A Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement at the time of the unionization that it had “no objection to these Cognizant workers electing to form a union,” but that it would not bargain with them. “We are not a joint employer as we simply do not control their employment terms or working conditions—this matter is between the workers and their employer, Cognizant,” the spokesperson said.
NLRB seems to disagree. This will be an interesting case, I suspect …
Megacorps can get fucked. Pay your employees well or deal with the consequences.
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.
True, but is this maybe WHY Google uses subcontractors – to avoid direct responsibility and need to negotiate?
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.
Google will simply find a different contractor company. Problem solved.
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.
The big names are making insane amount of money. What are they going to strike over? Their working conductions are also entirely up to themselves and have nothing to do with Google. Google gives them a free platform with a massive audience, and pays them money. It’s all upside.
Caleb Hammer just had the tables turned on him to have some audit his finances. He has 726k subscribers, a good number, but far less than the real big names, and he’s only been on the platform for 1 year. He is making $100k per month.
Is everyone here just pro-strike, no reason needed?
You can’t even say the algorithm requires them to post too much to stay relevant, as Mark Rober only posts 1 video per month and is one of the biggest people on the platform.
They could argue for
- a greater share of the value
- more certainty about being allowed to stay on the platform
Pretty much like anyone’s top two asks. More money, more security.
Some of the video take downs are bull shit. I’m with you on that.
I think I’d need to see a better picture of the value breakdown to know if that’s a reasonable ask. YouTube is extremely expensive to run, and these creators (the big ones) already have more money than they know what to do with. I can’t really feel bad for a 23 year old pulling in 7 figures.
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.
People are free to make videos and post them on their own websites. Where they have to try and figure out how people will find them, get people to check their site for new videos, source all their own ads, or rely only on sponsors (who will be hard to get without an audience), try to get people to sign up to their site for some user engagement, pay all the hosting fees for videos, build the actual website, make sure that site has metrics to sell yourself to sponsors, build a mobile site, probably an app…
All of this not only gets expensive, but makes it much more difficult to get noticed or scale. Maybe if someone is already famous they can pull it off, but for someone who just has an iPhone and a dream… that’s all you need to start on YouTube, and you can make millions.
The “platform” brings insane amounts of value to the table, and is extremely expensive to run. And the reason all the users are there to watch the big creators is that all the other random videos are hosted for free. There is no reason to go anywhere else.
Creators have tried to start their own thing. I see ads for it all the time in their videos. I don’t know anyone who uses those as a viewer. I am curious how it’s working out for the creators.
An empty platform has little value. Hundreds have gotten shut down for this very reason.
Content by and large makes the platform. Not the other way round. Yet the platform soaks up the lions share of the benefit. Leaving most who aren’t whales to see nothing at all. This is the problem google is very complicit with. I’m all for them making enough to sustain the service. I just think they owe far more than they are giving, to the content that made them.
Nebula is great. And is trundling along just fine. It could use some more promotion and love sure. But it’s goals aren’t the same as a behemoth like Google’s. Who’s talents aren’t in creating content, but promoting it.
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.
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.
Worst case you pay out what is left on the contract, but since you drove costs down it is cheaper than firing a regular worker!
That’s basically the current situation.
Dark Brandon and the NLRB are on that shit. No more malarkey.
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.
This is what laws and regulations are for. If we had a functioning government…
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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.
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.
- I’m not sure what the legal process is called for union claims.
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.
Seems fairly obvious that they need to negotiate with their direct employer.
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.
People use YouTube Music?
$10 a month to have basically every song ever and never have to worry about YouTube ads. Yes, I use it.
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)_/¯
What happened?
I had albums with missing songs, a few albums wouldn’t transfer. I had versions of songs that were different.
I didn’t lose everything but there was enough that I cared about that I no longer want to trust a system where I don’t actually own the music
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
I actually met employees from the company at a conference years ago and knew people that worked there off and on. It was a pretty toxic environment and the management was basically a frat party. The office had an in-house chef for a while before they had to tighten the purse strings due to the multitude of lawsuits they were getting hit with (most of which I learned came from Sony BMG). Their team of lawyers basically worked around the clock. They also underpaid devs but had an array of talent from every level that allowed people to cut their teeth and work on some cool UI.
I used to have a ton of stuff on Grooveshark and had stuff shared to me (and vice versa) from others. It was a cool UI even if it was a little clunky at times. Great place to find obscure stuff.
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.
I also get to Download videos for my flights or commute. I’m also in a big house. Family plan for 5 of us is ridiculous value to me.
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.
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.
in theory i agree, but i could not stand the UI when i tried youtube premium, compared to spotify which is just seamless
Not sure if you were referring to YT Music by YT Premium. But YT Music is a different interface specifically for music.
I think its the same thing here, you pay for premium it gives you access to YT music
they are talking about User Interface, it’s different for YouTube (the one for video) and YouTube Music (the one for music). Premium subscription can be shared between the two services, that’s correct
i know, and the YT music interface in my opinion, is shit
Try InnerTune or ViMusic. They’re based on YouTube Music.
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 :(
The Web site says $24 for 5 members. Is it different per location? How do you pay less?
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.
You can listen to just the music that’s on YouTube via YouTube music. That’s one of the main reasons why I’m using YouTube music.
Yeah. You can search for and add any YouTube video to a playlist for YMusic. I do this all the time with various Indies, remixes, and foreign artists that are hard to find otherwise.
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.
Totally. I was already in the ecosystem so it was only natural I go to Music when it was available. Is it better than Spotify? Shrug. Just different.
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.
Yes, and it’s great!
For me, every other music app is missing alot of the songs I want to listen to (Cover songs, and remixes are the big 2) and they are only available on yt music.
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?
Well, its most of the normal music and then a bunch of pirated music. It’s like YT music but with a better “Start Radio” button.
Only because I get both YT Premium and YT Music for cheap ($4/month).
Hah look at Mr. Money Bags over here, I had to pay $1.11 last month for YT Premium.
Same. India?
Argentina
Which region did you sign up in?
Argentina
YouTube Premium is so cheap, man. ₱159 (close to $3) per month. I gave up and exported my Spotify data for YouTube.
Yeah, I just don’t pay for it lmao. Apps like InnerTune are great, rips them as mp3s and can use YouTube music radio system and lyrics.
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
I mean, ReVanced, but yes. No way I’d pay for that shit.
A lot of FOSS music streaming apps (like ViMusic) use YT Music because you can access it for free. Doesn’t make them any tho.
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
/c/unions is worth subbing to.
What instance it on? I found two. So, for others,
(for kbin users)
@unions@lemmy.ml
@unions@sh.itjust.works
(if it’s on a different instance, I’ll edit this comment.)
I was referring the lemmy ml one but good to know there’s more!
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.
Been using DuckDuckGo for a month or two. It’s mostly good enough for me.
I’ve been using it for years and have never looked back.
You should. It uses Bing for its searches. So you are censored to oblivion.
What’s being censored? You have control over safesearch, and searching phrases verbatim returns all sites where that phrase exists.
Safesearch (NSFW) ≠ Censorship (Political, Government Posts, etc.)
I might be mistaken, but IIRC Bing is only one of the data sources DDG uses.
Gonna need to see a legit source on that that doesn’t read like right-wing nutjobbery or Russian botnik drivel.
DDG is my default and a very good engine, however, it does struggle with search results in my native language.
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 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.
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
If you need Google search results but don’t want to use google try SearXng or Startpage
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.
Just curious what’s wrong with saying Google?
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…
Everybody’s striking! LFG!
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.
My bad, I was thinking of Amazon and their delivery “companies”
Google:
Don’t be evil.PROFIT UBER ALLES!!!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.
According to the union, Cognizant has also refused to bargain, citing Google’s appeals as the reason for its delay.
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.
And in that time, they’ll set up a new shit call center under new shit management under a new shitty partner/reseller/vendor and just close that first contract down entirely.
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You are 100% correct, so it is especially funny seeing that almost 1/4 of the people downvoted you for no good reason. Holy fuck this site has a huge percentage of utterly clueless Lemmings.
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As somebody who’s been boycotting big media for years, I can’t be happier to see the copyright industry slowly backstabbing itself once and over again
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.
That’s cool n all…but what happens when Google drops the contract?
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.
I’m so glad bootlickers like you enjoy the taste of shoe leather. It makes the working class so much more unified.
