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Contract Employees At Pittsburgh's Google Campus Will Take Union Vote Tuesday
WESA ^
| 9/23/2019
| Kathleen J. Davis
Posted on 09/24/2019 9:35:32 AM PDT by 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.
TOPICS: Business/Economy; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: Pennsylvania
KEYWORDS: google; india; tech; unions
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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!
To: Buckeye McFrog
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of goons....
Google is Evil....
To: Buckeye McFrog
3
posted on
09/24/2019 9:37:48 AM PDT
by
rktman
( #My2ndAmend! ----- Enlisted in the Navy in '67 to protect folks rights to strip my rights. WTH?)
To: Buckeye McFrog
Voting to join a union when your job can be easily moved takes a special kind of stupid.
4
posted on
09/24/2019 9:38:35 AM PDT
by
thesharkboy
(Charter member of the Basket of Deplorables)
To: Buckeye McFrog
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”?
5
posted on
09/24/2019 9:40:59 AM PDT
by
Regulator
To: 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.
6
posted on
09/24/2019 9:42:24 AM PDT
by
WASCWatch
To: Regulator
Newsom won’t give a rats ass as long as the unions keep greasing him and the democraps.
7
posted on
09/24/2019 9:49:03 AM PDT
by
Mastador1
(I'll take a bad dog over a good politician any day!)
To: Buckeye McFrog
"We've seen people being hired at lower and lower rates recently." Gender Studies majors? Engineers still make good money
8
posted on
09/24/2019 9:50:24 AM PDT
by
FatherofFive
(Islam is EVIL and needs to be eradicated)
To: 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.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.
9
posted on
09/24/2019 9:52:35 AM PDT
by
thesharkboy
(Charter member of the Basket of Deplorables)
To: Buckeye McFrog
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
10
posted on
09/24/2019 9:57:42 AM PDT
by
petro45acp
(CHAOS TO THE ENEMY!!! It is part of daily prayer now....every bit helps to get America back.)
To: thesharkboy
I especially like the part about how the union was able to out the union busting consultant by Googling him.
11
posted on
09/24/2019 10:00:09 AM PDT
by
Buckeye McFrog
(Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer.)
To: FatherofFive
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.
12
posted on
09/24/2019 10:05:51 AM PDT
by
flamberge
(The wheels keep turning)
To: Buckeye McFrog
google can just shift the work to other cities .. a unionization effort in only one town is going nowhere
13
posted on
09/24/2019 10:09:13 AM PDT
by
faithhopecharity
( “Politicians are not , born; they are excreted.” Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BCE))
To: Buckeye McFrog
14
posted on
09/24/2019 10:10:02 AM PDT
by
NonValueAdded
("Sorry, your race card has been declined. Can you present any other form of argument?")
To: faithhopecharity
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.
15
posted on
09/24/2019 10:13:43 AM PDT
by
Buckeye McFrog
(Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer.)
To: flamberge
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
16
posted on
09/24/2019 10:31:10 AM PDT
by
FatherofFive
(Islam is EVIL and needs to be eradicated)
To: Buckeye McFrog
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.
17
posted on
09/24/2019 10:38:04 AM PDT
by
pburgh01
(Negan all the MSM)
To: pburgh01
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.
18
posted on
09/24/2019 10:45:29 AM PDT
by
Buckeye McFrog
(Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer.)
To: Buckeye McFrog
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 ...
19
posted on
09/24/2019 10:53:20 AM PDT
by
catnipman
(Cat Nipman: Vote Republican in 2012 and only be called racist one more time!)
To: 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
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.
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