They will, in fact, just hire somebody else. American companies have access to an unlimited supply of labor. Better to stick around and try to unionize. It may not happen in your lifetime, but the other fact is the United States is a corporate hellworld. Workers have no say in anything. Until that changes, the corporations won’t.
I don’t know that this level of defeatism is justified. Quitting does help.
Why does quitting help?
Consider IBM. Their revenue is about 20% of its peak. It used to be seen as a monopoly power. Now we barely think about them.
I think that IBM has made itself an unattractive place for employees where it used to be seen as an extremely prestigious place to work. And I think poor quality employees, along with average to mediocre management has squandered an incredible, dominant company over the past 20 years.
Facebook will decline if all the most desirable employees just quit. It’s basically just math - those who know the most, interview best, and have the most accomplishments will be able to leave the fastest. Facebook will be left with the D team and they’ll get taken to the cleaners by competitors (as they already are with TikTok - and what’s the average age of the most engaged users of Facebook again?)
Anyway, the point is, you quitting hits a company in precisely the right place - their wallet. Employee turnover is tracked and costs companies money. Higher turnover does bring about changes.
It absolutely does! There's a lot evidence to support this claim. The smartest, most ethical people leave first. Eventually replacement employees will cost more and more to attract. The company will implode in a toxic talent vacuum. Shareholders will flee as margins decline. The company will have to take increasing user hostile actions to survive. Users will flee. Advertisers will flee.
And FB ceases to exist. A loud message will echo through silicon valley fit years to come.
The only ethical decision for the engineers to make is to quit. Thus all employees there are mathematically unethical. They are writing the code that executes the immoral decisions.
Quitting doesn't help. For it to mean anything, there has to be a plausible alternative plan that the quitters are supporting.
What is the plausible internal plan of the agitators and activists inside FB and other firms? They have none, beyond systematically ban more and more users who violate ever more bizarre and ad-hoc purity rules. That's not a plan.
Moreover, quitting over this stuff isn't a one way street.
Facebook is not an evil company. I wouldn't work there today but that's exactly because of their vicious internal partisan politics that make these firms so unfriendly to anyone who isn't strongly on the left. For anyone who thinks corporate diversity programmes are sexist against men, Brexit is a commendable move towards localism, that sometimes Trump actually might have a point, etc, Facebook is just not attractive to those people today.
It sounds like Zuck may be getting a grip on his workforce and professionalising it. If so, for every activist quitter they'll suddenly find they're more appealing to 10 more normal employees who just don't want their workplace to be a political battleground. Moreover people get more conservative as they age, and they also get more experienced. So they may suddenly discover they have access to more experienced senior engineers who were previously, uh, content with their current job.
Facebook exactly is an evil company. No question about it. To its very core. Anyone who works there is paid money to propagate an evil impact on the world and thus, all employees who work there are evil.
If they have an unlimited supply of labor and we're living in a corporate hellworld, why do they pay so well and include so many perks? They sure seem to be acting like a company that's competing for a limited talent pool.
In short: to keep doing whatever they want without you opening your mouth.
To elaborate: They don’t all pay well. Not even close. And none of them pay workers in other countries well, and they can outsource endlessly with no repercussions.
But they want to keep their home in the US (the world military empire) because it lets them do whatever they want. And they don’t pay migrants nearly the same because migrants are bound by their visas. But too much of that and the Americans will catch on.
Unionizing in this case is extremely unlikely. There is too much for the employees to lose. Instead, Facebook and the US Government will continue doing whatever they want.
Yeah fair haha. But so does the US government if Facebook leaves. I do not actually think the current state of things is sustainable but I don’t think anyone knows how it will resolve.
Because it makes business sense to hire best of the best. Football clubs have unlimited supply of players, yet they pay ridiculous amounts of money to their players.
You're assuming the best of the best decide where to work based on compensation. Also consider the number of pro players is miniscule compared to the number of engineers at fb. It's a false analogy because of the law of diminishing returns and population dynamics.
