8 ms·

These companies are so huge and such an integral part of society that they need to be made more accountable to the public, and forcing them to be more accountab

These companies are so huge and such an integral part of society that they need to be made more accountable to the public, and forcing them to be more accountable to their workers is part of that. I think the recent proposal to require employee representation on the board of directors of $1B+ companies is a good start.

sleepybrett 7y ago
Why should you wait until the company is worth a billion. Why not a function of employee/contractor count?
- heer4it 7y ago
  Sure, I think that would be a good proposal as well. Ideally all companies would have some degree of worker representation / control.
- SeanAppleby 7y ago
  For startups decisions need to be made quickly and definitively in order to survive. You might reduce entrepreneurial success and make the economy correspondingly more inertial/monopolistic/feudalistic if you raise compliance overhead and management friction for young startups.
StevePerkins 7y ago
On Day One, the entire workforce of every company becomes "contractors". Labor does not have the leverage in most industries as it does in large tech. Even in tech it is cyclical. Younger readers here, who missed out on the 2001 and 2008 crashes, are going to have an eye-opening experience when the next recession gets here.
- signal11 7y ago
  > On Day One, the entire workforce of every company becomes "contractors". This is going to be increasingly difficult in Europe as they focus on “disguised employees” or “perm-tractors”. The UK has already implemented this rule (IR35) for the public sector, with the private sector set to follow suit in 2020. And the EU are beginning to consider how to clamp down on the practice.
  - gubbrora 7y ago
    It seems a lot of Americans think well the rich will just find loopholes let's just give up. I don't get it.
    - smacktoward 7y ago
      The rich here spend an awful lot of money encouraging us to think that way.
    - munificent 7y ago
      Cynicism is one of the most effective tools of the powerful.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    if employee representatives are on the board, these sort of unilateral decisions by management become a lot harder
  - rahimnathwani 7y ago
    Nitpick: IR35 was announced in 1999, and came into force in 2000.
    - signal11 7y ago
      I don’t believe the new rules around perma-contracting were ever applied to the private sector. Even the public sector guidance is dated 2017[1]. [1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/off-payroll-working-in-the-public-sector-reform-of-intermediaries-legislation https://www.gov.uk/guidance/off-payroll-working-in-the-publi...
    - pja 7y ago
      There has been a recent tightening of the interpretation of IR35 by HMRC which has been applied to the public sector first. I imagine it’s to this that the comment you’re replying to is referring. (Essentially as I understand things they’re no longer allowing contractors to make the decision as to whether they’re inside IR35 or not, but making the companies paying them make that decision & bear the liability for getting it wrong.)
- velcrovan 7y ago
  There are laws that determine who is and who isn't a contractor. The entire workforce of every company will not be reclassified. Under the proposal, the employees will thus get board representation and thus a big piece of leverage that you correctly say they currently do not have. On a broader note, your comment falls into one of the very annoying category of constructing a hip-shot theoretical model to explain why something won't work when it has actually already been implemented for decades in some places. YOUNGER READERS may not remember that Germany required codetermination for all companies over 2000 employees back in 1976.
  - DenisM 7y ago
    References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/warren-workers-boards.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/warren-workers-bo...
- bongobongo 7y ago
  Labor always has leverage. The question is whether or not it is organized enough to use it.
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    Atomation does fundamentally change this, even if it's only by a little so far.
    - billy_beef 7y ago
      Perhaps, but someone still has to build and maintain the automation, no?
      - Ericson2314 7y ago
        Oh sure, but as many people as before?
    - bongobongo 7y ago
      Automation shifts labor; it does not eliminate it.
      - Ericson2314 7y ago
        Sometimes that happens, but why always? And that's a bug not a feature in my book to the extent it is true.
- goobynight 7y ago
  Not sure it will be the same. 2008 was not just a regular business cycle recession. That was a huge event that I agree would be devastating. Tech work is much more diversified now, right? Did capital one, starbucks, nordstrom, Walmart, Target, car makers and just about everyone have a sizable SWE team in 2001? They do now and a lot of those are probably in profit center roles. That sets aside that big tech really got even more cemented into daily lives after both of those crashes. 2013 onward IMO. Just looks at how Tinder has changed relationships. That said, I'm still proceeding with caution and don't have a self-assurance that I'm correct. I've set myself up to be able to peace out for a year in Vietnam or another cheap place if, somehow, the floor falls out.
  - acdha 7y ago
    > Did capital one, starbucks, nordstrom, Walmart, Target, car makers and just about everyone have a sizable SWE team in 2001? Yes - and 1991 for that matter. They weren’t building mobile apps and the trend has become stronger but almost every large organization has been building software for decades.
    - goobynight 7y ago
      Building software wasn't what I was talking about. They've obviously done that. I'm talking about the sheer amount of software and people that support those efforts now, in addition to how much profit comes from it. Surely it has grown by more than say...5x.
- r00fus 7y ago
  This would have major consequences, and some not good possible outcomes for the companies. The concept of a salaried workforce is embedded in our society at a fairly deep level, and upending that to prevent workforce representation might not be that easy.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  You can’t just be a contractor. There’s rules for who is a contractor. No one except the smallest companies would be able to get away with it.
codingdave 7y ago
Sorry if I'm out of the loop, but which proposal are you referring to, and who proposed it?
- burkaman 7y ago
  There are many, but one recent bill from Elizabeth Warren: > Empowers workers at United States corporations to elect at least 40% of Board members: Borrowing from the successful approach in Germany and other developed economies, a United States corporation must ensure that no fewer than 40% of its directors are selected by the corporation's employees. - https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-introduces-accountable-capitalism-act https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren...
  - joeblow9999 7y ago
    heavy-handed central planning at its finest. no one is forced to work at these companies and no one is forced to buy the stocks. if you don't like the way the company is run don't work there or invest. imagine the opposite heavy-handed intervention. what if it was proposed that companies are banned from allowing employees reps on the board...
    - Retra 7y ago
      Forcing people to commit murder is bad, therefore the opposite -- forcing people to not commit murder -- must be equally bad, because they are both forced. This is not a strong argument.
bleh123 7y ago
I disagree. Many of these tech companies, Google included, are indeed too big and exert outsize influence on a variety of fields, but saying they aren't "accountable" to their employees isn't entirely accurate. As an employee in one of these companies, you have far more control over product strategy, direction, actual execution etc that i simply struggle to find in most if not all other sectors of private or public employment opportunities. Also, as the board/shareholders/owners of these one of these companies, you wouldn't want to "Reward" behavior at the workplace that disrupts the morale of the broader employee base and lowers productivity through acts of targeted disruption such as walkouts. Lets be honest, if this individual wanted to make such points or force change, she could do so on her own time, or even on company time after building up the skills needed to reach a position of influence and use the regular channels of influence to exert change instead of what is essentially a protest of defiance against a private company that is paying for the time used to disrupt their own business. Not to say i don't agree with your points about these tech companies essentially abusing their positions of power. . .the anti competitive legal route should be far more effective at reining them in and adding accountability compared to adding more chaos in the form of employee protests to the mix.
roybahat 7y ago
Employees are a meaningful constituency of any company, as meaningful as shareholders IMHO. Totally agree with you.
5440 7y ago
Who would would you suggest represent the employees exactly. The majority? That doesn't always work out the way you would like.
- erinnh 7y ago
  Work councils are working really well in Germany. Elect Employees to be in that council and the council has the right to make proposals/be heard by the management, often also have one or two people on the board of directors. They also need to be consulted about some areas that affect the employees (like work hours etc)
- billy_beef 7y ago
  Can you cite a source on this or explain your reasoning here, I'm a little unclear on the implication
tathougies 7y ago
I'm not familiar with Google's employee stock plan, but since -- I presume -- most employees are shareholders, don't they already have a say at the board level?
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  An important distinction is that companies like Google and Facebook have dual class structures for shares: The founders still hold all the power in any shareholder vote. Case in point, 68% of Facebook shareholders voted to remove Mark Zuckerberg, but since Zuckerberg's shares are a lot more powerful, it's completely irrelevant: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-68-percent-of-facebook-investors-voted-to-oust-zuckerberg-as-chairman-222950866.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-68-percent-of-facebook-in...
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    Dual class shares seem like a perversion of what the stock market and stocks were initially intended to do. If you can’t vote on important decisions made by the company, do you actually own the company, or is a stock just a fancy piece of paper to gamble on? (I call it gambling because any return is based purely on stock price; there are no dividends paid out for FB and GOOG).
    - drivingmenuts 7y ago
      It's designed to provide employees an incentive to go above and beyond in their particular area of employment by providing future financial incentives, without having a say in the overall direction of the company. Or put another way, it's a possible bonus if you and others like you do well.
      - bobthepanda 7y ago
        That intention is still a perversion of the actual intention of stocks and the stocks market, though. If you wanted to tie bonuses to share price, you can just do that instead of issuing these fake stocks. Plenty of people get paid with bonuses tied to share price or EPS.
Aunche 7y ago
Sundar Pichai is an employee and board member. He's not a "regular" employee, but I don't think a regular employee gets enough perspective to make effective decisions across the company. They would have to take their board position more seriously than their full time job, which would make them not a regular employee anymore.
- empath75 7y ago
  The point of having employee representation in the board isn’t putting a janitor in the board room, it’s putting someone on the board who represents the interests of employees first. She doesn’t have to be a regular employee. I think it’s the kind of idea that sounds good on paper, but it’s trivially easy to corrupt someone once they’re in that sort of position of power.
  - mtgx 7y ago
    Make it so the representative is paid directly by the workers via a mandatory fee (whatever sum is necessary to pay their salary), and then make it illegal for the company to pay or reward that board member in any way. If the latter is breached, put the company's CEO in jail. No weaseling out with "fines" or "settlements" -- straight to jail. Maybe my version is slightly too extreme, but I think we can be creative enough to find a good solution for this. It doesn't sound impossible to me at all. Other countries already have similar laws in place.
    - no_wizard 7y ago
      So, a Union? Isn't this basically what a Union is? Paying fees (dues) for continued employee representation. Sounds like Unionizing is what people are looking for, but not calling it that. I don't see a distinguished difference between any ideas of employee representation like this and a professional/labor union.
  - cmsj 7y ago
    An employee council could provide a person to the board, with the power to replace that person as they see fit.
Shivetya 7y ago
Eventually if they tarnish their image sufficiently the good workers will move on. However we here and elsewhere on discussion sites vastly over estimate how unhappy workers are at a particular job. Just because we would not want to work there or heard anecdotally on an issue does not mean the company is doing things incorrectly. A company this large is bound to have employee conflicts all over the place and it is up to their HR system to resolve it. If they cannot to the employee's liking then they should move on. We only see one side of a story here and the company certainly is not permitted to dump the results of the investigation into the public forum. Arbitrary decisions about who should and not should be regulated are inane. They are the field day work of politicians who rely on jealously, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to get you to empower them over more facets of your life. They exploit and exaggerate issues by repeating them over and over, enlist PACs to do the same, the Press, and more, until you believe the issue is insurmountable without their intervention. Yes the person who is quitting had a rotten time, it does not mean everyone else there had the same experience. If it was that bad up and down the chain surely it would be out in news by now
- klodolph 7y ago
  I think one of the problems is that they're still seen as having a "good" work environment compared to Amazon (which has a reputation for being hard on its employees) and Facebook (which these days is seen as having an ethical "cloud" over it). Whether or not these reputations are deserved is irrelevant, it seems like Google will have to do a lot of damage to its reputation before labor market forces push back. More meat for the grinder! (As a side note, as I've gotten older I've noticed that every fresh batch of graduates who come into the workforce are equally terrible at advocating for themselves. There's a never-ending supply, and a never-ending task of educating/empowering workers.)
  - klipt 7y ago
    > every fresh batch of graduates who come into the workforce are equally terrible at advocating for themselves cough the problem is further up the pipeline cough.
jm4 7y ago
Public accountability is a slippery slope. How do you accomplish that? Legislation? New legislation pitched as a solution to a problem tends to be a rat's nest of rules that no one understands, that doesn't often have the intended impact, that can have unintended consequences, and, after some public shaming of the offender, lets them conduct business as usual. Not sure employee representation on the board is a solution to anything. Not that I think it's necessarily a bad thing either. It's just that if you're looking to that as a solution to the problem of big companies that are too big I think you will be disappointed. Employees on the board can be as corrupt and unaccountable as anyone else. The solution to Google is to stop using their products. Stop using Android, stop using search, stop using Chrome, ditch as much of the ecosystem as possible. It makes a difference even if you can't get away from them completely and it starts with the individual. There are too many people bitching about Google and still using their products. Hit them where it hurts because it's the only way they will learn. Before Google was evil Microsoft was evil. Antitrust largely failed against them. It took the early adopters being completely fed up with them and using other products to make a difference. Microsoft missed out on mobile, nearly missed out on cloud, ceded a massive chunk of the server market to Linux, saw a resurgence of Mac on the desktop, had their own failures in the OS market and were basically washed up before they finally decided to do something different. Frankly, they are doing a pretty darn good job lately. They are making good products and embracing interoperability. I think Microsoft is a better company today than they would have been had the antitrust case been more "successful". We put up with their crap for as long as we did only because there weren't very good alternatives for much of that time. Ironically, the rise of Google helped break the stranglehold. Google doesn't have the same invincibility that Microsoft did. There are alternatives for every product they have. If we want them to change then it's time to start using these alternatives.
- jjdjr0odo7 7y ago
  Slippery slope is an informal fallacy. Why not legislation? It’s THE way for organizing our society. Do you really think it’s a free market and meritocracy? No. There are laws that incentivize and offer protection for starting corporations. Our society is not built on objective principles but on what’s good for it. And it’s never lurched forward in ways that move the needle to the benefit of the masses without top down rejiggering. Here’s an objective fact: neoliberalism and so-called free market capitalism are not owed deference and fealty by the masses. Either it works well enough for enough people or it encounters a tipping point where it needs dramatic change in guiding principles. What you’re arguing for is not increased freedom for the masses an accountability, but sitting still politically. Same old same old. How’s that working out? Pretty well for the privileged crowd on HN. Better not mess with it!

sleepybrett 7y ago

Why should you wait until the company is worth a billion. Why not a function of employee/contractor count?

heer4it 7y ago
Sure, I think that would be a good proposal as well. Ideally all companies would have some degree of worker representation / control.
SeanAppleby 7y ago
For startups decisions need to be made quickly and definitively in order to survive. You might reduce entrepreneurial success and make the economy correspondingly more inertial/monopolistic/feudalistic if you raise compliance overhead and management friction for young startups.

StevePerkins 7y ago

On Day One, the entire workforce of every company becomes "contractors". Labor does not have the leverage in most industries as it does in large tech. Even in tech it is cyclical. Younger readers here, who missed out on the 2001 and 2008 crashes, are going to have an eye-opening experience when the next recession gets here.

signal11 7y ago
> On Day One, the entire workforce of every company becomes "contractors". This is going to be increasingly difficult in Europe as they focus on “disguised employees” or “perm-tractors”. The UK has already implemented this rule (IR35) for the public sector, with the private sector set to follow suit in 2020. And the EU are beginning to consider how to clamp down on the practice.
- gubbrora 7y ago
  It seems a lot of Americans think well the rich will just find loopholes let's just give up. I don't get it.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    The rich here spend an awful lot of money encouraging us to think that way.
  - munificent 7y ago
    Cynicism is one of the most effective tools of the powerful.
- MiroF 7y ago
  if employee representatives are on the board, these sort of unilateral decisions by management become a lot harder
- rahimnathwani 7y ago
  Nitpick: IR35 was announced in 1999, and came into force in 2000.
  - signal11 7y ago
    I don’t believe the new rules around perma-contracting were ever applied to the private sector. Even the public sector guidance is dated 2017[1]. [1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/off-payroll-working-in-the-public-sector-reform-of-intermediaries-legislation https://www.gov.uk/guidance/off-payroll-working-in-the-publi...
  - pja 7y ago
    There has been a recent tightening of the interpretation of IR35 by HMRC which has been applied to the public sector first. I imagine it’s to this that the comment you’re replying to is referring. (Essentially as I understand things they’re no longer allowing contractors to make the decision as to whether they’re inside IR35 or not, but making the companies paying them make that decision & bear the liability for getting it wrong.)
velcrovan 7y ago
There are laws that determine who is and who isn't a contractor. The entire workforce of every company will not be reclassified. Under the proposal, the employees will thus get board representation and thus a big piece of leverage that you correctly say they currently do not have. On a broader note, your comment falls into one of the very annoying category of constructing a hip-shot theoretical model to explain why something won't work when it has actually already been implemented for decades in some places. YOUNGER READERS may not remember that Germany required codetermination for all companies over 2000 employees back in 1976.
- DenisM 7y ago
  References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/warren-workers-boards.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/warren-workers-bo...
bongobongo 7y ago
Labor always has leverage. The question is whether or not it is organized enough to use it.
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  Atomation does fundamentally change this, even if it's only by a little so far.
  - billy_beef 7y ago
    Perhaps, but someone still has to build and maintain the automation, no?
    - Ericson2314 7y ago
      Oh sure, but as many people as before?
  - bongobongo 7y ago
    Automation shifts labor; it does not eliminate it.
    - Ericson2314 7y ago
      Sometimes that happens, but why always? And that's a bug not a feature in my book to the extent it is true.
goobynight 7y ago
Not sure it will be the same. 2008 was not just a regular business cycle recession. That was a huge event that I agree would be devastating. Tech work is much more diversified now, right? Did capital one, starbucks, nordstrom, Walmart, Target, car makers and just about everyone have a sizable SWE team in 2001? They do now and a lot of those are probably in profit center roles. That sets aside that big tech really got even more cemented into daily lives after both of those crashes. 2013 onward IMO. Just looks at how Tinder has changed relationships. That said, I'm still proceeding with caution and don't have a self-assurance that I'm correct. I've set myself up to be able to peace out for a year in Vietnam or another cheap place if, somehow, the floor falls out.
- acdha 7y ago
  > Did capital one, starbucks, nordstrom, Walmart, Target, car makers and just about everyone have a sizable SWE team in 2001? Yes - and 1991 for that matter. They weren’t building mobile apps and the trend has become stronger but almost every large organization has been building software for decades.
  - goobynight 7y ago
    Building software wasn't what I was talking about. They've obviously done that. I'm talking about the sheer amount of software and people that support those efforts now, in addition to how much profit comes from it. Surely it has grown by more than say...5x.
r00fus 7y ago
This would have major consequences, and some not good possible outcomes for the companies. The concept of a salaried workforce is embedded in our society at a fairly deep level, and upending that to prevent workforce representation might not be that easy.
skinnymuch 7y ago
You can’t just be a contractor. There’s rules for who is a contractor. No one except the smallest companies would be able to get away with it.

codingdave 7y ago

Sorry if I'm out of the loop, but which proposal are you referring to, and who proposed it?

burkaman 7y ago
There are many, but one recent bill from Elizabeth Warren: > Empowers workers at United States corporations to elect at least 40% of Board members: Borrowing from the successful approach in Germany and other developed economies, a United States corporation must ensure that no fewer than 40% of its directors are selected by the corporation's employees. - https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-introduces-accountable-capitalism-act https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren...
- joeblow9999 7y ago
  heavy-handed central planning at its finest. no one is forced to work at these companies and no one is forced to buy the stocks. if you don't like the way the company is run don't work there or invest. imagine the opposite heavy-handed intervention. what if it was proposed that companies are banned from allowing employees reps on the board...
  - Retra 7y ago
    Forcing people to commit murder is bad, therefore the opposite -- forcing people to not commit murder -- must be equally bad, because they are both forced. This is not a strong argument.

bleh123 7y ago

I disagree. Many of these tech companies, Google included, are indeed too big and exert outsize influence on a variety of fields, but saying they aren't "accountable" to their employees isn't entirely accurate. As an employee in one of these companies, you have far more control over product strategy, direction, actual execution etc that i simply struggle to find in most if not all other sectors of private or public employment opportunities. Also, as the board/shareholders/owners of these one of these companies, you wouldn't want to "Reward" behavior at the workplace that disrupts the morale of the broader employee base and lowers productivity through acts of targeted disruption such as walkouts. Lets be honest, if this individual wanted to make such points or force change, she could do so on her own time, or even on company time after building up the skills needed to reach a position of influence and use the regular channels of influence to exert change instead of what is essentially a protest of defiance against a private company that is paying for the time used to disrupt their own business. Not to say i don't agree with your points about these tech companies essentially abusing their positions of power. . .the anti competitive legal route should be far more effective at reining them in and adding accountability compared to adding more chaos in the form of employee protests to the mix.

roybahat 7y ago

Employees are a meaningful constituency of any company, as meaningful as shareholders IMHO. Totally agree with you.

5440 7y ago

Who would would you suggest represent the employees exactly. The majority? That doesn't always work out the way you would like.

erinnh 7y ago
Work councils are working really well in Germany. Elect Employees to be in that council and the council has the right to make proposals/be heard by the management, often also have one or two people on the board of directors. They also need to be consulted about some areas that affect the employees (like work hours etc)
billy_beef 7y ago
Can you cite a source on this or explain your reasoning here, I'm a little unclear on the implication

tathougies 7y ago

I'm not familiar with Google's employee stock plan, but since -- I presume -- most employees are shareholders, don't they already have a say at the board level?

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
An important distinction is that companies like Google and Facebook have dual class structures for shares: The founders still hold all the power in any shareholder vote. Case in point, 68% of Facebook shareholders voted to remove Mark Zuckerberg, but since Zuckerberg's shares are a lot more powerful, it's completely irrelevant: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-68-percent-of-facebook-investors-voted-to-oust-zuckerberg-as-chairman-222950866.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-68-percent-of-facebook-in...
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  Dual class shares seem like a perversion of what the stock market and stocks were initially intended to do. If you can’t vote on important decisions made by the company, do you actually own the company, or is a stock just a fancy piece of paper to gamble on? (I call it gambling because any return is based purely on stock price; there are no dividends paid out for FB and GOOG).
  - drivingmenuts 7y ago
    It's designed to provide employees an incentive to go above and beyond in their particular area of employment by providing future financial incentives, without having a say in the overall direction of the company. Or put another way, it's a possible bonus if you and others like you do well.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      That intention is still a perversion of the actual intention of stocks and the stocks market, though. If you wanted to tie bonuses to share price, you can just do that instead of issuing these fake stocks. Plenty of people get paid with bonuses tied to share price or EPS.

Aunche 7y ago

Sundar Pichai is an employee and board member. He's not a "regular" employee, but I don't think a regular employee gets enough perspective to make effective decisions across the company. They would have to take their board position more seriously than their full time job, which would make them not a regular employee anymore.

empath75 7y ago
The point of having employee representation in the board isn’t putting a janitor in the board room, it’s putting someone on the board who represents the interests of employees first. She doesn’t have to be a regular employee. I think it’s the kind of idea that sounds good on paper, but it’s trivially easy to corrupt someone once they’re in that sort of position of power.
- mtgx 7y ago
  Make it so the representative is paid directly by the workers via a mandatory fee (whatever sum is necessary to pay their salary), and then make it illegal for the company to pay or reward that board member in any way. If the latter is breached, put the company's CEO in jail. No weaseling out with "fines" or "settlements" -- straight to jail. Maybe my version is slightly too extreme, but I think we can be creative enough to find a good solution for this. It doesn't sound impossible to me at all. Other countries already have similar laws in place.
  - no_wizard 7y ago
    So, a Union? Isn't this basically what a Union is? Paying fees (dues) for continued employee representation. Sounds like Unionizing is what people are looking for, but not calling it that. I don't see a distinguished difference between any ideas of employee representation like this and a professional/labor union.
- cmsj 7y ago
  An employee council could provide a person to the board, with the power to replace that person as they see fit.

Shivetya 7y ago

Eventually if they tarnish their image sufficiently the good workers will move on. However we here and elsewhere on discussion sites vastly over estimate how unhappy workers are at a particular job. Just because we would not want to work there or heard anecdotally on an issue does not mean the company is doing things incorrectly. A company this large is bound to have employee conflicts all over the place and it is up to their HR system to resolve it. If they cannot to the employee's liking then they should move on. We only see one side of a story here and the company certainly is not permitted to dump the results of the investigation into the public forum. Arbitrary decisions about who should and not should be regulated are inane. They are the field day work of politicians who rely on jealously, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to get you to empower them over more facets of your life. They exploit and exaggerate issues by repeating them over and over, enlist PACs to do the same, the Press, and more, until you believe the issue is insurmountable without their intervention. Yes the person who is quitting had a rotten time, it does not mean everyone else there had the same experience. If it was that bad up and down the chain surely it would be out in news by now

klodolph 7y ago
I think one of the problems is that they're still seen as having a "good" work environment compared to Amazon (which has a reputation for being hard on its employees) and Facebook (which these days is seen as having an ethical "cloud" over it). Whether or not these reputations are deserved is irrelevant, it seems like Google will have to do a lot of damage to its reputation before labor market forces push back. More meat for the grinder! (As a side note, as I've gotten older I've noticed that every fresh batch of graduates who come into the workforce are equally terrible at advocating for themselves. There's a never-ending supply, and a never-ending task of educating/empowering workers.)
- klipt 7y ago
  > every fresh batch of graduates who come into the workforce are equally terrible at advocating for themselves cough the problem is further up the pipeline cough.

jm4 7y ago

Public accountability is a slippery slope. How do you accomplish that? Legislation? New legislation pitched as a solution to a problem tends to be a rat's nest of rules that no one understands, that doesn't often have the intended impact, that can have unintended consequences, and, after some public shaming of the offender, lets them conduct business as usual. Not sure employee representation on the board is a solution to anything. Not that I think it's necessarily a bad thing either. It's just that if you're looking to that as a solution to the problem of big companies that are too big I think you will be disappointed. Employees on the board can be as corrupt and unaccountable as anyone else. The solution to Google is to stop using their products. Stop using Android, stop using search, stop using Chrome, ditch as much of the ecosystem as possible. It makes a difference even if you can't get away from them completely and it starts with the individual. There are too many people bitching about Google and still using their products. Hit them where it hurts because it's the only way they will learn. Before Google was evil Microsoft was evil. Antitrust largely failed against them. It took the early adopters being completely fed up with them and using other products to make a difference. Microsoft missed out on mobile, nearly missed out on cloud, ceded a massive chunk of the server market to Linux, saw a resurgence of Mac on the desktop, had their own failures in the OS market and were basically washed up before they finally decided to do something different. Frankly, they are doing a pretty darn good job lately. They are making good products and embracing interoperability. I think Microsoft is a better company today than they would have been had the antitrust case been more "successful". We put up with their crap for as long as we did only because there weren't very good alternatives for much of that time. Ironically, the rise of Google helped break the stranglehold. Google doesn't have the same invincibility that Microsoft did. There are alternatives for every product they have. If we want them to change then it's time to start using these alternatives.

jjdjr0odo7 7y ago
Slippery slope is an informal fallacy. Why not legislation? It’s THE way for organizing our society. Do you really think it’s a free market and meritocracy? No. There are laws that incentivize and offer protection for starting corporations. Our society is not built on objective principles but on what’s good for it. And it’s never lurched forward in ways that move the needle to the benefit of the masses without top down rejiggering. Here’s an objective fact: neoliberalism and so-called free market capitalism are not owed deference and fealty by the masses. Either it works well enough for enough people or it encounters a tipping point where it needs dramatic change in guiding principles. What you’re arguing for is not increased freedom for the masses an accountability, but sitting still politically. Same old same old. How’s that working out? Pretty well for the privileged crowd on HN. Better not mess with it!