Just going to raise an eyebrow at the company’s assertion that people with the titles “senior manager” and “senior editor” aren’t in managerial positions. They’re either being disingenuous or have some serious title inflation going on there.
I know a lot of places put Senior as just a way of differentiating from Tier 1,2,3 positions etc. Doesn't always mean they're managers. It's also like how the title VP is used these days in finance.
I have worked at companies with “managers” who have no direct reports, but rather gain prioritization for whatever project they are assigned from other “team managers” who have direct reports. To my knowledge this structure is reasonable.
Either theyre being disingenuous by saying their senior managers arent managers or theyre being disingenuous by calling employees that arent managers managers.
Compensation, vacation time, career advancement opportunities, equity ownership, heath care plan differences, on call/availability requirements, severance in the event of separation, and possibly other benefits I haven't thought of. Perhaps even how performance improvement plans are handled.
Senior staff and management don't want the playing field leveled, nor all the cards on the table. If one were so inclined, you'd go digging for the comp and benefits delta between different classes of Kickstarter staff.
Completely apropos of the major topic, I love that this person got a degree in fine arts and is now a senior software engineer. That kind of thing is something that I really like about the technology space.
> Forming a union is a great tool—for marginalized workers. Unions are historically intended to protect vulnerable members of society, and we feel the demographics of this union undermine this important function. We're concerned with the misappropriation of unions for use by privileged workers, some of whom receive compensation more than twice the average income in NYC, in addition to flexible work from home hours, above-and-beyond industry standards for parental leave, 25+ days of paid vacation, a wellness stipend, a bike stipend, an education stipend, a weekly catered lunch, and a great deal of other benefits. We're already a radically thoughtful and ethical company with our PBC, and can do more to lead the way in the tech industry by providing an open environment that's free of hostility.
Because a company treats their employees well, they always will. And employees should just take what they are given instead of trying to get a seat at the table. Welcome to the brave new world of woke stools and scabs.
Not to mention, that's not how/when unions got formed. Unions, as a derivative of trade guilds, formed exactly under the conditions we are seeing today. The capitalists _needing_ in-high-demand skilled laborers. If you consider that unionization requires a large concession from capital, it makes sense that unionization can only form during periods when labor is strong.
Yes, of course unions help marginalized workers, but that's only because they have been put into place by powerful workers to help out when that time inevitably comes. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.
I think you have a good point here. I see a time when programmers become somewhat replaceable and when the industry as a whole reduces benifits for programmers bit by bit. Currently, there is a huge increase in the number of freshmen joining the computer science department in the university I attended and I see it only growing. In the future, a computer science degree might become something like the biology degree and that's when programmers will feel the pain of not being high-demand skilled laborers any more.
It’s not a guarantee that collective bargaining will help privileged workers, and union dues aren’t free. The statement is a bit cheerleadery, but isn’t necessarily irrational.
Yeah, I used to work at a company with a mix of union and non-union sites, and the unions were good in a sense that the company standardized a lot of general union policies across sites. So the end result was the non-union sites had most of the pros of a union and none of the fees.
There has always been a fierce anti-labor streak in US politics. Even the first red scare in 1920's (before the cold-war!) associated all unions and pro labor moments and even speech as communist.
There is a feverish anti-union attitude even among people who have never even met anyone in one. If you ask, you will even find intense dislike of every foreign union without even knowing it's name or where its country is.
I think it's inaccurate to claim that there are people who aren't enamored with unions simply because people don't like unions.
Take police unions for example. It is well documented that many unions are fervently against policies such as always-on body cams that theoretically should protect a (good) cop and the citizen. Fail that, they are against releasing body cam footage.[0] Police unions are also known to protect abusive officers. [1]
I'm not trying to claim that there isn't an anti-union attitude, but it is not simply associating them with communism.
And therefore an engineering union is probably going to be bad?
Some police unions do these things and need to be stopped. But that does not mean all unions in every field are bad. There are evil corporations too, are all corporations bad? Are the majority? Why does the public precive that differently?
Since the cold war, the communism claim has given way to universally negative portal: the sole presentation in fact is negative. Usually by tacitly implying an unusual behavior is typical and inevitable of every possible union.
The difference is Exxon runs ads of happy children running through flowery fields and unions don't. And pointing out a union's deficiencies is not going to loose sponsors, possibly the reverse.
That's quite untrue. In several European countries, for example Germany, U.S.-style "union shops" (which, unfortunately, are basically mandatory under the NLRA) are illegal.
You have it backwards: the NLRA guarantees the right _not_ to join a union unless the _employer_ decides otherwise (Sec. 7. [157.])
And in many states, under deceptively named "right to work" laws, union-shops are illegal even if the employer agreed to them. Interestingly, while employers can not always require union membership as terms of employment, they can always require binding arbitration and non-competes which is the opposite of a "right to work"
I don't think it comes down to anything nefarious, I think a lot of people have dealt with union workers who really took advantage of their protected status to do a pretty bad job in exchange for too much money because they've managed to make it a requirement to use one of their members, no matter how badly you don't want to. And it leaves a really bad flavor in your mouth.
I downvoted you because you said multiple factually incorrect things. As others pointed out, US unions are not the same as "any place else." Many people, like myself, dislike unions not because we're anti-labor but because we're anti-corruption and recognize some of the ridiculous things unions do.
I've known people who worked under the UAW and Teamsters unions. The amount people got paid in US auto plants for menial tasks was outrageous. $15/h+ 15 years ago for the most unskilled roles. Hiring was full of nepotism. You had to know someone to get one of these overpaid jobs. Outsiders were not welcome. The UAW continued to demand above market salaries despite companies declaring bankruptcy. Auto makers responded by moving to Mexico. Great job UAW!
As for Teamsters, their history is full of corruption. Dues payments were a job requirement. No dues, no job. They protected the worst workers from being fired, much like police and teachers unions.
They tend to overreach their charter and rather than negotiate strongly with the entrenched powers that be they instead hinder newcomers aka competition thereby putting a drag on innovation. Or at least that is the common view in the US.
I think this is just management cynically reframing some popular “social justice” rhetoric in a way that allows them to paint their opposition as a “progressive” position to take. But maybe that’s a cynical reading of their language too...
I don't have a great intuition for this, so I looked it up. It looks like Black workers are more likely than White workers to be union members, while workers of other racial minorities are less likely [0]:
> Among major race and ethnicity groups, Black workers continued to have a higher union membership rate in 2018 (12.5 percent) than workers who were White (10.4 percent), Asian (8.4 percent), or Hispanic (9.1 percent).
But it's possible that the story is different for construction workers or for other individual sectors.
I'm sure that it varies somewhat by industry. But also, the absolute populations of white and black people in America are pretty different, so it matters how you measure this. A higher proportion of blacks could be union members, and still the absolute number of white union members could be larger.
I read “privileged workers” = workers for whom there is competition to hire, as opposed to workers who don’t have much mobility or (good) choices in employers
Other ethnicities may be so vulnerable so that they can't even form an union.
Note that labor activists have always seen racism as a threat to a unified workforce and left-wing ideology has always described a global caste of workers to be united.
Depends on the union but historically some unions have also been fairly anti-immigration and even racist. In response racial minorities formed their own unions.
That said, the statement in and of itself isn't incorrect. There has and still are vulnerable members of society who are in the racial majority. In fact, some historians have argued that racism was promoted in the US as a way to separate the vulnerable whites from other vulnerable groups. Before slavery became self perpetuating in the US (as in child mortality rate among slaves was high enough that slave had to be shipped in from other places), racism towards Africans was actually less pronounced and interracial marriages between Africans and white weren't outlawed. Once slavery became self perpetuating, laws were passed and attitudes changed to ensure that vulnerable whites won't mingle with African slaves and endanger slavery.
"White men account for less than one-fourth of the city’s union members, according to the study, written by Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a colleague, Stephanie Luce. Fully 60 percent of all union members in the city identify themselves as either black or Latino; women who do not identify themselves as black or Latino make up an additional 17 percent of the city’s union members."
Unions tend to equalize rewards because of their one worker one vote mechanics. Union representation will probably bring up the compensation of the worst workers and lower the compensation of the top workers, so senior employees are right to fight the unionization effort.
Senior employees who are motivated only by personal profit, with absolutely no feeling for their fellow humans are right to fight the unionization effort.
This is black and white thinking. There is a wide range of possible positions between "motivated only by personal profit, with absolutely no feeling for their fellow humans" and wanting to build a union.
Parent post was responding to black and white thinking:
Union representation will probably bring up the compensation of the worst workers and lower the compensation of the top workers, so senior employees are right to fight the unionization effort.
I hope you've never argued for a raise when you could have asked your boss to give someone else a raise instead.
It's like, yeah, we should think about others, that's great. But not every and all attempts at raising one's own status completely bad and evil.
When I was young and starting my career, there were plenty of fields I could have picked that were almost all unionized (in my home country, unions are the norm almost everywhere). I specifically didn't go those ways because I felt I could do better without. Didn't stop the others to go that route. Now that I'm there, on purpose, if people tried to build a union, I'd probably push back. And if the majority still wanted it (that's their right!), then they can get it, and I'll move somewhere else.
Which is not true for professional unions - this is classic red scare tactics that to be blunt people like Presidents father and Grandfather trotted out.
Union representation will probably bring up the compensation of the worst workers and lower the compensation of the top workers, so senior employees are right to fight the unionization effort.
This is FUD. Professional unions establish minimum pay but place no upper bounds on salary.
To drive home the point: Dwayne Johnson and that guy who was an extra in the background of that coffee shop scene are both members of SAG-AFTRA. Do you really thing Dwayne Johnson got paid the same as that rando?
So long as every one agrees that some sort of organization is desirable, I can't see what's wrong with potential members arguing out the details. That's the point of the democratic component.
On the other hand, subterfuge to derail the whole process with a form of concern trolling is not cool.
Union shops are lowest common denominator places. High performers tend to leave because seniority and politics dominates promotion and wages.
Apart from this, senior union reps and management tend to get cosy and form coalitions against workers and shareholders.
The people that win are the people that are good at politics, workers that are mediocre, and people that are uncomfortable with fast-paced change. Unions are great at slowing things down and keeping things in slow comfort zone so people don't have to learn new things.
Imagine the mediocre 50% of your company gets to determine the processes and procedures used in your team. That's a union shop.
Imagine that manager who isn't very good at his job but is good at politics and that union rep getting drinks after work, and making a coalition against the fast rising manager with aggresive new initiatives in mind ... that's a union shop.
Long term your company will stagnate and die.
Short term, a bunch of mediocre people will feel comfortable.
Flavor of the day workers will get hired based on checking boxes ... not based on any objective criteria/merit. That's a union.
Ever wonder why 90% of cops are white in the Bay Area, even when the neighborhoods are 90% non-white? That's a union.
Unions are the big lie that political animals tell everyone else ... OH JUST GIVE US THE POWER AND WE WILL EMPOWER YOU!
It's only true if you are incapable of providing for yourself. If you have the skills, fight against the union as long as you can, and then leave.
Best decision my parents ever made was to leave the union-choked midwestern city where I was born, to come west thirty years ago. I probably would have been one of those rust-trapped casualties by now if my parents had stayed.
> Union shops are lowest common denominator places. High performers tend to leave because seniority and politics dominates promotion and wages.
This is absolutely not true in the trade unions. In an earlier life I was a union plumber (on my way to becoming a master licensed plumber; and to this day I can walk into virtually any commercial or light industrial jobsite, and tell you at a glance, if it is a union or non-union job). I don't just mean the plumbing work either; but also the electrical, and the pipe and/or steam fitting, and I'd be right 90% of the time. Such is the difference between the training and tradition of taking pride in your work.
Salaries are also Not carved in stone. I was once paid $300 a week over General Foreman's wage to run a job, and that was in the mid-eighties.
They are not perfect, and yes it can be harder to get rid of a real slacker, but nothing is impossible. And FWIW based on what I read on here in terms of the problems a lot of coders have with age, performance reviews and interviewing--you guys should definitely consider forming a union...or for Pete's Code Up App and stick together!
How much does plumbing need to change with the times? I suspect it changes at a glacial pace compared to high tech. Also, how much does it matter whether your pipes are done by top 1% of plumbers vs just some average plumber? Probably the work is interchangeable as long as the plumber has some experience and has been trained.
None of that is true when you are building something cutting edge with competitors lapping at your heels. Maybe web development has become like plumbing now ... but search algorithms, robotics, space travel, etc. are certainly not.
Kickstarter could probably benefit from more slowness and processes. There have been loads of scams on that platform. Unionized workforces can either help or hinder a particular company's business model for a particular duration, you are making wide sweeping generalizations across all businesses. You are also "West Coastal" signaling as though everything on the West Coast is a Utopia while the Midwest is backward, which...what is the Midwest anyway? Which states constitute the Midwest and why are we to assume that invalidates companies there, are there zero successful companies in the midwest with unions? You also mention police being mostly white attributable to unions only...what is the connection there?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadLooks like this is also leaking that Kickstarter is raising...
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/CE...
Senior staff and management don't want the playing field leveled, nor all the cards on the table. If one were so inclined, you'd go digging for the comp and benefits delta between different classes of Kickstarter staff.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilaratna/
We're not talking about a senior executive here. We're talking about someone with ~5 years of experience.
Completely apropos of the major topic, I love that this person got a degree in fine arts and is now a senior software engineer. That kind of thing is something that I really like about the technology space.
Because a company treats their employees well, they always will. And employees should just take what they are given instead of trying to get a seat at the table. Welcome to the brave new world of woke stools and scabs.
Yes, of course unions help marginalized workers, but that's only because they have been put into place by powerful workers to help out when that time inevitably comes. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.
Also the "some of whom" ... Holy weasel words Batman!
But on closer analysis, I suppose things have always been done that way.
It's like saying that food stamps and welfare breed dependency when 80% of people in poverty are children or the elderly.
Either unions in the US are messed up, or they have a terrible terrible press.
There has always been a fierce anti-labor streak in US politics. Even the first red scare in 1920's (before the cold-war!) associated all unions and pro labor moments and even speech as communist.
There is a feverish anti-union attitude even among people who have never even met anyone in one. If you ask, you will even find intense dislike of every foreign union without even knowing it's name or where its country is.
Take police unions for example. It is well documented that many unions are fervently against policies such as always-on body cams that theoretically should protect a (good) cop and the citizen. Fail that, they are against releasing body cam footage.[0] Police unions are also known to protect abusive officers. [1]
I'm not trying to claim that there isn't an anti-union attitude, but it is not simply associating them with communism.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/nyregion/new-york-police-... [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/how-pol...
Some police unions do these things and need to be stopped. But that does not mean all unions in every field are bad. There are evil corporations too, are all corporations bad? Are the majority? Why does the public precive that differently?
Since the cold war, the communism claim has given way to universally negative portal: the sole presentation in fact is negative. Usually by tacitly implying an unusual behavior is typical and inevitable of every possible union.
The difference is Exxon runs ads of happy children running through flowery fields and unions don't. And pointing out a union's deficiencies is not going to loose sponsors, possibly the reverse.
That's quite untrue. In several European countries, for example Germany, U.S.-style "union shops" (which, unfortunately, are basically mandatory under the NLRA) are illegal.
And in many states, under deceptively named "right to work" laws, union-shops are illegal even if the employer agreed to them. Interestingly, while employers can not always require union membership as terms of employment, they can always require binding arbitration and non-competes which is the opposite of a "right to work"
I've known people who worked under the UAW and Teamsters unions. The amount people got paid in US auto plants for menial tasks was outrageous. $15/h+ 15 years ago for the most unskilled roles. Hiring was full of nepotism. You had to know someone to get one of these overpaid jobs. Outsiders were not welcome. The UAW continued to demand above market salaries despite companies declaring bankruptcy. Auto makers responded by moving to Mexico. Great job UAW!
As for Teamsters, their history is full of corruption. Dues payments were a job requirement. No dues, no job. They protected the worst workers from being fired, much like police and teachers unions.
Is this really true? Every union building site I see has mostly white guys. If I see a site with lots of other ethnicities its probably non-union.
> Among major race and ethnicity groups, Black workers continued to have a higher union membership rate in 2018 (12.5 percent) than workers who were White (10.4 percent), Asian (8.4 percent), or Hispanic (9.1 percent).
But it's possible that the story is different for construction workers or for other individual sectors.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm
Doesn't seem that way to me.
https://www.seiu.org
https://aflcio.org
https://teamster.org
https://cwa-union.org
https://unitehere.org
Note that labor activists have always seen racism as a threat to a unified workforce and left-wing ideology has always described a global caste of workers to be united.
That said, the statement in and of itself isn't incorrect. There has and still are vulnerable members of society who are in the racial majority. In fact, some historians have argued that racism was promoted in the US as a way to separate the vulnerable whites from other vulnerable groups. Before slavery became self perpetuating in the US (as in child mortality rate among slaves was high enough that slave had to be shipped in from other places), racism towards Africans was actually less pronounced and interracial marriages between Africans and white weren't outlawed. Once slavery became self perpetuating, laws were passed and attitudes changed to ensure that vulnerable whites won't mingle with African slaves and endanger slavery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/nyregion/new-york-citys-u...
"White men account for less than one-fourth of the city’s union members, according to the study, written by Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a colleague, Stephanie Luce. Fully 60 percent of all union members in the city identify themselves as either black or Latino; women who do not identify themselves as black or Latino make up an additional 17 percent of the city’s union members."
Union representation will probably bring up the compensation of the worst workers and lower the compensation of the top workers, so senior employees are right to fight the unionization effort.
It's like, yeah, we should think about others, that's great. But not every and all attempts at raising one's own status completely bad and evil.
When I was young and starting my career, there were plenty of fields I could have picked that were almost all unionized (in my home country, unions are the norm almost everywhere). I specifically didn't go those ways because I felt I could do better without. Didn't stop the others to go that route. Now that I'm there, on purpose, if people tried to build a union, I'd probably push back. And if the majority still wanted it (that's their right!), then they can get it, and I'll move somewhere else.
The push to unionize is also motivated by personal profit. Why is that a bad thing?
This is FUD. Professional unions establish minimum pay but place no upper bounds on salary.
To drive home the point: Dwayne Johnson and that guy who was an extra in the background of that coffee shop scene are both members of SAG-AFTRA. Do you really thing Dwayne Johnson got paid the same as that rando?
In what way is a pay scale not an upper bound on salaries?
On the other hand, subterfuge to derail the whole process with a form of concern trolling is not cool.
Apart from this, senior union reps and management tend to get cosy and form coalitions against workers and shareholders.
The people that win are the people that are good at politics, workers that are mediocre, and people that are uncomfortable with fast-paced change. Unions are great at slowing things down and keeping things in slow comfort zone so people don't have to learn new things.
Imagine the mediocre 50% of your company gets to determine the processes and procedures used in your team. That's a union shop.
Imagine that manager who isn't very good at his job but is good at politics and that union rep getting drinks after work, and making a coalition against the fast rising manager with aggresive new initiatives in mind ... that's a union shop.
Long term your company will stagnate and die.
Short term, a bunch of mediocre people will feel comfortable.
Flavor of the day workers will get hired based on checking boxes ... not based on any objective criteria/merit. That's a union.
Ever wonder why 90% of cops are white in the Bay Area, even when the neighborhoods are 90% non-white? That's a union.
Unions are the big lie that political animals tell everyone else ... OH JUST GIVE US THE POWER AND WE WILL EMPOWER YOU!
It's only true if you are incapable of providing for yourself. If you have the skills, fight against the union as long as you can, and then leave.
Best decision my parents ever made was to leave the union-choked midwestern city where I was born, to come west thirty years ago. I probably would have been one of those rust-trapped casualties by now if my parents had stayed.
This is absolutely not true in the trade unions. In an earlier life I was a union plumber (on my way to becoming a master licensed plumber; and to this day I can walk into virtually any commercial or light industrial jobsite, and tell you at a glance, if it is a union or non-union job). I don't just mean the plumbing work either; but also the electrical, and the pipe and/or steam fitting, and I'd be right 90% of the time. Such is the difference between the training and tradition of taking pride in your work.
Salaries are also Not carved in stone. I was once paid $300 a week over General Foreman's wage to run a job, and that was in the mid-eighties.
They are not perfect, and yes it can be harder to get rid of a real slacker, but nothing is impossible. And FWIW based on what I read on here in terms of the problems a lot of coders have with age, performance reviews and interviewing--you guys should definitely consider forming a union...or for Pete's Code Up App and stick together!
None of that is true when you are building something cutting edge with competitors lapping at your heels. Maybe web development has become like plumbing now ... but search algorithms, robotics, space travel, etc. are certainly not.