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Google broke labor laws when it refused to bargain with YouTube Music contract workers
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
No! You wanna tell me, a giant publicly traded company treats their employees like shit? That is the core of the concept. Sometimes I wonder what would happen, if the majority of the workers for these companies just drop out and start their own little venue, helping each other etc IMO that could be one way to fight back that killer capitalism.
The big difference between Google and The Little Guy tends to be the lending rate. Google can borrow money at far closer to the prime rate than smaller businesses, so it can expand its services faster and profit on smaller margins than regional competitors. Ultimately, it can buy out competition simply by borrowing $Cost-of-Company, enshittifying services on a captive audience, and then paying back the marginal interest while collecting a fat marginal profit on top.
It would work if we had a large coalition of like-minded working people all pulling in the same direction.
But... look at the public attitude towards unionization and collective worker bargaining. Its still pretty hairy. Very hard to get folks outside of YouTube Music contract workers department to side with them. Harder still to get folks at Spotify and Pandora and Bandcamp all on the same team.
Doubly so when management has an enormous propaganda machine at its disposal, while individual workers are alienated and unable to dedicate all their time strictly to organizing.
This happens moderately often already. It goes like this:
At this point there is a fork with two possible outcomes.
8a. The new company goes out of business when the cash runs out because the company refused to change and make the hard business decisions. All founders and employees lose their jobs. In some cases the employees find out when their paychecks bounce and the outside office doors are locked with the lights out.
8b. The new company continues business and grows. It become much of what it disliked about their original employer, but successful in business. Years later a group of dissatisfied lower level employees splits off and creates their own company... and the cycle repeats.
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