources, collectives can bring a gun to the gunfight. Strong unions can similarly match lobbying efforts when corporations attempt to weaken labor laws through legislation.
This is a pretty specious argument. Murder is illegal and punished severely, yet we still try and avoid getting killed.
I would posit that it is the same here; wage fixing is bad and punished, but wouldn't it be better if we had a faster mechanism for guaranteeing equity in treatment by corporations?
No. That’s more like saying we should join a union so we can put rules in place that say employers aren’t allowed to murder us.
It’s already illegal, and people who don’t care about the law won’t care about a union agreement either.
The same court battle and settlement process would result. Or worse, everyone would be forced to strike, and all employees are legally barred from working.
> No. That’s more like saying we should join a union so we can put rules in place that say employers aren’t allowed to murder us.
I love that people are so ignorant of the history of labor struggle in the US that they don’t know that people actually did form unions to prevent their employers from murdering them.
Before you call anybody ignorant, maybe stop and think about the last time a tech employer murdered people. That historical factoid is completely irrelevant when discussing solutions for today. Guess what, we don’t need to wear chain mail while riding a horse to work anymore either. Progress!
> Before you call anybody ignorant, maybe stop and think about the last time a tech employer murdered people.
Does the YouTube shooting count? Google only sent real time security updates to full time employees, leaving contractors to fend for themselves, even though they’re now a majority contractor workforce:
It doesn’t seem at all irrelevant to me that companies have a long history of compromising workers safety, unto their deaths, and especially when workers don’t organize to defend themselves.
The progress you celebrate is because people before you did this en masse, so perhaps it is a good idea to be a little more respectful and cognizant of that history.
I don't know if a union is the answer, but tech workers aren't immune to management hi-jinks:
"Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees"
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...