I’m not part of Google. I’m not even American. You’re taking a specific worst case to generalize for a global industry. Google is an anomaly in every regard.

To more directly speak to tech worker unionization, if you speak to the workers at most companies you will have the least productive organizing conversations you will ever experience. They are much, much more resistant to identifying workplace issues, much more sympathetic with management, much more willing to narc on organizing efforts, and much more likely to ideologically oppose unions.

Ah but I do, I’m part of tech workers coalition. For sure there’s ground to gain, but in the last 5 years, or compared to my university years, it has been an immense change, change that is possibly still invisible from the outside. For instance, I now see tech workers a lot more prone to collective action than categories like designers, architects or chefs that are hopelessly fragmented.

This is narrative is getting more and more stale. It was definitely convincing maybe 15 years ago, now those same people are the ones spearheading unionization efforts in most US tech companies. Obviously it is always a mix of roles, but engineering roles are often the majority in most efforts, even just because they tend to be the majority of the company.

At every round of layoffs, the identity of the tech engineer as a tech worker gets stronger and stronger.

because they picked companies which haven’t yet formed a union or just formed a minority union (like Google). Many other tech companies have already unionized.

On top of that, some of these companies have wild union busting strategies.

Also Blind is a shitty source.

Commenting with no clue what people are talking about

Thank you, you’re right ^^

Right now the whole model of generative AI and in general LLM is built on the assumption that training a machine learning model is not a problem for licenses, copyright and whatever. Obviously this is bringing to huge legal battles and before their outcome is clear and a new legal pratice or specific regulations are established in EU and USA, there’s no point discussing licenses.

Also licenses don’t prevent anything, they are not magic. If small or big AI companies feel safe in violating these laws or just profit enough to pay fines, they will keep doing it. It’s the same with FOSS licenses: most small companies violate licenses and unless you have whistleblowers, you never find out. Even then, the legal path is very long. Only big corporate scared of humongous lawsuits really care about it, but small startups? Small consultancies? They don’t care. Licenses are just a sign that says “STOP! Or go on, I’m a license, not a cop”