So Google, like Amazon, is trying to play the "they work for a subcontractor that only supports us, so it's their fault, not ours" card. I really want to see the NLRB smack this pattern down hard and set an example for all the other companies to try to avoid unionization by way of not directly hiring people.
NLRB changed their criteria for what is considered co-employment last month, widely broadening the definitions used to determine this status. Essentially, if a company has significant control (not just exclusive control) over any of a worker's employment status or conditions, then they are considered a co-employer now. It used to be that a company needed exclusive or overriding control over another company's employees to be considered a co-employer.
I'm certain we are going to see more lawsuits and legal challenges from employees because of this. I'm pretty certain there already are lawsuits from some other Google contractors over this exact thing; they are providing a case that Google is their co-employer due to the control they have over every aspect of their work.
Doesn't appear so, seems Google is okay with them unionizing. According to a ruling from a while back Google is required to bargain with the union just as much as cognizant is but it appears cognizant is the one which is unwilling to bargain with the workers. Google's track record with workers leads me to believe that they have no issue with workers unionizing.
What planet are you living on? Did you read the article? Or even the headline? Google is constantly union busting, and this article explicitly states that Google is refusing to bargain with the bargaining unit, despite court rulings that they are required to.
The only reason why they say they dont care about these people unionizing is because they fully intend on ignoring the union. They believe they can appeal the decision that they are required to bargain and win.
Yeah I read this article and other sources on the subject that give more details. Google has said they support them organizing but it's not up to them. As far as I'm aware Google is the only tech giant that has an employee workers union
I want to, but I can't shake off the feeling that Google does have a point here: it's like requiring Amazon to bargain with DHL's drivers. It's kind of not their issue: they pay DHL for their services and DHL commissions their employees to do particular tasks.
Yes, I think that's the reasonable argument Google's lawyers and PR will use - but your example kind of demonstrates why that argument falls flat. The service DHL is providing to Amazon is logistics and shipping. This is an established, well-regulated industry all its own.
Meanwhile, at Google, this contractor's services are listed in the article:
ensuring music content is available and approved for YouTube Music’s 80 million subscribers worldwide
That sounds an awful lot like running the service to me. These employees perform key YouTube-specific work on an ongoing basis. For all intents and purposes, they work for Google, in Google's offices, on Google's systems, but their paycheck comes from Cognizant. The services being rendered aren't on the level of "you make the widget and we'll transport it to stores around the country because we're a shipping company". This is more like "we employ people for you, but provide a flimsy air gap so you don't have to treat them like actual employees. We sell legally plausible deniability as a service."
ensuring music content is available and approved for YouTube Music’s 80 million subscribers worldwide
this could really mean anything from running the entire service to merely scraping lyrics. and since it's a group of 49 people, I wanna say it's probably something along the lines of the latter. but yeah, your point in general stands.
Absolutely fair. But as one of those IT dudes who used to be a contractor but now work for the same megacorp I was contracting for - I wouldn't bet on it being super menial stuff. I love my job and my employer, but it's very well understood that the agencies are essentially a cover for some fairly serious labor law violations.
Yeah, apparently working as a contractor apparently involves a middleman, a 'pimp', if you will, that brings nothing to the contractor, the person doing the labour, but instead just serves to make it easy for the company in need of services to skirt labor laws. Even unionized, what are you going to do, strike against the one with which you do the actual contracting by not attending the monthly check-ins with PimpCo and refusing to submit your timesheets?
I wonder, however, shouldn't not doing the work cause a breach of contract between the company requesting the service and the middleman and thus cost the middleman some valuable business?
Your last paragraph is the actual value of a unionized strike as a subcontractor.
If your employees strike, you can't fulfill your business obligations, and so you get pressured by the people you have a contract with.
The activity that skirts labor law is individual contractors, who are often indistinguishable from employees except for tax status and are much more often taken advantage of.
A contracting company is just a company agreeing to do business with another, and doing so via it's employees. It's basically identical to a auto parts manufacturer selling parts to a car company. A Ford parts supplier is largely just a middleman for managing the production of parts to keep Ford from having to manage that process itself. Ford can't renegotiate those employees contracts, even though their work is directly to a spec dictated by Ford.
NLRB contact details If workers provide a service, they should be allowed to bargain collectively to be adequately paid for that service. Full stop.
I'm very much pro-union, but meanwhile artists and creators who made that content in the first place are getting fucked by everyone
A YouTube creators' strike isn't an impossible notion. It'd just have to be led by a couple of big names, like a Mr. Beast type.
No, it is not all upside. What has more value. Content people want to watch somehow. Or an empty "platform" that slurps up most of the gains.
I'm not saying there is no value inherent to platform's. Merely pointing out the disingenuous nature of that argument.
Going with what is happening in the SAG/AFTRA strike, perhaps the big names shouldn't join the strike because they would come across as entitled, but they are more than welcome to donate towards the strike.
Artists, techies, and socialists need to come together. To build a platform focused on sustainability ultimately. Devoid of profit for the sake of profit. And more focused on meeting the needs of their members. No overpriced CEO or board of directors. Or layers of redundant management. Once the service costs are covered. Anything after that could be split somewhat proportionally within strict limits.
I'm on board with this idea, but I'm not sure where to start.
A lot of the basic pieces are in place. Torrenting/peer tube for distribution. Modern day royalty free codecs. Realistically the two biggest hurdles are how to monetize responsibly, and bringing people in. It's something that in one shape or form will always require some small donation of time and resources. And it's easier to convince someone to join a Ponzi scheme telling them you will make them wealthy. Than it is to get someone to join guaranteeing that you'll never make them wealthy but you will try to make them secure in their lives.
This is a good thread and good comment to throw this up on:
https://youtu.be/PJSTFzhs1O4?si=3SalhKn7wN6dgUpP
Benn Jordan, perhaps better known as "The Flashbulb" as an EDM artist, has an excellent YouTube channel. This video dives into some details on how we could get artists paid, and stop getting our art jerked around by corporations. For less than we pay to not get free healthcare healthcare, you could have access to all copyright content, ad free, and artists would be better compensated.
It's an idea worth spreading.
Anyone able to chime in on fileshare or w/e the crypto is that gives artists a cut per play? Has been a while since I've heard of it.
The article became increasingly redundant as it continued. The crux seems to be Google isn't their employer. These workers work for a subcontractor, Cognizant. Cognizant performs services for YouTube Music.
Cognizant is refusing to bargain citing the ongoing relevant litigation* between its employees and Google.
Some of the employees are striking for 1 day.
It's redundant because there's basically a circular argument that G and C are using to not respond to the workers. Workers want to C negotiate with G on the terms of their work with G but C says they can't because they're just contracting with G. Then G says the workers can't negotiate with G because they work for C. Both companies point the finger at the other as to why they can't help and just give nothing back to the workers.
The article is confusing but it sounds like the union wants both C and G at the table, but C and G both agree that C should be the employer and G doesn't need to join the talks. So C is saying, if you really want G to join, you'll have to wait until the appeals are finished.
I'm guessing the union doesn't want to negotiate with C, have C go to G with the terms and G refuse and just causing endless delays in a game of telephone bargaining.
One idea of subcontractors is to split and delegate societal responsibility to others to appear to be clean. Surely the law is focused on Cognizant here, but the responsibility lies fully on Google, including their ability to intervene.
What’s to stop every single corporation from leveraging third party contractor companies just to escape union bargaining? Cognizant seems like a company that basically exists for this reason. Both Amazon and Google play this game and it’s infuriating.
Nothing. It’s one of the alluring aspects of using third-parties. You pay a flat fee, people do work. You avoid all the overhead of HR, benefits, workers compensation and unemployment insurance. If you want someone gone there’s no process, you simply tell the third party that Joe doesn’t need to come back to work, ever, and you’re done.
Amazon and Google are not alone in this practice, nor is it exclusive to Fortune 500 companies.
I work as a contractor dev for fortune 500s. It's wide spread. Handful of full timers, padded with contractors.
Brain drain is a real problem, but it also means there's a culture of FTE being willing to jump through corporate hoops and on call hours, because they want to keep the FTE position instead of finding a new job every 1.5 years (in California where there are max contract lengths)
Hopefully people turn out in 2024 and stop us going down the 1930s Germany route..... my mother recently moved to Pennsylvania from a deep red state, and was saying that due to Bidens "corruption", she didnt think she would vote in 2024. Upon further questioning, my hyper conservative fundemantalist Christian uncle had been sending her news.
Hope my arguments convinced her otherwise, she detests Trump & the Republicans. Her vote DOES matter now. Have her set up with a variety of news websites & Firefox/ublock origin etc, and not "Townhall" garbage.
It's a shame that calling Uncle Tommy out for being the dumb ass he's always been is so frowned upon, even if it's to avoid fascism.
Depending on where in PA, it might be just as red as where she came from. If she's not near Pittsburgh, or basically bordering NJ, then she's probably in good ol Pennsyltucky.
That state really should be broken into three states, it's way too large and it's already divided geographically.
Nothing (yet). Yup, this model insulates corporations of all kinds from bargaining, costs (like healthcare), liability, and much more. Check out this episode from the Pitchfork Economics podcast https://podcasts.google.com/...
Nothing, and they do just that. No labor laws apply to contractors and it's practically the only way some of them can earn a decent wage, so striking is futile - they'll just switch to other contractors.
I'll use it as long as they keep it bundled with YouTube Premium. The day they unbundle I'm out.
hah, this was me with Grooveshark.
and then I lost everything when it shut down.
and then me again with Google play music. "upload your music, we'll keep it for you"
and then I lost everything when it shut down.
"oh it's ok, you can just use [new service], it's better anyway"
it just isn't the same, you lose stuff everytime. I don't think it's worth it.
and then me again with Google play music. "upload your music, we'll keep it for you"
and then I lost everything when it shut down.
There was a long period where you could transfer your GPM uploads to YTM.
It worked perfectly for me - all my previously uploaded music is in my Library under "Uploads".
You can still upload up to 100,000 tracks, I believe.
Though I've not personally tried to do a bulk upload since before it changed from GPM, so I don't know if there's still library import tools available to help with that
yeah, it did not work for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Grooveshark. Now that's a name that I really miss. I'll never stop being mad about that site being taken down.
this hit me hard on multiple levels. There was a lot of live performances and remixes on Grooveshark that just don't exist anymore.
But, I also lived where they were headquartered. They had started a "Grooveshark university" for local programmers to learn the ropes and it was really cool. I was self-taught but learned a lot from that experience. Such a shame
There's apps to sync your stuff when you move to another platform. It won't be perfectand certain features on certain apps are paywalled, but you should get a fairly acceptable copy of your content after using a service like this.
I used a tool that synced my Spotify playlists to Apple Music. It worked surprisingly well. I signed up the one time, moved everything over, and then made sure to cancel the service.
There are export options for many music subscription services now, as well as apps like TuneMyMusic, Playlisty, etc. which can transfer your library and services between services.
Right? It's awesome.
Or $6 every 6 months if you’re savvy ;).
If by "savvy", you mean flubbing your location to somewhere in the developing world where that's the price point, I refuse to do that. I have no issue pretending to be in say, Germany and taking up a 75% off deal. But I won't put myself somewhere where the regular $10-$15 price point is genuinely out of range of the locals.
If too many people fake their location to these places, the Googles and Steams of the world will stop giving those nations lower prices. I won't have my own selfishness take something away from thousands of people.
Your mileage may vary coming up in December. The $10 crew in the US will see a 40% increase at or near the end of the year. Grandfathering is going away.
This brings the cost of Google's video/music service to match Amazon's video/music service. Are those services of the same quality?
Soundcloud ($10) Is the real competitor to YT-Music in my book. Both benefit from user-generated and user-uploaded content. While there is crossover, I have found more tracks on Soundcloud that aren't on YT than the other way around.
YouTube Music is a much better option than Spotify, in my opinion.
On top of the music you get ad-free YouTube.
I also upload any music I buy via Bandcamp or physical CD so I can listen to it anywhere. No one else offers that as far as I know.
Just make sure you use the unofficial YouTube Music desktop app (http://ytmdesktop.app/) if you're on a PC because using it in a browser sucks.
6 family members for $15 a month and no YouTube ads. Also that money was basically paid for by Google Rewards. The Web App is good too. I don't have to deal with CEF/Electron or any install really.
I think it's 25 now :(
Yeah, sorry that was bumped up recently though I was grandfathered for a long while. But that was the impetus for getting it back when it was just GPM.
It's 6 actually (1+ 5 other members). My uncle basically paid for half of it.
It's $22.99 for me now which includes YouTube Premium. Just YouTube Music (for 6) is $16.99. Individual $10.99 and Student $5.49.
also pricing varies heavily by region. Family subscription is $6 and student is $2.50 where I live (Poland). But we also got 70% price cut when LJ introduced regional pricing for Sync ad-free because we are poor in general as an economy
I don't use YouTube Music but I love using YouTube for my music. Tons of songs on there that just aren't on either YouTube music or other services like Spotify.
Yeah, I switced to YouTube music when Google Play music went away because that's where I stored all of my music at. But The category is massive, especially for niche songs and you can choose to watch the video or just listen to the song, Also with a lot of the songs you can look at the lyrics in real time while the music's playing and that's kind of nice. Also ad free YT is nice.
Did they change it? The last time I tried it said a bunch of my songs weren't available on YouTube music and I couldn't use it cause of that.
Yes, and it's great!
Same + foreign artists. Lots of J-Rock artists that are hard to find on Western music services, let alone other countries. Only stuff like K-Pop I can find consistently on Western music services just because of how in demand it is.
Soundcloud might be an alternative worth looking into. For the music I tend to search for, I find I'm more likely to find it on Soundcloud, and it can take years to migrate from SC to YTM.
While YTM and SC were both $10, putting up with the worse platform was a reasonable price for no YT ads. Now that the grandfathering is ending and the price is jumping to $14, for US folks, I'm feeling the pressure to migrate.
isn't SC pretty much only amateur rappers nowadays?
Spotify has invested significant $$ in upgrading their platform.
YTM lets you access user-uploaded content. With that comes more in the way of remixes and Indy artists. The platform itself is pretty dogshit, though.
Same. India?
Which region did you sign up in?
YouTube Premium is so cheap, man. ₱159 (close to $3) per month. I gave up and exported my Spotify data for YouTube.
Revanced, yeah. Still sucks when you're looking for an album and all of the songs are from the official channel except for one that some schlub uploaded which repeats the previous track as an intro, has the levels maxed across all channels and sounds like it was recorded with a USB lapel mic in a paper bag
I do because I pay next to nothing for a family membership, I can access YouTube covers and music normally unaccessible in my region (yeah, that happens!) and it works with Android Auto which my father needs (otherwise I would simply use Revanced). Also could never learn Spotify, it's so counter-intuitive to me
Yeah it's pretty good
Ever since Google destroyed Google Music i switched to Spotifly because at the time YouTube music couldn't tell the difference between memes and music plus alot of my playlist was unavailable
Which was an enshittified version of Songza. Google lost me for music a loooong time ago.
God I loved Sonza. The best place I ever found to discover new music. RIP Songza
Is there a self-hosted alternative? Would love to do that.
Could you explain why you don't like it?
I actually love the fact that all of the underground, unknown, not officially published music I've liked on YouTube is there with all my other music, including the stuff I've uploaded myself.
Put a large collection of albums into your "Library".
Now try to pull up a list of a single artist's albums within your Library.
The "Library" management is so remedial that it's basically a joke. It can't measure up to iTunes from 20 years ago. It's completely unusable for a serious music collection.
It may be fine for people that just listen to singles and playlists, but every other music service can do that too, while also offering complete functionality elsewhere.
YouTube Music is a half-baked, half-complete product. It's inexplicable that it exists when they literally just needed to do nothing but rebrand Google Play Music.
I completely agree, I miss gpm so much. There's a lot wrong with it, especially if you have a big collection like you said, but another incredibly annoying thing is the radio for songs, bands, and even genres always seem to come back to the same stuff. I don't find new music on ytm like I did in gpm
What instance it on? I found two. So, for others,
(for kbin users)
(if it's on a different instance, I'll edit this comment.)
The lemmy.ml one seems more active so I joined that one, but it's good to have backup communities in case it ever goes down!
Time to stop using Gmail and YouTube. I had already avoided go░gle search for months now.
Over the last three or four months I had deleted all my FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram accounts. And this made me want to avoid go░gle search.
What's being censored? You have control over safesearch, and searching phrases verbatim returns all sites where that phrase exists.
Honestly a good chunk of time its a better experience than google was
DuckDuckGo is fine for some things, but if you want to do a search with a specific phrase in quotes, it doesn't recognize it. I hate having to go back to Google for some searches, but sometimes it's just better. I wish it wasn't, but it is.
DuckDuckGo's image search also leaves a lot to be desired.
I tried switching to DDG and then Qwant and sadly they both suck for some searches. For example neither could successfully find anything more specific than the home page on my country's government websites. Perhaps Bing, but, again, it's Microsoft?
DDG uses Bing results.
oh fuck me
I use duckduckgo but just throw in the google bang if I need specific functionality. Usually DDG is fine for me usually but it's convenient to be able to switch quickly.
If you need Google search results but don't want to use google try SearXng or Startpage
Not exactly. It's a privacy respecting front end so your data isn't being sent to Google
You don't need to do the quote thing in DDG. You can literally just search the quote, and maybe the domain it was hosted on. You will find what you're looking for. DDG even has business profile widgets like google search does. I don't even miss google search at all.
I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a search phrase that is partially in quotes for an exact match and partially not for an inexact match. Google handles that, DDG does not.
You must be new to Lemmy. Grab a tinfoil hat from the box by the door.
Funny how the term "tinfoil" persists even though it hasn't been used in over 70 years.
Easier to say than "aluminium"
Not special enough
I had already stopped for googles slew of other issues. For email I recomebd proton mail
proton is very adequate to replace Gmail.
Oh most definitely. I'm still waiting for a desktop app on Linux for drive but I pay them abually and totally worth it for what I pay.
They do have free email options for those who prefer
Oh sweet summer child, you'll be waiting a while. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you a story about how I've been waiting years, with an S, for the Android app remake that they keep pushing back.
At least iOS users get to enjoy it..
Well, they aren't even replying to whether the community-developed rclone backend breaks TOS, so don't expect much... but yeah, i pay for Proton and they're good for what they are.
Here's some alternative recommendations: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/
Start your own email server!! Download all of your favorite channels! Sub to your fav youtubers patreons! If you need music, use Spotify until you amass a collection of digital/physical music! Use FireFox! Google does not need to have any grip on our digital lifestyles.
A Cognizant spokesperson told Motherboard in an email, “We have received the Alphabet Workers Union’s request for a Cognizant bargaining representative. The request put forward was for both Cognizant and Google to bargain. While we respect our associates’ rights to unionize, we firmly believe Cognizant is the sole employer of our associates. While the joint employer ruling remains unresolved, we cannot bargain at this time.”
“Google refuses to just admit that they are our employer, and then Cognizant is just using Google's legal appeals as a scapegoat,” Marschner said. “That, honestly, is exactly why we filed for joint employer status in the first place. We knew that if we just tried to engage in collective bargaining with Cognizant, that's exactly what they would do.”
wut
Google has a shell company, Cognizant, that hires and subcontracts people to Google. When the workers unionize, they're unionizing against cognizant, not Google. The workers are trying to say otherwise, will more than likely need a court case to sort it out.
Cognizant is very much NOT a Google shell company, they are a third-party contractor with business in healthcare, tech, energy, insurance, education, etc.
This isn't right. Cognizant are a well known systems integrator. In Australia alone recently they bought out some of the best local SIs just to get presence - contino and Servian, with a rumoured third (versent) on the way..
Theyre a body shop looking to grow their born in the cloud generstion of engineers.
Everybody's striking! LFG!
Google: Don't be evil. PROFIT UBER ALLES!!!
I get the technicality of all this, but this could be a watershed moment. Businesses like to contract people out to move liability and cut corners in their obligations to the workers. The bottom line is that its cheaper and easier to fire whatever contractors you don't like for any reason, and artificially push their salaries/wages down.
Look at Fedex Ground, Amazon drivers, etc. Google is now firmly in the role of the bad guy here, with Sundar Pichai making 220+ million dollars with much of it on the backs of layoffs and ethnically bankrupt business practices. I honestly think the ramifications of this in a positive way for the workers is tantamount to the formation of the UAW itself with their sitting strikes. They sat at the machines and forcibly halted production.
That needs to happen here, and all you scabs, fuck you. You can just piss off.
I just want to see more strikes. 🙂
I can't believe I'm saying it but but I'm with Google here. They are sub-cons so negotiation would surely go through their employer who is cognizant. I'm a sub-contractor, I'm not gonna go to the client and ask for a raise, I'm gonna go to my employer. Maybe it's different in different regions but if I asked the client for a raise in the uk they would probably just laugh at me.
Outsourcing in Europe is heavily scrutinised and regulated due to companies kept choosing to depend on third party agencies do they don't have to do with strikes and unions.
Yeah thinking about it more, you're definitely right. I've only ever been a W-2 employee (United States) so I know nothing about this kind of thing. If they are employees of another company, they should bargain with them instead, and force them (via strike if required) to negotiate a new contract with Google. I'm very pro worker and support striking to get results but you have to make sure you're targeting the right business to get the results you want.
You missed the plot. They found a loophole and are probably conspiring to halt the Union. One company says they have to wait for the other to negotiate, the other company says they won't negotiate because they are not their employees. The whole process enters into a permanent delay, workers get fucked by both companies for months. This is a tale as old as unions have existed. It's one of the reasons why in most sane countries, unrestricted outsourcing is not allowed and outsourcing in general is heavily regulated. It's one of the most common tools companies use to abuse workers and avoid responsibilities.
could they put bring the dislike count back on the demands? and make so video posters can't delete comments, so we can call bullshit when needed? that would be nice
No they have bigger priorities, like retroactively demonitizing and removing videos that used to be just fine under the new ruse of "making everything more kid friendly" when we all know it's to make it more advertiser friendly
If only there were an app... suited for kids that google could use... One that would give them the limitations and safety they want from people and not ruin the whole site while still chasing those kid viewers.
If only such a thing existed.
Yea, no...the headline is wrong on this one. These guys are contractors. Google will just nuke Cognizant's contract and call it a day.
Those guys aren't particularly good in my experience and are just warm bodies to do things that should be automated anyway.
Google will simply go to another big contract firm and call it a day.
The NLRB ruled that the nature of their work makes them employees of both Cognizant and Google, despite whatever those companies try to classify them as, and that both are required to negotiate with the union. Google is now just flat-out refusing to respect that decision.
I was a "contractor" for JnJ. Which ok, is a different company but it's the same premise. The reason they contract the work out is so they can avoid giving benefits and cut costs for an essential job. All so when something like this happens they can just pass the buck off to the contracting company saying it's not their responsibility for the working conditions they set.
Can I also live in your fantasyland where you get choices like this?
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
NLRB seems to disagree. This will be an interesting case, I suspect ...
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