Unions don’t exactly give individual employees more input. By unionizing, the individuals surrender a lot of their individual bargaining power to the union and let the union act according to what it thinks is best for the union, but not necessarily individual employees.
Exactly. Look how well the union protected Don McNeil during his dust up. Even though he was a committed union guy who helped the union negotiate, the union decided to side with management.
Unions are democratic organizations. Employees elect the leadership, which can effectively advocate on their behalf for changes to company strategy in addition to general compensation & working conditions issues. So yes, by creating a parallel power structure beholden to workers, not management, unions do give individual employees more input.
You are saying that an individual employee voicing their concerns to their manager has more sway than a union bringing that concern up to the executives.
Sure. Pretty easy to beat the standard set when there's no union though, which in my experience is "your manager listens to your concerns and explains to you why it isn't a problem". The parallel power structure offers you the possibility of recourse, but not the guarantee. And if you want to put effort into having your concerns heard, you'll be convincing people (your coworkers) whose interest generally align with yours.
I left about 2.5 years ago. I wasn't unhappy with the job, just got a better offer, but this is pretty true. You could count on a "re-org" or new project management strategy being announced every two quarters with no more justification than "the current thing isn't working", and you could count on essentially no follow-through after that announcement.
I don’t imagine badly. I’d love to be able to have a Union where I can tell my manager not to put me on on-call rotations with no compensation, but I have no bargaining power as an individual. I’m sure other programmers have a whole slew of things that would be great, too, that can only happen if everyone works together to negotiate for it.
Sure you can. Usually there’s a combo of rank+time. I know, I’ve done it.
Collective bargaining is usually around work rules and core issues. No non-VP+ individual has the ability to effectively bargain re health insurance.
All companies have pay scales. Even massive unionized bureaucracies like the Federal government have the ability to compensate critical employees or critical skills. (Although your definition of critical may not align with the entity)
I've been in three different unions before I landed in this career. Salary increases were fixed by time and position. Position was always based on seniority. No exceptions. You could try to transfer locations within the same company to try and get better roles (which is how most people got promotions, aside from waiting for people to die).
If you changed companies though you started at the bottom, guaranteed, because if you get moved ahead of people in the new company it creates an utter shitstorm. Management at the new job basically has to hate their employees and themselves to do such a thing.
This is the point that seems so often missed. I was union before I joined tech, and unions are poison to somebody who wants to represent themselves. They completely remove the option. It often forces people into either management or just learn to be happy inside the system.
It bothers me the ignorance of people who immediately think that having a union means "I'm going to get what I want."
No. You're going to get what the union wants.
People complain endlessly about HOAs and their behavior. Being in a union is the same shit!
By the way, in my professional adult life, there has never been a situation where there was something reasonable that I wanted in my employment contract and didn't get it. Just ask!
I wonder how many people out there want unions and are also the kinds of people who don't ask for things they need.
And if you want to use unions to get you things that are _unreasonable_ that's bad for everyone.
Why does that matter? If you don't like your current job, start looking around until you have a new offer in hand. That new offer in hand is now your leverage ("bargaining power") if you really like your current company. Otherwise if they "call your bluff" you still have a job.
Lame living by someone else's ultimatum also. If you had a union you'd have to go on strike for shit you don't necessarily care about and you would have to wait for somebody to age out to get off of pager duty. It's outsourcing responsibility of your life to someone else.
This isn't 2010. Unless, you're some legendary-tier coder (and I have my doubts these actually exist or are useful in a corporate environment), the company will most likely call your bluff. There are loads of coders willing to take the job.
Don't make it a bluff then. Have an offer in hand before bargaining. If the company values you (and not every company treats its programmers like cogs) they will work with you. Otherwise if they refuse you still have a job.
> Don't make it a bluff then. Have an offer in hand before bargaining. If the company values you (and not every company treats its programmers like cogs) they will work with you. Otherwise if they refuse you still have a job.
So what you are describing is a situation in which there is zero long-term pressure for the company to improve or change their practices, because there is a never-ending source of people to replace the ones leaving, and as long as they're fine with the churn (spoiler: they are), they'll just chalk it up to the system working as intended.
What are you talking about? I'm a totally average programmer, hell, maybe below average for my age and experience level, and I literally walked on a job that wanted to make me do uncompensated on-call at the end of 2019 for one that compensates me to be on call.
It doesn't have to be a bluff, programmers are still in high demand.
And I'm not even in Silicon Valley, and I have no degree. C'mon!
You don't have to be "legendary" to have that kind of leverage.
If the software has any level of complexity, an org does not want to incur the cost of training a newly hired engineer and waiting 3-6 months while they get up to speed.
Are you in a salaried role with pager duty? Are your responsibilities different from what was advertised? It sounds like you’re okay with pager duty—have you tried asking for an increase in comp? You can probably fix your current plight without invoking a union...
with a union, at best, you'll submit a ticket to your rep. Like most tickets, it will likely never see the light of day.
btw, would you be prepared to strike if negotiations don't go well? That's the only tool a union has to keep the other side at the bargaining table. heh I doubt you can charge PTO to a strike so i wouldn't expect a paycheck.
Apparently you can pay them some of the highest salaries in the world, make their meals, do their laundry, give them unlimited time off, and they will still find a reason to complain.
Then again it’s the NYT, who has been completely overtaken by activists.
This is just not true. I have met so, so, many wildly entitled workers (many, but not all, tech).
It's a function of detachment from reality, not a function of compensation or material comfort. You can make $1mm a year, earning the company practically nothing, and have a story in head where you're being cheated out of what is rightfully yours.
_Anyone_ who thinks they can get away with entitled behavior can build up a narrative in their head where they are denied benefits and even higher compensation they deserve.
This is a very naive viewpoint. People's wants, needs and desires will expand to fill up all of space-time if you let them. A lot of people (in general) have a huge sense of entitlement these days when its often not justified.
No it's not, the relationship between the company itself and the employees is fundamentally hostile, the desires of the shareholders will, also, expand to fill up all of space-time if you let them. I'm not saying this out "everybody can be friends :D", just that each one keeps the other in check.
Also, a lot of the NYT is already unionized and the apocalypse you speak of hasn't happened.
So again, if they treat their employees well they have nothing to fear.
I get the advantage of collective bargaining for workers, but I still can't help but think that unions also add a lot of inertia and generally just have a dampening effect on agility, individual contribution, risk taking, etc. which is opposite of what you want for a software shop.
Maybe I'm wrong, and perhaps abusive megacorps really do need unions in place as a check against corporate power (never worked for one). I guess time will tell.
To be fair, if you've been in business more than a century (and are facing weird pressures probably best weathered by staying true to your Paper Of Record history), you probably don't want to be agile and risk taking.
One friend of mine was extolling unions after we discussed some pattern of microaggressions that ruined his latest job. He also hated HR which did nothing. A union, he claimed, would have saved him.
Perhaps, I said, but private sector unions can't handle workplace friction as easily. Often the other side of the complaint is also in the union and the union is just like a shadow HR. It has to choose winners and losers.
Of course collective bargaining is another thing. It can be useful, especially when the jobs are pretty standardized.
> a dampening effect on agility, individual contribution, risk taking, etc. which is opposite of what you want for a software shop.
These are company problems and not employee problems. The employees have no incentive to care about this so unions are a way to get more power over the things that matter.
The most trodden down workers of the first world - poor, starving programmers - who for the most part voluntarily passed on high salaries so they could "be a force for the good" and by joining news outlets [1], are stadning up to the powers that be (no one).
It's unfortunate that you included the sarcastic second paragraph, because the link you provided is quite good and provides important perspective. While I clicked it primarily because you were sarcastic, I would bet far more people will look past it because of the same reason. I could be wrong tho.
I can't find the column right now, but the columnist I read said that some of the internal tensions of the New York Times newsroom that have spilled out into public (well, "public" as defined by Twitter's reality distortion field) are partly due to having employees -- specifically, the highly-valued and sought after tech employees -- having a greater say in corporate policy that their predecessors, the printing press operators and the delivery men, didn't have.
Maybe what you're thinking of. Most of this started after I left the company, but I saw some of the beginnings of it, and knowing Kathy Zhang (the organizer quoted in the union article), I would be very surprised if she didn't play a major role in a lot of what's described there.
I interviewed there a couple years back. They loved me but the culture seemed pretty clearly to be "we are the elite of the elite reporters, and software engineers are brainless minions here at our pleasure." The offer was... commensurate with that way of thinking. Needless to say, I didn't accept.
A few years before they shut operations here, I'd met a few engineers/journalists at Al Jazeera at a bar. They were gushing about how much the company had embraced tech and how they were having engineers & data scientists work together with journalists on breaking new stories. That included cross-training engineers to do passable journalism.
It seemed like they had a dream job and they were really keen on recruiting every decent engineer they could find.
Is that really a surprise though? This is going to be the experience at 100% of companies where tech is an operating expense, not a money maker.
Flipping things around, do you think a Pulitzer prize winning NYT editor would get the salary and respect they expect if they take up a job at a tech company writing marketing copy for their website?
> do you think a Pulitzer prize winning NYT editor would get the salary and respect they expect if they take up a job at a tech company writing marketing copy for their website?
Probably not the level of respect and deference they are accustomed to, but potentially higher pay?
That's interesting. Maybe it's too small a sample, but I always found it interesting that NYT has at some point employed two very influential frontend developers: Mike Bostock (d3) and Rich Harris (svelte, rollup).
Eh, I make well over twice what they offered now, still live in a MCOL area that I love, am set to retire early having grown up in a poor area in a poor family for the area, and am building awesome unique software that has the potential to make the world better. I feel I made the right choice.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadSame comments about management from all of them: directionless, self-defeating.
You are saying that an individual employee voicing their concerns to their manager has more sway than a union bringing that concern up to the executives.
That means you can't go to your bosses and say "I think I'm worth this much (more) money".
You also can't leave your job to get paid that much, because seniority at your new company means you will start at lower pay than you currently have.
Collective bargaining is usually around work rules and core issues. No non-VP+ individual has the ability to effectively bargain re health insurance.
All companies have pay scales. Even massive unionized bureaucracies like the Federal government have the ability to compensate critical employees or critical skills. (Although your definition of critical may not align with the entity)
If you changed companies though you started at the bottom, guaranteed, because if you get moved ahead of people in the new company it creates an utter shitstorm. Management at the new job basically has to hate their employees and themselves to do such a thing.
No. You're going to get what the union wants.
People complain endlessly about HOAs and their behavior. Being in a union is the same shit!
By the way, in my professional adult life, there has never been a situation where there was something reasonable that I wanted in my employment contract and didn't get it. Just ask! I wonder how many people out there want unions and are also the kinds of people who don't ask for things they need.
And if you want to use unions to get you things that are _unreasonable_ that's bad for everyone.
What about "stop putting me on call without compensation or I will leave the company"
Says the dude without kids and a mortgage who can afford a couple of months without a salary :)
End of the day, requiring such a high friction approach to addressing basic issues sets up incentives to take no action.
So what you are describing is a situation in which there is zero long-term pressure for the company to improve or change their practices, because there is a never-ending source of people to replace the ones leaving, and as long as they're fine with the churn (spoiler: they are), they'll just chalk it up to the system working as intended.
It doesn't have to be a bluff, programmers are still in high demand.
And I'm not even in Silicon Valley, and I have no degree. C'mon!
If the software has any level of complexity, an org does not want to incur the cost of training a newly hired engineer and waiting 3-6 months while they get up to speed.
btw, would you be prepared to strike if negotiations don't go well? That's the only tool a union has to keep the other side at the bargaining table. heh I doubt you can charge PTO to a strike so i wouldn't expect a paycheck.
At least Frank is fucked if their relationship ever sours though. Fucking Frank. Everyone wants to see that guy get injured.
Apparently you can pay them some of the highest salaries in the world, make their meals, do their laundry, give them unlimited time off, and they will still find a reason to complain.
Then again it’s the NYT, who has been completely overtaken by activists.
It's a function of detachment from reality, not a function of compensation or material comfort. You can make $1mm a year, earning the company practically nothing, and have a story in head where you're being cheated out of what is rightfully yours.
_Anyone_ who thinks they can get away with entitled behavior can build up a narrative in their head where they are denied benefits and even higher compensation they deserve.
No it's not, the relationship between the company itself and the employees is fundamentally hostile, the desires of the shareholders will, also, expand to fill up all of space-time if you let them. I'm not saying this out "everybody can be friends :D", just that each one keeps the other in check.
Also, a lot of the NYT is already unionized and the apocalypse you speak of hasn't happened.
So again, if they treat their employees well they have nothing to fear.
And the reporting, it would be nice to see the coverage of this by their own reporters or journalists.
Maybe I'm wrong, and perhaps abusive megacorps really do need unions in place as a check against corporate power (never worked for one). I guess time will tell.
Perhaps, I said, but private sector unions can't handle workplace friction as easily. Often the other side of the complaint is also in the union and the union is just like a shadow HR. It has to choose winners and losers.
Of course collective bargaining is another thing. It can be useful, especially when the jobs are pretty standardized.
If a union mandated that its members must be allowed to fix bugs before being put on a new project everyone I know would join in a heartbeat.
These are company problems and not employee problems. The employees have no incentive to care about this so unions are a way to get more power over the things that matter.
The most trodden down workers of the first world - poor, starving programmers - who for the most part voluntarily passed on high salaries so they could "be a force for the good" and by joining news outlets [1], are stadning up to the powers that be (no one).
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/whats-wrong-with-the-media
Maybe what you're thinking of. Most of this started after I left the company, but I saw some of the beginnings of it, and knowing Kathy Zhang (the organizer quoted in the union article), I would be very surprised if she didn't play a major role in a lot of what's described there.
It seemed like they had a dream job and they were really keen on recruiting every decent engineer they could find.
Sad to see how that all ended up.
I'm disappointed to hear they weren't much better than most [traditional] media companies when it comes to the digital approach, at least in HR.
The NYT is still in a whole other league over most media companies for their digital product and development.
Flipping things around, do you think a Pulitzer prize winning NYT editor would get the salary and respect they expect if they take up a job at a tech company writing marketing copy for their website?
Probably not the level of respect and deference they are accustomed to, but potentially higher pay?
You missed out on a unique life opportunity.
I went on their homepage and 11 of the 12 opinion articles are written by non minority authors.
Can they do same here with unions and somehow get away with being anti union?
what is the logic here?