Contract Employees At Pittsburgh's Google Campus Will Take Union Vote Tuesday

WESA ^ | 9/23/2019 | Kathleen J. Davis

[Buckeye McFrog]

Contract employees at Google's Pittsburgh campus are voting on whether to unionize Tuesday. If successful, this will be the first union with the Pittsburgh Association of Tech Professionals, a new arm of the United Steelworkers.

Renata Nelson, a Google contractor in Pittsburgh, said the main priorities are to improve wages and benefit, and to cement job security.

"Our salaries are fairly low compared to industry average," Nelson said. "We've seen people being hired at lower and lower rates recently."

Google contractors in Pittsburgh are employed through international consulting company HCL Technologies. According to United Steelworkers, HCL employees work at Google's Bakery Square campus.

Last week, USW released a statement condemning HCL Technologies "for coercing employees into mandatory meetings aimed at defeating the workers' campaign to organize a union and bargain collectively."

Nelson said a quick Google search revealed the consultant who held the meetings self-identified as an "expert in union-proofing companies" on Twitter. The consultant's page has since been deleted.

In a statement, HCL Technologies disputed this claim. "We respect our [employees'] legal right to decide whether or not they want to be represented by a union and are dedicated to fostering an inclusive and open office culture for all of our team members at HCL," the statement said.

Google contractors will cast ballots Tuesday between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. at the Carnegie Library of East Liberty. Results are expected soon after the vote is over.

[Buckeye McFrog]

My my my....so much schadenfreude, so little time.

So BIG EEEEVIL tech giant Google comes to Pittsburgh and finds we haven't veered far from our shovel-leaning roots in organized labor. The United Steelworkers (needing to organize somebody as we have none of those left around here anymore)are attempting to organize IT contractors working through HCL, a big Indian H1B outsourcing shop. Apparently the boys from Hyderabad are tired of sitting next to Google employees who have better pay and benefits. So 2/3 of them signed union cards.

The vote is today. This should get REAL interesting!

[HamiltonJay]

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of goons....

Google is Evil....

[rktman]

goggle has a school?

[thesharkboy]

Voting to join a union when your job can be easily moved takes a special kind of stupid.

[Regulator]

And what will Gavin Newsom say when the vote installs the Union?

The Democrats in the Santa Clara valley have helped the world’s worst sweatshops run H1B games on all the American working class here.

What will they say now when someone tries to set up a bargaining unit in Mountain View? “Make America India”?

[WASCWatch]

HCL and Google have been colluding to keep independent contractor pay suppressed. I am not a big fan of unions, but Google deserves to have their contractors unionize. They treat them like shit.

[Mastador1]

Newsom won’t give a rats ass as long as the unions keep greasing him and the democraps.

[FatherofFive]

"We've seen people being hired at lower and lower rates recently."

Gender Studies majors? Engineers still make good money

[thesharkboy]

HCL and Google have been colluding to keep independent contractor pay suppressed. I am not a big fan of unions, but Google deserves to have their contractors unionize. They treat them like shit.

I don't doubt that for a minute. Probably (I say without proof), the impact of low-rate H1Bs is the result of this collusion, and contractors joining a leftist union won't do anything to help this problem. In other words, the union won't fight a standard Democrat policy like the massive importation of H1Bs.

[petro45acp]

The united steelworkers just “helped” the library workers of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie library system. Looking forward to seeing how that works out.

steelworkers, librarians, nerds, guess that is what they meant by retraining for new careers. No steelworkers because you priced them out of the market? NO sweat! Organize some other groups of workers so you can suck dues, pension plans, and savings out of whole new classes of workers.

Unions suck. No worker has the right/authority to tell the person signing the paychecks how to do business. Any “”protections/improvements”” the workers may derive from collective bargaining are simply extortion.

.02, YMMV

KYPD

[Buckeye McFrog]

I especially like the part about how the union was able to out the union busting consultant by Googling him.

[flamberge]

Engineers still make good money

Less and less so when corporate employers import substantial numbers of H1B indentured contractors with absolutely no recourse in the domestic political system.

I have seen it first hand many times.

Google deserves to get bit hard by the unions. And the H1B program should be abolished.

[faithhopecharity]

google can just shift the work to other cities .. a unionization effort in only one town is going nowhere

[NonValueAdded]

dripping with irony

[Buckeye McFrog]

google can just shift the work to other cities .

In which case a big chunk of the support base for gun-grabbing bikepath-loving Mayor Peduto will go with it.

A win-win in my view.

[FatherofFive]

Less and less so when corporate employers import substantial numbers of H1B indentured contractors with absolutely no recourse in the domestic political system.

Two sons with chemical engineering degrees working in the oil industry would say otherwise.

But I agree with you.

I would rather import an engineer than someone who harvests cow pies

[pburgh01]

Indian Tech workers are to software like cheap Puma knockoff sneakers you get Walmart. They look like the real deal but you realize that they don't hold up to any kind of mileage and their bona fides are not what they said they were. I own an IT consulting firm and I am an avowed racist when it comes to hiring consultants. I will not hire a mumbling Indian, period. With their fake resumes and creative as a rock brain. They 95% of the time suck and my clients can't stand them after 6 weeks. They have no quality ethic and act stupid when they don't undertanad requirements or get confused. Indian men just will not ask for help. "Yes" to an Indian is multi faceted. It means, "I don't understand you", or "I hear you", or "I meant No but I say Yes anyways" or as a stock answer to anything

Whole country is bunch of degree faking, 6 arm goddess worshiping, bullshit artists. Start a software company in your own country, stop being vampires on our economy.

[Buckeye McFrog]

The fake resume thing is apparently a HUGE problem. Maybe the government should audit them and anyone found to have gotten hired on a fake resume gets deported.

As a business associate of mine put it, it’s not a Judeo-Christian culture, so its a mistake to expect them to demonstrate Judeo-Christian ethics.

[catnipman]

given how badly google and amazon treat ALL of their employees, regardless of pay level, it’s no wonder that they’re being forced to unionize! And quite frankly, I’m totally sympathetic to their efforts ...

[Svartalfiar]

Indian Tech workers are to software like cheap Puma knockoff sneakers you get Walmart. They look like the real deal but you realize that they don't hold up to any kind of mileage and their bona fides are not what they said they were. I own an IT consulting firm and I am an avowed racist when it comes to hiring consultants. I will not hire a mumbling Indian, period. With their fake resumes and creative as a rock brain. They 95% of the time suck and my clients can't stand them after 6 weeks. They have no quality ethic and act stupid when they don't undertanad requirements or get confused. Indian men just will not ask for help. "Yes" to an Indian is multi faceted. It means, "I don't understand you", or "I hear you", or "I meant No but I say Yes anyways" or as a stock answer to anything

Oh yea. I'm in AV, and we (luckily) don't really have to deal with IT issues much. But, one of our clients has some kind of education/cooperation agreement with one or two Indian firms, and we've done a couple cross-ocean video conferences. Livestream/Skype. And holy crap, our system was way more complicated (we have a whole video switching system, records, etc on our side), and we were still up and running while the 5-6 Indian techs were calling their buddies in India trying to wake half of them up to test the system on their end. Ridiculous.

I have buddies that do app development / programming, and I've pretty consistently heard that the Indian programmers are useless. Over half of their 'work' is just copy-paste code, half of which they probably don't understand anyway, and they do very little, if any, debugging or testing of any kind. Once the code is put together, their job is done. It's someone else's job to figure out why it doesn't work.

That said, no all of them are completely worthless. I had a buddy in college who was here on a student visa, and he was cool. Not the best worker, he wanted to spend more time womanizing, but he was fun. Refused to date Indian chicks, cause none of them knew what deodorant was.