This is a big move on their part. If it’s successful for them, it could inspire a lot of others. I’m curious what their reason for unionizing is. Wanting more reasonable hours, perhaps?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% supportive of unionising for better conditions, but the thing I keep hearing from tech companies is that people want to unionise to have a voice in the ethical practices of their firms. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was as much about that as working conditions.
According to The Verge “The goal of our union is to have a formal seat at the table to negotiate with management,” the Kickstarter Union organizers write in their email to staff. “We’re negotiating to promote our collective values, and ensure Kickstarter is around for the long haul. We care about preserving what’s great about Kickstarter and improving what isn’t.”
If this works out, this has the potential to be huge for the industry. I would love to see more unionization in tech, and this could be a first step in that direction.
It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech. Companies are going to embrace distributed teams/remote teams very fast and unionizing will just be a reason to close up shop in that location. That's what I imagine happening, predicting the future is hard tho.
I think it would be comparable, but not equal, to a factory walkout. Without active bug-squashing, DevOps and server maintenance, there is an increased risk of a major outage, which would even affect previous customers as well. Also, most tech companies collect revenue incrementally, via subscriptions, ads and the like, rather than up-front like most factories would. And getting a scab developer up to speed would likely take a lot longer than getting scab factory workers up to speed.
There are some differences as you said. If you're an auto factory that goes on strike, the management is likely still making money—they have all the cars made yesterday and the day before to sell. Of course, the pressure would rise much quicker in a factory vs a tech company; where the latter could presumably float itself for a few weeks, the former would start losing money within days.
A programmer walk-out is way worse. The Bus Factor is a real thing. Hire a new team to replace the old one on a complex project and it'll be months or years before they start doing anything productive. Making things worse, bit-rot is real and threatens existing software with failure if complaints aren't addressed.
If everyone in my department walked out and a new team had to be hired, they'd just be screwed. There's not enough documentation and the system is pretty complicated, with bits of it hiding everywhere and a bunch of ancient code that we never got around to refactoring (especially after they laid off half our department and another half quit afterwards, without replacement).
I'm sure whenever I get a new job and resign they're going to be like 'oh shit', because there's just not anyone left to replace what I do, really (I'm the last person in the department with a good amount of knowledge on their proprietary and stupid complicated phone systems, and they've kept me too swamped to be able to do any knowledge transfer worth a damn).
And in phone systems, there's always something going wrong or down, it seems like, often network related.
>It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech.
Certain types of work-to-rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) would bring most tech companies to their knees in a matter of minutes. It wouldn't just gum up the works as it would in industry, it could literally put systems into failure states.
The amount of crap I've had to do outside of my contract to keep the business running, I totally believe it. People in the right positions doing this and you're going to have swarms of angry clients and customers in minutes.
Came up at GDC last year.[1] There's Game Workers Unite, but they haven't accomplished much.[2] The biggest success remains The Animation Guild, IATSE local 839.[3] They represent most of the Hollywood studio animators. Much of what their members do is very similar to what game industry employees do.
But they get overtime. From the IATSE contract with Disney:
"... all time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Except as otherwise herein provided: Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 ½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification."
For comparison in Japan where the animators union is non-existent or not as strong, the working condition is usually pretty rough to downright horrible.
Don't know why you're downvoted; that is exactly right.
There's nothing particularly unusual about game dev jobs or companies compared to other areas of tech (especially including startups); it's just that there are a lot of people who want to work on games. It's been that way for at least a couple of decades now.
I think people assume I'm anti-developer or anti-union, but I was just trying to remind people stuff they seem to be discounting (but already know -- nothing I said was innovative at all). It really isn't that complicated, I don't believe. :/
There are "way more" actors in the sense that there are many people who want to act for a living, but the analogy doesn't hold from an education and experience married to that desire standpoint.
Further acting is older than gaming, and those unions were given space to form during a period of time that was very different from today.
>Further acting is older than gaming, and those unions were given space to form during a period of time that was very different from today.
In the 1930s back when union organizing was likely to get you beaten by goons or assassinated by hitmen/the mob? Or in the 1940s and '50s, when active membership in the union put you at risk of getting brought up in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee and blacklisted from ever working again?
That's not at all how the film industry's unions formed or any of its history, and blackballing a statistically small number of writers was wrong, but completely unrelated to what we're talking about...
Labor movement != film industry union movement. A lot of the issues other labor movements experienced simply didn't happen nearly to the extent in film.
I suspect not. My family hosted a couple aspiring actors in LA as boarders. They left because they couldn't get enough work. There's a lot of people out there trying to break in to Hollywood.
>It'll never happen so long as there are "gamers" who want to work in the industry they "love", unfortunately.
Judging by the gamer-centric media, it seems like most of them hate the industry and most of the major companies in it. They love small developers, they love making games, they love their Twitch streamers, but they hate the companies with a burning passion.
Unfortunately, that passion often gets channeled into harassing women and minorities instead of going anywhere productive.
Part of the problem is it's too easy to just leave the industry altogether to get better working conditions, and then after a few years out you don't have the skills (or the willingness to be screwed over) to go back in.
The all too common path seems to be enter the industry for a few years, endure crap that none of your friends that do similar jobs outside of the industry endure for a lot less money, actually want to plan for the future at some point, then get a job outside of the industry, and even though you love games, you just can't go back to getting mistreated.
That was what I did, and lots of other coworkers I had, and is why the industry seems to have a huge dearth of senior talent.
So the people who would be most willing to unionize are no longer in the industry to do so.
Most US unions have been heavily neutered and de-politicized, and rarely have the ability to force management to change course. Outside the US, its not uncommon for unions to own a good share of the company, holding board seats which let it affect who manages the company, and in some cases with the business becoming entirely worker owned.
This is what I was thinking. I know a big complaint especially of the larger US unions is that they just end up mirroring the bureaucracy & power structure of management anyway
That’s not how unions get board seats in countries where they’re on the board; they don’t own significant parts of the company. They have board seats because that’s legally mandated. This can help with short and long term planning but it’s not a free lunch.
A worker owned business is either a partnership or a co-op. The forms have been around for centuries. They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.
> They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.
That logic doesn't actually follow; even if they performed equally, capital owners get more return in conventional firms (because they get all the returns, not just partial returns from lending capital), so they will favor conventional firms. So, all other things being equal, employee-owned firms have a disadvantage in access to capital and so can be expected to be less common than traditional firm unless they outperform enough to negate the return disadvantage for capital providers.
That’s a consequence of the fact that diversification is good. You don’t want your investments and your employment in the same place unless the greater productivity is enough to offset the added risk.
I don’t see any disagreement between what you wrote and I did outside of companies with explosive growth trying to dominate an industry, i.e. VC.
If your aim is to build a cooperative supermarket chain like the Coop in the U.K. banks will happily lend once you have a proven business plan. So someone does need to put up the initial capital but once you have a proven business model you’ll be able to borrow from banks and capital markets in the same way as conventional firms.
Your argument fails to address the sectors where partnerships and cooperatives dominate, law, accounting and management consulting. I’m sure there are others but the fact that every twenty years or so the Big 4 all spit out a giant services company but they don’t change their own corporate structure is suggestive that a partnership model works. And McKinsey, Bain or BCG would have no trouble accessing capital if they wanted to stop being a partnership.
Previously I've expressed my skepticism of US unions that rely heavily on seniority to determine pay and opportunity and work out very... overarching type deals that leave little room for personal advancement or even change beyond the prescribed path. The senior folks who have their seniority and refuse to change / don't have to is a real thing.
I've heard European trade unions are more flexible and are as far as technical aspects allow for more more individual progress outside of say a union / employer agreement.
To be clear, this is just what I've heard about European unions. I've had no personal experience with them.
One of the big problems in the US is that they're organized at the shop level and consituted to represent the interests of their present membership rather than the interests of the workers in the industry more broadly. This leads to some perverse, short-sighted incentives.
For example the IBEW, which organizes electrical workers, decided to come out against the Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power, in developing distributed smart grids, and generally overhauling all sorts of infrastructure to come in line with new energy efficiency regulations. But most of the IBEW members are from the incument energy companies rather than part of the new energy companies that would come to life if we kicked off a Green industrial policy. They have no interest in growing the field of electrical workers as a profession, they're focused specifically on protecting the interests of the people currently employed as electrical workers.
This feeds into a lot of criticisms people have about unions preferentially focusing on creating benefits for seniority and incumbency over actually protecting the rights and status of workers more broadly.
Yeah there very much is a preserve the status quo in US unions.
I've seen a lot of "Feel free to learn new skills" / "But no way are we going to let them be a requirement / judged for advancment because that would be bad for those with seniority who don't want to learn it...." type policies.
And if you're in a related field outside the union... you're just hosed, and unions are surprisingly not interested in growing in to closely related areas at times even if their PR says otherwise. I suspect those areas are dealt away with in the negotiations.
Well done, one of the more succinct and accurate explanations of the shortcomings of the unions I've experienced and have relayed to me (Teamsters, NEA, CWA) in the US.
Thank you. I will say though, that as a shortcoming I think this is largely a consequence of the American labor movement being so small and neutered. If they encompassed a larger share of the workforce I think the pressure from the membership would push them towards being more representative of industrial interests as a whole. But they've been on the back foot over multiple generations of retrenchment now, so the leadership has kind of been captured by insular and reflexively change-averse factions.
The unions that have actually been successful at growing their membership during this era of reaction, such as the SEIU, tend to be a lot more progressive and forward looking.
There is also an aesthetic thing at play here and the older dudes just don't like the idea of tech workers, professional workers, and "pink collar" jobs unionizing because they're not "real" workers. If we made hard-hats and tool-belts part of the standard nurse's uniform we could probably make some real strides. . .
Well you seem to have a good handle on some of the pain points with unions in the US. Hopefully the folks taking this up at Kickstarter will find a way to make up for the overall shortcomings of collective labor in this country and build a system that takes the long view. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, i learned a bit!
>Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power
Very possibly at the destruction of as many jobs in established industries. That's not really a clear win for electrical workers. This is especially true if new employers living off of the GND subsidies decides not to use the senior union members or the union at all.
> How would you qualify US style vs non-US style unions? The prevalence of business unionism here?
The big difference, which nobody seems to have mentioned here, is that unions in the US are guaranteed exclusivity by law over representing people within a bargaining unit, as well as unilateral and retroactive control over defining the bargaining unit. In practice, this means that all employees at a given company are required to be represented by the same union; they have no choice in the matter. Once the union is established, it is almost impossible to decertify it, so the union corporate structure will never feel any real pressure from the employees.
In almost every other country, employees can choose alternative representation, which means the unions are forced to compete with each other for membership, and they are not guaranteed to represent employees at that company in perpetuity. This creates a healthier and less exploitative dynamic.
Sure, but if you didn't force an exploitative monopoly by the existing unions, how would you build anti-union sentiment and drive union membership lower and lower year over year? /s
The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.
I agree that some competition could help in this matter since so many unions at this point no longer need to fairly represent their members as a whole due to their ubiquity in the industry. Also I feel that many of them are so large that they would have too many conflicting interests within the union and could be harming as many people as they help with a choice.
> The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.
Exactly - it's a stable equilibrium, where unions and employers are actually content with the status quo and don't want to cede power, but ultimately it produces a clearly suboptimal result for workers.
Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to fix this, as you said, for political reasons.
the market's not doing a good job of taking care of these people. i understand why they get paid poorly in the sense that i understand why they will accept these jobs for this pay, and why companies pay that much for the job: it's because companies can get away with it. either through unionization or legislation, we need to fix that. FB etc don't function without these people, but these people are used by that system with no regard for their welfare.
programmers and other usually direct employees of software companies can have it bad, but they usually don't have it nearly as bad as the content screeners.
> I'm not sure what could be done.
me either, really, but there are some reasonable things we can try. i don't think we should just abdicate responsibility on this because it's hard and those people don't have much power.
The problem is being treated poorly in gaming is an equilibrium market clearing outcome.
People who want to make games (or discover dinosaur bones, or paint, or do other professions that are correlated with a deep, almost-aesthetic, passion) are competing with other people just like them. Since they tend to be so passionate about these things, they bid each other down. They work just a few more hours a week without pay then the next guy, just because they would so much rather build video games than standard dev work.
And before you know it, the field is treated worse. But it's an equilibrium worse, brought about by rational agents trading off work-life balance for work-passion.
Where did you get the idea that there aren't industry-wide unions in the US? UA is, for instance, a national plumbing union, with numerous local chapters.
There's a lot of lobbying and work between the current generally anti-union situation of the US and that sort of setup. I'm quite sure the German model is the result of no small amount of work on the part of the unions.
Join the union at your job, ask why there isn't a union at your job if there isn't one, find a freelancer's union if you're not working for The Man, give some of your time/money/skills to people fighting for unions...
When I've described my experience with American unions it I hear a lot for Europeans who report their unions are far different than my experience.
The American union tradition / behavior seems quite different than what I hear about elsewhere.
I'm interested in the European systems, but very very wary of the US systems. Too many US unions are really just bureaucracies on their own, emphasize seniority for pay, advancement, and etc, and seem to limit options for workers in terms of flexibility. And to some extent american unions become their own bureaucracy serving the folks embedded in that bureaucracy. Granted for some jobs that probabbly is ok, but for technical things, I'm very wary about flexibility and etc.
My experience with American unions has been highly disappointing and I'm skeptical about their ability to handle a more technical / fast changing world.
From my experience the US workplace is much more hostile both ways. Either the employer will screw over the employees or the union will try screw the employer. At least in Germany it'a little more collaborative partially because of laws that give employees some say how the company is run.
I think the negative type stuff makes the news, but I don't think that reflects the system over all.
US unions in my experience don't so much give people say in my experience, they just make for a sort of formalize a system into an adversarial type one with union and company.
For the most part I've enjoyed working for my employers and would rather manage that relationship on my own and not have someone else run it for me.
There are situations where folks might not feel that way too I'm sure.
It's not hostile, it's professional. I advocate for my interests, you advocate for your interests, and we negotiate to find out a compromise that works for both of us. During this process, I do not worry about your interests (that's your job), and you do not worry about mine. We trust each other to take responsibility for our own interests and proceed accordingly.
I can understand why this would seem hostile to someone who isn't acculturated to it, but I don't find it hostile at all. I find it _honest_. The other side isn't pretending to care about me, and they aren't making hamfisted attempts to look out for my interests in ways that I don't like but they think I do (or should).
It's perfectly legal for a business to fire union employees. The US is an at-will country, and businesses are entitled to terminate employees for financial reasons.
Even public sector unions can't prevent terminations for financial reasons, though they negotiated no-fire clauses into their union contracts decades ago.
But also, that's what negotiation is. If the company didn't want to be occasionally held hostage, it should have included a "you can't hold us hostage" clause in its employees' work contracts, and also given them enough compensation to get them to agree with it.
But, super serious: If the union decides they will only accept a 50% raise, and the company _can't_ give it to them, what has happened several times before is that the company will cease operations of the facility that is unionized entirely, and move to a new geography where that union has no power.
Just as the union has the ability to hold the company hostage, management also has this ability. Theoretically, mass layoffs are not good for union members, and so they would not make such an obviously ridiculous demand.
However, you run in to major problems when for whatever reason the union does not think something is a ridiculous demand, when it is. Or, like I mentioned in my big comment somewhere else, if a union is representing multiple factories for one organization this can happen.
Say, hypothetically, the union for ABCTech represents ABCTech employees at two facilities, one in San Francisco and one in Seattle. Perhaps the union demands that, because the cost of living has risen so dramatically in SF, they require a 50% raise for all SF employees effective immediately. The company cannot afford this, and so they say no. The union says I don't care, fuck you, if you won't do this we won't work.
So ABCTech says well if we can't afford your contracts, we have to close up shop. They close the SF office. Every single employee there loses their job.
However, the union also represents ABCTech employees in Seattle. And now, ABCTech knows that the union is serious. They will make severe demands and not back down. This improves the unions bargaining power in the Seattle office, by sacrificing the SF office.
If you're the union, you're probably quite pleased with this state of affairs. If you're an employee of ABCTech in Seattle, doubly so. But maybe not so much if you were a (former) employee in SF
I feel like this is just your experience. As a counter-anecdote I spent a bit of time in the Teamsters in the 90's and it got very hostile and extremely unprofessional. There was zero material communication with management and any influence on the part of the union as a $9/hr entry level employee was equally zero. The scab situation was super dicey as well, and while there was clearly no official support for 'extracurricular' enforcement, there was enough of a question about what would happen that you didn't really want to test it.
It doesn't seem like a lot of folks commenting here have direct experience with working in unions in the US. They have done great things in the past and I feel like they are a necessity in industries where individual employees regularly face decisions that affect the physical safety of others or themselves. However, in my experience and in the experience of family members (CWA/NEA), unions in practice fall far short of the promise they hold in theory. User
naravara has some pretty insightful comments elsewhere in this thread that i feel get to the meat of the matter and why there might be a disconnect on opinions between those in the US and those elsewhere.
All that said I do applaud the folks working at Kickstarter for trying this out. Maybe they will figure out a way to make a functional apparatus that ensures a positive work environment while minimizing the coddling of parasites and negative impact on Kickstarter's ability to execute, but it's going to be a struggle.
The German model is explicitly illegal in the US. I cannot explain why, but I saw a guy on reddit once break down why German unions are great, US unions are terrible, and why the US can never have German unions
I know a German SE who was senior and had a good job in Germany. He moved to the US and his total comp went up something like 5x (at a company with good benefits, work life balance, etc).
I feel so confused by the large negative reaction to this thread.
The unions in other countries have done great things for workers. In Germany, most employed individuals get 6 weeks of vacation and 35 to 40 hour a week contracts.
People are scared they're salary is going to go down the hole for some reason. A tech union can exist with pay scales that match current peoples compensation.
Articles like this really put into perspective how strong the American perspective is here.
I'm one of the software engineers who was fired for organizing a union at a SF/DC based startup last year. The National Labor Relations Board found in our favor and we won a large cash settlement. But what we wanted was a union. Seeing others pick up the torch is extremely gratifying. Below are some links to news coverage of our case.
Here's an interesting question: The NLRB says you can't fire someone for union organizing, but does it say you can't refuse to hire someone for union organizing?
Yes. A friend of mine in college (who had the highest LSAT score of anyone I knew, and went on to become a lawyer) joked that his strategy would be to announce during an interview that he planned to organize, and if he didn't get the job that he would sue them on the grounds that they rejected him for this.
Right, but that's on the same grounds as refusing to hire someone because they're black/Muslim/some other minority of some sorts. Becomes very hard to prove.
We were all fired in late January. I was the only worker to go on record with my real name before finding another job. I had several offers in February an was sitting at a new desk for a job that paid about $10k more by mid-March. Those who had had less experience prior to the job we were fired from had a harder time getting re-employed.
Software employers are not yet collaborating to avoid unions, as employers associations in other sectors have historically. There is not yet an organized blacklist for outspoken activists.
Unions are certified by card check or secret ballot. In either case, no future employer will ever know whether you supported unionization in a former job. You will always have plausible deniability, and its illegal to ask outright.
$775k for 15 people especially SF based I wouldn't exactly call that a large cash settlement considering what happened, rep damage, time to find new work, etc.
Just had expectations of at least a year salary per person.
It was approximately $20k per person and the difference between the wages they earned after being fired and the wages they would have earned had they not been fired. Some of my coworkers did end up getting substantial amounts of backpay.
But your point stands: this is a weak remedy, and completely out of line with international norms.
It must have set them back months, if not years. Strange culture where unionization is viewed as a worse alternative than letting go of the majority of your technical know-how.
Two questions:
Why are tech company staff wanting to unionize? For the most part, aren't tech staff reasonably to well paid - with good working conditions and moderate hour expectations (say 40-50)?
Management has the right at a workplace to make any decisions, whether someone in non-management sees fit. Can't people who are frustrated with the company just go pursue a position elsewhere?
Because work conditions are not as you describe universally, and management’s rights are what we grant them through regulation. Management has excessive power in the US, hence efforts to rein it in.
Historically, management (factory owners) was dragged into the streets and beaten to death (yikes) when excessive inequality was reached. This is an improvement (and hopefully management would see the benefit of treating labor as a partner, not a resource to be consumed).
Why not take power that is available to you? Management certainly exercises every bit of power that they are able to.
The relationship between a company's stockholders and a company's employees is part competitive and part collaborative. Ignore either at your own peril.
I see your point but at the same time this can create an adversarial dynamic between managers and junior employees, which is toxic even if junior employees get what they want.
>Management certainly exercises every bit of power that they are able to.
I'm a manager and my proudest moments have been those of restraint, not force. Regardless of whether or not unions can and should be formed, organizations with employees feeling compelled to unionize should be hiring better managers.
"organizations with employees feeling compelled to unionize should be hiring better managers."
This is a fantastic observation - and I believe it holds true. I've been in some very demanding technology roles, long hours, with competitive peers. A great leader is worth much more than some Union would have been (anecdotally).
This is true, but my personal support for collective organizing stems from a belief that there's a material constraint on the "quality" of managers, and we can effectively surpass that upper limit only through collective action.
> Why not take power that is available to you? Management certainly exercises every bit of power that they are able to.
This isn't true. Management only exercises every bit of power once the relationship becomes hostile. There are tons of things management could do to me to make their jobs easier (e.g. standups twice a day at 8am and 4:45pm with mandatory, in-person attendance) that they don't leverage.
Unionizing when there isn't already a hostile relationship is sure a way to bring hostility into it.
Right this minute? Yes, tech employees are better off in a lot of areas than say Amazon warehouse employees, but there's nothing saying that in 10 years the market won't be saturated and people won't be pressured into working 60-80 hours a week (which they already are at a lot of the huge firms).
It would be better to solidify these things before the industry takes a nose dive.
Not a popular opinion, but these are usually non CS types that have flooded the fields later due to money. Not very skilled, but very entitled. The sense of entitlement is very ridiculous these days. I see folks outside the Bay asking why shouldn't they get paid the same as Bay area folks, when they want to remote from somewhere that has 1/3rd the cost of living. Or people outside the country with 1/10th the cost of living wanting USD rates. ... or literally "coders" who just know how to plumb software and build a basic CRUD wanting compensation that's on par with FAANG level. The world has lost it's damn mind and all I can do is SMH and watch with a grin.
> I see folks outside the Bay asking why shouldn't they get paid the same as Bay area folks, when they want to remote from somewhere that has 1/3rd the cost of living.
Well, why shouldn't they? It's not like the company magically has more money available when they hire a non-remote employee, is it?
Unionization has nothing to do with wages reflecting skills or living costs. Also, your anti-entitlement rant, ironically, gives off a strong scent of entitlement.
>I see folks outside the Bay asking why shouldn't they get paid the same as Bay area folks
Pay has nothing to do with cost of living. That's a lie told by companies as a negotiating tactic. You don't magically make the company more money by being in the bay area.
Pay has a ton to do with the cost of living, because salary is the lowest amount you can offer while still enticing people to work for you - I'm not saying penny pinch every dollar, but business is not charity. You don't magically make the company more money by being in the bay area, but hiring in the bay area gives the company an advantage (or else they wouldn't do it) and they are willing to pay extra for that advantage.
>>salary is the lowest amount you can offer while still enticing people to work for you
>> business is not charity
And this is why unions exist. Even if managers try to be nice, even if the company gives out buckets of benefits and pays a living wage, this is the adversarial thought that exists in business currently. Management wants to pay the lowest they can, because that helps the business the most. They want to spend the least amount possible because that's the correct business choice.
Management/Ownership and Employees are frequently at odds when it comes to their goals, and changing the math from "me vs the company" to "the union vs the company" is a huge boon for employees.
"You mentioned that the letter to management listed your grievances. Some people find the idea of a tech workers union implausible, because they find it hard to believe that tech workers could have grievances in the first place. After all, software engineers are relatively well paid. What’s your perspective on that?"
"People didn’t even want that much more time off, or that much more time not on call. They just wanted to know where they stood. They didn’t want to have to engage in highly personalized bargaining all the time. It wasn’t that there were rules that favored management — there were simply no rules, and this ambiguity worked in management’s favor."
In the uk its relatively well paid but much less than say a train driver is the average dev in London earns less than a train driver gets for a four day week an they have over time and a DB pension.
This is so important. Just because you're being paid well, doesn't mean you're being paid what you deserve. As stupid as it might sound, there are underpaid multi-millionaire pro athletes relative to the value they create for their company. I bring this up because the sports unions are a great example of what white collar unions could look like. Setting minimums, handling grievances, and specifying what things can and cannot be foisted on their members. These guys still sign their own contracts and superstar performers (the "rock star coders" of the sports world) are still able to get the money they feel they deserve by negotiating independently.
> Management has the right at a workplace to make any decisions, whether someone in non-management sees fit.
What?
There is no constitutional right for management to make decisions. Management are people with certain forms of influence over the company; workers are other people with other forms of influence over the company.
The only way in which there's a "right" is "might makes right" - that management, when they want to make a decision, can force that decision to happen, and workers can't. The point of a union is to change this calculus. If the workers say, do what we want or we'll leave, there's no question of whether they have the "right" to say that. They have the power. The question is whether it's socially acceptable for workers to say they have that power.
Some are. You're probably imagining some Python engineer who is making $140k and can work normal hours, drink craft beer and take advantage of "unlimited time off" policies and such.
Think about operations staff who are doing mission critical work, like discovering and removing spam clusters. People like that often make an hourly wage, often are expected to pick up extra volume as a company grows, and are often the target of layoffs and wage controls because they are considered "variable cost" not "overhead".
Also think about people doing traditionally woman's jobs, like customer support or office support. These people make or break customer relationships, make or break team dynamics, or set the bar for content quality. But senior people on those teams often make less than junior engineers right out of school, because companies can exploit the popular idea that these kinds of workers are just less important.
Even coders, especially in production-based industries like video games or special effects, can work under semi-abusive conditions. Many of these firms dramatically staff up and down cyclically which gives employees little bargaining power.
The official reason listed is to "promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table" and Kickstarter describes itself as a "Public-benefit corporation".
So it comes off as just the usual lefty political signalling, not the start of a real movement.
It's a ton of work to start a union, one that can and has absolutely cost people their jobs, both historically and recently. It seems unlikely that it's just "lefty political signalling". Perhaps you can point to specific reasons why you think this is the case?
Furthermore, articles published on this topic indicate that their motivations included well-established and reasonable on-call hours, slightly more vacation days, and more collaborative decision making with management. All of those are real, tangible benefits that most of us would value and enjoy.
I’m not really pro-union (though I used to be unabashedly anti-union), but wanted to let you know that I appreciate your courage to fight for what you believe is right.
I’m a little annoyed that using the word courage made me twitch for a second because of how much “bravery” and “courage” everyone is getting commended for these days, but I think you’re an example of what every day courage can look like.
You knew what the repercussions could be, I doubt you were so independently wealthy that losing your salary meant little, and you publicly stood for what you believe in for the greater good of those around you.
Even after all the crap you’ve probably had to deal with, I hope you feel positively about your efforts.
Time and perspective are a funny thing... Coming up as young adult and professional engineer I saw unions as a relic that definitely served for positive change (way back in dinosaur times), grew fat and complacent (if not even complicit), and did more harm to the market in general than they did to benefit their members today.
Now I site here (still relatively young, thank you) at 37 with young family, having co-founded a company that employs dozens, losing sleep over how much things like health insurance cost for my employees, and my stance on unions has softened up quite a bit.
Markets and investors have perverted corporate incentives to a degree that moral leadership can be considered downright mismanagement. I’ve heard managers and other founders complain that “if I pay to train them, they’re just going to walk out the door”, etc. My little sister is in year 3 of her software development career and I can’t believe some of the crap I have had to tell her to watch out for, or worse, how to handle as it’s happening to her.
I read about things like the IBM layoffs of “old” workers, then see people I used to work with struggle to get hired (totally not because of their age, of course!) when I know how capable they are and my blood boils.
I still don’t know if unions are the answer. Maybe they’re part of it, but I believe we’ve got a generation (or two) of spineless and/or immoral corporate leadership to survive before things get back on the right track.
Kickstarter was founded as a public benefit corporation, so they've always been friendly towards social consciousness. Are there any other tech companies that are PBCs or worker co-ops?
I have long thought crowdfunding is ripe for disruption. We should not need a middleman to send people money over the internet. It can be accomplished via a smart contract and creator listings could be self-hosted (think openbazaar). It could also fix the censorship issue inherit to these platforms.
With Patreon raising prices and now this, maybe someone will crowdfund an alternative.
It would use a cryptocurrency of course and probably a stablecoin. That means there's a blockchain somewhere along the line although crowdfunding would be an excellent use case for lightning-style payment channels to compress fees. If you pay a recurring fee every month then that's 12 fees a year. With payment channels we can reduce it to 2 - the fee to open the channel and the fee to close it.
I don't know how unions work in the US, but most unions in the UK fund a single political party, which means you could be forced to pay to support a party with views you find abhorrent in order to work, so I hope not.
The Labour party (the official Opposition party, and the previous ruling party) has very strong links to trade unions in the UK. The current ruling party, the Conservatives, introduced new law in this area:
At least you have a vote in the union, unlike when your employer decides to use the products of your labor to lobby for policies or support parties you find abhorrent.
It's not just the levy - the paid officers of the union could still be working to support Labour Party activities, speaking in your name and spending your dues, couldn't they?
As you can see, there's a massive amount of political spending by unions, and it's almost completely on one side. The "right to work" laws which are so demonized do at least provide one huge advantage: people are no longer forced to contribute to a political campaign which they do not wish to support. There has been court ruling around this area in the past few years, but it was a problem for a long time and, to an extent, remains one.
This is exactly the problem. Many of the unions I mentioned above are such ones, where in many places, you must be a member if you work in an industry. They are less unions and more guilds.
Let's say you are a carpenter, a skilled trade you have likely spent a large number of years learning. It's quite hard to leave the union, because you will be forced to move to a different profession. This obviously isn't right. Unions can serve a purpose for collective bargaining; I think most agree on that. But they don't need to support political parties.
It seems that some unions have shifted from representing employees in negotiations to representing a profession in all respects. I believe that's contrary to their original purpose and dilutes both their support and their credibility as simply advocating for the worker.
What do you do when all the best-paying companies in your industry lobby for things you don't like, leaving you few, poor, options for employment? If we must solve this problem for unions, it's surely at least as important to solve it for companies.
It's illegal, so's the similar "union shop", and you can opt out such that you still pay dues but they may only go toward collective bargaining activities and services to members, which appears to solve this "I'm being forced to support the only viable political party that wants to make anything whatsoever better" problem. Maybe leaving others, sure, but this issue's... not an issue. Unlike employers. I can't sign a piece of paper banning them from using profit derived from my labor for political activity.
> What do you do when all the best-paying companies in your industry lobby for things you don't like, leaving you few, poor, options for employment? If we must solve this problem for unions, it's surely at least as important to solve it for companies.
But the thousands of companies I could work for have healthy competition and diversity of approach to issues. An industry-wide union has no competition and no diversity.
> Maybe leaving others, sure, but this issue's... not an issue.
Say you were a Green supporter, and had a strong conviction against military intervention. How would you feel funding a union leadership that campaigns for Labour, following Iraq?
Kickstarter's in the US, no? Did you check out that WP link? I don't mean this as a "did you even read the article" jab, but you mention Labour, but this is about the US and the laws in the US mandate that those working under union labor agreements may be required to pay dues, yes, but may also be allowed to (effectively) specify that their funds may not go toward (most forms of) political spending, but only bargaining and member services.
Money is fungible; every dollar they get from you for bargaining and services, is a dollar they don't have to spend from other members, and can allocate to political lobbying.
> "I'm being forced to support the only viable political party that wants to make anything whatsoever better"
Wow, I can tell you evaluate statements in an unbiased manner. What happens when you realize the idea of "better" turns out to depend on some pretty big assumptions that you no longer believe are true? Additionally, if the only two "viable" political parties are abhorrent like the ones in the US, giving any money to either of them is still morally fucked up if you truly disagree with them and vote 3rd party.
Wasn't trying to be unbiased there and it's not especially relevant to the broader point—I just find the "I want to be free to keep punching myself in the face!" POV funny and couldn't resist a poke. As for evaluating statements, I evaluate everything with bias, of course. FWIW I'm pretty much single-issue on fixing our healthcare system until that's done, and only one viable party's even sort-of trying to do that. Anyway, the post that started this thread was written by one "mises" so I'm not worried about ruffling feathers—that was inevitable.
At any rate, the two-party thing's how our (the US's) system's structured. It stabilizes there. A third party replacing one of the big two, as has happened occasionally in the past, would assuredly acquire a good bit of distasteful cruft along the way. Effective political action revolves around trying to help a 3rd party replace one of them despite that likely outcome (and accepting an even smaller voice in policy than most voters have, in the meantime); participation in one of the big two parties themselves (much, much large effect than just voting in elections, though still usually tiny); or working to reform our system to break the two-party stability point. Or some combination of those things.
So let's say the far-left carpenters union is the one to successfully negotiate with an employer. I belong to a centrist union. Now what? Do I go against my political and personal beliefs or do I suffer because of them?
Much worse. They collect dues, which ostensibly are to support what's going on where you work, and then just funnel it to politicians. So, it's your money going to political campaigns. If a company owner or corp funds a campaign, at least they're doing it with their own money.
Corporations aren't people. They don't have "their own money". They have the money their employees generated. I spend 40 hours a week working for someone to create value greater than my salary. They then use this money for all sorts of things (shareholder payouts, acquisitions, political activities). T
You get upset that tenants are subsidizing a landlord's political spending without a say? Any time you give money to anyone else for any purpose, for that matter? And "their money" comes from your labor (plus their capital, in some share, yes) as surely as "your money" does. This is a way less clear-cut distinction than you're making it out to be, and may not be relevant anyway:
> This is a way less clear-cut distinction than you're making it out to be
It really isn't. I think we can all make arguments as to why we're justified in taking from others, but that doesn't change the reality of what is happening.
> may not be relevant anyway:
AFAIK this means only public sector non-union employees cannot be forced to pay for unions' political activities. Private sector employees are still on the hook. Unless there's something else you're trying to draw attention to.
> AFAIK this means only public sector non-union employees cannot be forced to pay for unions' political activities. Private sector employees are still on the hook. Unless there's something else you're trying to draw attention to.
I'll pick out the part I think's most relevant, since yeah, that's a big ol' wall of text.
"Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), as amended by the Taft-Hartley Act, and held by the Supreme Court in Communications Workers of America v. Beck that in a union security agreement, unions are authorized by statute to collect from non-members only those fees and dues necessary to perform its duties as a collective bargaining representative known as agency fees.[12]"
Collect fees? Yes. Spend those fees on political activities, if you're a non-member? No. Unless I'm misreading this. The public unions bit comes next and says that public sector unions can't even collect the agency fees from non-union members, which is a step farther and into union-busting territory. The original point was that union fees amount to compelled political speech, though (again, so does your company spending on politics, assuming they're making money off you even in an abstract way, but whatever) and this seems to make that moot, best I can tell. If that's wrong I'd like to know—I don't get off on going around spreading incorrect info.
I've been known to boycott companies for political actions I don't like. It is much easier to boycott when there is an option down the street that is otherwise equal.
Switching jobs is harder: could you be working for a different company tomorrow, or would it take a few weeks to figure out. Switching unions is often impossible: the same union often covers everyone with the same skills.
In many cases the controlling interests are index and pension funds. Members of these funds do not get a say in political donations. Corporations are people spending other people's money with little consequence all the way down.
You're kind of burying the lede here by saying "Completely correct" and ending with "There has been court ruling around this area in the past few years". Haven't workers under a union been able to opt out of political giving since Abood in 1977? And public workers have been able to completely free ride since Janus
Speaking of Carpenters & Joiners, the article makes this claim:
> If recognized, Kickstarter would be the first major tech company with union representation in the United States.
But that's not correct. Engineers at Hughes Aircraft, including programmers, were unionized and represented by Local 1553 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. I think Hughes counts as a major tech company. Local 1553 also represents electronics and space engineers at other aerospace companies.
How did a carpenter's union end up representing engineers whose work had nothing to do with wood? Briefly, in the 1940s when Hughes built the Spruce Goose, a huge plane built almost entirely out of wood, they hired a lot of union carpenters. After the Spruce Goose was cancelled, many of those carpenters stayed on doing other work at Hughes, and kept their union. More history of 1553 here [1].
If you're management you won't be part of the union. As a non-manager person it's generally more complex. Often, non-union employees will work under the collective bargaining agreement and still have to pay union dues. At that point, you might as well join the union as you'll get other protections then.
I don't think that's how unions work unless the company has agreed to that in collective bargaining.
I think it's more like you join a company, and there is a set RoE for both the company and the union to talk to you about the union, and joining the union as an individual is usually, politics aside, a strong option because of all the extra benefits and protections union workers receive.
If you want to work at a company there are lots of aspects of corporate culture and working environments that you have to accept if you want to work there. Presumably if you don't want to work in a union shop... you won't?
And to put another way: would it be reasonable for you to benefit from the work the union does for all employees without also contributing to that union?
All this is besides the point that requiring employees to join the union is a decision the _employer_ would have to make (although probably through union pressure).
> would it be reasonable for you to benefit from the work the union does for all employees without also contributing to that union?
If I never asked for the union or their collective bargaining, then yes. It's like cleaning my windows when I never asked you to and then demanding cash for it.
Moreover, is a free software developer elsewhere in the world, supplying a free operating system, compiler, web server, ... to these workers considered a honorary member of the union?
I work under a union (though not this one). Every comment here is almost exactly backwards from my experience. In particular:
- You don't have to be a union member to get nearly all the benefits of the union -- including the pay scale from its collective bargaining, access to legal representation, health insurance benefits, and being able to attend regular union meetings. Basically, the only thing a non-member can't do is vote. (I see on our worker list today that fewer than half of our workforce today are actually union members.)
- Legally, they can't even require members to pay dues, though I imagine everyone here does, because it's inexpensive, and benefits all workers, including yourself. That's why one would vote to unionize in the first place!
These rules can and almost certainly do differ according to your union, local, contract, and state and federal law.
Unless someone responding here has specific knowledge of OPEIU, Local 153, their Kickstarter contract, or New York labor law, I would not place any trust in it. Many of these answers sound more like anti-union FUD than facts from the Kickstarter United contract.
The way I heard it best explained is no one would try to start a union if it made them less money.
Better pay and benefits - my maximum out of pocket was lower than most deductibles. Democratizes the workplace - really helps keep management in check. You get real job security - firing is much less arbitrary with a steward fighting for you.
However, if people aren't active in union elections, bargaining etc. it can get really stale really fast
Software developers are so "in demand" right now, it seems like it would be better to not become a union worker and instead just shop around. It's really a sellers market for talent.
Pay by seniority is a thing that developers keep bringing up and not understanding the basic concept that seniority-based pay is a decision that unions can adopt or reject.
Hollywood unions, for example, do not use a seniority-based pay scale.
If there’s an industry-wide closed-shop union and it votes for seniority pay then I’m out of luck. It’s replacing tyranny of the employer with tyranny of the majority.
Closed-shop unions are illegal in the US, for starters, so you can't have a closed-shop industry-wide union.
The only industry-wide unions that exist set workplace protections and salary floors but no salary caps...and no indutry-wide union has ever embraced seniority-based pay because, being an industry-wide union, that regime wouldn't work across the very different economic environments of 50 states and their thousands of cities.
As I understand it, when a company unionizes, there are three main ways that you as an employee are impacted:
1. You are required to pay a certain amount (either percentage or flat fee, I'm not sure) of your paycheque into a new political organization, the union
2. You are entitled to periodically vote on the who to elect to leadership of the union
3. The leadership of the union represents the entirety of the staff at the company in any and all negotiations and disputes with management. The leadership of the union will engage in collective bargaining with management, establishing a single working contract that encompasses every employee<->employer relationship in the company.
So, right now, in a non-unionized company, if you go to work there, you and the company negotiate a contract which is the terms of your working relationship. Frequently, the company will dictate the terms of the contract and then you will exercise some marginal negotiation power regarding, say, pay or vacation time or whatever, although (especially for specialists and highly paid staff) these are far more open to negotiation, generally, than people think.
When you do this, this is a private relationship between you and your employer. Your coworkers are not involved. They have their own private individual relationships with the employer that have nothing to do with yours. Their contracts could be radically different from yours. That's between them and the company.
What a union does is get in between you and the employer, and collectivizes all of those individual negotiations into one larger, general negotiation. So now, instead of you negotiating a private contract with the employer, the union will negotiate a general contract that applies to _all_ staff, and then you will sign that contract.
The main argument in favour of unions like this is that by collectivizing the bargaining, it gives them negotiation power. So imagine, for instance, that you are getting a job at Google. As an individual, if you don't like the contract Google is giving you, you can demand dramatic changes to it. And then Google will laugh at you, spit in your face, and kick your ass out the door, because they're one of the richest corporations on the planet and you dare to think that _you_ can dictate terms to _them_? But, if the staff at Google were unionized, suddenly it's different. Suddenly, when the union pushes back on Google and demands drastic changes, Google has to negotiate in good faith. This is because the union represents _all_ of the employees; if the union threatens to walk away from the negotiation, then _all_ of Googles employees stop working. Google might be able to kick any individual out the door, but if the entirety of Google's staff stops working suddenly there are massive problems.
So why might you not want a union? Well, there's a few reasons. One might be obvious from the previous paragraph. Say you are quite happy with your current job at Google, but some of the unions _other_ members are unhappy and are demanding change. Eventually, negotiations come to an impasse. The union threatens to walk away. If they do that, you _must_ stop working. The fact that you are quite happy with your job doesn't matter. You are bound by their collective agreement, and they just suspended their collective agreement.
More generally, unions take a distributed, private, individual process and turn it into a politicized, public, collective process. This can reduce the company's flexibility to make different arrangements with different groups of people, and if you are someone who benefits from such a different arrangement you might rationally be opposed to this. Additionally, if you are someone who is heavily skeptical of the ability of political processes to make effective decisions, you might not want a board of elected union activists making decisions on your behalf.
Unions also cost money. I admit I don't know how much they cost; for all I know it's $5 per paycheque. But fees can be substa...
It's disappointing that this comment got zero replies aside from this one, I would love to see detractors' responses to it and get an actual discussion going
Pretty much nailed it on the head here. The biggest issue with unions in tech is that life is pretty good - it's a workers market right now. Why would I give up my strong negotiating position (albeit as a pampered company pawn) to be a union pawn where my negotiating power as an individual is very limited?
The one thing you didn't touch on too much is the efficiency of decision making by hierarchical management vs the efficiency of decision making by committee. This is already sometimes painful with processes like Scrum and unions would probably make it worse. The process of negotiating, suing and setting binding legal precedent is so tedious - it can seriously damage companies' ability to move quickly.
Plus unions are pretty dated. I have very little confidence that legal precedent around unions would work well in the modern global world.
I don't claim to be an authoritative source, but from my experience as a unionized employee at a university
Pros (mostly the employees perspective):
- Greatly increased negotiating power (We all got paid way more than I expect we would have if we weren't unionized)
- Pooling of resources to acquire shared resources (e.g. labor lawyers)
- Generally the ability to appeal decisions like "you're fired"
- Selling point when hiring (since unionized tech companies are rather rare, and everyone claims it's hard to attract talent, I'd expect this to be valuable to the company)
Cons:
- That increased negotiating power is wielded by people you often don't quite agree with.
- It's more bureaucracy, which means more inefficiency
- Generally less ability to negotiate for yourself
- While job security for yourself is obviously a feature, job security for under-performing colleagues can actually really suck. Working with, and fixing the messes made by people who just don't care is not fun.
Prediction: if whoever is leading the charge is even moderately successful in getting employees to rally, they will be offered in job in management (at Kickstarter or somewhere else) at twice their current pay and the whole thing will crumble.
Is anyone aware of an example where (a) a really small company unionized and/or (b) a workforce unionized without any real demands?
I run a 17 person company and I've heard employees mention that they think all companies should be unionized even if there aren't currently any problems that the union would seek to address. I strongly support the big tech companies unionizing and so it would be hypocritical of me to be opposed to it for my own company, but at the same time it seems like the overhead for such a small company would be really significant and I'm not sure what it would accomplish given that I'm not aware of current employees having any demands that we haven't satisfied already.
Even if nothing comes of it, I think it's an interesting thought experiment.
I think in that case the value of unionization might not be in the present but instead guarding against future problems that the union would seek to fight against. It is much easier to proactively organize, and then keep those problems out, then to try to organize and fight after they already are present.
I'll admit I'm not very knowledgeable about the logistics of unions, but I imagine there's some kind of up-front legal overhead. Like, maybe there are contracts between the union and the company, or within the union itself to determine how it's governed? I also get the impression there is some overhead in an ongoing basis in the form of extra meetings, more complicated negotiations, etc.
All of those things seem like relatively minor costs when spread out across a large employee base, but I could see it being prohibitive for a smaller company. Or maybe this is a solved problem and you can just find some boilerplate stuff online that takes care of the whole process.
It seems your mis-understanding what a union is, the union will talk with management, forming an agreement as to what the pay scales are, how much paid leave is given at minimum, and escalation processes like grieving an issue when management does shitty things to the workers.
The "overhead" you speak of is to pay someone to negotiate on the workers behalf, save up for a strike stipend, and provide worker training (usually Unions will run or subsidize courses to help workers skill up, get licensed, etc).
Not as well as I'd like which is why I'm asking about this. I meant this as a discussion starter about unions at smaller companies, so even if I'm not the one paying the overhead, it's still relevant to the topic of whether or not a union makes sense.
It's a very important mechanism to have even if you have 2 employees. Being able to collectively bargain empowers workers at companies at any size, and mitigates retaliation that could happen to individual workers who attempt to bring up grievances.
Software developers are a far cry from auto workers or even teachers. Its interesting to see the differences between early SV startups 10-15 years ago that would brag about the benefits of working for them and now. Things like ping pong tables, free dry cleaning, and daycare would be things people would go out of their way for years ago.
Can someone explain what the Kickstarter employee's hope to gain? “promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table,” sounds very left wing in an already left wing company in a left wing area.
It will be interesting to see what this does for developer salaries at Kickstarter. If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me. For unions in our industry to work they are going to have to be very explicit about how they are going to raise developer salaries.
Salaries aren't the only thing unions are good for. I'd be very interested in a job that had cast-iron guarantees about working hours, on-duty overtime, no open offices, stuff like that.
Why can you not ask for those things directly for the company you want to work for? I’m not getting my office? no thank you. I have to be on page duty in the middle of the night? No thank you. There are companies that offer all those maybe you sacrifice salary a bit. Someone has to pay the cost, I don’t think unions magically can give you the same salary or more at the same time you getting everything you wish for above. And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia.
As someone who has pushed back against on-call overreach, all it achieved was a negative remark on my next performance review. The company attempted to make an "intermediate-severity" class of incident, where on-call workers were required to respond between the hours of 8 am and midnight (the next-lowest severity required response only during business hours, and the next-highest required 24 hour response - both reasonable if applied reasonably). Of course this new severity class was instantly abused to enact permanent crunch time. Even my humble suggestion of changing it from 9 am to 11 pm so I could have time for 8 hours of sleep with buffer time on each end was shot down.
Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
> Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table.
What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
Many workers putting their labor on the table is a much, much stronger negotiating position than a single worker putting their labor on the table. This is the entire thesis of unions.
I am asking whether it is legitimate or not, I can't help but think how incredibly well it also applies to gangs when I hear that argument.
If more money is paid to individual employees just because they demanded the added cost to the employer makes them inherently less competitive and therefore able to earn less and therefore pay said employees lower wages over time or go out of business.
It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally?
The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Any money not going to the workers ought to be justified, rather than the negation. So to turn the question around: why are management & shareholders entitled to such a large share of what the workers produce? The answer is because management & shareholders are more powerful than any single worker, and this is abused to take more than their share. No moral justification is given or even considered. To unionize is to relatively equalize this power relation.
> It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally?
I mean is it rational.
> The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work.
Completely disagree. I believe most of the value of a company is created by the vision of its founding team and the execution of its leadership not the numerous workers along the hierarchy. I also think the 80-20 rule maybe a good way to identify how much value creation should be attributed to a group of workers ie on average most likely 80% of the value is created by 20% of workers.
What you mean by "execution of its leadership" is... telling other people to do the actual work. There's a term for startups where leaders mill around but no actual work is done, it's called playing house: http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html
...what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor?
It's as if we're rediscovering the stated purpose of unions, right here in this thread! The union can negotiate with everyone's labor, not just that of an individual worker.
I understand the stated purpose. Why should an individual benefit from the abilities of others just because he/she happens to belong to the same community? I think if we can ask the question in its most basic form, which is what I am trying to do, it may be clarifying.
Leverage. As an individual, the response of the company is likely to be "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." If hundreds of people are saying the same thing, we're in a better negotiating position.
It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
> "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands."
So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
Capitalism is definitely working as intended; I'm not disputing that. But there are two catches:
1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that.
2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
> And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia.
Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism?
The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request.
But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
> Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism?
I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes.
> But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices
Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.
What about unions do you think magically makes it impossible to fire someone who isn't doing the required work? The only thing that changes is you have to actually do the requisite paperwork and monitoring to validate that you're firing them with cause instead of for arbitrary reasons and pretending it's with cause. The "we can't fire someone who is honestly slacking" is just as much a consequence of bad bookkeeping and administration from the management.
Just a quick question... But do you have any personal experience with the UAW (United Auto Workers Union)? Because while on it's face, I'd agree with your comment... but in experience I've seen things closer to what the other guy was implying.
It is exceptionally hard to measure work done by knowledge workers. Which makes is extremely hard to get enough hard documentation to fire them. In the vast majority of cases, you slowly realize they are no good and then you have to sink a bunch of time into organizing their work in a way that makes their underperformance measurable.
raises hand
I see my job to be a human-shield whose sole purpose is to try to ensure something worthwhile gets done by the collective.
No shortage of smart-people. Tricky bit is keeping them pointing vaguely in the right direction and ensuring nobody upsets/interrupts them.
I'll fight my/their corner, but accept I may be wrong/out-of-my-depth if you can tell me why. Until then, I just soak up the grief.
Biggest turn-off - people who think personal excellence in one area is infinitely transferable.
I wouldn't consider myself a top performer. Though I'd expect I'd become one at a place that had a union ensuring low performers got accumulated at the company.
This is a problem everywhere, but it is worse when you are stuck with unionized employees. Compare public school teachers to private school teachers. Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).
I'm up in Canada where the teaching unions are actually pretty strong and the teachers are well compensated, but in the US teacher salaries are legendarily poor given the expectations placed on them and the importance of their job.
In fact, due to the extremely low salaries in either private or public schools many people who would consider teaching end up in different fields... _that_ is what is driving down the quality.
I'm interested in that also. I don't really see how you can compare public and private education without looking at class and the ability for the private school to select students. At the very least private school students have parents who can and will spend a significant amount of money on their kids education.
Look up rubber rooming in NY schools. Basically, they can't fire teachers with tenure (which they get relatively quickly compared to eg college professor tenure) for even gross misconduct, so they end up paying them to sit in a room doing nothing. If there isn't enough budget, they have to lay off newer teachers, even if they're doing well.
> Although teachers are now being charged more quickly, it still takes several years to complete the hearing process and for the arbitrator to render a decision.
So they get stood down until they've had a misconduct hearing, that seems fair, we don't want to ruin careers on allegations alone.
> In June 2012 it was revealed that the New York State Education Department had not paid its arbitrators for several years, and collectively owed them millions of dollars for cases they had completed, or were in the process of hearing. In frustration, ten of the 24 arbitrators on the New York City panel have quit, while the remaining 14 refuse to hear any testimony or issue any decisions until their back wages have been paid in full.
This is a massive administrative failure, I don't know why your blaming unions.
I'm not blaming them for the number of people in those rubber rooms or for the terrible administration of that school district. I am blaming them for how hard it is to fire a teacher the administration doesn't want, for whatever reason, to the point where new, exceptional teachers are being let go because they have to keep around older teachers with tenure who are phoning it in. That drags down the average quality of teaching in the US.
That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.
EDIT: I should also note that NYC public schools are an incredibly challenging teaching environment, a lot of false accusations fly around, and I don't mean that all the teachers in the rubber rooms should be let go. I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.
> I am blaming them for how hard it is to fire a teacher the administration doesn't want, for whatever reason, to the point where new, exceptional teachers are being let go because they have to keep around older teachers with tenure who are phoning it in.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but is there any evidence that it is a huge problem and not isolated cases?
> That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.
The problem is not having a way to quantify what a good teacher is. Is it the one that imparts a love of learning on there students or the one that gets better test results? Is it the one in the wealthy area or the one in the poor area where kids aren't even being fed? If the students do poorly is it the teachers fault or did a teacher in a previous year skip crucial topics?
Paying good teachers more isn't possible until you can identify good teachers.
> I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.
Well there I agree, it should at least be very rare. It does sound strange to me, I don't think it's a thing in my country and even in academia tenure isn't as strong.
Sadly, I've only heard anecdotal evidence from young teachers I know, and maybe some reading I've done in the past, so I don't have any sources on hand to point to, and maybe it's isolated rather than endemic.
You're right that it's hard to quantify whether someone is a good teacher or not, but I don't think it's impossible to judge. It's probably impossible to make it a simple succinct rubric, though. Maybe it's a challenge for a universal function approximator like a neural net :-)
You sure it's the unions and not the fact that private schools get to cream-skim children from families with means who want to prioritize their education rather than being forced to take all comers?
> Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).
Mandated by government and paid for with taxes seems to be part of the equation too. I'm not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing.
However, if a regular business ended up being forced into a situation where they had to overpay underperformers, they'd go out of business, probably for the better(?).
And on the rare occasions they do recognize an above-average contributor, they're likley to overburden them with all the stressful and difficult work until they burn out.
1. I do my best work when my colleagues are also doing their best work. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job if I can't use the leverage of having teammates. I will be happier if the company can compensate all of my coworkers well and make them happy and hire good coworkers - both in terms of intrinsic motivation / happiness and in terms of whether the company is profitable enough to compensate me as my performance deserves.
2. I'm a lot better at doing the work than negotiating for the salary I deserve. There are plenty of people in this industry who are the other way around.
You do best when your colleagues do the best, for sure. Do you think the union is going to help or hurt when you have underperforming or disruptive colleagues?
Regarding disruptive employees: Why would a union restrict a company's ability to fire disruptive employees? (excepting the corrupted union that has irrational favorites)
Regarding under-performing employees: Are you talking about the person who is just a bit slower than others or the person who's lack of aptitude causes other employees to lose unreasonable amounts of time to assisting that employee? I'd count the second type in the same class as being disruptive.
Also, at your current workplace is everyone equal in terms salary when when normalized by performance? Is it a problem if you're a bit more efficient than a co-worker and earning the same salary as them?
Union will help. Unions usually have probationary times before they start representing a new employee. For a year of probationary time, it's plenty to know if the employee is a good fit. If not, the employee can be let go and doesn't get the help of the union.
And union is by the employees, for the employees. If the person is truly disruptive and slipped through the 1 year mark, unions don't just back you up regardless.
In my second hand experience (friends and family, IBEW and automotive workers) this is not at all the case. Admittedly, second hand information and only two locals, but the amount of incompetence and ineptitude that they tell me about is astounding.
I think the problem gets out of hand when the represented employees become too large. If you have a nationalized union for many types of professions all under one umbrella, I can see your issue. There are those cases today as we speak. But if you have a focused union for a specific profession in a specific region, it can be easily managed and be a representative.
For example, a national union of software engineers would not be a great idea. (Even with local branches) Too many factors to consider to come to agreement. I guess a lot more sacrifice on the employees part nationally when mou negotiations are happening.
But if you have a California union for software engineers who are in a media industry, you have really focused the goals to a set of people. They can negotiate by looking at a union formed by google employees. Same thing with google. Vice versa, Just a union for google employees. They negotiate on their own or look at the benefits of a union provided by, say, Facebook.
There's a wide spectrum in "a union" just like in "management". I've had good management and bad management. There are good unions and bad unions. So, a priori, I don't have an expectation of whether "the union" - some arbitrarily picked union - will definitely help or hurt, any more than I have an expectation that arbitrary "management" will definitely help or hurt. But there are a few things:
- Just like I evaluate management when finding a new job (in my most recent job hunt I quite explicitly asked my interviewers what they thought about their management and how they thought it differed from other places they've worked, and hearing poor answers from one famous company was a reason I turned them down), I can evaluate the union when finding a new job. If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
- I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
- Management often prioritizes their own needs as individual employees, and is willing to overlook failures or mistakes if it's in the interest of their own career paths. It's hard to crack down on people failing up into management if you yourself are a manager because you failed up.
> I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities. I prefer that system over a straight democracy for changing management priorities.
"The best ideas" is a pretty unclear phrase. The ideas that make the individual lives of managers the best will win. That's usually strongly correlated with profit for the company (on purpose, using mechanisms like stock grants). Depending on how things are structured, it may or may not be correlated with long-term profit for the company. And it's very likely to be poorly correlated with long-term happiness of workers. As a worker, an idea that increases my long-term happiness is "better" than one that increases the company's profitability. But that same idea is unlikely to appear "best" from management's point of view. You can quantify the cost to the company (and thus to the personal payout of management) from giving all workers a raise of X% or an office with a door instead instead of an open-plan desk or increased PTO or whatever, and it's harder to quantify the benefit to profitability.
But in the end, the "best" ideas in the sense of the most profitable ones will still win, because companies with truly bad ideas from populism (e.g., "empty the company's cash reserves into end-of-year bonuses") will just not survive. Unions don't change the fact that companies themselves participate in a market.
And if you prefer that system, you and others who agree with you can absolutely participate in the market too and compete as part of your own business. You can choose not to join unionized companies. But I don't prefer that system. That's all.
>In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities.
I don't want to deny you your experiences, but this has not been mine. Not by a long-shot. Tons of time and effort get spent at my company trying to work around the idiosyncrasies of our capricious and out of touch management. And we're in a fast growing industry and our management seems to become more out-of-touch about the state of the technology and the market every year.
Their cognitive biases, pickled in their experiences from 8-10 years ago when they were last in touch with the real work, have a much bigger role in their priorities than any rational or dispassionate evaluation of what the "best ideas" are. The one saving grace they have is hiring subordinates who are good at manipulating them for their own benefit. Very VERY few tech companies can find that many people with the necessary soft skills to do it.
> I've had good management and bad management. There are good unions and bad unions.
One downside of this is it sounds like we get to roll the "good bureaucracy / bad bureaucracy" dice twice instead of once, if either roll comes up "bad" we're in trouble.
I don't think that's quite right: the idea is that a good union can insulate you from bad management. So you're using a different dice roll, but it's just one roll. (It is true that things are strictly worse under good management + a bad union than under good management + no union.)
Also, you usually have more influence in what your union does than what your management does. If I have to pick one of two dice to roll, I'll pick the one that's weighted in my favor, even if it sometimes comes up 1.
> If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
The issue is not that the management will defends the bad employee, it's that the union will.
How can you know if the union will?
I got a friend that right now have to deal (ask re-do the work of someone else constantly) because they can't fire her because the union don't want to do anything about it. How could she have known that the union would be ready to not protect one of their member?
The same way you learn if a job has bad management when considering taking a job there - reputation, sites like Glassdoor, asking friends in the industry, etc. This problem doesn't seem unique to unions, nor does it seem that not having unions solves it. Management can still refuse to fire a bad employee in a non-unionzed shop. I've seen it countless times.
> If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me.
I think this statement is used as an anti-union argument here a lot, and it speaks to the ego that many engineers/developers have. "Top performers" are single-digits in a lot of even medium sized organizations, and chances are that an individual employee falls outside of this "top performer" category even if they think they are one. The unions work for the majority. This means that the unions probably work for you.
Everyone wants to say they hire the top 1% of top 1% but in reality that's not possible, and most of them are sucked up in some pretty strange places or by big companies with lots and lots of incentives to throw at them.
Salary isn't the only point of negotiation. Unions can protect people against safety concerns, long hours or lack of vacation etc. or whatever issues are a problem at a company. A union is a group of people organizing to define how they want to work and salary structure doesn't have to part of the contract if it's not an issue to the workers. The union members get to define what is important to them.
Not sure why this is being downvoted beyond just not liking unions? It's literally a fact. Members decide what their collective goals are. In cases like nursing in California under staffing and long hours are the issues they are most concerned about above salary.
Agreed. I think Kickstarter employees jumping out and trying this is a good thing for the overall industry.
The majority of information I see online about software unions tends to be either anecdotal, or generalized across every industry rather than focused on a specific one (ie, on average, unions across all industries get X% higher pay).
This is being applied to a single company, so people who think it's terrible have no shortage of other places to go. It's high profile enough that Kickstarter trying to shut it down will get public blowback, so there's a better than average chance that they end up taking its demands seriously. It'll give at least one very tangible data point of, "here's what a software union in a software company looks like." And even if it does crash and burn, maybe we'll get some Kickstarter competitors out of it from prior employees.
I see very little downside. Let's have at least one trial somewhere, even if it's not perfect, that gives us at least some preview about what a US-based software union will look like.
Why are tech company staff wanting to unionize? For the most part, aren't tech staff reasonably to well paid - with good working conditions and moderate hour expectations (say 40-50)?
Well, when the Kickstarter staff unionized, they said "The goal of our union is to have a formal seat at the table to negotiate with management. We’re negotiating to promote our collective values, and ensure Kickstarter is around for the long haul. We care about preserving what’s great about Kickstarter and improving what isn’t.” In the last year, employees at Google and Microsoft have begun to agitate collectively to end sexual harassment and their companies’ respective involvements in the military-industrial complex and overseas censorship. Employees at Amazon and Salesforce have also implored their executives to stop selling technology to the US government. All of these requests could have more impact if made with a union behind them. All of this information was in the article linked in this post.
Maybe not at Kickstarter and mature startups specifically, but tech is notorious for having bad hours during crunch time, weekend work and all-nighters. Plus even the best-funded of startups there can be corruption and abuse that HR will not help employees with, see the experience of Susan Fowler. A union serves to provide individual workers with leverage with collective protection.
> For the most part, aren't tech staff reasonably to well paid - with good working conditions and moderate hour expectations (say 40-50)?
That can vary wildly. And just like other industries, there can be management abuses - like demanding regular, unpaid overtime, substandard wages, sexism, unreasonable behavior, etc. Think about all the basically permanent contractors working for tech companies that might not have healthcare or other benefits, etc.
Allowing company management to organize and act as a collective while not doing so as an employee puts you at a disadvantage in every negotiation and conflict.
Reasonably well paid doesn't alway hold compared to the cost (and supply) of housing in the bay area; new grads are often forced to share bedrooms even though they make $110k+. (This isn't entirely tech companies' fault -- homeowners are not incentivized to allow housing growth to match new jobs, and California has been through many booms and busts in the past, so it is conservative in building out new capacity.)
Moderate hour expectations don't always hold during "crunch time"; Facebook and Google have large swaths of their employee base who are subject to the schedules of the large annual developer conferences (F8, Google Cloud Next, Google I/O). There have been internal mandates where employees were forced to work weekends for entire quarters.
> Reasonably well paid doesn't alway hold compared to the cost (and supply) of housing in the bay area; new grads are often forced to share bedrooms even though they make $110k+.
Yes, this is true, but I wonder if anyone is going to someday connect the dots between "crazy high average salary" and "high housing prices". Simply raising wages doesn't in and of itself make housing more affordable... it kicks off a feedback loop. When it's not unheard of for tech workers to make $250K-$500K per year (ostensibly to make it easier to buy those million dollar homes!), don't be surprised when housing prices spiral out of control.
I think folks have, but it's hard for any one group to break the loop:
Local government mostly represents native San Franciscans who, understandably, do not want to give up their home so that "other people" can live there (even if, by utilitarian standards, more of those other people can live there).
Folks who moved to the Bay Area in search of employment in tech (both immigrants and Americans who are not "native San Franciscans") who desire more housing are not always represented in local government. (In some local meetings, folks shoot down your opinion if you aren't born in SF.)
For CEOs/management, telecommuting and remote sites can make your company less nimble / competitive. Remote workers get left out of "serendipitous microkitchen discussions", and coordinating across sites/time zones is more work than just having one big all-hands in one big campus. (Can be mitigated by starting with a remote-first culture, but this is very hard to bolt on to an existing company.)
Finally, companies can't exactly reduce their hiring (number of roles) or salaries in collaboration with their neighbours to reduce housing prices.
50's too much and 40 should include an hour of breaks. Noncompetes and very broad claims of inventions and copyright by employers need serious push-back until they're rare or illegal, and organized labor can do that.
Also it'd be nice if some of the more powerful workers here could organize and help lobby for things like parental leave and minimum vacation for all workers, including those without so much clout.
One down, 49 to go, I guess. (probably there are a few other states where they're illegal, but it's far from all of them)
EDIT: and there's still the "if you write a novel in your free time on your own hardware we can try to claim it if we feel like it" clauses that are so common.
"America’s political climate is changing; among other things, the 2016 presidential election brought up the issue of wealth inequality in this country and made people consider more closely the structural forces that define class here."
What on earth does the 2016 election have to do with wealth inequality (or unions for that matter)? Inequality has been on the rise for decades and Clinton was also a member of the 1%. This seems like a non-sequitur.
They're probably mostly referring to Bernie Sanders, who ran a campaign very focused on wealth inequality. The union link is that when people become more aware of inequality and by extension class, they become more likely to participate in class-based politics and organizations such as unions, in theory at least.
The part I seem to be missing, is that most of the people working at Kickstarter are the top 2-5% of the U.S.. Their business caters to many people who want to start projects, who aren't living pay-check-to-pay-check anyway.
I don't really understand the purpose of the unionization effort, beyond the facade of just wanting to in some way "fit in" with a social movement.
> I don't really understand the purpose of the unionization effort, beyond the facade of just wanting to in some way "fit in" with a social movement.
It's pretty naive to think unionization is just a social fad. It's a path towards job security, safety, good pay, and control over the direction of your own labor. Trendiness is pretty low on the totem pole.
Collective control over the collective direction of the collective labor. Unions, at least in practice, are only good for the majority of the laborers and definitely not good for independent control over your own work.
> Collective control over the collective direction of the collective labor. Unions, at least in practice, are only good for the majority of the laborers and definitely not good for independent control over your own work.
The alternative is complete control by the employer. Sure, a union, as an institution with power, can likely limit some of your independence, but an employer can limit all of it.
Just because someone belongs to a group, doesn't make their criticism of the unjust advantages of that group invalid. Similarly, a white person arguing for civil rights is not a hypocrite either.
Yeah inequality has been in play for decades but heavily since 2000s.
The Great Recession and subsequently Occupy Wall Street were early reactions to the symptoms that started heavily in the 2000s but really has been in play since the 70s. Share of GDP is a steady downtrend [1]. Velocity of money fell of a cliff in 2000s [2]. US GINI coefficient has increased steadily [3]. Inequality definitely became more of an issue in 2016 election but not much has been done to help it, it will continue to be an issue until UBI or GDP share changes.
The globalist vs anti-globalist thing is a way to capture the "wealth inequality" vote for conservatives - our town hasn't been doing well but those damn dirty urban liberals seem to be doing great!
>What on earth does the 2016 election have to do with wealth inequality
A guy who is objectively unqualified for every conceivable post had the opportunity to become elected as president of the U.S. merely because he was born wealthy.
You might have heard the following term before: plutocracy
Of course, his opponent was objectively unqualified for every conceivable post but had the opportunity to be elected president of the U.S. merely because of her husband's name.
America's in a lot of trouble. 2020 is going to make 2016 look like Jefferson & Adams.
That's palpably false. She was the single most qualified candidate for President, from a policy viewpoint, the nation has ever had. It was dismissive nonsense like that comment, that was her biggest obstacle.
The "from a policy viewpoint" clause is doing a lot of work in that proposition. Was she more qualified than Washington? Jefferson? Eisenhower? Bush the Elder?
> She was the single most qualified candidate for President, from a policy viewpoint, the nation has ever had.
She wasn't even close. She had a fair amount of NGO issue advocacy experience (mostly in the human services domain), less than two full terms in the Senate, and a brief (and arguably none too impressive) stint as the weakest-incoming-foreign-policy-resume Secretary of State we’d had in a long time (but Rex Tillerson displaced her for that “honor”.)
You can make the case that she edges out Obama and certainly W in terms of initial policy qualifications, but not her own husband or Ronald Reagan (unless you focus only on foreign policy), not George H. W. Bush (unless you focus only on domestic policy), maybe Carter, probably Nixon, not even close to Johnson, ...
Yale Law studying Policy, board of the Yale Review, Faculty of a School of Law, active in family advocacy her entire life. Its disingenuous to say 'fair amount' for a lifetime of service. Chair of numerous Education committees. So active in White House public policy decisions that they were famously described as 'Billary'.
She is so obviously experienced, vetted, responsible and educated as to make that 'not even close' assertion ridiculous.
Would you please stop posting political flamebait and/or unsubstantive and/or uncivil comments to HN? You have a track record of these things. We've asked you repeatedly before. We eventually ban accounts that ignore our requests to follow the guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> America’s political climate is changing; among other things, the 2016 presidential election brought up the issue of wealth inequality in this country and made people consider more closely the structural forces that define class here.
What is a structural force that defines class in America?
I'm not claiming to be any sort of expert, but I would guess the tax system (not taxing the ultra-wealthy as much as you could/should, and corporations not carrying as much of the tax burden as they used to, once again arguably not as much as they should).
There is also a lot of structure around consumerism, debt, and the like, though this is split between societal/cultural structures and government/business structures.
Inherited wealth, disparities in access to education, racism, and a weak labor movement are a few of the many forces that impede upward social mobility.
Whats wrong with inherited wealth? Literally anyone can pass on wealth to their heirs. It takes no brains, and no special access. Just spending less. People shouldn't be taxed more because they have more foresight or impulse control than others. Yes, maybe it doesn't happen in one or two generations - but it can. Also - lots of people have moved up in the world from nothing - and it wasn't "inherited wealth" keeping them down previously. edit: as minikites mentioned below, it is education that wealth can be transferred is what needs to happen.
Your emotional response to my logical statement doesn't necessitate a downvote.... Edit: it should be inspiring, bc it shows that literally anyone middle class or above can be incredibly wealthy if principles are followed for 3-4 generations.
Wealth inequality has been increasing for 40 years despite worker productivity rising. Nearly every metric shows the rungs to wealth being pulled away, and I'm the non logical one here?
> doesn't necessitate a downvote
You were already downvoted before I commented.
> should be inspiring, bc it shows that literally anyone middle class or above can be incredibly wealthy if principles are followed for 3-4 generations.
You didn't 'show' anything; you simply stated economic religion.
Wealth has nothing at all to do with worker productivity. It has only to do with saving a lot more than one spends by spending less, or generating large value to society with a monetary reward.
The pathway for any middle class family is through inherited wealth and NOT some fantasty of wealth equality achieved in 1 lifetime. We need to stop thinking in small terms of 'years'.
Wealth can be achieved generally in a family over the course of 1.5 centuries. If a family applies good saving practices, and saves over 5-6 generational lifetimes - it is very hard NOT to be wealthy. My parents were a fireman and teacher. My grandfather paid for my college, my parents are paying for my kids college, and I'm paying for my grand kids and great grand kids college - SOLELY bc of saving over extended periods of time. That was our family deal - take care of those after you 2 generations down. Thinking multi-generational is the easiest path to success.
>Wealth inequality has been increasing for 40 years despite worker productivity rising. Nearly every metric shows the rungs to wealth being pulled away, and I'm the non logical one here?
Yes, inequality increasing because the richest aggregate in the US says absolutely nothing about how the quality of life has changed for regular people. It's a red herring.
If a rich person moves into my tiny town, I don't suddenly become worse off, despite inequality increasing drastically.
Inherited wealth is part of the American dream. Everyone wants to pass on enough wealth to provide for their children - even if their children turn out to be morons. I agree that at a certain amount of wealth, inheritance seems problematic. When those morons inherit enough to shape the world instead of just living comfortably.
kinda ironic, a platform that relies on a community of people and donors and leans on the socialist side of the spectrum is hit by a socialist leaning ideology.
Mostly libertarian here, but not aware of the full views of the party, so I looked it up. Apparently the 2016 election view states on unions as below which I don't see contradictory to unions. [did this for my own knowledge]
"We support the right of private employers and employees to choose whether or not to bargain with each other through a labor union. Bargaining should be free of government interference, such as compulsory arbitration or imposing an obligation to bargain." https://www.lp.org/platform/
I think there needs to be an overall IT union, with apprenticeships and the whole thing. Make new people do QA testing, or tech support as they work on their other skills and level up. Get mandatory overtime to finish a project, then get laid off and collect unemployment until the Union needs you again. Just like carpenters and glaziers and all.
EDIT:
Instead of replying to everyone individually. Over the last ~15 years I've held jobs from tech support to network engineer to full stack developer. In each of them I have noticed that recent college grads are almost always clueless, and basically have to start from scratch. These are kids with massive student loan debt that could have started working earlier and learned through an apprenticeship.
Have you talked to anyone who does professional entertainment/movie work about their thoughts on unions?
Unions are expensive, corrupt, and don't actually do much to help most of the workers. The unionized workers hire contractors to do the real work for many features, and are parasitic organizations that mostly just drive up the cost of making movies.
There was recently an article in the Times about a local NYC union president who's office is decorated with such high-end fixtures & furniture that he has a second office on another floor just to appear more humble. I can't find it at the moment...
What would be the benefit? I really don't see the point. Employees collectively demamding something from their employer, that I understand, but why create a new directive structure above the whole industry?
Is there such thing as "tech" that makes unionizing easier? AI that helps with the paperwork, some sort of app the allows structure organization easier, etc?
Well, there goes the high salaries, flexible working hours, and generous RSU grants for tech employees. Have fun fighting and scraping for 2% raises, paying exorbitant union fees for questionable benefits, and dealing with the nepotism and personal politics of your union leaders. And thanks in advance for adding to the unfunded pension liability crisis.
You know unionizing isn't something people do lightheartedly. A lot of planning and working goes into it, planning and working done by the folks who want to unionize. The idea that you only get benefits if you don't agitate your boss too much sounds pretty sad.
People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.
>People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.
Tell that to anyone whose workplace unionizes against their wishes and lives in a "closed shop" state. (Yes, closed shops are illegal, but agency fees lead to essentially the same thing).
Being forced to pay a fee to a union that does not represent you and that you did not vote to join is absolute bullshit.
You can say that about any job, union or non union. You don't join a job not knowing it's a union job. But in a non union workplace, if you don't like how things are you can change them. Good luck doing that without a union.
>People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.
Of course they do. The difference is that they are tricked into thinking they won't be worse off by the union organizers pretending that it's unlikely everyone will completely lose their job.
So the logic goes, don't join a union or you'll lose you job?
How does that not sound coercive? A company saying "If you collectively bargain against us, we will punish you" sounds ok to you? You've been tricked out of collective bargaining by decades of anti-union propaganda, and now you're carrying water for capital.
It would be valuable to provide some sources for your claim, because as-is this reads like propaganda.
Perhaps the causation is reversed, and industries with terrible working conditions and low raises tend to attract unions to empower the workers to change those conditions?
All of which were, what, privileges bestowed upon workers by management in exchange for their not unionizing? Seems like they were pretty fragile, then.
Unions in tech companies is a very interesting idea. A lot of people never speculate this idea because lets be honest most of them get paid really well or visa workers are simply too scared to join such "abominable" unions etc etc. If any one can start materialize unions would be the workers at FAANG companies. And I am pretty sure rest will follow suit. As a tech worker, I see this as a positive change. As a CTO, this should scare me. As an honest CTO, I would see this as a balanced change for my subordinates and slightly shifting the power dynamics towards them.
Maybe the US has a different experience with unions but in Brazil, they are simply hated. They were made mandatory by law and very rarely (never?) step in to help employees.
It's only at big factories that they show up when more than X number of people are fired and do a big show out of that. Meanwhile, all the employees not working for big factories paid their union fees and saw nothing back. It's often a platform to launch their political careers.
Luckily, they are not mandatory anymore and now employees have to opt-in which was a great change. They have to work to earn respect and those fees back... but I'm not seeing much movement in that direction. So far they have been going the legal route, trying to cancel the changes to the law (and have lost).
In theory, the concept of unions is great but in practice, at least here, it was a terrible thing, from my IT bubble perspective.
Unions are voted on by workers at each workplace (and can be ejected and replaced) in most countries, sounds like Brazil had something similar to the mandatory, toothless union that China enforces on larger businesses like Walmart.
Not everyone in the US likes unions. Union-driven high labor costs are one of the reasons why lots of auto manufacturing left Michigan for various points foreign and domestic. Some unions do a great job negotiating benefits for workers. Others do a great job only for union leadership, to the ultimate detriment of companies' profitability and workers' salaries and job security.
If tech unions are new organizations by, for, and of tech workers, they might result in positive change for tech workers. If they fall in line with AFL-CIO et al., stand by for trouble.
I'd be interested to learn more about the German system, where the union sits on the board of the company. They would seem to then have an actual interest in the success of the enterprise as a whole, rather than just trying to extract as much as they can from it. Of course in other places they have no power and just extract fees from workers.
In the US, it is illegal federally to mandate that an employee join a union as part of their employment, and it's illegal to force them to pay dues.
Some of our states go a step further and have introduced measures that seek to directly attack the ability of employees to collectively bargain, to remove the power organized labor has against management. These are called "right to work states".
Generally speaking, RTW states have lower pay on average, they are less educated on average, and their workers have less benefits from their businesses (parental leave, vacation time, healthcare benefits, etc), they have less recourses against employer bad behavior (both as a function of RTW attacking collective bargaining, and from the reality that the same politics that are against unions also are very anti-labor, anti-minimum wage, anti-regulation of labor marketplace all together, so there are far less public resources and regulators to assist with claims). If you're an employer, this probably sounds great. Labor is cheaper and you can fire them whenever you want for no reason at all on the drop of a dime AND there is no pesky government regulator to come waste your time and money investigating. "Easy come easy go" is one of the most common management philosophies from small and medium business owners in my RTW state, from my experience.
From the perspective of an American: you choose a liberal/blue/union state when you want good infrastructure, highly educated and competent staff, and little turnover. You choose a conservative/red/anti-union state when you're planning to take advantage of your staff, you don't care about higher turnover, you want to pay below-national-market rates as a rule, and you don't care as much about the individual quality of each employee. There's a reason why tech companies don't pick the South and when they do they require billions in literal free cash to do so.
It is what it is, but the slow death of the union in the United States correlates quite perfectly with the slow death of the American middle class in terms of wealth and income gains per year.
(disclaimer: also Brazilian, even if I don't live in Brazil anymore)
I have mixed experience with unions in Brazil, the fact that they are mandated makes it almost like a scam, a part of your wages go towards union contributions but rarely do you get anything out of that. Most directors at unions are in it for political powers as the bigger unions are major players in politics(as seen that our ex-president is a former unionist).
On one hand, unions can provide negotiation power, specially in class action suits, including unfair dismissal. But most of the time I've seen unions collude with companies and associations to provide underwhelming benefits and wages that are below inflation.
In some cases such as medicine and dentistry they are solid credentials of many professionals and I take it as mostly positive.
In the case of engineering it should follow the same as the engineer's union is a very strong powerhouse that requires quite high minimum wages for engineers(IIRC 8.5x the national minimum wage). However this has led many companies to use a loophole where engineers are hired with a different job title, performing the same job, just so that they don't have to pay that minimum, while sometimes even requiring that said engineer is registered with the union. As computer science is not engineering, even though some computer engineers are qualified as such, I've never met a programmer that has a proper engineer contract.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 393 ms ] threadThere are some differences as you said. If you're an auto factory that goes on strike, the management is likely still making money—they have all the cars made yesterday and the day before to sell. Of course, the pressure would rise much quicker in a factory vs a tech company; where the latter could presumably float itself for a few weeks, the former would start losing money within days.
I'm sure whenever I get a new job and resign they're going to be like 'oh shit', because there's just not anyone left to replace what I do, really (I'm the last person in the department with a good amount of knowledge on their proprietary and stupid complicated phone systems, and they've kept me too swamped to be able to do any knowledge transfer worth a damn).
And in phone systems, there's always something going wrong or down, it seems like, often network related.
You're mistaken in thinking that a walkout is the only, or even primary, method of direct action organized collectives can employ.
Here are 197 others: https://www.aeinstein.org/nonviolentaction/198-methods-of-no...
Certain types of work-to-rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) would bring most tech companies to their knees in a matter of minutes. It wouldn't just gum up the works as it would in industry, it could literally put systems into failure states.
But they get overtime. From the IATSE contract with Disney:
"... all time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Except as otherwise herein provided: Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 ½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification."
"Crunch time" gets very expensive for employers.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/22/17149822/gdc-2018-igda-rou... [2] https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ [3] https://animationguild.org/
[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2017-06-07/nhk-pro...
[2] https://kotaku.com/an-insider-s-look-at-working-in-the-anime...
There's nothing particularly unusual about game dev jobs or companies compared to other areas of tech (especially including startups); it's just that there are a lot of people who want to work on games. It's been that way for at least a couple of decades now.
Yet they have the SAG-AFTRA union which had a strike to force better working conditions from games companies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016–17_video_game_voice_act...
Further acting is older than gaming, and those unions were given space to form during a period of time that was very different from today.
In the 1930s back when union organizing was likely to get you beaten by goons or assassinated by hitmen/the mob? Or in the 1940s and '50s, when active membership in the union put you at risk of getting brought up in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee and blacklisted from ever working again?
IATSE Local 728 has an article about their own history that doesn't gloss over the bad stuff.[1]
[1] https://www.iatse728.org/about-us/history/the-war-for-warner...
The concept is similar, the volume of people is vastly different, however.
Judging by the gamer-centric media, it seems like most of them hate the industry and most of the major companies in it. They love small developers, they love making games, they love their Twitch streamers, but they hate the companies with a burning passion.
Unfortunately, that passion often gets channeled into harassing women and minorities instead of going anywhere productive.
The all too common path seems to be enter the industry for a few years, endure crap that none of your friends that do similar jobs outside of the industry endure for a lot less money, actually want to plan for the future at some point, then get a job outside of the industry, and even though you love games, you just can't go back to getting mistreated.
That was what I did, and lots of other coworkers I had, and is why the industry seems to have a huge dearth of senior talent.
So the people who would be most willing to unionize are no longer in the industry to do so.
A worker owned business is either a partnership or a co-op. The forms have been around for centuries. They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.
That logic doesn't actually follow; even if they performed equally, capital owners get more return in conventional firms (because they get all the returns, not just partial returns from lending capital), so they will favor conventional firms. So, all other things being equal, employee-owned firms have a disadvantage in access to capital and so can be expected to be less common than traditional firm unless they outperform enough to negate the return disadvantage for capital providers.
I don’t see any disagreement between what you wrote and I did outside of companies with explosive growth trying to dominate an industry, i.e. VC.
If your aim is to build a cooperative supermarket chain like the Coop in the U.K. banks will happily lend once you have a proven business plan. So someone does need to put up the initial capital but once you have a proven business model you’ll be able to borrow from banks and capital markets in the same way as conventional firms.
Your argument fails to address the sectors where partnerships and cooperatives dominate, law, accounting and management consulting. I’m sure there are others but the fact that every twenty years or so the Big 4 all spit out a giant services company but they don’t change their own corporate structure is suggestive that a partnership model works. And McKinsey, Bain or BCG would have no trouble accessing capital if they wanted to stop being a partnership.
I've heard European trade unions are more flexible and are as far as technical aspects allow for more more individual progress outside of say a union / employer agreement.
To be clear, this is just what I've heard about European unions. I've had no personal experience with them.
For example the IBEW, which organizes electrical workers, decided to come out against the Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power, in developing distributed smart grids, and generally overhauling all sorts of infrastructure to come in line with new energy efficiency regulations. But most of the IBEW members are from the incument energy companies rather than part of the new energy companies that would come to life if we kicked off a Green industrial policy. They have no interest in growing the field of electrical workers as a profession, they're focused specifically on protecting the interests of the people currently employed as electrical workers.
This feeds into a lot of criticisms people have about unions preferentially focusing on creating benefits for seniority and incumbency over actually protecting the rights and status of workers more broadly.
I've seen a lot of "Feel free to learn new skills" / "But no way are we going to let them be a requirement / judged for advancment because that would be bad for those with seniority who don't want to learn it...." type policies.
And if you're in a related field outside the union... you're just hosed, and unions are surprisingly not interested in growing in to closely related areas at times even if their PR says otherwise. I suspect those areas are dealt away with in the negotiations.
The unions that have actually been successful at growing their membership during this era of reaction, such as the SEIU, tend to be a lot more progressive and forward looking.
There is also an aesthetic thing at play here and the older dudes just don't like the idea of tech workers, professional workers, and "pink collar" jobs unionizing because they're not "real" workers. If we made hard-hats and tool-belts part of the standard nurse's uniform we could probably make some real strides. . .
Very possibly at the destruction of as many jobs in established industries. That's not really a clear win for electrical workers. This is especially true if new employers living off of the GND subsidies decides not to use the senior union members or the union at all.
The big difference, which nobody seems to have mentioned here, is that unions in the US are guaranteed exclusivity by law over representing people within a bargaining unit, as well as unilateral and retroactive control over defining the bargaining unit. In practice, this means that all employees at a given company are required to be represented by the same union; they have no choice in the matter. Once the union is established, it is almost impossible to decertify it, so the union corporate structure will never feel any real pressure from the employees.
In almost every other country, employees can choose alternative representation, which means the unions are forced to compete with each other for membership, and they are not guaranteed to represent employees at that company in perpetuity. This creates a healthier and less exploitative dynamic.
The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.
I agree that some competition could help in this matter since so many unions at this point no longer need to fairly represent their members as a whole due to their ubiquity in the industry. Also I feel that many of them are so large that they would have too many conflicting interests within the union and could be harming as many people as they help with a choice.
Exactly - it's a stable equilibrium, where unions and employers are actually content with the status quo and don't want to cede power, but ultimately it produces a clearly suboptimal result for workers.
Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to fix this, as you said, for political reasons.
that doesn't mean you can't try to mitigate the worst aspects of it. here are some suggestions to start:
* saner hours
* saner goals as far as throughput for amount of content screened* comprehensive medical insurance including good mental health care
the market's not doing a good job of taking care of these people. i understand why they get paid poorly in the sense that i understand why they will accept these jobs for this pay, and why companies pay that much for the job: it's because companies can get away with it. either through unionization or legislation, we need to fix that. FB etc don't function without these people, but these people are used by that system with no regard for their welfare.programmers and other usually direct employees of software companies can have it bad, but they usually don't have it nearly as bad as the content screeners.
> I'm not sure what could be done.
me either, really, but there are some reasonable things we can try. i don't think we should just abdicate responsibility on this because it's hard and those people don't have much power.
People who want to make games (or discover dinosaur bones, or paint, or do other professions that are correlated with a deep, almost-aesthetic, passion) are competing with other people just like them. Since they tend to be so passionate about these things, they bid each other down. They work just a few more hours a week without pay then the next guy, just because they would so much rather build video games than standard dev work.
And before you know it, the field is treated worse. But it's an equilibrium worse, brought about by rational agents trading off work-life balance for work-passion.
Join the union at your job, ask why there isn't a union at your job if there isn't one, find a freelancer's union if you're not working for The Man, give some of your time/money/skills to people fighting for unions...
The American union tradition / behavior seems quite different than what I hear about elsewhere.
I'm interested in the European systems, but very very wary of the US systems. Too many US unions are really just bureaucracies on their own, emphasize seniority for pay, advancement, and etc, and seem to limit options for workers in terms of flexibility. And to some extent american unions become their own bureaucracy serving the folks embedded in that bureaucracy. Granted for some jobs that probabbly is ok, but for technical things, I'm very wary about flexibility and etc.
My experience with American unions has been highly disappointing and I'm skeptical about their ability to handle a more technical / fast changing world.
I think the negative type stuff makes the news, but I don't think that reflects the system over all.
US unions in my experience don't so much give people say in my experience, they just make for a sort of formalize a system into an adversarial type one with union and company.
For the most part I've enjoyed working for my employers and would rather manage that relationship on my own and not have someone else run it for me.
There are situations where folks might not feel that way too I'm sure.
I can understand why this would seem hostile to someone who isn't acculturated to it, but I don't find it hostile at all. I find it _honest_. The other side isn't pretending to care about me, and they aren't making hamfisted attempts to look out for my interests in ways that I don't like but they think I do (or should).
A company can't fire all their union employees, so if the union decides they'll only accept a deal that includes a 50% raise, what do you do?
I'm being serious here, from what I can tell it's not legal to fire your union employees. So what do you do?
Even public sector unions can't prevent terminations for financial reasons, though they negotiated no-fire clauses into their union contracts decades ago.
Montana isn't at-will after 6-months of full-time employment and follows the French system.
The other 49 states are at-will employment, with generally the same rules with limited restrictions.
I stand by my original comment. Even Montana has at-will employment for the first 6 months.
But also, that's what negotiation is. If the company didn't want to be occasionally held hostage, it should have included a "you can't hold us hostage" clause in its employees' work contracts, and also given them enough compensation to get them to agree with it.
But, super serious: If the union decides they will only accept a 50% raise, and the company _can't_ give it to them, what has happened several times before is that the company will cease operations of the facility that is unionized entirely, and move to a new geography where that union has no power.
Just as the union has the ability to hold the company hostage, management also has this ability. Theoretically, mass layoffs are not good for union members, and so they would not make such an obviously ridiculous demand.
However, you run in to major problems when for whatever reason the union does not think something is a ridiculous demand, when it is. Or, like I mentioned in my big comment somewhere else, if a union is representing multiple factories for one organization this can happen.
Say, hypothetically, the union for ABCTech represents ABCTech employees at two facilities, one in San Francisco and one in Seattle. Perhaps the union demands that, because the cost of living has risen so dramatically in SF, they require a 50% raise for all SF employees effective immediately. The company cannot afford this, and so they say no. The union says I don't care, fuck you, if you won't do this we won't work.
So ABCTech says well if we can't afford your contracts, we have to close up shop. They close the SF office. Every single employee there loses their job.
However, the union also represents ABCTech employees in Seattle. And now, ABCTech knows that the union is serious. They will make severe demands and not back down. This improves the unions bargaining power in the Seattle office, by sacrificing the SF office.
If you're the union, you're probably quite pleased with this state of affairs. If you're an employee of ABCTech in Seattle, doubly so. But maybe not so much if you were a (former) employee in SF
I feel like this is just your experience. As a counter-anecdote I spent a bit of time in the Teamsters in the 90's and it got very hostile and extremely unprofessional. There was zero material communication with management and any influence on the part of the union as a $9/hr entry level employee was equally zero. The scab situation was super dicey as well, and while there was clearly no official support for 'extracurricular' enforcement, there was enough of a question about what would happen that you didn't really want to test it.
It doesn't seem like a lot of folks commenting here have direct experience with working in unions in the US. They have done great things in the past and I feel like they are a necessity in industries where individual employees regularly face decisions that affect the physical safety of others or themselves. However, in my experience and in the experience of family members (CWA/NEA), unions in practice fall far short of the promise they hold in theory. User naravara has some pretty insightful comments elsewhere in this thread that i feel get to the meat of the matter and why there might be a disconnect on opinions between those in the US and those elsewhere.
All that said I do applaud the folks working at Kickstarter for trying this out. Maybe they will figure out a way to make a functional apparatus that ensures a positive work environment while minimizing the coddling of parasites and negative impact on Kickstarter's ability to execute, but it's going to be a struggle.
If that’s the route people think things should go it’d be a big cultural shift from the status quo.
The unions in other countries have done great things for workers. In Germany, most employed individuals get 6 weeks of vacation and 35 to 40 hour a week contracts.
People are scared they're salary is going to go down the hole for some reason. A tech union can exist with pay scales that match current peoples compensation.
Articles like this really put into perspective how strong the American perspective is here.
I'm one of the software engineers who was fired for organizing a union at a SF/DC based startup last year. The National Labor Relations Board found in our favor and we won a large cash settlement. But what we wanted was a union. Seeing others pick up the torch is extremely gratifying. Below are some links to news coverage of our case.
https://gist.github.com/bwestergard/a77744dc6f3095fd3fb769dd...
If anyone has questions about the process, I'm happy to answer what I can.
Software employers are not yet collaborating to avoid unions, as employers associations in other sectors have historically. There is not yet an organized blacklist for outspoken activists.
Unions are certified by card check or secret ballot. In either case, no future employer will ever know whether you supported unionization in a former job. You will always have plausible deniability, and its illegal to ask outright.
I hope you're right, but it's probably hard to know for sure.
My skepticism stems from the no-poach cartel discovered a few years ago.
$775k for 15 people especially SF based I wouldn't exactly call that a large cash settlement considering what happened, rep damage, time to find new work, etc.
Just had expectations of at least a year salary per person.
But your point stands: this is a weak remedy, and completely out of line with international norms.
Doesn't this kill a company?
Management has the right at a workplace to make any decisions, whether someone in non-management sees fit. Can't people who are frustrated with the company just go pursue a position elsewhere?
Historically, management (factory owners) was dragged into the streets and beaten to death (yikes) when excessive inequality was reached. This is an improvement (and hopefully management would see the benefit of treating labor as a partner, not a resource to be consumed).
The relationship between a company's stockholders and a company's employees is part competitive and part collaborative. Ignore either at your own peril.
I see your point but at the same time this can create an adversarial dynamic between managers and junior employees, which is toxic even if junior employees get what they want.
>Management certainly exercises every bit of power that they are able to.
I'm a manager and my proudest moments have been those of restraint, not force. Regardless of whether or not unions can and should be formed, organizations with employees feeling compelled to unionize should be hiring better managers.
This is a fantastic observation - and I believe it holds true. I've been in some very demanding technology roles, long hours, with competitive peers. A great leader is worth much more than some Union would have been (anecdotally).
This isn't true. Management only exercises every bit of power once the relationship becomes hostile. There are tons of things management could do to me to make their jobs easier (e.g. standups twice a day at 8am and 4:45pm with mandatory, in-person attendance) that they don't leverage.
Unionizing when there isn't already a hostile relationship is sure a way to bring hostility into it.
It would be better to solidify these things before the industry takes a nose dive.
Well, why shouldn't they? It's not like the company magically has more money available when they hire a non-remote employee, is it?
Pay has nothing to do with cost of living. That's a lie told by companies as a negotiating tactic. You don't magically make the company more money by being in the bay area.
And this is why unions exist. Even if managers try to be nice, even if the company gives out buckets of benefits and pays a living wage, this is the adversarial thought that exists in business currently. Management wants to pay the lowest they can, because that helps the business the most. They want to spend the least amount possible because that's the correct business choice.
Management/Ownership and Employees are frequently at odds when it comes to their goals, and changing the math from "me vs the company" to "the union vs the company" is a huge boon for employees.
"People didn’t even want that much more time off, or that much more time not on call. They just wanted to know where they stood. They didn’t want to have to engage in highly personalized bargaining all the time. It wasn’t that there were rules that favored management — there were simply no rules, and this ambiguity worked in management’s favor."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unio...
In the uk its relatively well paid but much less than say a train driver is the average dev in London earns less than a train driver gets for a four day week an they have over time and a DB pension.
What?
There is no constitutional right for management to make decisions. Management are people with certain forms of influence over the company; workers are other people with other forms of influence over the company.
The only way in which there's a "right" is "might makes right" - that management, when they want to make a decision, can force that decision to happen, and workers can't. The point of a union is to change this calculus. If the workers say, do what we want or we'll leave, there's no question of whether they have the "right" to say that. They have the power. The question is whether it's socially acceptable for workers to say they have that power.
Some are. You're probably imagining some Python engineer who is making $140k and can work normal hours, drink craft beer and take advantage of "unlimited time off" policies and such.
Think about operations staff who are doing mission critical work, like discovering and removing spam clusters. People like that often make an hourly wage, often are expected to pick up extra volume as a company grows, and are often the target of layoffs and wage controls because they are considered "variable cost" not "overhead".
Also think about people doing traditionally woman's jobs, like customer support or office support. These people make or break customer relationships, make or break team dynamics, or set the bar for content quality. But senior people on those teams often make less than junior engineers right out of school, because companies can exploit the popular idea that these kinds of workers are just less important.
Even coders, especially in production-based industries like video games or special effects, can work under semi-abusive conditions. Many of these firms dramatically staff up and down cyclically which gives employees little bargaining power.
So it comes off as just the usual lefty political signalling, not the start of a real movement.
Furthermore, articles published on this topic indicate that their motivations included well-established and reasonable on-call hours, slightly more vacation days, and more collaborative decision making with management. All of those are real, tangible benefits that most of us would value and enjoy.
I’m a little annoyed that using the word courage made me twitch for a second because of how much “bravery” and “courage” everyone is getting commended for these days, but I think you’re an example of what every day courage can look like.
You knew what the repercussions could be, I doubt you were so independently wealthy that losing your salary meant little, and you publicly stood for what you believe in for the greater good of those around you.
Even after all the crap you’ve probably had to deal with, I hope you feel positively about your efforts.
Time and perspective are a funny thing... Coming up as young adult and professional engineer I saw unions as a relic that definitely served for positive change (way back in dinosaur times), grew fat and complacent (if not even complicit), and did more harm to the market in general than they did to benefit their members today.
Now I site here (still relatively young, thank you) at 37 with young family, having co-founded a company that employs dozens, losing sleep over how much things like health insurance cost for my employees, and my stance on unions has softened up quite a bit.
Markets and investors have perverted corporate incentives to a degree that moral leadership can be considered downright mismanagement. I’ve heard managers and other founders complain that “if I pay to train them, they’re just going to walk out the door”, etc. My little sister is in year 3 of her software development career and I can’t believe some of the crap I have had to tell her to watch out for, or worse, how to handle as it’s happening to her.
I read about things like the IBM layoffs of “old” workers, then see people I used to work with struggle to get hired (totally not because of their age, of course!) when I know how capable they are and my blood boils.
I still don’t know if unions are the answer. Maybe they’re part of it, but I believe we’ve got a generation (or two) of spineless and/or immoral corporate leadership to survive before things get back on the right track.
With Patreon raising prices and now this, maybe someone will crowdfund an alternative.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Union_Act_2016
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/08/26/not-just-in...
* Carpenters & Joiners Union gave $38,366,262 with $37,822,215 to democrats and $529,000 to republicans.
* Service Employees International Union gave $28,224,658 with $28,219,509 to democrats and $132 to republicans.
* Laborers Union gave $27,538,080 with $26,810,870 to democrats and $708,100 to republicans.
Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?id=
As you can see, there's a massive amount of political spending by unions, and it's almost completely on one side. The "right to work" laws which are so demonized do at least provide one huge advantage: people are no longer forced to contribute to a political campaign which they do not wish to support. There has been court ruling around this area in the past few years, but it was a problem for a long time and, to an extent, remains one.
In both cases the answer to "how do I stop supporting this political action I don't like?" is "Quit. Hope your skills are marketable."
What do I do when there is an industry-wide closed-shop union, as some people seem to want?
It seems that some unions have shifted from representing employees in negotiations to representing a profession in all respects. I believe that's contrary to their original purpose and dilutes both their support and their credibility as simply advocating for the worker.
As for closed shop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_shop#United_States
It's illegal, so's the similar "union shop", and you can opt out such that you still pay dues but they may only go toward collective bargaining activities and services to members, which appears to solve this "I'm being forced to support the only viable political party that wants to make anything whatsoever better" problem. Maybe leaving others, sure, but this issue's... not an issue. Unlike employers. I can't sign a piece of paper banning them from using profit derived from my labor for political activity.
But the thousands of companies I could work for have healthy competition and diversity of approach to issues. An industry-wide union has no competition and no diversity.
> Maybe leaving others, sure, but this issue's... not an issue.
Say you were a Green supporter, and had a strong conviction against military intervention. How would you feel funding a union leadership that campaigns for Labour, following Iraq?
Wow, I can tell you evaluate statements in an unbiased manner. What happens when you realize the idea of "better" turns out to depend on some pretty big assumptions that you no longer believe are true? Additionally, if the only two "viable" political parties are abhorrent like the ones in the US, giving any money to either of them is still morally fucked up if you truly disagree with them and vote 3rd party.
At any rate, the two-party thing's how our (the US's) system's structured. It stabilizes there. A third party replacing one of the big two, as has happened occasionally in the past, would assuredly acquire a good bit of distasteful cruft along the way. Effective political action revolves around trying to help a 3rd party replace one of them despite that likely outcome (and accepting an even smaller voice in policy than most voters have, in the meantime); participation in one of the big two parties themselves (much, much large effect than just voting in elections, though still usually tiny); or working to reform our system to break the two-party stability point. Or some combination of those things.
Well, in one scenario it's their money being spent. In the other, it's yours. You don't draw a pretty clear distinction there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_shop#United_States
It really isn't. I think we can all make arguments as to why we're justified in taking from others, but that doesn't change the reality of what is happening.
> may not be relevant anyway:
AFAIK this means only public sector non-union employees cannot be forced to pay for unions' political activities. Private sector employees are still on the hook. Unless there's something else you're trying to draw attention to.
I'll pick out the part I think's most relevant, since yeah, that's a big ol' wall of text.
"Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), as amended by the Taft-Hartley Act, and held by the Supreme Court in Communications Workers of America v. Beck that in a union security agreement, unions are authorized by statute to collect from non-members only those fees and dues necessary to perform its duties as a collective bargaining representative known as agency fees.[12]"
Collect fees? Yes. Spend those fees on political activities, if you're a non-member? No. Unless I'm misreading this. The public unions bit comes next and says that public sector unions can't even collect the agency fees from non-union members, which is a step farther and into union-busting territory. The original point was that union fees amount to compelled political speech, though (again, so does your company spending on politics, assuming they're making money off you even in an abstract way, but whatever) and this seems to make that moot, best I can tell. If that's wrong I'd like to know—I don't get off on going around spreading incorrect info.
Switching jobs is harder: could you be working for a different company tomorrow, or would it take a few weeks to figure out. Switching unions is often impossible: the same union often covers everyone with the same skills.
> If recognized, Kickstarter would be the first major tech company with union representation in the United States.
But that's not correct. Engineers at Hughes Aircraft, including programmers, were unionized and represented by Local 1553 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. I think Hughes counts as a major tech company. Local 1553 also represents electronics and space engineers at other aerospace companies.
How did a carpenter's union end up representing engineers whose work had nothing to do with wood? Briefly, in the 1940s when Hughes built the Spruce Goose, a huge plane built almost entirely out of wood, they hired a lot of union carpenters. After the Spruce Goose was cancelled, many of those carpenters stayed on doing other work at Hughes, and kept their union. More history of 1553 here [1].
[1] http://www.east1553.com/history.htm
I think it's more like you join a company, and there is a set RoE for both the company and the union to talk to you about the union, and joining the union as an individual is usually, politics aside, a strong option because of all the extra benefits and protections union workers receive.
They _could_ require that _after_ joining Kickstarter either join the union or pay equivalent dues.
That sounds like exactly the same thing as a closed shop. How is that practically any different?
And to put another way: would it be reasonable for you to benefit from the work the union does for all employees without also contributing to that union?
All this is besides the point that requiring employees to join the union is a decision the _employer_ would have to make (although probably through union pressure).
If I never asked for the union or their collective bargaining, then yes. It's like cleaning my windows when I never asked you to and then demanding cash for it.
In the case of single-developer projects as single contractors, in the case of multi-developer projects as worker cooperatives or collectives.
Eg, https://www.iww.org/membership/3
If you're in a right to work state neither fees or membership is required.
Kickstarter is in NY, which is not a right-to-work state. So you may as well join the union, because you have to pay dues.
- You don't have to be a union member to get nearly all the benefits of the union -- including the pay scale from its collective bargaining, access to legal representation, health insurance benefits, and being able to attend regular union meetings. Basically, the only thing a non-member can't do is vote. (I see on our worker list today that fewer than half of our workforce today are actually union members.)
- Legally, they can't even require members to pay dues, though I imagine everyone here does, because it's inexpensive, and benefits all workers, including yourself. That's why one would vote to unionize in the first place!
These rules can and almost certainly do differ according to your union, local, contract, and state and federal law.
Unless someone responding here has specific knowledge of OPEIU, Local 153, their Kickstarter contract, or New York labor law, I would not place any trust in it. Many of these answers sound more like anti-union FUD than facts from the Kickstarter United contract.
Better pay and benefits - my maximum out of pocket was lower than most deductibles. Democratizes the workplace - really helps keep management in check. You get real job security - firing is much less arbitrary with a steward fighting for you.
However, if people aren't active in union elections, bargaining etc. it can get really stale really fast
People could start a union so _they_ make more money, but _you_ could make less money.
For example pay by seniority. Great for the senior people in the union, not so great for you.
Hollywood unions, for example, do not use a seniority-based pay scale.
Closed-shop unions are illegal in the US, for starters, so you can't have a closed-shop industry-wide union.
The only industry-wide unions that exist set workplace protections and salary floors but no salary caps...and no indutry-wide union has ever embraced seniority-based pay because, being an industry-wide union, that regime wouldn't work across the very different economic environments of 50 states and their thousands of cities.
1. You are required to pay a certain amount (either percentage or flat fee, I'm not sure) of your paycheque into a new political organization, the union
2. You are entitled to periodically vote on the who to elect to leadership of the union
3. The leadership of the union represents the entirety of the staff at the company in any and all negotiations and disputes with management. The leadership of the union will engage in collective bargaining with management, establishing a single working contract that encompasses every employee<->employer relationship in the company.
So, right now, in a non-unionized company, if you go to work there, you and the company negotiate a contract which is the terms of your working relationship. Frequently, the company will dictate the terms of the contract and then you will exercise some marginal negotiation power regarding, say, pay or vacation time or whatever, although (especially for specialists and highly paid staff) these are far more open to negotiation, generally, than people think.
When you do this, this is a private relationship between you and your employer. Your coworkers are not involved. They have their own private individual relationships with the employer that have nothing to do with yours. Their contracts could be radically different from yours. That's between them and the company.
What a union does is get in between you and the employer, and collectivizes all of those individual negotiations into one larger, general negotiation. So now, instead of you negotiating a private contract with the employer, the union will negotiate a general contract that applies to _all_ staff, and then you will sign that contract.
The main argument in favour of unions like this is that by collectivizing the bargaining, it gives them negotiation power. So imagine, for instance, that you are getting a job at Google. As an individual, if you don't like the contract Google is giving you, you can demand dramatic changes to it. And then Google will laugh at you, spit in your face, and kick your ass out the door, because they're one of the richest corporations on the planet and you dare to think that _you_ can dictate terms to _them_? But, if the staff at Google were unionized, suddenly it's different. Suddenly, when the union pushes back on Google and demands drastic changes, Google has to negotiate in good faith. This is because the union represents _all_ of the employees; if the union threatens to walk away from the negotiation, then _all_ of Googles employees stop working. Google might be able to kick any individual out the door, but if the entirety of Google's staff stops working suddenly there are massive problems.
So why might you not want a union? Well, there's a few reasons. One might be obvious from the previous paragraph. Say you are quite happy with your current job at Google, but some of the unions _other_ members are unhappy and are demanding change. Eventually, negotiations come to an impasse. The union threatens to walk away. If they do that, you _must_ stop working. The fact that you are quite happy with your job doesn't matter. You are bound by their collective agreement, and they just suspended their collective agreement.
More generally, unions take a distributed, private, individual process and turn it into a politicized, public, collective process. This can reduce the company's flexibility to make different arrangements with different groups of people, and if you are someone who benefits from such a different arrangement you might rationally be opposed to this. Additionally, if you are someone who is heavily skeptical of the ability of political processes to make effective decisions, you might not want a board of elected union activists making decisions on your behalf.
Unions also cost money. I admit I don't know how much they cost; for all I know it's $5 per paycheque. But fees can be substa...
The one thing you didn't touch on too much is the efficiency of decision making by hierarchical management vs the efficiency of decision making by committee. This is already sometimes painful with processes like Scrum and unions would probably make it worse. The process of negotiating, suing and setting binding legal precedent is so tedious - it can seriously damage companies' ability to move quickly.
Plus unions are pretty dated. I have very little confidence that legal precedent around unions would work well in the modern global world.
Pros (mostly the employees perspective):
- Greatly increased negotiating power (We all got paid way more than I expect we would have if we weren't unionized)
- Pooling of resources to acquire shared resources (e.g. labor lawyers)
- Generally the ability to appeal decisions like "you're fired"
- Selling point when hiring (since unionized tech companies are rather rare, and everyone claims it's hard to attract talent, I'd expect this to be valuable to the company)
Cons:
- That increased negotiating power is wielded by people you often don't quite agree with.
- It's more bureaucracy, which means more inefficiency
- Generally less ability to negotiate for yourself
- While job security for yourself is obviously a feature, job security for under-performing colleagues can actually really suck. Working with, and fixing the messes made by people who just don't care is not fun.
I run a 17 person company and I've heard employees mention that they think all companies should be unionized even if there aren't currently any problems that the union would seek to address. I strongly support the big tech companies unionizing and so it would be hypocritical of me to be opposed to it for my own company, but at the same time it seems like the overhead for such a small company would be really significant and I'm not sure what it would accomplish given that I'm not aware of current employees having any demands that we haven't satisfied already.
Even if nothing comes of it, I think it's an interesting thought experiment.
All of those things seem like relatively minor costs when spread out across a large employee base, but I could see it being prohibitive for a smaller company. Or maybe this is a solved problem and you can just find some boilerplate stuff online that takes care of the whole process.
That is, so long as the employees are content, it will be very low; try to do things that they don't like and the cost will go up.
The "overhead" you speak of is to pay someone to negotiate on the workers behalf, save up for a strike stipend, and provide worker training (usually Unions will run or subsidize courses to help workers skill up, get licensed, etc).
Can someone explain what the Kickstarter employee's hope to gain? “promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table,” sounds very left wing in an already left wing company in a left wing area.
Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
If more money is paid to individual employees just because they demanded the added cost to the employer makes them inherently less competitive and therefore able to earn less and therefore pay said employees lower wages over time or go out of business.
The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Any money not going to the workers ought to be justified, rather than the negation. So to turn the question around: why are management & shareholders entitled to such a large share of what the workers produce? The answer is because management & shareholders are more powerful than any single worker, and this is abused to take more than their share. No moral justification is given or even considered. To unionize is to relatively equalize this power relation.
I mean is it rational.
> The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work.
Completely disagree. I believe most of the value of a company is created by the vision of its founding team and the execution of its leadership not the numerous workers along the hierarchy. I also think the 80-20 rule maybe a good way to identify how much value creation should be attributed to a group of workers ie on average most likely 80% of the value is created by 20% of workers.
It's as if we're rediscovering the stated purpose of unions, right here in this thread! The union can negotiate with everyone's labor, not just that of an individual worker.
It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that.
2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism?
The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request.
But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes.
> But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices
Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.
I hate my open plan office but I would never give up even a week's salary to protest it.
How many people in this thread honestly DON'T see themselves as a "top" contributor? Tech is like Lake Woebegone... all the kids are above average.
You're absolutely right though, it can be very difficult to have enough self knowledge and awareness to even place one's self sometimes.
In fact, due to the extremely low salaries in either private or public schools many people who would consider teaching end up in different fields... _that_ is what is driving down the quality.
Is there additional information about how unions lower the quality of public education inside the United States?
> Although teachers are now being charged more quickly, it still takes several years to complete the hearing process and for the arbitrator to render a decision.
So they get stood down until they've had a misconduct hearing, that seems fair, we don't want to ruin careers on allegations alone.
> In June 2012 it was revealed that the New York State Education Department had not paid its arbitrators for several years, and collectively owed them millions of dollars for cases they had completed, or were in the process of hearing. In frustration, ten of the 24 arbitrators on the New York City panel have quit, while the remaining 14 refuse to hear any testimony or issue any decisions until their back wages have been paid in full.
This is a massive administrative failure, I don't know why your blaming unions.
That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.
EDIT: I should also note that NYC public schools are an incredibly challenging teaching environment, a lot of false accusations fly around, and I don't mean that all the teachers in the rubber rooms should be let go. I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but is there any evidence that it is a huge problem and not isolated cases?
> That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.
The problem is not having a way to quantify what a good teacher is. Is it the one that imparts a love of learning on there students or the one that gets better test results? Is it the one in the wealthy area or the one in the poor area where kids aren't even being fed? If the students do poorly is it the teachers fault or did a teacher in a previous year skip crucial topics?
Paying good teachers more isn't possible until you can identify good teachers.
> I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.
Well there I agree, it should at least be very rare. It does sound strange to me, I don't think it's a thing in my country and even in academia tenure isn't as strong.
You're right that it's hard to quantify whether someone is a good teacher or not, but I don't think it's impossible to judge. It's probably impossible to make it a simple succinct rubric, though. Maybe it's a challenge for a universal function approximator like a neural net :-)
You sure it's the unions and not the fact that private schools get to cream-skim children from families with means who want to prioritize their education rather than being forced to take all comers?
Mandated by government and paid for with taxes seems to be part of the equation too. I'm not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing.
However, if a regular business ended up being forced into a situation where they had to overpay underperformers, they'd go out of business, probably for the better(?).
1. I do my best work when my colleagues are also doing their best work. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job if I can't use the leverage of having teammates. I will be happier if the company can compensate all of my coworkers well and make them happy and hire good coworkers - both in terms of intrinsic motivation / happiness and in terms of whether the company is profitable enough to compensate me as my performance deserves.
2. I'm a lot better at doing the work than negotiating for the salary I deserve. There are plenty of people in this industry who are the other way around.
Regarding disruptive employees: Why would a union restrict a company's ability to fire disruptive employees? (excepting the corrupted union that has irrational favorites)
Regarding under-performing employees: Are you talking about the person who is just a bit slower than others or the person who's lack of aptitude causes other employees to lose unreasonable amounts of time to assisting that employee? I'd count the second type in the same class as being disruptive.
Also, at your current workplace is everyone equal in terms salary when when normalized by performance? Is it a problem if you're a bit more efficient than a co-worker and earning the same salary as them?
And union is by the employees, for the employees. If the person is truly disruptive and slipped through the 1 year mark, unions don't just back you up regardless.
For example, a national union of software engineers would not be a great idea. (Even with local branches) Too many factors to consider to come to agreement. I guess a lot more sacrifice on the employees part nationally when mou negotiations are happening.
But if you have a California union for software engineers who are in a media industry, you have really focused the goals to a set of people. They can negotiate by looking at a union formed by google employees. Same thing with google. Vice versa, Just a union for google employees. They negotiate on their own or look at the benefits of a union provided by, say, Facebook.
- Just like I evaluate management when finding a new job (in my most recent job hunt I quite explicitly asked my interviewers what they thought about their management and how they thought it differed from other places they've worked, and hearing poor answers from one famous company was a reason I turned them down), I can evaluate the union when finding a new job. If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
- I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
- Management often prioritizes their own needs as individual employees, and is willing to overlook failures or mistakes if it's in the interest of their own career paths. It's hard to crack down on people failing up into management if you yourself are a manager because you failed up.
In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities. I prefer that system over a straight democracy for changing management priorities.
But in the end, the "best" ideas in the sense of the most profitable ones will still win, because companies with truly bad ideas from populism (e.g., "empty the company's cash reserves into end-of-year bonuses") will just not survive. Unions don't change the fact that companies themselves participate in a market.
And if you prefer that system, you and others who agree with you can absolutely participate in the market too and compete as part of your own business. You can choose not to join unionized companies. But I don't prefer that system. That's all.
I don't want to deny you your experiences, but this has not been mine. Not by a long-shot. Tons of time and effort get spent at my company trying to work around the idiosyncrasies of our capricious and out of touch management. And we're in a fast growing industry and our management seems to become more out-of-touch about the state of the technology and the market every year.
Their cognitive biases, pickled in their experiences from 8-10 years ago when they were last in touch with the real work, have a much bigger role in their priorities than any rational or dispassionate evaluation of what the "best ideas" are. The one saving grace they have is hiring subordinates who are good at manipulating them for their own benefit. Very VERY few tech companies can find that many people with the necessary soft skills to do it.
One downside of this is it sounds like we get to roll the "good bureaucracy / bad bureaucracy" dice twice instead of once, if either roll comes up "bad" we're in trouble.
Also, you usually have more influence in what your union does than what your management does. If I have to pick one of two dice to roll, I'll pick the one that's weighted in my favor, even if it sometimes comes up 1.
The issue is not that the management will defends the bad employee, it's that the union will.
How can you know if the union will?
I got a friend that right now have to deal (ask re-do the work of someone else constantly) because they can't fire her because the union don't want to do anything about it. How could she have known that the union would be ready to not protect one of their member?
Then go work elsewhere. I'm sure your co-workers won't miss the "what about mine???" attitude.
I think this statement is used as an anti-union argument here a lot, and it speaks to the ego that many engineers/developers have. "Top performers" are single-digits in a lot of even medium sized organizations, and chances are that an individual employee falls outside of this "top performer" category even if they think they are one. The unions work for the majority. This means that the unions probably work for you.
Everyone wants to say they hire the top 1% of top 1% but in reality that's not possible, and most of them are sucked up in some pretty strange places or by big companies with lots and lots of incentives to throw at them.
The majority of information I see online about software unions tends to be either anecdotal, or generalized across every industry rather than focused on a specific one (ie, on average, unions across all industries get X% higher pay).
This is being applied to a single company, so people who think it's terrible have no shortage of other places to go. It's high profile enough that Kickstarter trying to shut it down will get public blowback, so there's a better than average chance that they end up taking its demands seriously. It'll give at least one very tangible data point of, "here's what a software union in a software company looks like." And even if it does crash and burn, maybe we'll get some Kickstarter competitors out of it from prior employees.
I see very little downside. Let's have at least one trial somewhere, even if it's not perfect, that gives us at least some preview about what a US-based software union will look like.
That can vary wildly. And just like other industries, there can be management abuses - like demanding regular, unpaid overtime, substandard wages, sexism, unreasonable behavior, etc. Think about all the basically permanent contractors working for tech companies that might not have healthcare or other benefits, etc.
Allowing company management to organize and act as a collective while not doing so as an employee puts you at a disadvantage in every negotiation and conflict.
Moderate hour expectations don't always hold during "crunch time"; Facebook and Google have large swaths of their employee base who are subject to the schedules of the large annual developer conferences (F8, Google Cloud Next, Google I/O). There have been internal mandates where employees were forced to work weekends for entire quarters.
Yes, this is true, but I wonder if anyone is going to someday connect the dots between "crazy high average salary" and "high housing prices". Simply raising wages doesn't in and of itself make housing more affordable... it kicks off a feedback loop. When it's not unheard of for tech workers to make $250K-$500K per year (ostensibly to make it easier to buy those million dollar homes!), don't be surprised when housing prices spiral out of control.
Local government mostly represents native San Franciscans who, understandably, do not want to give up their home so that "other people" can live there (even if, by utilitarian standards, more of those other people can live there).
Folks who moved to the Bay Area in search of employment in tech (both immigrants and Americans who are not "native San Franciscans") who desire more housing are not always represented in local government. (In some local meetings, folks shoot down your opinion if you aren't born in SF.)
For CEOs/management, telecommuting and remote sites can make your company less nimble / competitive. Remote workers get left out of "serendipitous microkitchen discussions", and coordinating across sites/time zones is more work than just having one big all-hands in one big campus. (Can be mitigated by starting with a remote-first culture, but this is very hard to bolt on to an existing company.)
Finally, companies can't exactly reduce their hiring (number of roles) or salaries in collaboration with their neighbours to reduce housing prices.
Also it'd be nice if some of the more powerful workers here could organize and help lobby for things like parental leave and minimum vacation for all workers, including those without so much clout.
EDIT: and there's still the "if you write a novel in your free time on your own hardware we can try to claim it if we feel like it" clauses that are so common.
What on earth does the 2016 election have to do with wealth inequality (or unions for that matter)? Inequality has been on the rise for decades and Clinton was also a member of the 1%. This seems like a non-sequitur.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/2/16720952/s...
I don't really understand the purpose of the unionization effort, beyond the facade of just wanting to in some way "fit in" with a social movement.
It's pretty naive to think unionization is just a social fad. It's a path towards job security, safety, good pay, and control over the direction of your own labor. Trendiness is pretty low on the totem pole.
The alternative is complete control by the employer. Sure, a union, as an institution with power, can likely limit some of your independence, but an employer can limit all of it.
Sanders is in the 1% as well.
Just because someone belongs to a group, doesn't make their criticism of the unjust advantages of that group invalid. Similarly, a white person arguing for civil rights is not a hypocrite either.
The Great Recession and subsequently Occupy Wall Street were early reactions to the symptoms that started heavily in the 2000s but really has been in play since the 70s. Share of GDP is a steady downtrend [1]. Velocity of money fell of a cliff in 2000s [2]. US GINI coefficient has increased steadily [3]. Inequality definitely became more of an issue in 2016 election but not much has been done to help it, it will continue to be an issue until UBI or GDP share changes.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
A guy who is objectively unqualified for every conceivable post had the opportunity to become elected as president of the U.S. merely because he was born wealthy.
You might have heard the following term before: plutocracy
America's in a lot of trouble. 2020 is going to make 2016 look like Jefferson & Adams.
She wasn't even close. She had a fair amount of NGO issue advocacy experience (mostly in the human services domain), less than two full terms in the Senate, and a brief (and arguably none too impressive) stint as the weakest-incoming-foreign-policy-resume Secretary of State we’d had in a long time (but Rex Tillerson displaced her for that “honor”.)
You can make the case that she edges out Obama and certainly W in terms of initial policy qualifications, but not her own husband or Ronald Reagan (unless you focus only on foreign policy), not George H. W. Bush (unless you focus only on domestic policy), maybe Carter, probably Nixon, not even close to Johnson, ...
She is so obviously experienced, vetted, responsible and educated as to make that 'not even close' assertion ridiculous.
What is a structural force that defines class in America?
There is also a lot of structure around consumerism, debt, and the like, though this is split between societal/cultural structures and government/business structures.
Wealth inequality has been increasing for 40 years despite worker productivity rising. Nearly every metric shows the rungs to wealth being pulled away, and I'm the non logical one here?
> doesn't necessitate a downvote
You were already downvoted before I commented.
> should be inspiring, bc it shows that literally anyone middle class or above can be incredibly wealthy if principles are followed for 3-4 generations.
You didn't 'show' anything; you simply stated economic religion.
Wealth has nothing at all to do with worker productivity. It has only to do with saving a lot more than one spends by spending less, or generating large value to society with a monetary reward.
The pathway for any middle class family is through inherited wealth and NOT some fantasty of wealth equality achieved in 1 lifetime. We need to stop thinking in small terms of 'years'.
Wealth can be achieved generally in a family over the course of 1.5 centuries. If a family applies good saving practices, and saves over 5-6 generational lifetimes - it is very hard NOT to be wealthy. My parents were a fireman and teacher. My grandfather paid for my college, my parents are paying for my kids college, and I'm paying for my grand kids and great grand kids college - SOLELY bc of saving over extended periods of time. That was our family deal - take care of those after you 2 generations down. Thinking multi-generational is the easiest path to success.
Yes, inequality increasing because the richest aggregate in the US says absolutely nothing about how the quality of life has changed for regular people. It's a red herring.
If a rich person moves into my tiny town, I don't suddenly become worse off, despite inequality increasing drastically.
Racism is structural in a number of ways:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
"We support the right of private employers and employees to choose whether or not to bargain with each other through a labor union. Bargaining should be free of government interference, such as compulsory arbitration or imposing an obligation to bargain." https://www.lp.org/platform/
EDIT: Instead of replying to everyone individually. Over the last ~15 years I've held jobs from tech support to network engineer to full stack developer. In each of them I have noticed that recent college grads are almost always clueless, and basically have to start from scratch. These are kids with massive student loan debt that could have started working earlier and learned through an apprenticeship.
Have you talked to anyone who does professional entertainment/movie work about their thoughts on unions?
Unions are expensive, corrupt, and don't actually do much to help most of the workers. The unionized workers hire contractors to do the real work for many features, and are parasitic organizations that mostly just drive up the cost of making movies.
There was recently an article in the Times about a local NYC union president who's office is decorated with such high-end fixtures & furniture that he has a second office on another floor just to appear more humble. I can't find it at the moment...
e-Mail, instant messaging, etc. Any form of communication makes unionizing easier.
People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.
Tell that to anyone whose workplace unionizes against their wishes and lives in a "closed shop" state. (Yes, closed shops are illegal, but agency fees lead to essentially the same thing).
Being forced to pay a fee to a union that does not represent you and that you did not vote to join is absolute bullshit.
Of course they do. The difference is that they are tricked into thinking they won't be worse off by the union organizers pretending that it's unlikely everyone will completely lose their job.
How does that not sound coercive? A company saying "If you collectively bargain against us, we will punish you" sounds ok to you? You've been tricked out of collective bargaining by decades of anti-union propaganda, and now you're carrying water for capital.
Perhaps the causation is reversed, and industries with terrible working conditions and low raises tend to attract unions to empower the workers to change those conditions?
It's only at big factories that they show up when more than X number of people are fired and do a big show out of that. Meanwhile, all the employees not working for big factories paid their union fees and saw nothing back. It's often a platform to launch their political careers.
Luckily, they are not mandatory anymore and now employees have to opt-in which was a great change. They have to work to earn respect and those fees back... but I'm not seeing much movement in that direction. So far they have been going the legal route, trying to cancel the changes to the law (and have lost).
In theory, the concept of unions is great but in practice, at least here, it was a terrible thing, from my IT bubble perspective.
If tech unions are new organizations by, for, and of tech workers, they might result in positive change for tech workers. If they fall in line with AFL-CIO et al., stand by for trouble.
Some of our states go a step further and have introduced measures that seek to directly attack the ability of employees to collectively bargain, to remove the power organized labor has against management. These are called "right to work states".
Generally speaking, RTW states have lower pay on average, they are less educated on average, and their workers have less benefits from their businesses (parental leave, vacation time, healthcare benefits, etc), they have less recourses against employer bad behavior (both as a function of RTW attacking collective bargaining, and from the reality that the same politics that are against unions also are very anti-labor, anti-minimum wage, anti-regulation of labor marketplace all together, so there are far less public resources and regulators to assist with claims). If you're an employer, this probably sounds great. Labor is cheaper and you can fire them whenever you want for no reason at all on the drop of a dime AND there is no pesky government regulator to come waste your time and money investigating. "Easy come easy go" is one of the most common management philosophies from small and medium business owners in my RTW state, from my experience.
From the perspective of an American: you choose a liberal/blue/union state when you want good infrastructure, highly educated and competent staff, and little turnover. You choose a conservative/red/anti-union state when you're planning to take advantage of your staff, you don't care about higher turnover, you want to pay below-national-market rates as a rule, and you don't care as much about the individual quality of each employee. There's a reason why tech companies don't pick the South and when they do they require billions in literal free cash to do so.
It is what it is, but the slow death of the union in the United States correlates quite perfectly with the slow death of the American middle class in terms of wealth and income gains per year.
I have mixed experience with unions in Brazil, the fact that they are mandated makes it almost like a scam, a part of your wages go towards union contributions but rarely do you get anything out of that. Most directors at unions are in it for political powers as the bigger unions are major players in politics(as seen that our ex-president is a former unionist).
On one hand, unions can provide negotiation power, specially in class action suits, including unfair dismissal. But most of the time I've seen unions collude with companies and associations to provide underwhelming benefits and wages that are below inflation.
In some cases such as medicine and dentistry they are solid credentials of many professionals and I take it as mostly positive.
In the case of engineering it should follow the same as the engineer's union is a very strong powerhouse that requires quite high minimum wages for engineers(IIRC 8.5x the national minimum wage). However this has led many companies to use a loophole where engineers are hired with a different job title, performing the same job, just so that they don't have to pay that minimum, while sometimes even requiring that said engineer is registered with the union. As computer science is not engineering, even though some computer engineers are qualified as such, I've never met a programmer that has a proper engineer contract.