2) Commitment to non-discrimination based on legal classes
3) Discipline happens on the clock and is free from harassment and abuse
4) Right to self-defense, covid safety, disaster/emergency pay raises, and zero tolerance for harassment
5) All firings should have a Just Cause
6) Allow workers to pick up shifts in non-union stores, transfer to them, etc.
7) Reimbursement for necessary equipment, limits on dress code
8) Full time for 32+ hours, benefits for 20 hours
9) New work cannot be added to job descriptions without negotiation
10) Schedule guarantees
11) Seniority will be used to prevent unfair working conditions
12) Workers in a store will have a committee to oversee working conditions in their store
13) No reduction in wages or benefits without negotiation
14) Unions have a place set up in the break room for union comms
15) The right to wear union pins/swag
Absolutely zero of these are "petulant", and we can argue about whether any of them are "counterproductive", but they all seem absolutely baseline reasonable to me.
"7) Reimbursement for necessary equipment, limits on dress code"
Whereas the actual text reads:
"We propose that workers will not be held to a dress code, except for where local, state and federal health/safety standards are enforced. We propose that Starbucks will provide or reimburse each worker 2 pairs of non-slip shoes each year, as well as fresh aprons for partners every shift. We also propose Starbucks provide visors for workers who cannot comfortably use Starbucks-provided hats."
So they're not proposing limits on dress codes. They want to do away with the dress code entirely. This is absolutely petulant. Maybe some employees will show up in tuxedos, but my money would be on more and more employees showing up in less and less professional attire. Adding distraction, eroding the customer experience, and reducing the professionalism.
On another note, seniority is a toxic, irrational policy. If you want to see how corrosive it is, go talk to any honest member of a teacher's union. Seniority allows low performers with bad attitudes to hang around indefinitely with little consequence.
This is pretty basic negotiation though, ask for more than you think you can get to have something you can give up in the discussion.
I expect the compromise to be something like, "there's a dress code but I'm not forced to buy anything other than basic black T-Shirts that the company wants me to wear, and the company buys me 1 pair of shoes a year."
> Adding distraction, eroding the customer experience, and reducing the professionalism.
The professionalism of ... Starbucks coffee shops? Are you for real? It's not a bank. Let people wear what they want and what makes them happy. You can still require people cover sufficiently for sanitary and safety reasons.
> On another note, seniority is a toxic, irrational policy
Yes. Agreed. But also, Starbucks has been hiring people specifically to "outcompete" pro union voices. A rush of new hires can destabilize organization efforts. Seniority for the purposes of protecting workers is reasonable. Seniority as the only criteria is not. It's a careful balance.
...this is an incredibly disingenuous reading of the stated proposal.
#4 alone isn't "covid safety", it includes a reinstatement of COVID benefits and pay. "Protecting pay for store closures...and for workers who leave early or are sick" also doesn't really make sense in an _hourly_ work environment.
> “Protecting pay for store closures…and for workers who leave early or are sick” also doesn’t really make sense in an _hourly_ work environment.
Yes, it does. Hourly environments can (and some do) have paid leave for special circumstances based on, e.g., scheduled time during which the special circumstances prevent work. I’ve seen this in both private unionized environments and public sector (union or not) ones.
Some of this (e.g., paid sick leave) may be balance-driven, whereas paid leave for closures, and external events which force early unplanned shift termination often would not be, since these conditions would be decided by management, but the decision would trigger paid leave for individuals impacted.
Are you okay with the other 14 then? I understand how you can find issue with one of their proposals but then Starbucks ought to handily agree with all but the one and offer to negotiate #4.
"...if a worker's religious belief prohibits handling of pork, they would be exempt from being assigned to food warming and won't be discriminated against."
Perhaps they just shouldn't be working at a restaurant that serves pork? What a ridiculous idea. I'm going to found a religion in which the main belief is that I should not be required to type on a keyboard. As someone working in tech who uses a keyboard non-stop, this is not my problem. Rather, my employer should be obligated to offload that work onto others and only assign me work that does not require the use of a keyboard.
Supposing a religion that doesn’t exist as a counter example to a religion that does, is a bad faith argument which shouldn’t really be answered. But I’m enjoying this so I’ll answer it anyway.
First of all, there are plenty of developer that don’t use keyboards. Perhaps they have some eccentric tools which they believe are superior, but more realistically they have a disability or injury and can’t use keyboard. Usually they have other tools at their disposal and are able to do their work just fine. It is in fact illegal to discriminate against them on those grounds in most jurisdictions, and employers are able to accommodate just fine. I’m sure your fictional religion will do just fine as well.
Secondly, if you’ve worked in the service industry, or even manual labor, you should know that situations arise all the time where a worker is unable to perform a task. Reasons range from religion and ideology, but also disability injury, sensory issues, neurodiversity, and even just a lack of skill and confidence. What usually happens is that workers are nice to each other and accommodate the worker’s inability, usually by rotating tasks among them selves. In many cases their bosses don’t even know about this, but more commonly their immediate manager knows this and hands out tasks according to their worker’s abilities.
Now this is ripe for abuse. So codifying this in a labor contract makes perfect sense. While this is just unofficial a bad manager could force a worker to perform a task they are unable or unwilling to do, effectively forcing them to either suffer or quit. Codifying this in the union contract is a protection against this kind of abuse.
Come on. There are billions of people worldwide who have religious prohibitions from pork. This is not a niche population.
Can we really not take a quick moment to say, "Maybe we can help our Muslim and Jewish friends feel more comfortable"? Your solution is really, "No Muslims or Jews in restaurants" rather than "Hey, if needed, we can just ask Kevin to toss the bacon in the oven."
> There are billions of people worldwide who have religious prohibitions from pork.
That's hardly the point. The majority of Starbucks locations are in countries with tiny or non-existent Jewish/Muslim populations: U.S., China, Japan, Canada, etc. [1] In the United States, for example, only 3.5% of Americans are Jewish or Muslim. [2] Wanna bet that figure is far smaller in China?
What's more, this isn't a situation in which there are no alternatives. A person who doesn't want to handle pork has plenty of other employment options.
> "No Muslims or Jews in restaurants"
Seriously? I suggest that people who don't want to handle pork shouldn't apply for jobs where they'll handle pork, and you paraphrase me as "Ban Jews and Muslims from restaurants"???
Let me put it this way: do you think someone who doesn't want to handle pork should be accommodated at a pork processing plant?
"Protecting pay for store closures...and for workers who leave early or are sick" is national laws in many jurisdictions. You’ll have to provide some reason for why it doesn’t make sense, many national assemblies and labor boards seem to think otherwise.
Starbucks and Amazon are hardly "progressive". Most folks I know would describe them as pretty much bog standard big capitalist companies. Sure, they slap a rainbow logo on their twitter during June, but so does Raytheon.
I'm less sure about Apple, which might actually have more of a progressive streak in it (I'm simply not knowledgable), but the other two are pretty much standard exploitative mega corps.
Maybe because I am in denial, but I like to sort of differentiate the two. However you feel about the twain a decade ago, to be blunt, Steve is no more and Apple continues on.
Jobs recruited Tim Cook to Apple, make Cook the COO, and then made Cook his successor.
Moreover, Cook was the main driver for putting all of Apple manufacturing in totalitarian China, which has caused many difficulties for Apple's "progressive" image, because the Chinese government has forced Apple into censoring the App Store and even into censoring the operating systems (removing references to Taiwan, for example). Not to mention the often terrible working conditions in iPhone factories.
Yeah, all ideals any large company claims to have are shed for the sake of China's market. That should be evidence enough that it's just a method to maximize their profits.
Specifically in the case of Starbucks, they absolutely think they are.
Does anyone besides me remember that CEO Howard Schultz thought he should be president back in 2016? This whole thing just makes me want to shout from the rooftops: We do not have a left-wing party in the United States! The Democrats are anti-union and pro-austerity. We have a center-right party and a far-right party, that's it!
In the context of discourse in American politics -- and increasingly Canadian ones as well -- "left wing" has been rewritten to be almost exclusively about cultural politics. This is the only way one can decode everyday conversations when people talk about "the left"; they clearly don't mean what it meant "classically": socialist politics / economic policy, working class politics.
It's basically a marginal position at this point to be outright pro-union, even more so to be pro-nationalization / pro-interventionist. Apart from outliers like maybe Bernie Sanders, an explicit working class orientation has been taken over almost completely by the populist right, and much of the self-identified "left" speaks mostly to the concerns of the upper middle class. Not just the mainstream of the US Democrats, but even much of what is spoken about by "the squad", or the Canadian NDP party.
In some areas, if you break down voting maps by demographic, parties lumped in as "left wing" now tend to dominate in areas with higher incomes. Strongly working class areas often swing populist right. This was not the case even 20 years ago.
Regular working people are not the audience anymore.
Every socially conservative pro-labor movement in the USA is rapidly labeled as "fascist" in America, usually because they promote economic protectionism by reducing immigration and raising barriers to cheap imports from countries that don't protect their workers to the degree the US does.
Part of the problem is that those organizations allow fascists to enter them. (Like many left wing movements allow authoritarian communists -- tankies -- to enter them.)
If a part of your platform is "No immigration" it becomes very difficult to distinguish that from "No immigration (because I don't like brown people)".
In my experience, most devs dislike working in C++. (I'm an industry engineer in games. Even the people who like C++ hate C++.)
Maintaining C++ support is expensive for an engine, just like maintaining any language binding. IMO, they should optimize for the most approachable/developer ergonomic language, which C++ definitely is not.
That said, I strongly disagree with their decision to simply build their own language. I think there are many languages that already exist that make better candidates for game development either because they are well known, well supported, or easily portable.
GDScript is basically Python syntax with some sugar.
* Well known: Python is well known. GDScript is thus familiar.
* Well supported: it's a first class citizen in Godot, that's all that matters
* Easily portable: portable to what? it runs on the Godot engine. That's all the portability it needs.
I think they built their own language because of the integration with their Editor. It's not Lua or JavaScript or Python, but it works well enough for Godot in my experience.
I don't doubt that I can learn it. Learning a language is pretty easy.
I doubt that I'll have rich tooling and libraries to draw from when I need them.
If I build a game in C#, for instance, I have editors that can lint my code, perform intellisense, automate test generation, and a rich set of libraries I can draw from. If I don't want to write my own Hierarchical Task Network planner, I can use FluidHTN. Likewise, I can pull out my code from my project and modularize it for other engines/games -- maybe I've got a great state machine implementation or something I want to share. GDScript limits my reach.
The knowledge is also not particularly useful outside of working with Godot. Picking up C# from working with Unity, for example, translates to other domains easily if I want to change careers.
I also can't write my backends and supporting services in GDScript. If I wanted to , I could make my entire codebase in C# for both front end and back end code, simplifying my tooling and knowledge needs.
I don't want to be too down on it. I'm sure there are ways that it would save time. My use cases are much more about setting a high bar for ergonomics and engineering excellence for larger projects. I think that in my case, they've provided the Extensions and C# support route. (Though it sounds like getting those to work on all platforms is non-trivial today.)
>I also can't write my backends and supporting services in GDScript.
I mean technically you can. Godot has a headless mode for servers, etc. I certainly wouldn't pick it as my first choice for all the other reasons you listed though.
In my case the main issue with GDScript is the tooling, or lack of thereof. No symbol aware rename, no go to definition/usages, poor autocomplete, cryptic errors. Also static typing that's kinda but not entirely there, which exacerbates the tooling issues.
Good tooling is an enormous undertaking, so the way I see it, GDScript is forever doomed to feel like someone's impressive hobby project.
Not the OP but I can pitch in that, for me, it is important (and I'd add: efficient) to invest my scarce time in a language that can be used in several contexts
e.g.: Using python, I can do games, scientific/bio work, math, web backends etc. The same time investment in GDScript will only net me experience with GDScript which right now only exists in Godot.
From my experience it's a lot easier to learn another language than to learn a new model of operation or new concepts entirely. And if you'll want to work with Godot, that will likely be the main barrier, and the main thing that will not be transferable to other contexts. The language however, can only make working with the concepts easier or harder. Godot team has decided that having their own language designed for dealing with the concepts of the engine makes it easier to use and results in less work than trying to adapt some existing language to the concepts of the engine. I've dealt with this a couple times, where a language was transformed so much by the context it was used in, it felt like an entirely different language.
On your last point, even just a language like JavaScript (or even Java) has, over long enough periods of time, evolved to accumulate enough new features and common idioms that if you look at typical code from the 90s vs now in those languages, it's not hard to picture entirely different languages. And engineers are expected to just learn the new changes and keep on, much as they're expected to just learn algorithms, libraries, test frameworks, other domain specific frameworks that come and go, database stuff, profiling and other monitoring methods, security concerns, how not to violate the GDPR, ....
But suggest a different language or a DSL for something, no matter how much sense it makes (sometimes getting simple SQL in places is a political struggle, and it's unfortunate when teams develop a "regex expert" even though all the regexes are simple), even one that is already super similar to one they already know like GDScript and so is rather trivial to learn (no one's asking you to learn something on the order of complexity and different-to-others like Haskell here), and devs start putting their foot down and saying "Of all the things, I"m not learning that!"
It's a toy language with almost zero open source library support. And trying to hire someone to work in it and implicitly agree that they don't care about their CV and future hireability is a tough sell.
I've no horse in this race, but want to point out that a lot of the criticism here seems to be from folks who haven't actually worked with GDScript, whether in a production, or even at all.
Very interesting! Does this support GeoTIFF images?
I ask because I've got ~200 acres of forest I use a drone to survey. I generate a high resolution orthophoto, and I currently built my own site on top of leaflet using tiles cut from the large orthophoto.
I'm working with conservation organizations to try and restore some stream habitat, and being able to markup maps together would be incredible, but it looks like you are focusing on vector layers first?
Is it possible to provide my own tile server url? (e.g. I'll host the tiles on S3/Cloudfront/whatever, I just want to fancy notation/collaboration infrastructure.)
Edit:
Follow up -- I'm just one person who happens to work with various conservation groups to maintain the health of my forest. Typically, these groups are already strapped for cash, but it looks like this wouldn't really fall under 'personal' use because it's multiple people collaborating on a map? Very curious about whether you plans include a price tier for "I guess I want something like this but I'm also just like, one dude and not a business"
Edit 2:
Looks like yes, I can bring my own baselayer. (In my case, I have two base layers, one topgraphic, and an additional one that's the raster image, but it looks like I could create a similar experience on Felt?) So really, then the question becomes one of pricing for small uses like mine.
Played around with it, looks like my particular use case is not supported (and also there appears to be a bug where the minimum tile zoom is not being respected for base layers?)
I want a base layer of one map, with an additional base layer (or raster data layer) on top of that base layer. It appears I can have one raster base layer, and any number of vector data layers on top.
Also, my tiles use -y, which I think is something I ought to fix (I just noticed this because I exported with the default output from ddb tile, which requires telling leaflet to use TMS or -y), so I can't just drop them in Felt.
Hey there! Sorry it didn't work well for you but this is valuable feedback. We are working on adding more raster support. If you shoot an email to support@felt.com, we can better understand your use case and potentially add you to our testing groups when we build those features so you get to see them first and even influence!
> and also there appears to be a bug where the minimum tile zoom is not being respected for base layers?
Hi there, Felt engineer here! Thanks for reporting that issue. We've since fixed that bug. Out of curiosity what kind of base layer are you using that has a minimum zoom?
I dunno, they make me smile because they are so ugly/goofy.