Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Equity can be okay, especially for a union. If a worker is sick and needs to take leave, a union will stand up to make sure their job is protected and they are compensated.
It's not "fair" and "equal" that someone who isn't working gets paid, but we need to take care of those who need help the most.
Equity had tradeoffs, equality has tradeoffs too. I think equity sounds like a more appropriate word for what a union does. Do you disagree?
Equity in this context likely means diversity, inclusion, and equity (DI&E) which has been an absolute cancer on US tech companies in the years leading to the current cycle of layoffs.
i.e. roles and promotions reserved for people of certain races and genders.
You're going to need a massive bucket of evidence to back that claim. The current layoffs are most definitely not due to diversity hires, they are largely driven by a skittish market, active shareholders being more critical of cashflow, reduced funding and performative overhead reduction.
There's the argument that the definition of equality has been twisted in order for equity to make sense.
10 years ago, if someone said kids should have the right to education equally, that always meant taking especially care of the poor ones. It didn't make sense to send a million dollars to a public school and another to a private - that would have considered very dumb.
So why did we twist the old term, introduce a new one and now get into semantic discussions instead of discussing rights and policy?
> We are committed to protecting the benefits we have, fixing historical disparities within and across departments, and promoting equitable conditions and economic stability for all of our colleagues
Organised labour has been a cancer on western civilisation. Both "equity" and "equality" are the expression of the underlying ideology of communism, where disparate outcomes are the result of imaginary malignant oppressive forces.
Equality and centralisation go hand in hand, as evidenced by every communist/socialist regime ever and the simple insight that suppressing human nature requires a suffocating (secret) state police that controls every aspect of its subject's lives, and they cannot co-exist with freedom and de-centralisation.
It doesn't take a communist to see the inherent conflict of interest between employer and employee, or the disproportionate power in the hands of employers. These are not "invisible forces" by any means.
Massive false equivalence and poor understanding of the concepts of equality, socialism and associated regimes, which were never equal. You also seem to subscribe to the idea that human nature is inherently purely selfish, which it has been proven not to be.
It is more likely that you have consumed too much American based anti-union media, happily pushed by corporations whose profits would be threatened and politicians whose campaign contributions would be threatened by stronger unions. I accept that US unions have had a bad history but if you step outside of that narrow viewpoint there is a lot of benefits to unions and organised workforces.
What nonsense. Organized labor is the only force that has ever brought any parity between labor and management. Do you think a 40 hour week and other benefits were magnanimously bestowed on workers by management? Unions are the only force that have gotten labor anything.
You sound like a typical vulture capitalist. So with your disdain for labor, I suggest whatever great lofty idea or concept you have, do it all yourself. Development. Engineering. Marketing. Sales. Service. You can't. You need that labor you so airily brush off with the 1953 bugaboo of communism.
And it's not funny inthe slightest how that's the case.
You of course ignore my main point. Go make your earth shattering life changing product without labor and see how far you get. You throw around buzz words like communism and socialism without apparently knowing the distinction between them, using them as if they were a bludgeon to smash those who disagree with you.
So you have, as I said previously, no understanding of either term.
Why do you keep dodging my real point? Go make your great idea entirely by yourself. Then you can keep all the moneys. Great ideas are a dime a bale. Making them happen requires people willing to make it happen other than yourself. Why should they get anything other than the maximum they can extract from you, in the same way you extract the maximum possible from your customers?
I'm genuinely curious what people are like who believe cooperation and mutual support is against human nature. Do you perform a daily cost-benefit analysis to consider whether to leave your spouse for another candidate? Do you eject your children from your home if they don't deliver sufficient value? Do you slam the door in your neighbor's face if they ask you for a cup of flour on a Saturday night and can't immediately repay you or sign a credible contract with interest?
> disparate outcomes are the result of imaginary malignant oppressive forces
Funny. Most people seem to agree that different starting conditions are likely to yield different outcomes. I struggle to imagine your reasoning for why wealth is so unevenly distributed and why this inequality persists over generations assuming you aren't a believer in eugenics (i.e. natural superiority by bloodline).
> freedom
Freedom to what, specifically?
> de-centralisation
Someone recently said to me "When tech dudes say de-centralisation they always mean de-regulation" and I have no idea what made me think of that.
> every communist/socialist regime ever
Yes, let's not look up what those words mean or else we'll risk finding out what leftist thinkers thought about the Bolsheviks before they successfully purged all other revolutionary movements. Communist Russia killed ten billion people and its Gestapo surveillance state kept track of every resident, Mao Ché Minh banned religion and gave Cuba bad WiFi, Marx was a Leninist and Stalin his prophet.
Let's not think about the uncanny parallels to surveillance capitalism, the economics at scale of monopolist corporations like Amazon, the industry poisoning our water and scorching our Earth, the way our entire collective wealth (however minute it may be for each of us) hinges on our collective capacity to extract natural resources for a pittance from the Third World so we can sell refined goods back to them at a profit for loans they can never repay. The Bolsheviks may have created housing for all unhoused people but the houses were ugly and the consumer goods were outdated, thank god we ended up on the right side of the international pissing match that nearly drove us to extinction so let's not bite the hand that begrudgingly feeds us if we give it every waking hour as labor because this is just the natural state of human existence: some have it all, the rest of us lives on scraps. The guns and bombs staring us down aren't to keep us in our place but to keep us safe against the others who want what we have and want to take away our freedoms. We must surpass, we must compete, we must be better than the Reserve Army of Labor or else society will collapse. Solidarity is defeat, cooperation is death. After all, this is how man evolved: the primordial Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, standing alone in the desert, fruits of his labor in hand, staring down the sabre tooth with entrepreneurial spirit, the self-made man, standing on the shoulders not of giants but of those he outcompeted because they were inferior to him.
Pardon the prose but in the spirit of competition your comment did not warrant anything less fanciful.
Yeah, it’s disheartening how labor unions seem to attract this ideological poison. Can’t a labor union just be about collective negotiation with the employer? -_-
Most don't. It's just the ones where there is very little at stake or that they need to bargain for.
Tech worker unions can't really strike because the ratio of red and blue M&Ms in one of the thirty free snack rooms is slightly off. They need something else to rile people up.
Agree, equity at workplace could easily be highjacked for nepotism and tribalism since the criteria for “opportunities needed” is often subjective. IMO it’s best addressed via governmental and social programmes.
However, kudos to them if they’ve found a verifiable model that takes into account all historical injustices done to all people who are currently in the US labour force (including new immigrants from Africa, South Asia, South America, Central Asia, etc).
Important to note "equity" not "equality".
Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Not my kind of place.