By contrast, Microsoft workers tend to be more highly skilled, and the increase in pay and benefits that a union might bring to the company “is not going to be a hit to the business model,” Hedden said. The company relies on a vast low-skilled workforce and quickly churns through employees, with annual turnover at warehouses often exceeding 100 percent. It’s unlikely that Amazon will adopt a more conciliatory approach to unions anytime soon, Hedden said. Though WashTech failed to unionize Microsoft workers a few decades back, Courtney said the company “never took the Amazon approach,” referring to the notorious anti-union tactics of their Seattle-based peer which persist to this day. The deal with the union was not an attempt to improve Microsoft’s standing among antitrust regulators, who are currently reviewing the merger, CWA President Christopher Shelton told the Washington Post. With the agreement, Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision now has the formal blessing of the CWA, which had previously expressed concerns about the merger. Should the Microsoft-Activision merger go through, Knief said ideally organizers won’t “have to jump through all the hoops that we saw with Raven QA and Activision for so many months.” She added that she hopes the neutrality agreement will be a “catalyst movement” for other members of Activision’s workforce looking to unionize. Following the announcement of the union, Activision reorganized Raven Software’s quality assurance workers into different teams-a move that a CWA official said was designed “to thwart Raven QA workers who are exercising their right to organize.” The company didn’t voluntarily recognize the union, though the NLRB ultimately granted the union’s request for a vote. In a June 2 blog post the company’s president Brad Smith wrote that Microsoft respects employees’ legal right to join a union, and will pursue approaches to “make it simpler, rather than more difficult” for workers to “choose whether to form or join a union.”ĪBK fought workers’ efforts to organize ahead of Raven Software’s successful union vote. Realizing that they’re not in a position to stop organized labor at Activision, this move “allows them to get ahead of it, and gives them more control over the process.”Įarlier this month Microsoft adopted new principles for employee organizing. “Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall,” said Andrew Hedden, associate director of the Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington. private-sector workers were part of unions last year, but labor movements in the technology sector are starting to take hold, with efforts underway at Apple, Amazon, and Google’s parent company Alphabet. You can opt out of this when you first run the extension so none of your data is shared.Microsoft’s apparent willingness to work with unions marks a sharp contrast with competitors that have been fighting union drives. It works on a model of taking the data that trackers pick up about you, making it anonymous and selling it on to third parties.
It’s free, too, and blocks all kinds of ads and trackers.
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It’s available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and Internet Explorer as well as Android and iOS (and the Cliqz browser, which is owned by the parent company of Ghostery). Ghostery has been around for years and is one of our favourite privacy extensions.
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With all this in mind, here are a few of the best ad blockers you can install today. AdBlock even lets you create exceptions for specific YouTube channels so you don’t deprive creators of their ad earnings. But all ad blockers allow you to create a ‘whitelist’ where ads are allowed so you can support your favourite websites. From a privacy point of view you probably don’t want to be tracked, but these again are a source of revenue for the websites that use them.
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