
Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Across the Tech Industry - rmason
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/google-employees-demand-the-end-of-forced-arbitration-across-the-tech-industry/
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brightball
I know this won't be popular...but I don't understand why people are so anti-
arbitration. Court cases are very expensive, regardless of the verdict. In the
situation of running a business, you have a 1 business to many employees
situation handling multiple cases simultaneously could get extremely expensive
whether the cases are valid or not.

People use the threat of legal fees to extort business owners all the time
because all it takes is one bored attorney who's willing to take the case on
contingency while the business is looking at $150-500 / hr fees to defend
itself. Happens to doctors constantly.

If you are a business that employees thousands of people the amount of
potential legal costs could put you under entirely, because attorneys have to
respond to every single claim that opposing attorneys make. These techniques
exist almost solely to drive up legal costs.

When your potential cost for an employee is far higher than the actual
compensation you can afford to pay, it significantly increases your risk for
every job you can create.

This is usually a two way street as well.

In nearly every contractor agreement I've read, the liability for the hired
contractor is limited to at most the amount of compensation they receive from
the business for the job they were performing.

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taurath
People are anti-arbitration because they empathize more with the employees
than businesses. It is objectively better for employees to not have to go
through a company-issued arbiter when the company has wronged them. The
argument you're making is a bit like trickle-down economics - what about
instead of minimizing the cost of lawsuits, you do less things that are likely
to land you in a lawsuit, which is the point of the laws in the first place?

Maybe then companies would focus their lobbying efforts on muting the effects
of patent trolls and shady lawsuits. I do feel for the business owner, but
taking away the rights of employees is worse for society.

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pitaj
> It is objectively better for employees to not have to go through a company-
> issued arbiter when the company has wronged them.

The main argument of your parent comment is that it's better for both
employees and employers due to generally lower costs all around. You simply
made an assertion to the contrary. Do you have any evidence to support your
position?

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taurath
I alluded to it being similar to trickle-down economics - what is good at
lowering costs for business is not necessarily better for both employees and
employers. Employees giving up their rights to take action against an employer
is a net negative against the employee - I would submit that for employees
that are wronged, its a more significant negative than any lowered costs.

I'm definitely for making it easier to run a business and afford to be able to
hire people, but not at the expense of the employee. I didn't get into it much
because it risks an argument on economic outlooks which I didn't feel was as
important as the main point.

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deogeo
How forced arbitration is legal in the US never made sense to me.

If the clause was "In the case of a dispute, we win.", it'd be deemed invalid
by the courts. But since it's "In the case of a dispute, we have an
overwhelming advantage in a private court.", that makes it valid?

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shados
> In the case of a dispute, we win

Wasn't there an article recently about some predatory lending practice where
the lender made you sign a clause essentially letting them win in any dispute?
And it got enforced a bunch?

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frei
Confession of judgement is what the clause is called.

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BMorearty
I am so glad to see this movement. We've needed this for decades.

But please, let's not limit this to the tech industry. Forced arbitration
should be made illegal as a condition of employment in the U.S. And if it's
not something that can be legislated nationwide (the Supreme Court rejected
Susan Fowler's appeal), let's do it state by state.

~~~
munk-a
Sadly a state-by-state approach would leave a lot of employees stuck without
options in the most vulnerable positions.

I am not unhappy to see this start in the tech industry, white collar workers
have much more power to effect change in their workplace than blue collar
workers... But I am similarly concerned that this might not be carried to
other industries (or for it to be limited to a small number of companies that
slowly reverse their policy due to "competitive issues")

~~~
CydeWeys
The idea would be to eventually transition from state-by-state to nationwide,
it's just easier to do it one state at a time than try to go from 0 to 100
with the whole nation at once.

Some advancements that have been made state-by-state and then finally
nationwide, rather than nationwide all at once, include the abolition of
slavery, gay marriage, and currently in process, marijuana decriminalization.

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40acres
Honestly seems like we may be headed toward unionization, it may not happen
within the next 5 years or so but silicon valley mega-giants sell a bill of
goods to their employees regarding how they are all about changing the world
for the better, but when analyzing their day to day operations it's obviously
a lot murkier.

I think workers are really starting to see through the wool and demand that
their companies act as ethically as they claim.

~~~
el_nahual
I'm...pretty sure unions would end up being heavily anti open source.

"I'm sorry, the union is opposed to postgres. You can either roll your own DB
or use Oracle. Oh, and you're not allowed to store more than half a million
rows without a Union Approved database administrator."

~~~
el_nahual
Replying to clarify my point for all the replies:

Think of all the job descriptions that have become irrelevant, for most
startups, in the last decade: "DBA", "sysadmin", "IT". Even in the past year
or two, thanks to docker, there's less need for "devops".

Unions exist to protect the interests of today's--not tomorrow's--workforce.

So yes, I certainly believe that a union would say "companies that use docker
hire 90% fewer sysadmins than those that do not. We have 70,000 members with
that job description. The next collective bargaining agreement will forbid it.

Labor unions have historically been anti automation. If you think software
unions are somehow different then the burden of proof is on you.

Imagine that 10 years from now someone invents an AI that can magically take a
set of plain english specifications and output a working, high-quality CRUD
web app, making a single engineer as efficient as 10. Do you think the
_software engineers union_ at BigEnterpriseCo would let them use it?

~~~
CydeWeys
Fortunately we don't need to rely on your hypothesis here; we can simply look
at what's actually happening in the many countries where unions for software
engineers are common.

Do you have actual examples of irrelevant jobs in software engineering that
have been kept on because of unions? How about unions advocating for
proprietary software in order to keep out open source software?

Given that many software unions already exist, the burden of proof is on you
to prove that such things are actually happening. It's unreasonable to expect
someone to prove the negative here.

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throw2016
Every single part of the economic system is organized into industry groups,
lobbying groups, industry associations and everyone thinks its perfectly
natural for them to group together to promote and push their collective
interest. No individualism there. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others are
part of multiple such industry associations and lobbying groups.

But curiously when it comes to labor suddenly collective action becomes
anathema? This is not logical. Isn't it high time anti-union propaganda and
demonizing unions on the flawed logic of 'bad unions make all unions bad' ie
some banks are corrupt so banking as a concept is bad is jettisoned for
informed discussion.

The key word in this case is 'forced'. If you prefer company managed
arbitration then you should be able to 'choose' it. Similarly those who see it
as fundamentally flawed should have the freedom to choose due process in a
court of law as is the right of every citizen.

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mschuster91
For the content of the article: it's amazing (in a negative way) with how much
utter crap companies are able to get away. I get that the US takes pride in
individual liberty, but allowing companies that much leverage including
forcing employees to relinquish their right to a court of law is abhorrent.

For the presentation of the article: anyone from Techcrunch reading? The site
looks like shit on tablets. In a webview after 500ms the site goes blank, only
the footer remains. In Chrome, the article is 40% of the screen, the right
side is some ad. What the fuck?

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TomMckenny
>the US takes pride in individual liberty

In many states it is unlawful to negotiate Union favored closed shops. Not to
mention arbitrary bans on alcohol sales and nude beaches and intermittent
restrictions on teaching natural selection or climate change.

In much of the county, language around liberty is not remotely about
individuals but is used disingenuously to drive voters to act against their
own interest.

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masonic

      unlawful to negotiate Union favored closed shops
    

Agency shop has the exact same effect, unless your employment predates the
union. You are still constrained to the CBA and have to pay full dues.

~~~
TomMckenny
Just pointing out that employment requirements such as non compete, inventions
clause, forced arbitration and others are all legal under the (dubious) notion
that employees can just work elsewhere. But a union membership requirement is
outlawed. Seems a double standard.

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ageek123
I love how the headline is "Google Employees" instead of "35 Google
Employees." I guess the latter would make it too obvious that this is just
Techcrunch pushing an agenda.

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sdenton4
It's also a mischaracterization to imply that only 35 googlers care about
this. Removing arbitration for sexual harassment was one of the core demands
that 20k Googlers walked out for last month. So the number of supporters is
somewhere between 35 and 20k...

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jMyles
> So the number of supporters is somewhere between 35 and 20k...

This is actually a pretty good summary of micro-political science in a
nutshell.

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winstonewert
These companies presumably have these forced arbitration clauses in order to
save money. There costs would increase if they no longer had these clauses.
Where is that money going to come from? I'd suggest it probably comes from
lower employee salaries.

Further, the deck seems pretty stacked in favour of the company in court
anyways. They have a team of lawyers each way more expensive than any lawyer
I'll be able to afford. Not to mention the time and effort that would spent
suing a company when I'd really rather be moving on with my life.

So its not at clear to me that I'm worse off with forced arbitration. Without
it, I'd have a lower salary and only slighter better chance of winning a suit
against my employer.

~~~
0x262d
google has 50 billion dollars in cash lmao

court is unfavorable but it's less unfavorable if you do a class action
lawsuit, which is the whole point.

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winstonewert
Google having 50 billion dollars in cash is irrelevant. What makes you think
they'd spend that on legal fees/settlements?

Perhaps I've got a better chance of winning a class action suit, but it
probably returns me as an individual a tiny amount of money. Still not a
winning proposition.

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tanilama
Had Google ignored their demand, what would they fo then?

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ocdtrekkie
Some Googlers have already discussed a strike (as Google refused a number of
other demands from the walkout) and have raised money to support Googlers who
may be financially constrained in a strike situation. Some have resigned, and
others have made plans to leave in the near future.

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matte_black
What exactly would a strike at Google do? Will the servers stop running?

~~~
CydeWeys
There's a lot of room between "nothing" and "all Google services stop
running". Reduced trajectory on new feature development, for instance.

I'm sure you can figure this out if you think about it.

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madhadron
You don't have to sign the forced arbitration clause in many places. I didn't
sign one at my current employer. I had to explicitly do a little extra
paperwork to do so, but I don't have a forced arbitration clause.

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norswap
It's anyone's guess why this is even legal in the US...

