This trend bothers me. Employees are not shareholders, or if they are, they ought to do this in their capacity as shareholders. If they want to govern the company, they ought to buy in or move to management.
Or, they can always move companies. This is always an option.
Also, socialism is an awful idea. I can't believe people actually support it. I have a massive moral objection to its core tenets: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?
Sorry, overall my above comment had two sub-points:
First, the point that employees are not always shareholders. They get payed to do a job at a wage accepted by both the company and employee.
Second, the idea of socialism over all. As Marx described it, it's merely a transitional phase: the means of production is taken from capitalists and given to the government to basically hold in custody until it can be passed to the people. Don't believe me that this push is happening? Elizabeth Warren wants workers placed on company boards. The fruits are those produced by someone who works, be it for a company or starting his own. I go out and earn money, and socialism says I must give that money away, not to the government to uphold the social contract. Rather, it says I must give it to anyone who does not have a constantly-changing set of "basic needs", simply by virtue of their existence. It's not encouragement to give to charity (which I already do, as I can), but rather coercion by the government.
I hate this straight jump to warnings of socialism whenever somebody questions the current system. There is much more nuance. In Germany workers get a seat on the board of directors and from what I know these companies still make the owners rich and the country is quite different from Venezuela.
The headline of the article is that Silicon Valley has a "budding socialist movement". Even if it's not a full-scale war, it's still a move toward it (and quickly). Don't believe me? Take a look at this recent article: https://qz.com/1580091/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-how-far-left...
Scroll down to the graphic, and look at the massive recent leftward lurch by the Democratic party.
Employees share responsibility for the success of a company so they should also have stake in the company.
This whole idea that a company exists exclusively for the owners doesn’t make sense to me. There is a bigger picture to make a society work for all citizens.
Warning about “ socialism “ also doesn’t make sense. We don’t have to choose between the way the US is at the moment and the Soviet Union or Venezuela. There is a lot of room between these extremes.
> Employees share responsibility for the success of a company so they should also have stake in the company.
Exactly, so what is stopping them from using their salary to buy shares? If you believe you are doing such a good job that the company will sustain or do better, it would almost be silly not to. You have domain expertise by virtue of working there. You may even have a solid insider feel for the pulse of the organization.
There are plenty of employee-owned companies to join if that's your opinion. Trying to shoehorn that ownership into companies that often got to where they are by not being employee-owned seems really entitled.
There's a little bit of a difference between the social structure of governance in a place you have to live and an opt-in corporate structure for people who can choose where they want to work.
> Employees share responsibility for the success of a company so they should also have stake in the company.
At a restaurant, a chef is not allowed to have a bite of your meal because s/he is the one who prepared it. That meal is owned by you in its entirety because that is what you paid for.
If a group of employees want a say in the how a business is run, they are free to purchase ownership, whether directly or through shares.
There's no reason to elevate one particular (and historically rare) version of property rights over all others. And there's no particular reason economic organizations should or must be authoritarian dictatorships ruled by "shareholders" instead of workplace democracies.
She's referring to the distribution and central planning aspects of socialism, which are secondary consequences of the philosophy. The discussion here is more relevant to the core tenet: worker ownership of the means of production.
If only there was something analogous to the inflationary monetary system except for equity instead. Shareholders equity in companies could be diluted just like workers' wages are diluted by inflation.
Ever heard of dilution? This does happen at times. It was banned over a hundred years ago, if I recall correctly, because people got clever and abused it.
Ever heard of dilution? This does happen at times. It was banned for public companies over a hundred years ago, if I recall correctly, because people got clever and abused it.
I think the best example of this is Uber. Uber connects riders and drivers, and theoretically doesn't really do "labor". However, without the middleman, neither would likely be connected.
I'd say most companies are similar. Yes, the worker does a lot. Without the company, it's unlikely one guy manufacturing something could find as many customers, if any. Finally, not everything can be done on an individual scale: the iPhone can't be built by one man.
Also, what do you mean by dictatorships? You can leave any time you want to. The job market is amazing for a worker right now.
The workers get their compensation in the form of benefits, wages, etc. There are companies that are run as co-ops: see REI. Most employees love it their, according to a friend who worked their for a while. If you want to work there, that's fine. If you want to work at a company with stock options, that's fine. But don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.
No, we're talking about workers pushing for increased control of the means of production. That's definitionally a discussion of Marxism, even if it's people pushing for it gradually.
A country with a right of exit can still be quite authoritarian, just as an organization that you can leave can be as well. What's authoritarian is the structure: owners and especially managers nowadays controlling priorities and work rules, as opposed to the people actually doing the labor in companies. I'd generally opt for all those parties collaborating in decision making.
> don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.
Do you think existing corporate management structures don't rely on state violence to maintain themselves? If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace, do you think shareholders would be the ones coming in and cracking heads, or government agents?
You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.
> owners and especially managers nowadays controlling priorities and work rules
So? I do think some people have bad practices. Non-competes, for instance, are often abused. But you can still leave...
> existing corporate management structures... rely on state violence to maintain themselves... If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace
Yes, if there was a workers uprising, I would darn well hope the police would come in and crack heads. You don't get to "enact control" over other people's stuff (including their company). But I do think that crony capitalism is cancer, see Amazon's recent $15/hr push to force competitors out of business.
> You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.
You're absolutely right that property rights are the Right and Natural Way for things to Be. If you don't agree, read about the tragedy of the commons. And look at the 100s of millions communism has killed.
We live in a nation founded on the basis of property rights. One of the most basic functions of our government is to enforce property rights. It's impossible to run a civilization on our scale without it. If you really don't like America and the way she's run, you could leave.
And the idea that you can have my stuff just because you want it is plain wrong.
Care to clarify? I was never alive at either of those times, nor were my predecessors (all immigrated legally after that). I and my family have fairly earned what we have. I agree there were past issues, but socialism/communism is worse in that it keeps taking every year after. And none of what you mentioned is a free market.
A main point is this (and I think its been mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well):
An attack on the status-quo is not a promotion of socialism
Our current implementations are a far cry from a free market. The entrenched powers and corporations don't want free markets-- its socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor [3] [4]
We'd have to start from scratch to attain a free market. And even then, the oft-quoted invisible hand of competitive markets falls flat in an increasingly opaque, complex world [5]
It seems to me that you have a strong sense of what is fair. I urge you to look out into all the wealth of information we have and take a hard look to see if our current way of being is fair [6][7]
The capitalist answer is they don't have any right to your labor.
They purchase your labor with the wages that they pay you. You are free to not accept any opportunity offered, and either party can terminate it at any time for any (legal) reason if they feel the deal is no longer to their satisfaction.
Almost everyone believes that they are underpaid. There is a very simple way to prove it by checking your worth in the marketplace.
You are also free to ply your trade on your own if you so wish.
I lean more on the capitalist side, but this is a more interesting question than a basic view of capitalism would lead one to believe.
The ethics of capitalism are based on the assumption that the business owner rightfully has final say on all of the property of the business, and that the workers are merely guests on the property, paid to do something with the property, collect a paycheck, and go home. They have no right to it.
But then you can start asking questions like, did the capitalist have rightful ownership of the money to buy the thing in the first place? If you go far back enough, you have things like conquest, homesteading land (which is inherently ambiguous), government grants of land (open to favoritism), etc. The whole foundation can be called into question.
Again I'm not ultimately convinced by it, but I think there's at least a discussion to be had. I feel like I've heard some convincing arguments but they're not coming to me now. But if you have the patience for it (I didn't even finish it), you might check out "What is Property" by Proudhon. He lays out a philosophy called Mutualism that sort of has socialist ethics, but is still somewhat market based in the end. He enumerates all of the assumptions he sees as underlying private property ownership and makes an interesting argument against them.
Relatedly, imagine the Soviet Union still existed and continued to own all productive property within it.
Would the people who give absolute value to the right of property holders to do what they choose with it support the Soviet Union's right to organize its economy however it so choose, along with controlling the media it owns and the workforce it contracts with? After all, it owns the property, and anyone with credible contrary claims to it would be long dead.
I heard that instead they gave ownership of the factories to the workers :-P (who then sold it off to the oligarchs)
I think the question here is legitimate ownership of property. If you think the Soviet Union stole the property (I do), then it should be assumed that it's homesteaded to those using it. Even Murray Rothbard suggested giving ownership of U.S. universities to students and professors, if I recall correctly. (I think it was in "All Power to the Soviets")
I suppose you believe the capitalists stole the property, which allows for the same appropriation by the workers.
But here's the thing: what then? Could the workers sell their shares? If they can, another capitalist class can emerge just as well, purely by preference of people wanting an earlier payout selling the shares + steady paychecks vs risking being responsible for the enterprise. And if the workers can't make such a choice, in what sense do they really own the share? (EDIT: I think Proudhon actually had a counter argument to this, I forgot what it was)
There was a thread yesterday about a jury selection glitch that made young people less likely to be selected, and someone suggested making them 10x more likely as recompense. I said that wasn't fair to the new jurors or the new defendants (who would still get a biased jury). I believe it's the same here. I know several people who were raised dirt-poor, and even one who was a high-school drop-out, who started successful companies. Getting ahead is hard, but certainly possible.
There was another thread yet, a day or two back, where people were talking about the financial windfalls that they received from their parents. I found that interesting, because as one person put it, paraphrasing, receiving that money from their parents to kick-start their life and presumably successful business had led them towards a more liberal political outlook.
Having been raised in relative poverty, I have no idea what it's like to have wealthy parents to fall back on. Instead, I spent a decade after high school fighting to get ahead. Today, I find myself, over a decade later still, living what can only be called an excellent quality of life. I, instead, give back to my parents. And I look back at the path that I walked and it makes me less liberal in my politics as a result.
> Getting ahead is hard, but certainly possible.
I think that most everything we do in life is hard and that the daily challenges of life are exactly what make it worth living.
Your employer is able to bargain with you as one massive, collective organization with all its resources to bear. Why should you have to negotiate with them as a one atomic individual person, when you and your coworkers can instead get together and negotiate from a much stronger position?
The worst is that with the secrecy about compensation you don’t have enough information to negotiate effectively whereas the employer has full information.
When you join the union, you lose the atomic individuality. I've been a union member and a manager outside of a union. When I was in the union, they tried to prevent me from getting paid more - they wanted me to fall in line with the collective agreement which specified my hourly rate. If you don't go with mob, they call you a scab. Not pretty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikebreaker
There's a difference between unionization and trying to get board representation. Also, in many states, you're stuck dealing with a union in many jobs. You now have to negotiate with the union as one atomic person...
The thing I personally hate about unions is their political advocacy. The idea that a worker is stuck supporting a politician he might not agree with is one that makes me very uncomfortable.
Also, I think appleiigs summarized it better than I did, with the lack of individuality.
As it turns out, union contracts don't just set minimum prices that employees can be paid; they also tend to set pay ceilings that employers cannot exceed without the union's permission--and that permission is rarely forthcoming. Paying the most talented, hardest-working employees more than the average Joe who barely works to rule is not allowed, you see.
If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service (I'm thinking healthcare), then you're saying you have a right to the people who produce the product or service, which is slavery. The government can't guarantee your "right" if there's no people to produce it, unless the government forces it (slavery), or just throws random workers into the position (low quality).
> If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service
Who said this should ever be the case? You're assuming I support a right to healthcare. I don't support that, nor do I support most positive rights. Especially if they're not constitutional and are federally implemented.
The obvious solution to all the problems you mentioned is that nobody has a right to anyone else's product or service, which goes back to my original point: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?
You mentioned the constitution so you agree that some effort has to be made to enforce it. This effort has to be paid for by tax on your labor. Once you agree on that you only haggle if it is more tax efficient to put someone in jail for stealing a pizza or handing out free pizza. You’re free to take part in this democratic process.
The constitution has been enforced via tax, yes, but I would argue that income tax is (or was and ought to be) unconstitutional (and wrong) and amendment XVI was an overt power grab. Sales tax, excise tax, sin tax, road toll, pick some other way. The goal is not tax efficiency but upholding the most basic freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and performing the very few duties specifically outlined in the Constitution. Notice how there is, for instance, no "right to healthcare" in it.
Point me to the clause in the Constitution where it says anyone has a right to healthcare or that the federal government is allowed to dispense it.
> Point me to the clause in the Constitution where it says anyone has a right to healthcare or that the federal government is allowed to dispense it.
The latter, and it's the militia clause read together with the elastic clause. Arguably, depending on whether one views health status identification and health maintenance as more essential to training or organization of the universal militia, it may require the states to operate as delivery intermediaries, but it certainly allows federal funding.
The latter what? What does the militia clause have to do with it, outside of providing healthcare to the military? The necessary and proper execution of which federal power? The federal government no longer calls up a militia, so you can make no pretense of this being anything but an unconstitutional reach. Also, militiae are not composed of all the populace, therefore you could at most justify a certain subgroup. Arguably the most vulnerable groups are the least covered by this. Also, the necessary and proper clause is a bs justification in most senses of its use, possibly tied with the commerce clause for most-abused.
The federal government is allowed to dispense it as opposed to anyone has a right to it.
> What does the militia clause have to do with it, outside of providing healthcare to the military?
The military clauses would be what authorizes healthcare to the military. The militia is not the military (and the militia clause is not the military clauses), and is universal.
> The necessary and proper execution of which federal power?
The militia power, as specified in the militia clause, hence the “read together with”.
> The federal government no longer calls up a militia,
The militia power expressly is not just about calling up and using a militia, but keeping one in readiness should a desire to call it up be made in the future. (Also, the federal government does calls up part of the militia, what is in current statute defined as the “organized militia”.)
The militia power does not go away just because Congress does not anticipate a near-term need for a call-up.
> Also, militiae are not composed of all the populace, therefore you could at most justify a certain subgroup.
Arguably, the Constitutional militia is universal, and the statute purporting to limit the scope of the “unorganized militia” (currently to able-bodied males 17-45 [0]) is simply an application of the power to organize the militia based on anticipated likelihood of call ip, and does not alter the Constitutional scope of the militia.
[0] the “males” part being in tension with the recent ruling against the male-only draft registration, as draft registration is also an exercise of the organizing part of the militia power.
Conversely, companies that oppose employee unions should hire and employ only shareholders, with a number of shares commensurate with the importance of their work roles. That door swings both ways.
Unions are not an exclusively socialist construct.
I support unions as an anarchist, because I recognize that it is both useful for corporations with concentrated capital to exist and necessary to counterbalance their power with opposing institutions to keep their perverse incentives from directing their behavior unchecked. If all social institutions are set up such that they check and balance one another, no single one of them can safely dominate. Each has a time to be supported, and a time to be undermined.
For now, government institutions and religious institutions have refused to counter commercial/mercantile institutions, so the lowest-energy path to doing so is reviving the unions. Growing a neo-socialist voting bloc now is a longer play, but that one will be beneficial between 6 and 12 years from now, and probably won't become threatening for 20 years. One can never know in advance; democracy is messy.
Socialism is an awful idea in isolation. It's a great idea if your goal is to temporarily undermine those whose power is based on accumulations of wealth and pre-existing social contacts. If you feel that those in power are keeping you from breaking into their ranks, you can promote socialism to clear them out, and then move into their vacated places of power to quash the socialism before it gets out of hand.
As I am not one of the elite, and do not currently have any plausible way to become one, I fully support a socialist political movement. For now.
My personal morality does not compete well against those whose ethics revolve around "might makes right", "them that has the gold, makes the rules", and "F U, I got mine". So I have a newer rule: to suppress my other ethical rules in all situations where those who do not share them are exploiting my respect for them, and any information asymmetries, in order to influence my behavior to my own detriment.
I have no right to the fruits of your labor, but rights are a political construct. They have to be protected by a chain of support, like chess pieces. And right now, someone has sacrificed all of the pawns. The right to keep one's own property weakens in the face of a growing class of people who are somehow completely unable to accumulate significant wealth, even after a lifetime of toil and diligence.
Middle class purchasing power has been stagnant since the 70s. That's more than enough time for all those getting screwed by the system to forget why they ever believed in it, and to raise children who never believed in it, who then decide to replace it with literally anything else. The seeds for the democratic socialist resurgence of 2019 were planted in the 1980s and 1990s. Sow sighs; reap gales.
I can live with socialism for a few political cycles, if it can clear out some cruft at the top. It's dangerous, and difficult to know when to hit the brakes, but I feel ill used by the current system, and I'm not going to go down with it.
I don't have mine, but I hope to some day. Under socialism, that won't happen. Here's a great objection: I want to be rich some day. Very rich. I suspect this is the case with many of us. Under socialism, that can't happen. And so, I will never support it.
Your whole idea is that socialism will clear out the elites in power. It won't. You'll end up with a bastardized version that oppresses everyone but a few.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - Ronald Wright
Clear out, no. Replace, yes. The socialism-inspired civil wars of the past did not get rid of elites-in-power as a concept, but they did get rid of some of the specific individuals that previously qualified.
Each time, the socialism did significant damage to the economy... as measured by the elites, anyway.
Nobody, except those who already got it, has gotten theirs since the 1970s. The theory behind trickle-down economics is demonstrably false. When you give rich people more control over resources and production, they keep all the additional profits, because they can, and then use some of those to gain more control over resources and production. Socialists, while incorrect in many (most?) areas of economics, at least realize that the people who do the work should get paid fairly for it, even if their calculations for "fair" are frequently inaccurate. The socialist war is the ultimate penalty for unfairness in the economy.
The system will never find a higher peak without a good, hard kick, off of the local maximum it seems to be stuck on. It doesn't need to be a socialist revolution that does it, and everything would probably be better off if it wasn't them, but they're the only ones that seem to be in position to get the job done now. And once they do, then the non-socialist, non-mercantile-elitist armies may begin to fight, if they have enough numbers, or enough clout with the socialists to steer them away from the cliff peacefully.
You're not going to be rich someday, because your parents weren't rich, and you grew up in the wrong postal code. That's the current regime in the US. Accept that, statistically speaking, everyone that has bucked the trend to achieve extreme upward mobility has been in the right place, at the right time, with the right ideas, and the right skills, to take advantage of an ephemeral opportunity. Most people still can't afford to be prepared for anything, and also look up from their daily toil long enough to recognize an opening.
You cannot get rich with a lifetime of hard work and wise investments; if you do that, never make a single mistake, and never get screwed, you can retire comfortably, snugly ensconced in hopefully the higher end of the middle class. It's a fine goal, achievable, and not something socialism does well. You can get rich by getting lucky, and buying the right lottery tickets. You can get rich by abandoning your ethics and screwing over those still attempting hard work over a lifetime. For instance, blow a bubble in the mortgages market and erase the majority of net worth for a lot of middle-class families, and then place bets on how many extra defaults and foreclosures there will be because of it. Nobody went to prison for that. It won't be me that does it, but I definitely won't cry if those even peripherally responsible, and those following in their footsteps, ever get shoved up against the wall.
I'm not an elite in this system. I won't be an elite in any system that replaces it, socialist or not. I have accepted that I am a nobody, and will be forgotten before my corpse cools. And I have also accepted that religious fantasies of justice-after-death are bullshit, psychologically crafted to discourage vigilantism and mob behaviors. So when there is an obvious asshole that clearly requires a humility-boosting supplement, for whom the gods fail to send a nemesis, and for whom the prosecutors fail to send marshals, and for whom the helpers fail to send redeeming inspiration, that guy is going to be an exemplar of a strategy for winning the game of life. In the meta-game, successful dickwads encourage other players to become dickwads. I can see the endgame, and I don't win; I don't have enough points, don't have the right cards to play, and I'm not good enough at cheating to not get caught. But I can pick one player that's still in the running, and make it more difficult for them to win.
Socialism aside, the unionization of tech workers is extremely important. Failing this, they will be exploited at every damn job. Unions exist in local governments, so why not at private firms too. It's time to organize. A lot of CEOs and CTOs will hate this idea, of course, and will do anything to make you believe otherwise.
Why should they have such ability? If someone else is ready, willing, and able to do the same job for an overall more attractive package to the company, I believe the work should go there, whether or not it's the work that I used to do or wished I would do next year.
Well because it’s one of the main drivers of layoffs—which is part of job security which is one of the main factors in wanting to unionize in the first place.
I understand the obvious reason they want that ability. That doesn't extend to explaining why a random American technologist is more deserving of (ie "should have a right to") that job than a random other Earth citizen technologist. (I say this as an American technologist.)
Ok then why have these unions at all, if it’s not to add worker rights? A union for the sake of unionizing but not afforded rights to guide how people are hired, fired, furloughed, outsourced, etc., is just a pretense. Can you imagine firefighters’s unions saying, yeah, we don’t care how you reduce costs, you wanna fire us and hire prison labor instead, just do it, we’re good!
Besides, if I lose a job to a worker in Romania, China, India or Brazil, I can’t simply waltz on over there and say “Hey youse all, I just landed, I don’t have a work visa, but you all gotta play fair, gimme a job, you took mine!”
I'm 46 years old. I can't think of one example where I was exploited as a tech worker. I'm from a union town, grew up in a union family. I support unions. The UAW was very important to the country and the middle class. I'm just not sure where the need is in tech. I think it might hurt us, if anything. Tech workers are not fungible. We do have quite a bit of leverage. Your average factory floor worker is fungible and has almost zero leverage.
I am also worried about who would end up leading these unions. If traditional blue collar jobs, where members are most certainly not Left-leaning already end up with literal communists in the leadership, I cannot imagine how bad it would get when the membership is largely Left-leaning.
I have heard too many stories of overworked programmers (lots of stories if you google it), especially in the gaming industry, and let's not forget Amazon's NY Times story a few years back, to think that there is no worker exploitation going on in the industry like you say.
I think your examples are valid. I wonder though if it's a choice for someone to work 80 hours a week at $40k to make video games versus 37 hours a week at $80k doing forms over tables stuff for The Bobs. Is that a choice or exploitation?
It's a choice to get a highly competitive "dream job" that's full of long hours and crap pay. It's exploitation when you're given crap pay, work extremely long hours, your company clears close to two billion dollars in profit that year, and then lays you off (to use recent news about Activision Blizzard as an example).
I'm not necessarily against companies making money, because fully automated gay space communism isn't yet a practical option. I'm not against working long hours, and I'm not against prioritizing things other than money in someone's career choice. That's all valid! What I do have a problem with is companies taking advantage of people and hurting them.
Tech workers face the same issues as most white collar workers. It's common to be unfairly treated in regards to promotions, workload, overtime etc. But the biggest issue is probably equity. It would probably be worth unionizing just over that.
This exploitation seems to take many forms. Being paid a multiple of the median income, working indoors under climate-controlled conditions, and (at least in my case) being paid to do that which I’d do for free anyway.
My grandfathers mined coal and milled steel. They needed unions. I don’t see any benefit to unions for me.
Look at airlines and auto companies for the danger of extreme unionization. You can kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Unions generally only work in monopolies (think old school telecom) where there is a surplus that is protected from competition. In this case it’s just about dividing a fixed pie.
The best thing for workers is to have many companies competing for their talents. That’s why counterintuitive things like lower corporate taxes can sometimes benefit workers. Same with reducing barriers to market entry.
Unionization is also extremely important to protect the non-tech workers at tech companies who do not have the same leverage as the salaried engineers.
Socialism is a cancer that needs to be stomped out. Not all devs want to unionize. Not all devs want "democracy in the workplace". These devs need to stop hiding behind crowds and learn to stand up for themselves.
Could you please pause and review the guidelines? We're here for thoughtful, informative discussion, and another turn on the socialism-is-cancer not-so-merry-go-round is not that.
I've noticed this trend here on HN beyond workers organizing for their own benefit. The idea of regulating the internet, for almost any reason was abhorrent to the tech community a decade ago.
Now, most people seem to think the likes of Uber and AirBnB need to be regulated. A majority of comments here about GDPR seem to support it, and I regularly see calls for more regulation of the sort. I'm not sure if the same group of people have changed their views, or if a wider range of people have brought new perspectives to the community.
I think there was a sort of techno-utopianism in the aughts that the hip new startups will solve all the world's problems. People will be educated and not fall for disinformation with wikipedia and google at their fingertips. People will discover the wonders of democracy and free speech with facebook and rise against oppressive governments. These were obviously overly optimistic projections.
Also, the rise of outrage porn makes it much easier for people to come to the conclusion that "the system" is horribly broken and needs to be changed (for almost any "system" that we speak of, government or capitalism, or youtube, literally anything)
I think there's a tendency to discount the partial successes, perhaps because they make the failures yet more shocking. I can fact-check most things I read in seconds, yet there's a still-growing anti-vaccine movement. While the mechanisms promised are there and work great at an individual level, that's not always the case at a national, regional, or global scale.
And now the popular hope seems to be that the wonders of democracy can temper the excesses that came with these partially successful solutions. It is my fear that this hope is also irrationally optimistic, and that regulation will lead to politicians and bureaucrats deciding what is true at scale for their own benefit.
That's true. Let me clarify: the first calls for regulation I saw get a lot of popular support on HN were for the meatspace business practices of Uber and AirBnB. Since then, I've seen a growth in support for regulation of activities done primarily or purely online, GDPR's opt-in tracking provisions being one of the most visible examples.
There are numerous notable caes of changed views. Kara Swisher, Roger McNamee, BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie, Tim Wu, Tristan Harris, the entire Wired editorial slant.
I've never been convinced that unions are necessarily the best approach to resolving the employer/employee power differential, but I do believe that in the coming decades something will be necessary.
By luck, the explosive growth of software in the states and relative scarcity of developers has resulted in a lot of wealth and luxury for engineers. There's no reason to believe this trend will continue indefinitely.
On the other side of the spectrum, another country that has explosive software growth but a large supply of engineers and STEM workers is China. China's 996 work policy has been getting a lot of attention lately and I think it should highlight the risk we face in a matter of maybe a generation or two if the software industry does eventually cool down.
As a recent graduate (last 5 years), I can't agree with most works desire to unionize for one reason: demand for your skills.
When I was looking for my second tech job, I turned on that switch in my LinkedIn that lets recruiters contact me. I was immediately inundated with 10-20 messages a day from recruiters asking if I could speak with them about <Role with my expertice>. For me this was the most insane luxury in the workplace, instead of having to go out and look for jobs, those jobs were coming to me and knocking on my door.
What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize? Don't like where you work? Flip a switch and suddenly you have 10-20 offers a day from other companies looking to hire someone with your skillset. Yes, you have to spend time combing through the messages, on the phone with recruiters and going to interviews but at the end of the day with that level of attention to your skillset, you can basically decide where you want to work. Company A seems great but the culture is toxic, ok great let's see what company B has to offer. Company B has a good culture but their data collection practices you don't agree with, ok let's see what company C has to offer. Company C has a great culture and doesn't do the things you consider unethical with data collection, bam we have a winner.
Also on the topic of general democracy in the workplace regarding decisions. As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them. Don't like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more/total control over decision making? Start your own company.
Hirschman wrote a book called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that you may find interesting. What I see in your response is this: 'Exit and Loyalty are enough, so why have Voice?' In your mind it's good enough to just go to another job that has better conditions, but why is it wrong to want to change your current job? I don't see a good argument in your post against the usage of voice or democracy in the workplace, just your perspective that you don't need it. But maybe others do think they need it, so let's give it to them.
I agree, and that's one of the reasons I posted how long I've been in the industry. On the one hand, right now everything is flowers and daisies but who knows what it will look like for me in 10-20-30 years, it might be a completely different landscape and unions might be required.
I've been through the ringer... I'm in my 40s and at the point in my life where if you'd pay me good money to dig holes, then I'd dig holes. I go to where ever pays me the most to dig. I don't identify myself by where I work at. I don't expect other people to have my values, and definitely don't have those expectations on a corporation. I have this mercenary attitude because I know that I'm solely responsible for myself and my family. If you are going to expect that a union, corporation or a government take care of you, then you are going to be very disappointed - that is my problem with socialism.
It sounds like you are mixing the positive and normative. Yes, corporations now don't represent the values of their workers and lobby for all kinds of awful things. Yes, there is no social net now provided by unions or the government in the United States.
But wouldn't it be excellent if these things were true?
In theory, if it all magically worked, then sure.
In reality, no. Because no matter the good intentions, I can not trust the government to not screw it up.
If a company screws something up, I can just switch jobs and move to another company. If the government screws up, there is little I can do.
The Nordic model shows that it is possible to have a highly unionized workforce with free higher education, free healthcare, and social welfare. They have been very effective in fighting poverty this way.
"Financial constraints are colliding with the healthcare costs imposed by Finland’s fast-aging population. But cutting those costs is a major political obstacle in a Nordic country that historically has provided an extensive -- and expensive -- healthcare system."
On one hand, I think it's unfortunate that a society has to have a mindset of self preservation. On the other, I think individuals should be self-sufficient and responsible for themselves.
What happens when you can't take care of yourself?
What happens when a series of unfortunate events interfere with your ability to dig those holes?
Who then will be responsible for you?
You mentioned you have a problem with socialism, have you experienced and lived in socialism? I haven't and have no actual experience of what is good or bad about it. Do you have any concrete examples of why socialism is bad?
Unrelated, but it's "through the wringer" not "ringer". A "wringer" being something that wrings your clothes out i.e. puts a great amount of stress and force on them.
AH, my mistake and thank you. I was wondering about that spelling but obviously I didn't take the time to double check.
Ringer[1]
1. a person or thing that encircles, rings, etc.
2. a quoit or horseshoe so thrown as to encircle the peg.
3. the throw itself.
4. Also ring·ers. Also called ring taw. Marbles . a game in which players place marbles in a cross marked in the center of a circle, the object being to knock as many marbles as possible outside the circle by using another marble shooter.
5. Australian . a highly skilled sheep shearer.
I think that increasing efforts to unionize or blackball projects will just increase off-shoring. This isn't like a coal mine where physicality is important and can be leveraged. It is easy to open an office in random company and also pay people less. I'm not making a judgment that it isn't important to stand up to companies being evil but I just don't see unions being successful. Most big companies could cut 50% staff on the engineering side and simply make more money. A lot of this is hoarding of resources and using it to create new products to enable more consolidation.
>> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them
I feel that is a very myopic attitude. Engineers and tech workers generally are in the best position to present options that can inform business decisions. In order to identify a good option it helps to have a lot of options. Disregarding the positive input that any employee can have on how a company operates is incredibly stupid.
The relative ease of finding employment shouldn't factor into your desire to unionize. In fact, quite the contrary: It's less difficult to organize when you're the strongest.
But more importantly, these are the "halcyon" days of finding tech work, and they are fleeting. There is absolutely no guarantee the job market will look this promising in a few years. Things seemed to be on an endless upward trajectory in the 90s and then it all came crashing down.
If you're gambling on the fact that tech work will always be in extremely high demand, then you have a combination of risk appetite and optimism that makes for a founder.
As someone who worked through the period of the tech industry during the dotcom fallout, lots of stuff people take for granted today was non-existent: You had much less autonomy over the technical aspects of the objectives you were trying to achieve. Mandated tools, crappy underpowered computers, bureaucracy, over project dependencies, process-heavy SDLCs weren't just the norm, but widely viewed as the proper way to build software. It was all a reaction to what was seen as the "inmates running the asylum" during the dotcom boom. It basically took a bunch of promising startups in the mid-aughts to start cleaning people's clocks and become juggernauts to get the broader industry to reverse course. It also became a lot cheaper to do a tech startup.
Basically, understand that a lot of what is enjoyable today about working in tech is a side-effect of supply-and-demand; they HAVE to avoid developer-hostile actions because we're difficult to hire and expensive to employ. Once that's no longer the case, the screws are going to tighten. Just look at China's 9-9-6 work policies and companies using chat tools to spy on their employees to keep them working as a point of reference.
> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them.
I'd like to think we have enough integrity as a profession to fall back on an Eichmann-adjacent justification.
* Things seemed to be on an endless upward trajectory in the 90s and then it all came crashing down.*
It the job market for developers only came crashing down if you didn’t have the skillset needed and/or were looking for a job at one of the $cool_unprofitable_startups. There was plenty of demand for your regular old corporate developers. The company I was working for didn’t even blink during the dot com bust. We were a boring old profitable company that did bill processors. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and have never found it difficult to find a job.
Professional actors and actresses can also be in-demand and are often 'recruited' constantly for different projects. They get paid sometimes millions of dollars.
>> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them. Don't like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more/total control over decision making? Start your own company.
Don't you want more out of the roles in your career? I want to work at a place that wants my best self, ideas, opinions and all. I don't want my only career options to be a paid typist or an entrepreneur.
> What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize?
These things are not diametrically opposed.
A union doesn't imply anything other than collective bargaining. Maybe having a union would prevent things like Disney firing a bunch of full time employees after they retrain contractor replacements. This type of nonsense is driving down wages for the entire middle class of workers.
Once you discover later on in your career that seniority and respect of your peers is not transferable between companies, that hopping to the next job from the job board is vicious circle of working on dull dead end projects under authocratic and dumb at times people (with long length of service at the company), you might change your mind. Also you’ll discover that life is more complicated than „just walk away or start your own business”, at times neither of these is possible or even both of these are straight suicidal.
>seniority and respect of your peers is not transferable between companies, that hopping to the next job from the job board is vicious circle of working of dull dead end projects under authocratic and dumb at times people (with long length of service at the company)
I haven't found this to be the case at all. I know many people who jump companies every 3 years or so, make more money each time they change, get to work on a variety of projects that interest them, and are well respected by their peers regardless of what company they are with due to the work they have done and continue to do. It is relatively common advice that you are generally able to advance faster by moving between companies and negotiating for better pay and titles rather than trying to get promoted frequently while staying with the same company. If you decide to take a position where you will be doing dull, dead end work with "dumb" people that is your own fault.
Significant payrise on switching jobs is a thing in Europe only until mid-level perhaps, above that it's on pair with regular payrise and is absolutely not compensating the stress of adapting to the new working environment. The salary ceiling is disappointingly low. Don't even think about launching own business - unless one manages to chime in into the supply chains for DACH, Scandinavian, or French economies' supply chains (automotive!) and keeps the salaries of its employees low.
It will plateau though. You can't get 10-20% bumps every time you switch in perpetuity. Most of us would be making over a million a year after 40 years if that were true.
Just as a counterexample, my job changes early in my career netted me raises of sometimes 50% but each subsequent one increased less on a percentage basis. My last job change (now have 20 years experience) was +0%, and I give even odds that it will turn negative soon as I get older.
Why do I care if the projects are a dead end of a check is appearing in my account twice a month? My job is just a way to have money in my account. I don’t look for “excitement” in my job. I’ve been working for over 20 years. I think I am “later in my career”.
It seems obvious to me that there is a burning need for tech unionization and the reason has little to do with individual compensation or job security (although those are very important ancillary issues that deserve to be addressed and discussed as well). The real purpose that unionization could potentially serve is as a check against what people like Stallman and Bruce Schneier would perhaps call the mass exploitation associated with extreme surveillance capitalism. There are risks associated with unionization, of course, but collective bargaining offers one of the only proven mechanisms for average workers to impact the behavior of their employers. In the past, collective action was taken primarily as a means to improve the work conditions and compensation of average employees; as you point out, work conditions are generally very good for tech workers already, and so the improvement of working conditions isn't such an issue (although there is a good argument for organization as a means to preserve good conditions). I argue that in the case of tech employees, many of whom are involved in the development of systems that carry the potential for horrific misuse against vulnerable populations in the name of corporate profits, unionization is actually a moral imperative. Such unionization would represent a form of evolution in the history of collective action and employee organization, since it would be (at least in part) about challenging large-scale trends that run counter to the ideals of privacy, human rights, and equal society - things that can't be meaningfully impacted by individuals switching jobs. For instance, consider the case of challenging the pervasive use of privacy-violating adtech in products, or partnerships between corporations and authoritarian governments.
As tech workers, we are uniquely positioned within society: we have privileged knowledge of how the most powerful systems and products of the age function and we are incredibly close to the control surfaces of the major pillars of the economy. We are in demand, paid well, and generally well-educated. We have the ability to make a difference in the world in ways that very few people do. This is why organization is important.
The main reasons I would like to see a tech unions and things I would want out of it:
1. assessment training and rank. my sister is in a union and has been train and qualified for specific kinds of work. she does this work for many clients and the chance that they are getting the skills they need and she has those skills are very high. she can also call in others from the union if needed and the union handles negotiations of changed whatever.
2. unions handles her seniority. she can work for several different companies a year, but time off and other benefits come from time in union not those companies.
There is a lot of other things about her union I do not like, but my biggest problems in tech are finding or developing the right talent (including my own) and constant loss of seniority (pto, retirement, and other benefits). I lost a lot of both early in my career because I didn't negotiate well.
If a union existed that helped protect my interests, develop my talents, and match my skills with work I would join it. If they were good at training/vetting their members (apprentice, journeyman, whatever) in whatever skill set they learned that would benefit both employee and employer. Might help with imposter syndrome. Might help both sides with many issues if done right.
As someone who was pretty heavily invested in getting tech workers to organize, I've watched with interest as some version of this article gets written every three or four months. There is always a small group of people actively tilting at this windmill, and they make for a good story.
What I am waiting to see is a significant demand being met by any major tech employer. The end of forced arbitration at Google was a promising development, but the failure of the Google walkout organizers to get their key demand—an employee representative on the board—doesn't bode well.
I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone's capacity. I wish the current crop of organizers the best of luck in trying to make it happen.
> I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone's capacity
I agree strongly. My generation (millennials) often look with disdain at how easy the baby boomers had it, often paying off their college tuition by taking on just a summer job.
I think my future children (or maybe their children) will look with disdain at how easy software engineers had it. Imagine that you get a degree and train for a job, without a particular position of power, and just like that you have leverage and a growing salary that you can increase 30% every time you switch jobs! Just from the scarcity of your skills!
I always thought it was strange that we live in a democracy but spend most of our time working in corporations, which are more like autocracies than anything remotely resembling that of a democracy.
Why beat around the bush, they are literally Autocracies. Dozens of people in this thread will try to convince you of why you should be grateful to work at one though. Capitalist propaganda has been astonishingly effective since the 1930s.
Arguably housing is too far on the side of democratic/social control. Sure you can live in a house by yourself, but you can't do what you want with your house or your land without first getting town approval, HOA approval, and so on.
Unions for tech workers are ridiculous. We’re not coal miners, we are highly skilled white collar professionals that should be more than capable of finding work that suits us without extra regulatory bullshit.
I find the people who are clamoring for unions in tech are among the least talented and skilled of employees, and they should probably find a new industry entirely instead of trying to change the one they’re in to be more hospitable to the lowest common denominators. Perhaps we can help the process along by putting these people on hiring blacklists and ensuring they never work in this town again.
> I find the people who are clamoring for unions in tech are among the least talented and skilled of employees, and they should probably find a new industry entirely instead of trying to change the one they’re in to be more hospitable to the lowest common denominators.
That's one perspective, sure. Here's another perspective: There's nothing stopping a company from firing it's junior and 'least talented and skilled' employees in favor of contractors or outsourcing.
Unionization is the incorporation and concentration of human capital to gain leverage in negotiations. If that isn't smart capitalism, I don't know what is.
A lot of counter arguments here say that this isn't necessary because we can easily find new jobs. Yes that's true, but that's not what I want to always have to do in my career.
I don't always want to cut and run. I want to invest in a workplace and have a meaningful say about my circumstances there and the work we do. I don't want to quit or have to suck it up and deal. I don't want to have to go into management and then have dueling loyalties (what comes first, ethics or keeping my team employed?) If I work at a big company like Amazon, I want a say in what our tech does and who uses it. Even if I cut and run from them, I'm not going to catch up to Amazon anytime soon. In a place like that positive change could much more easily come from within than from competition.
I've started businesses. When I start a business, it's mine (and my partner's). Like a car or a house or a website. I'm trying to do something specific with it, with plans that I've drawn up. It's not just to make money. If all I wanted to do was make money, I'd just get a normal job.
When I hire people, I'm not giving away my business, in the same way that if I give a friend a ride, I'm not giving away my car. If they don't like where I'm driving, their only option is to find another ride.
That's the key difference between starting a business vs getting a job: all the decision making is yours.
And this applies at any scale, even Amazon scale. If you have plans and you start a business to execute them, you can execute them even better at a large scale. Getting Amazon big and maintaining control is the reason you start a business.
It'd be insulting if my hires started wanting to take away control. When you hire someone, it's with the implicit understanding that they respect that the business is not theirs. They don't own any of it. (Unless they want to buy in.)
Violating that understanding is disrespectful. Like your neighbor letting their dog shit on your lawn and not picking it up, because they think "well, he's just going to walk his dog in twenty minutes, he can do them both at the same time."
I don't like working (whether for my business or for someone else's business) with disrespectful people. There's a lack of trust.
For low-skilled factory workers a union is largely about defending their rights and making sure they're treated fairly.
For a tech worker, a union is largely about providing a worker-focused counterbalance to your companies decisions. Who buys the tech we make? What tech do we make? Do we allow ourselves to make tech that evades, impedes or outright destroys a person's rights?
I don't want tech employees to quit those facial recognition companies. I want a large group of employees with a seat at the table saying that their work should be used ethically. Those companies can always find employees who for a variety of reasons will do the work. My hope is that there is a group of employees there who want to do the work and for the right reasons. More power to them.
This seems like an all or nothing type of thing. I for one would never join a union so if some tech workers started to unionize I would always be available to take their place for the right price. It seems like incomplete attempts to unionize our industry will benefit those that don't want to unionize the most by making them more attractive employees.
I think it is time for tech workers to force their companies to pursue an agenda that is in-line with the worker's ethics. We are highly paid, we are also highly valuable to the US economy. If we can effectively unionize - we can use that leverage to pressure the government to act in ways we support with regards to surveillance and climate change.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadOr, they can always move companies. This is always an option.
Also, socialism is an awful idea. I can't believe people actually support it. I have a massive moral objection to its core tenets: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?
First, the point that employees are not always shareholders. They get payed to do a job at a wage accepted by both the company and employee.
Second, the idea of socialism over all. As Marx described it, it's merely a transitional phase: the means of production is taken from capitalists and given to the government to basically hold in custody until it can be passed to the people. Don't believe me that this push is happening? Elizabeth Warren wants workers placed on company boards. The fruits are those produced by someone who works, be it for a company or starting his own. I go out and earn money, and socialism says I must give that money away, not to the government to uphold the social contract. Rather, it says I must give it to anyone who does not have a constantly-changing set of "basic needs", simply by virtue of their existence. It's not encouragement to give to charity (which I already do, as I can), but rather coercion by the government.
Scroll down to the graphic, and look at the massive recent leftward lurch by the Democratic party.
" Even if it's not a full-scale war, it's still a move toward it (and quickly). "
that's just scaremongering. Why use words like "war"?
I used the word war because that's typically how socialist and communist governments have gotten into place.
Employees having a say in what their company does?!?!?! OH THE HUMANITY, THINK OF THE INVESTORS!!! /s
BTW Von Mises is a crank and anyone that follows Austrian economics is a fool or a charlatan.
This whole idea that a company exists exclusively for the owners doesn’t make sense to me. There is a bigger picture to make a society work for all citizens.
Warning about “ socialism “ also doesn’t make sense. We don’t have to choose between the way the US is at the moment and the Soviet Union or Venezuela. There is a lot of room between these extremes.
Exactly, so what is stopping them from using their salary to buy shares? If you believe you are doing such a good job that the company will sustain or do better, it would almost be silly not to. You have domain expertise by virtue of working there. You may even have a solid insider feel for the pulse of the organization.
At a restaurant, a chef is not allowed to have a bite of your meal because s/he is the one who prepared it. That meal is owned by you in its entirety because that is what you paid for.
If a group of employees want a say in the how a business is run, they are free to purchase ownership, whether directly or through shares.
capitalist are allowed to aggregate in the form of corporations why shouldn't workers be allowed to aggregate.
Socialists ask the same thing of capitalists.
There's no reason to elevate one particular (and historically rare) version of property rights over all others. And there's no particular reason economic organizations should or must be authoritarian dictatorships ruled by "shareholders" instead of workplace democracies.
Well, workers can buy equity in some company if they want. And shareholders' dividends get diluted.
I'd say most companies are similar. Yes, the worker does a lot. Without the company, it's unlikely one guy manufacturing something could find as many customers, if any. Finally, not everything can be done on an individual scale: the iPhone can't be built by one man.
Also, what do you mean by dictatorships? You can leave any time you want to. The job market is amazing for a worker right now.
The workers get their compensation in the form of benefits, wages, etc. There are companies that are run as co-ops: see REI. Most employees love it their, according to a friend who worked their for a while. If you want to work there, that's fine. If you want to work at a company with stock options, that's fine. But don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.
That's authoritarianism.
> don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.
Do you think existing corporate management structures don't rely on state violence to maintain themselves? If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace, do you think shareholders would be the ones coming in and cracking heads, or government agents?
You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.
So? I do think some people have bad practices. Non-competes, for instance, are often abused. But you can still leave...
> existing corporate management structures... rely on state violence to maintain themselves... If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace
Yes, if there was a workers uprising, I would darn well hope the police would come in and crack heads. You don't get to "enact control" over other people's stuff (including their company). But I do think that crony capitalism is cancer, see Amazon's recent $15/hr push to force competitors out of business.
> You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.
You're absolutely right that property rights are the Right and Natural Way for things to Be. If you don't agree, read about the tragedy of the commons. And look at the 100s of millions communism has killed.
We live in a nation founded on the basis of property rights. One of the most basic functions of our government is to enforce property rights. It's impossible to run a civilization on our scale without it. If you really don't like America and the way she's run, you could leave.
And the idea that you can have my stuff just because you want it is plain wrong.
Assuming you live in the United States, do you mean the right to enslave people and take their labor? Or the right to kill people and take their land?
Are there current issues as well? [1][2]
A main point is this (and I think its been mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well):
An attack on the status-quo is not a promotion of socialism
Our current implementations are a far cry from a free market. The entrenched powers and corporations don't want free markets-- its socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor [3] [4]
We'd have to start from scratch to attain a free market. And even then, the oft-quoted invisible hand of competitive markets falls flat in an increasingly opaque, complex world [5]
It seems to me that you have a strong sense of what is fair. I urge you to look out into all the wealth of information we have and take a hard look to see if our current way of being is fair [6][7]
[1] https://poverty.umich.edu/research-projects/policy-briefs/ri...
[2]https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilizati...
[4]https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-...
[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis
[6]https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
[7]https://vimeo.com/129550053
They purchase your labor with the wages that they pay you. You are free to not accept any opportunity offered, and either party can terminate it at any time for any (legal) reason if they feel the deal is no longer to their satisfaction.
Almost everyone believes that they are underpaid. There is a very simple way to prove it by checking your worth in the marketplace.
You are also free to ply your trade on your own if you so wish.
The ethics of capitalism are based on the assumption that the business owner rightfully has final say on all of the property of the business, and that the workers are merely guests on the property, paid to do something with the property, collect a paycheck, and go home. They have no right to it.
But then you can start asking questions like, did the capitalist have rightful ownership of the money to buy the thing in the first place? If you go far back enough, you have things like conquest, homesteading land (which is inherently ambiguous), government grants of land (open to favoritism), etc. The whole foundation can be called into question.
Again I'm not ultimately convinced by it, but I think there's at least a discussion to be had. I feel like I've heard some convincing arguments but they're not coming to me now. But if you have the patience for it (I didn't even finish it), you might check out "What is Property" by Proudhon. He lays out a philosophy called Mutualism that sort of has socialist ethics, but is still somewhat market based in the end. He enumerates all of the assumptions he sees as underlying private property ownership and makes an interesting argument against them.
Would the people who give absolute value to the right of property holders to do what they choose with it support the Soviet Union's right to organize its economy however it so choose, along with controlling the media it owns and the workforce it contracts with? After all, it owns the property, and anyone with credible contrary claims to it would be long dead.
I think the question here is legitimate ownership of property. If you think the Soviet Union stole the property (I do), then it should be assumed that it's homesteaded to those using it. Even Murray Rothbard suggested giving ownership of U.S. universities to students and professors, if I recall correctly. (I think it was in "All Power to the Soviets")
I suppose you believe the capitalists stole the property, which allows for the same appropriation by the workers.
But here's the thing: what then? Could the workers sell their shares? If they can, another capitalist class can emerge just as well, purely by preference of people wanting an earlier payout selling the shares + steady paychecks vs risking being responsible for the enterprise. And if the workers can't make such a choice, in what sense do they really own the share? (EDIT: I think Proudhon actually had a counter argument to this, I forgot what it was)
Having been raised in relative poverty, I have no idea what it's like to have wealthy parents to fall back on. Instead, I spent a decade after high school fighting to get ahead. Today, I find myself, over a decade later still, living what can only be called an excellent quality of life. I, instead, give back to my parents. And I look back at the path that I walked and it makes me less liberal in my politics as a result.
> Getting ahead is hard, but certainly possible.
I think that most everything we do in life is hard and that the daily challenges of life are exactly what make it worth living.
The thing I personally hate about unions is their political advocacy. The idea that a worker is stuck supporting a politician he might not agree with is one that makes me very uncomfortable.
Also, I think appleiigs summarized it better than I did, with the lack of individuality.
Unions really fight against performance based differences...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/us/denver-teacher-strike....
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/michel-kellygagnon/union-perfo...
As it turns out, union contracts don't just set minimum prices that employees can be paid; they also tend to set pay ceilings that employers cannot exceed without the union's permission--and that permission is rarely forthcoming. Paying the most talented, hardest-working employees more than the average Joe who barely works to rule is not allowed, you see.
Edit: Nobody.
If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service (I'm thinking healthcare), then you're saying you have a right to the people who produce the product or service, which is slavery. The government can't guarantee your "right" if there's no people to produce it, unless the government forces it (slavery), or just throws random workers into the position (low quality).
Who said this should ever be the case? You're assuming I support a right to healthcare. I don't support that, nor do I support most positive rights. Especially if they're not constitutional and are federally implemented.
The obvious solution to all the problems you mentioned is that nobody has a right to anyone else's product or service, which goes back to my original point: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?
You mentioned the constitution so you agree that some effort has to be made to enforce it. This effort has to be paid for by tax on your labor. Once you agree on that you only haggle if it is more tax efficient to put someone in jail for stealing a pizza or handing out free pizza. You’re free to take part in this democratic process.
Point me to the clause in the Constitution where it says anyone has a right to healthcare or that the federal government is allowed to dispense it.
The latter, and it's the militia clause read together with the elastic clause. Arguably, depending on whether one views health status identification and health maintenance as more essential to training or organization of the universal militia, it may require the states to operate as delivery intermediaries, but it certainly allows federal funding.
The federal government is allowed to dispense it as opposed to anyone has a right to it.
> What does the militia clause have to do with it, outside of providing healthcare to the military?
The military clauses would be what authorizes healthcare to the military. The militia is not the military (and the militia clause is not the military clauses), and is universal.
> The necessary and proper execution of which federal power?
The militia power, as specified in the militia clause, hence the “read together with”.
> The federal government no longer calls up a militia,
The militia power expressly is not just about calling up and using a militia, but keeping one in readiness should a desire to call it up be made in the future. (Also, the federal government does calls up part of the militia, what is in current statute defined as the “organized militia”.)
The militia power does not go away just because Congress does not anticipate a near-term need for a call-up.
> Also, militiae are not composed of all the populace, therefore you could at most justify a certain subgroup.
Arguably, the Constitutional militia is universal, and the statute purporting to limit the scope of the “unorganized militia” (currently to able-bodied males 17-45 [0]) is simply an application of the power to organize the militia based on anticipated likelihood of call ip, and does not alter the Constitutional scope of the militia.
[0] the “males” part being in tension with the recent ruling against the male-only draft registration, as draft registration is also an exercise of the organizing part of the militia power.
Unions are not an exclusively socialist construct.
I support unions as an anarchist, because I recognize that it is both useful for corporations with concentrated capital to exist and necessary to counterbalance their power with opposing institutions to keep their perverse incentives from directing their behavior unchecked. If all social institutions are set up such that they check and balance one another, no single one of them can safely dominate. Each has a time to be supported, and a time to be undermined.
For now, government institutions and religious institutions have refused to counter commercial/mercantile institutions, so the lowest-energy path to doing so is reviving the unions. Growing a neo-socialist voting bloc now is a longer play, but that one will be beneficial between 6 and 12 years from now, and probably won't become threatening for 20 years. One can never know in advance; democracy is messy.
Socialism is an awful idea in isolation. It's a great idea if your goal is to temporarily undermine those whose power is based on accumulations of wealth and pre-existing social contacts. If you feel that those in power are keeping you from breaking into their ranks, you can promote socialism to clear them out, and then move into their vacated places of power to quash the socialism before it gets out of hand.
As I am not one of the elite, and do not currently have any plausible way to become one, I fully support a socialist political movement. For now.
My personal morality does not compete well against those whose ethics revolve around "might makes right", "them that has the gold, makes the rules", and "F U, I got mine". So I have a newer rule: to suppress my other ethical rules in all situations where those who do not share them are exploiting my respect for them, and any information asymmetries, in order to influence my behavior to my own detriment.
I have no right to the fruits of your labor, but rights are a political construct. They have to be protected by a chain of support, like chess pieces. And right now, someone has sacrificed all of the pawns. The right to keep one's own property weakens in the face of a growing class of people who are somehow completely unable to accumulate significant wealth, even after a lifetime of toil and diligence.
Middle class purchasing power has been stagnant since the 70s. That's more than enough time for all those getting screwed by the system to forget why they ever believed in it, and to raise children who never believed in it, who then decide to replace it with literally anything else. The seeds for the democratic socialist resurgence of 2019 were planted in the 1980s and 1990s. Sow sighs; reap gales.
I can live with socialism for a few political cycles, if it can clear out some cruft at the top. It's dangerous, and difficult to know when to hit the brakes, but I feel ill used by the current system, and I'm not going to go down with it.
I don't have mine, but I hope to some day. Under socialism, that won't happen. Here's a great objection: I want to be rich some day. Very rich. I suspect this is the case with many of us. Under socialism, that can't happen. And so, I will never support it.
Your whole idea is that socialism will clear out the elites in power. It won't. You'll end up with a bastardized version that oppresses everyone but a few.
http://hellyesjohnsteinbeck.tumblr.com/post/23486952183/comm...
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck
Each time, the socialism did significant damage to the economy... as measured by the elites, anyway.
Nobody, except those who already got it, has gotten theirs since the 1970s. The theory behind trickle-down economics is demonstrably false. When you give rich people more control over resources and production, they keep all the additional profits, because they can, and then use some of those to gain more control over resources and production. Socialists, while incorrect in many (most?) areas of economics, at least realize that the people who do the work should get paid fairly for it, even if their calculations for "fair" are frequently inaccurate. The socialist war is the ultimate penalty for unfairness in the economy.
The system will never find a higher peak without a good, hard kick, off of the local maximum it seems to be stuck on. It doesn't need to be a socialist revolution that does it, and everything would probably be better off if it wasn't them, but they're the only ones that seem to be in position to get the job done now. And once they do, then the non-socialist, non-mercantile-elitist armies may begin to fight, if they have enough numbers, or enough clout with the socialists to steer them away from the cliff peacefully.
You're not going to be rich someday, because your parents weren't rich, and you grew up in the wrong postal code. That's the current regime in the US. Accept that, statistically speaking, everyone that has bucked the trend to achieve extreme upward mobility has been in the right place, at the right time, with the right ideas, and the right skills, to take advantage of an ephemeral opportunity. Most people still can't afford to be prepared for anything, and also look up from their daily toil long enough to recognize an opening.
You cannot get rich with a lifetime of hard work and wise investments; if you do that, never make a single mistake, and never get screwed, you can retire comfortably, snugly ensconced in hopefully the higher end of the middle class. It's a fine goal, achievable, and not something socialism does well. You can get rich by getting lucky, and buying the right lottery tickets. You can get rich by abandoning your ethics and screwing over those still attempting hard work over a lifetime. For instance, blow a bubble in the mortgages market and erase the majority of net worth for a lot of middle-class families, and then place bets on how many extra defaults and foreclosures there will be because of it. Nobody went to prison for that. It won't be me that does it, but I definitely won't cry if those even peripherally responsible, and those following in their footsteps, ever get shoved up against the wall.
I'm not an elite in this system. I won't be an elite in any system that replaces it, socialist or not. I have accepted that I am a nobody, and will be forgotten before my corpse cools. And I have also accepted that religious fantasies of justice-after-death are bullshit, psychologically crafted to discourage vigilantism and mob behaviors. So when there is an obvious asshole that clearly requires a humility-boosting supplement, for whom the gods fail to send a nemesis, and for whom the prosecutors fail to send marshals, and for whom the helpers fail to send redeeming inspiration, that guy is going to be an exemplar of a strategy for winning the game of life. In the meta-game, successful dickwads encourage other players to become dickwads. I can see the endgame, and I don't win; I don't have enough points, don't have the right cards to play, and I'm not good enough at cheating to not get caught. But I can pick one player that's still in the running, and make it more difficult for them to win.
Besides, if I lose a job to a worker in Romania, China, India or Brazil, I can’t simply waltz on over there and say “Hey youse all, I just landed, I don’t have a work visa, but you all gotta play fair, gimme a job, you took mine!”
My point is that if they institute a union it then should also be a strong union that looks after its workers.
I'm not necessarily against companies making money, because fully automated gay space communism isn't yet a practical option. I'm not against working long hours, and I'm not against prioritizing things other than money in someone's career choice. That's all valid! What I do have a problem with is companies taking advantage of people and hurting them.
I would suggest reading about crunch I the video games industry, and remember that people take big pay and benefits cuts just to work in these places. Here is one to get you started: https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2018/01/16/c...
Negotiation works best when done from a position of strength.
My grandfathers mined coal and milled steel. They needed unions. I don’t see any benefit to unions for me.
The best thing for workers is to have many companies competing for their talents. That’s why counterintuitive things like lower corporate taxes can sometimes benefit workers. Same with reducing barriers to market entry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Now, most people seem to think the likes of Uber and AirBnB need to be regulated. A majority of comments here about GDPR seem to support it, and I regularly see calls for more regulation of the sort. I'm not sure if the same group of people have changed their views, or if a wider range of people have brought new perspectives to the community.
Also, the rise of outrage porn makes it much easier for people to come to the conclusion that "the system" is horribly broken and needs to be changed (for almost any "system" that we speak of, government or capitalism, or youtube, literally anything)
And now the popular hope seems to be that the wonders of democracy can temper the excesses that came with these partially successful solutions. It is my fear that this hope is also irrationally optimistic, and that regulation will lead to politicians and bureaucrats deciding what is true at scale for their own benefit.
Wind's done shifted.
By luck, the explosive growth of software in the states and relative scarcity of developers has resulted in a lot of wealth and luxury for engineers. There's no reason to believe this trend will continue indefinitely.
On the other side of the spectrum, another country that has explosive software growth but a large supply of engineers and STEM workers is China. China's 996 work policy has been getting a lot of attention lately and I think it should highlight the risk we face in a matter of maybe a generation or two if the software industry does eventually cool down.
As a recent graduate (last 5 years), I can't agree with most works desire to unionize for one reason: demand for your skills.
When I was looking for my second tech job, I turned on that switch in my LinkedIn that lets recruiters contact me. I was immediately inundated with 10-20 messages a day from recruiters asking if I could speak with them about <Role with my expertice>. For me this was the most insane luxury in the workplace, instead of having to go out and look for jobs, those jobs were coming to me and knocking on my door.
What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize? Don't like where you work? Flip a switch and suddenly you have 10-20 offers a day from other companies looking to hire someone with your skillset. Yes, you have to spend time combing through the messages, on the phone with recruiters and going to interviews but at the end of the day with that level of attention to your skillset, you can basically decide where you want to work. Company A seems great but the culture is toxic, ok great let's see what company B has to offer. Company B has a good culture but their data collection practices you don't agree with, ok let's see what company C has to offer. Company C has a great culture and doesn't do the things you consider unethical with data collection, bam we have a winner.
Also on the topic of general democracy in the workplace regarding decisions. As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them. Don't like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more/total control over decision making? Start your own company.
EDIT: changed "ringer" to "wringer".
But wouldn't it be excellent if these things were true?
If a company screws something up, I can just switch jobs and move to another company. If the government screws up, there is little I can do.
See: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/08/finlands-government-resigns-...
"Financial constraints are colliding with the healthcare costs imposed by Finland’s fast-aging population. But cutting those costs is a major political obstacle in a Nordic country that historically has provided an extensive -- and expensive -- healthcare system."
What happens when you can't take care of yourself? What happens when a series of unfortunate events interfere with your ability to dig those holes? Who then will be responsible for you?
You mentioned you have a problem with socialism, have you experienced and lived in socialism? I haven't and have no actual experience of what is good or bad about it. Do you have any concrete examples of why socialism is bad?
As a fellow tech worker who have been through the wringer many times, I can confirm this is absolutely true.
Sorry for being annoying and pedantic :-(
Ringer[1] 1. a person or thing that encircles, rings, etc. 2. a quoit or horseshoe so thrown as to encircle the peg. 3. the throw itself. 4. Also ring·ers. Also called ring taw. Marbles . a game in which players place marbles in a cross marked in the center of a circle, the object being to knock as many marbles as possible outside the circle by using another marble shooter. 5. Australian . a highly skilled sheep shearer.
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ringer
I feel that is a very myopic attitude. Engineers and tech workers generally are in the best position to present options that can inform business decisions. In order to identify a good option it helps to have a lot of options. Disregarding the positive input that any employee can have on how a company operates is incredibly stupid.
But more importantly, these are the "halcyon" days of finding tech work, and they are fleeting. There is absolutely no guarantee the job market will look this promising in a few years. Things seemed to be on an endless upward trajectory in the 90s and then it all came crashing down.
If you're gambling on the fact that tech work will always be in extremely high demand, then you have a combination of risk appetite and optimism that makes for a founder.
As someone who worked through the period of the tech industry during the dotcom fallout, lots of stuff people take for granted today was non-existent: You had much less autonomy over the technical aspects of the objectives you were trying to achieve. Mandated tools, crappy underpowered computers, bureaucracy, over project dependencies, process-heavy SDLCs weren't just the norm, but widely viewed as the proper way to build software. It was all a reaction to what was seen as the "inmates running the asylum" during the dotcom boom. It basically took a bunch of promising startups in the mid-aughts to start cleaning people's clocks and become juggernauts to get the broader industry to reverse course. It also became a lot cheaper to do a tech startup.
Basically, understand that a lot of what is enjoyable today about working in tech is a side-effect of supply-and-demand; they HAVE to avoid developer-hostile actions because we're difficult to hire and expensive to employ. Once that's no longer the case, the screws are going to tighten. Just look at China's 9-9-6 work policies and companies using chat tools to spy on their employees to keep them working as a point of reference.
> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them.
I'd like to think we have enough integrity as a profession to fall back on an Eichmann-adjacent justification.
It the job market for developers only came crashing down if you didn’t have the skillset needed and/or were looking for a job at one of the $cool_unprofitable_startups. There was plenty of demand for your regular old corporate developers. The company I was working for didn’t even blink during the dot com bust. We were a boring old profitable company that did bill processors. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and have never found it difficult to find a job.
They're in a union
Don't you want more out of the roles in your career? I want to work at a place that wants my best self, ideas, opinions and all. I don't want my only career options to be a paid typist or an entrepreneur.
These things are not diametrically opposed.
A union doesn't imply anything other than collective bargaining. Maybe having a union would prevent things like Disney firing a bunch of full time employees after they retrain contractor replacements. This type of nonsense is driving down wages for the entire middle class of workers.
I haven't found this to be the case at all. I know many people who jump companies every 3 years or so, make more money each time they change, get to work on a variety of projects that interest them, and are well respected by their peers regardless of what company they are with due to the work they have done and continue to do. It is relatively common advice that you are generally able to advance faster by moving between companies and negotiating for better pay and titles rather than trying to get promoted frequently while staying with the same company. If you decide to take a position where you will be doing dull, dead end work with "dumb" people that is your own fault.
Just as a counterexample, my job changes early in my career netted me raises of sometimes 50% but each subsequent one increased less on a percentage basis. My last job change (now have 20 years experience) was +0%, and I give even odds that it will turn negative soon as I get older.
As tech workers, we are uniquely positioned within society: we have privileged knowledge of how the most powerful systems and products of the age function and we are incredibly close to the control surfaces of the major pillars of the economy. We are in demand, paid well, and generally well-educated. We have the ability to make a difference in the world in ways that very few people do. This is why organization is important.
1. assessment training and rank. my sister is in a union and has been train and qualified for specific kinds of work. she does this work for many clients and the chance that they are getting the skills they need and she has those skills are very high. she can also call in others from the union if needed and the union handles negotiations of changed whatever.
2. unions handles her seniority. she can work for several different companies a year, but time off and other benefits come from time in union not those companies.
There is a lot of other things about her union I do not like, but my biggest problems in tech are finding or developing the right talent (including my own) and constant loss of seniority (pto, retirement, and other benefits). I lost a lot of both early in my career because I didn't negotiate well.
If a union existed that helped protect my interests, develop my talents, and match my skills with work I would join it. If they were good at training/vetting their members (apprentice, journeyman, whatever) in whatever skill set they learned that would benefit both employee and employer. Might help with imposter syndrome. Might help both sides with many issues if done right.
What I am waiting to see is a significant demand being met by any major tech employer. The end of forced arbitration at Google was a promising development, but the failure of the Google walkout organizers to get their key demand—an employee representative on the board—doesn't bode well.
I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone's capacity. I wish the current crop of organizers the best of luck in trying to make it happen.
I agree strongly. My generation (millennials) often look with disdain at how easy the baby boomers had it, often paying off their college tuition by taking on just a summer job.
I think my future children (or maybe their children) will look with disdain at how easy software engineers had it. Imagine that you get a degree and train for a job, without a particular position of power, and just like that you have leverage and a growing salary that you can increase 30% every time you switch jobs! Just from the scarcity of your skills!
I find the people who are clamoring for unions in tech are among the least talented and skilled of employees, and they should probably find a new industry entirely instead of trying to change the one they’re in to be more hospitable to the lowest common denominators. Perhaps we can help the process along by putting these people on hiring blacklists and ensuring they never work in this town again.
That's one perspective, sure. Here's another perspective: There's nothing stopping a company from firing it's junior and 'least talented and skilled' employees in favor of contractors or outsourcing.
I don't always want to cut and run. I want to invest in a workplace and have a meaningful say about my circumstances there and the work we do. I don't want to quit or have to suck it up and deal. I don't want to have to go into management and then have dueling loyalties (what comes first, ethics or keeping my team employed?) If I work at a big company like Amazon, I want a say in what our tech does and who uses it. Even if I cut and run from them, I'm not going to catch up to Amazon anytime soon. In a place like that positive change could much more easily come from within than from competition.
When I hire people, I'm not giving away my business, in the same way that if I give a friend a ride, I'm not giving away my car. If they don't like where I'm driving, their only option is to find another ride.
That's the key difference between starting a business vs getting a job: all the decision making is yours.
And this applies at any scale, even Amazon scale. If you have plans and you start a business to execute them, you can execute them even better at a large scale. Getting Amazon big and maintaining control is the reason you start a business.
It'd be insulting if my hires started wanting to take away control. When you hire someone, it's with the implicit understanding that they respect that the business is not theirs. They don't own any of it. (Unless they want to buy in.)
Violating that understanding is disrespectful. Like your neighbor letting their dog shit on your lawn and not picking it up, because they think "well, he's just going to walk his dog in twenty minutes, he can do them both at the same time."
I don't like working (whether for my business or for someone else's business) with disrespectful people. There's a lack of trust.
For a tech worker, a union is largely about providing a worker-focused counterbalance to your companies decisions. Who buys the tech we make? What tech do we make? Do we allow ourselves to make tech that evades, impedes or outright destroys a person's rights?
I don't want tech employees to quit those facial recognition companies. I want a large group of employees with a seat at the table saying that their work should be used ethically. Those companies can always find employees who for a variety of reasons will do the work. My hope is that there is a group of employees there who want to do the work and for the right reasons. More power to them.