Interesting you'd recommend him, I enjoy his writing but didn't know he had expertise here. Any reason why?
Also isn't "unionizing" a quick way to get a black mark in Silicon Valley? I vaguely remember Michael O. Church was essentially exiled just for accusations of unionizing.
Maciej (and others) believe the best way to get your company to stop doing things you may not like:
- keeping user history around forever
- donating more from the company PAC to Republicans than Democrats
- keeping engineers in open plan offices
- providing services to election campaigns of anti-immigrant politicians
- not paying the same amount of money to men and women for the same work
- provide less-than-livable wages to cafeteria staff
Is to form a union and strike or negotiate for more worker-friendly policies.
Notably no one is suggesting striking for higher engineering wages, just the avoidance of bad policy and a say in the company's future direction.
As to your second point, I can't speak to that, other than to say it's illegal to retaliate against someone for discussing or organizing to form a union.
Forming a union is a big step. You can fight for these things through concerted collective action, and still enjoy most of the protections of labor law (especially against retaliation). The point is to organize so that a large group of employees is speaking with a single voice about the workplace issues that matter most.
I urge anyone interested in learning more to contact me or coworker.org, who have experience running successful employee campaigns, and understand the tech world well.
Also isn't "unionizing" a quick way to get a black mark in Silicon Valley? I vaguely remember Michael O. Church was essentially exiled just for accusations of unionizing.