Ask HN: Would a tech recession vindicate calls for tech unionization?
For years, the idea of unionizing software engineers and other tech workers has been mostly a fringe idea. While there have been some high-profile examples such as the Kickstarter union and organizing in the notoriously cutthroat video games industry, the idea has been largely scoffed at. The idea is that because SWEs are in such hot demand, it is one of the very few examples where employment relations benefit workers greatly.
Now with large scale layoffs already and who knows what else on the horizon, it seems like that leverage, once present during the low interest rates environment of the pandemic bubble, is fast disappearing. So does that vindicate the idea that tech workers should have codified the benefits they enjoyed during the good times, through unionizing?
102 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadAlso, it's not clear to me how a union would assist. If your startup is shutting down because it cannot get funded because interest rate rises mean there is no more cheap cash, what will a Union do? Convince the FED to slash interest rates to save your company?
What kind of firms are there? Saw a comment on HN last week saying that recently-funded startups are still hiring, which means they might have a year or two of runway before they get into trouble. We're not actually in a recession yet, and hopefully there won't be, but the smoke we're seeing before the fire is not great.
> If your startup is shutting down because it cannot get funded because interest rate rises mean there is no more cheap cash, what will a Union do? Convince the FED to slash interest rates to save your company?
It's less that a union could have prevented this situation, and more that a union could protect whatever benefits SWE in tech are taking for granted right now, that might be removed later on. Pushing back against involuntary RTO, for instance, which may or may not happen regardless if there is a recession.
Perhaps it could be argued that unions could have cautioned against management from overhiring during the last two years, but given that would be seen as gatekeeping, which is a common accusation against not only unions but professional orgs such as the AMA, I'm not sure if tech unions would have affected the current industry predicament. They might have even agreed with managements' actions during the gravy train years.
I think it's important to remember that a recession is a whole-economy event. A 20% drop in one half of the economy and 10% growth in the other half is still a 5% drop over all. But if you work in that growing part then you, your company etc don't have a problem...
I am not fundamentally opposed to unions, but I am also not convinced they will improve things either (either for me or my colleagues or the company). Like you say, maybe a union would have reduced hiring and put companies in a better place? Or maybe they would have increased it and made things worse? Who knows?
We could go back and forth and be right or wrong. But I don't think and of those factors change significantly in a (possible) recession that may or may not affect tech...
> I am not fundamentally opposed to unions, but I am also not convinced they will improve things either (either for me or my colleagues or the company). [...] But I don't think and of those factors change significantly in a (possible) recession that may or may not affect tech...
My overall point that when the boom times end and employee leverage goes away, who knows what benefits will disappear as well. A union could help maintain that leverage even in bad times.
In my experience, everyone seems to be recruiting but with salaries that no longer correspond to the cost of living (and especially housing) nor will allow you to save anything meaningful to eventually get on the property ladder.
Actually good roles that allow you build a future (in London at least) are far and far between.
People who look at history often see unions becoming a solution in search of a problem.
Unions are the reason we have a 40-hour workweek, minimum wage and the Civil Rights Act. If you're not working today (Saturday), you can thank organized labor efforts for that. They've deeply impacted our work lives in ways that are not immediately apparent to those that haven't read about them.
Do you have a source for this? The Wikipedia entry on the Civil Rights Act hardly mentions unions.
There's quite a bit of literature on organized labor's relationship to the Civil Rights Movement, here are just a couple of examples[1][2].
0: https://www.afscme.org/about/history/mlk/dr-martin-luther-ki...
1: https://teamster.org/2021/02/civil-rights-and-the-labor-move...
2: https://www.epi.org/blog/labor-rights-and-civil-rights-one-i...
Unions did have a role in the Civil Rights act, but they were not the only backers, and were hardly uniform in their support. Unions in the South had pushed blacks out of entire industries.
I'm open to a discussion on this, but I'd make an argument that the biggest direct factor that caused improvements like 40 weekly hours of work being possible isn't unionization, but the overall process of industrialization.
Many people always seem to forget that employers also have to compete for labor. Once a society becomes wealthy enough through industrialization, the setting for better working conditions emerges and becomes possible; whether it's union agitation or simply market competition for workers that pushes them there. The root condition that has to be in place is industrialization.
To illustrate this, I'd offer a thought experiment. Imagine a dirt poor country with no machinery that multiplies their labor. People there currently need to work at least 80 hours a week just to feed their families low-quality gruel and give them rags to wear. How does this hypothetical country ever get to 40 hours of work a week without starving? It doesn't matter how well-intentioned and powerful their unions are, their only path to living at 40 hours per week is going through the shitty process of industrializing and becoming efficient enough first.
> minimum wage
I would strongly argue that an enforced minimum wage isn't the act of love it sounds like, but an act of supreme hatred. It completely locks the most disadvantaged out of the labor market. I know some borderline mentally/physically limited people who hate feeling useless and would love to have some kind of routine and feel like they can contribute to society in a small way and benefit themselves a bit with some kind of job, but due to their working speed and special challenges, there's no way they can be employable at a normal minimum wage for any task. The minimum wage doesn't help them: it just makes the least advantaged among us as depressed wards of the state who rot away their lives because they're completely locked out of a normal life in the world.
It seems like one is unrelated to the other. The goal is good — to get back to the good times. But the path from here to there seems unlikely to pass through a union, at least for most tech workers.
It would help to list some of the perceived benefits of unionizing. Then we’d be able to quantify an answer. Without a specific target, it’s hard to say whether a certain proposal might get there.
Later: The recent layoffs are a good example of one of the benefits of unionizing. Theoretically, companies would have a tough time reducing head count if we were organized. But that raises the question of whether 14 weeks of severance is sufficient. For me it would’ve been, but there are a great many who wouldn’t have.
Are there other benefits besides layoff protection? Discussions like these often focus on the downsides of unionization. It’s hard to recall one extolling the virtues.
It helps to look at other highly-skilled workers that are unionized, and pro athletes are a particularly interesting as a case-study for modern organized labor. They get profit-sharing and guaranteed raises built into their contracts. No need to wade through the BS of exercising shares that may or may not be worth something down the road. There are obviously many differences between the revenue that pro athletes generate and earn compared to tech workers, but if anything, I believe that it shows that tech workers leave a lot on the table by not unionizing.
Additionally, organized labor would give more power to workers in termination situations. Right now, lots of people are being laid off because companies raised headcount irresponsibly and are now dealing with it by trimming their staffs. A unionized workplace is in a much better position to demand more favorable separation terms (guaranteed insurance, severance, etc.) in order to disincentivize employers from irresponsibly hiring and firing. If we're gonna be sacrificed in a market downturn, we should always be taken care of.
The companies that go under don’t tend to have a lot of profit.
Also, tech is a fairly open marketplace. John Carmack can start his own company and has done so multiple times, but LeBron James can’t start or even buy his own NBA franchise if he wants to play. So while professional sports owners are an obvious, fixed counterparty to the players in a collective bargaining sense, the top tech workers can be and often are the owners and management of tech companies.
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope...
Failing that, we have a bit of a fork. Either we have a union that acts in the interests of its members (which the AMA has done!) or we have a union with some serious principal/agent issues that follows some other agenda, and the odds aren’t very good that you or I would always agree with that agenda.
https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-decline-inequality-ri...
And again, the AMA is not a union, but a professional association.
Yes, one of the “professional organizations that effectively function as unions” that you mentioned earlier as a positive example.
It's less about preventing layoffs, than preventing employers behaving differently from they did during the good years. Slashing benefits, imposing harsher conditions, and so forth.
It just feels like we're in a grasshopper and the ants situation and if winter comes, we're going to be inundated with news stories about tech corporate management undertaking gross and appalling actions that would have been unthinkable, or easily avoidable, during the boom times.
Yes. I want:
- union-paid lawyers to back me up if I refuse to follow illegal or unethical demands from management
- H1B Visa protections and networks to help laid off H1B visa workers to find work
- non-visa workers to legally back and support their visa peers to prevent abusing visa workers knowing they can't leave
- sane on-call standards I can point to when negotiating my employment
- extra pay if my manager wants to make me work evenings, weekends, or holidays
- union-paid contract lawyers to protect my open source and personal side projects from my employer's greed
- union-paid advisors on equity offerings, including tax effects
- sane layoff requirements and legal teeth to sue if layoff contracts aren't met
I didn’t expect to be swayed, yet that was a tilt in the direction of unionization. The H1B situation in particular is indentured servitude, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t become an issue yet. I remember one fellow in particular from my time at Scottrade; it seemed like he was there 14 hours a day. I only noticed because of my erratic sleep schedule. In hindsight it was pretty obviously an H1B situation.
The advisors are a benefit I never knew I wanted. In hindsight it seems strange to have to navigate it by ourselves.
See teachers unions that don't let bad teachers get fired even after abusing students.
The iron law of bureaucracy dampens my desire to have the feeling of safety that may come from being in a union.
It highlights the absurdity of choice under markets, namely that markets frame choices in a way that constrains thinking. Markets don't provide for choices beyond their horizon while making people think that they have all the choice in the world.
These are in fact the same thing. It's just as absurd to say, "why don't you create your own government if you don't like this one?" as it is to say "why don't you just not engage with corrupt corporations?" The question itself is ill-posed and assumes its own conclusion.
This very mechanism is addressed in Žižek's summation, "I would prefer not to," and in the topic of choosing among the least corrupt corporations, I too would like to affirm the non-predicate. I would prefer not to.
How is it not just "any organization eventually get captured by corruption?"
I have seen this happen on every scale and even with seemingly frivolous things, like my mom's garden club.
I think corruption is an emergent trait of groups of humans. We socialize. We're political. We have goals. Favors happen. Boom - corruption!
https://www.statista.com/statistics/460548/youth-unemploymen...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/217448/seasonally-adjust...
[EDIT] I'm poking around the sites for various unions for technical workers and engineers outside the software industry and, at a casual glance, many seem to factor in seniority as well. Are there examples of technical or engineering unions that are not seniority-based? Seems like those would be better indicators of what a software workers union would look like than the usually cited actors or sports player unions.
My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped, and perhaps include an option for everyone to take a pay cut instead (which might be bad! but it's an idea I've heard floated by engineers way more than seniority based protections).
The people who really get screwed are the OPTs/H1-Bs who have a very short grace period to get a new job or leave the country.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/amazon-salary-negotiation.html
It seems like there is more Amazon non-warehouse employees interest in unionizing now anyway:
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-layoffs-corporate-emp...
We already do that, it's called RSUs. If a portion of your compensation is in RSUs and the market goes down, you automatically get a paycut. Better than being laid off, isn't it?
I have had personal experience with men in leather jackets giving you the “better vote x or you might have an accident” unions. So I’m a bit biased.
Tech culture, and Silicon Valley in particular, is so obsessed with recreating things from first principles and experimenting for the sake of it, that you would expect that they'd give reinventing unions but under a different name a shot.
Seniority is a completely legible and unambiguous criteria, and it’s one that most workers can eventually benefit from in the long run. Merit is more of a judgment call. Management at least has the incentive to get that judgment call right (which isn’t to say they do get it right, but at least they have the incentive to, modulo the same principal/agent problems that unions also introduce), but unions don’t. So if I’m part of the top 20% of workers at a firm, or part of the top 20% that the firm could reasonably hire, my incentives are actually better aligned with management than with the other 80% of workers who would dominate the union. The classic union solution to this problem is closed shops, but that’s hard to achieve without specific legal and regulatory moats.
Also:
> My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped
This is another common failure mode of unions. People who already work in a given field are in the union, but people trying to break into the field are not. So it becomes harder to hire new people, which actually leads to longer tenures and makes seniority seem like a better deal for the union members.
For me the tradeoff is not worth it. I understand that there will be ups and downs and I may one day be a victim. But I appreciate the flexibility that likely led me to be hired in the first place without a traditional background in tech. Basically they took a chance and luckily it worked out. But if the firm had a much higher cost to get rid of someone, they likely would have went with a more traditional candidate
Youth that are in post-secondary education and not looking for work are included in that 20% figure you cite, and France has a much higher post-secondary education rate than its neighbors. I don't think your assessment that it's caused primarily by unionization holds up.[0]
> You're assuming that a tech union would prevent people from being laid off and maybe it would to some degree.
A primary goal of such a union would be to negotiate better separation terms in a layoff scenario, not necessarily avoid layoffs altogether. Markets are unpredictable and things happen, but people should be taken care of in the event that it does happen.
That's incorrect. Unemployment is defined below and includes only those that are available and seeking employment. You're thinking of workforce participation rate.
> Youth unemployment refers to the share of the labor force ages 15-24 without work but available for and seeking employment (modeled ILO estimate).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLUEM1524ZSFRA
Either way, I think people who advocate for tech unionization blindly (not those who consider it carefully, I'm talking more about people on the internet who likely have never been in a union) should understand that it's not without tradeoffs, it's not always a net good depending on what the higher order effects are.
Thing is, tech unionization is most likely to happen in gradual patchwork efforts, as it is now, and is far from the bogeyman that critics pose it as. Not to mention, there are different halfway compromises that could be a good initial step, such as introduction co-determination or bringing back board ombudsmen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367243
I’d definitely welcome more comparisons with professional guilds or similar, and especial non-English sources. For example, I’ve been told by multiple people German and Scandinavian unions are quite different culturally.
“weaker performers” is either (1) an objective measure that unions can be sold on, or (2) a cover for “management discretion”. Usually, what management wants is #2, which is why unions tend to oppose it.
Union agreements do often allow shutting down locations/functions with notice and sometimes meet/confer rules, but if people are laid off for that reason and not for cause, they tend to have rehire priority if the company hires for the same job classification, preventing closures being paired with new (but surprisingly similar) new units and discretionary rehiring to do bypass targeted firing rules requiring process and evidence of violation of rules/standards.
Do you have any examples of unions accepting that?
Also the rehire thing sounds fine but its one of those benefits that would have to be negotiated but in practice almost no one would use.
Laying off locations and functions make a lot of sense. If it becomes prohibitively expensive or inconvenient for a location why would you want to make it harder for the employer to adjust?
What I'd love to see is a collective of employees that owns a significant portion of the company- the group, not just the individuals within it. It doesn't need to be the majority ownership, but enough that this group is a major player. They get consulted, and their support matters.
As owners, this group would be incentivized to help maximize profits. But those profits would then go to the employees. The leadership would be elected, and be tasked with trying to divvy up those profits among employees in whatever way seems fair.
There's a lot of flaws in this idea. It's initial. But I would love to see something tried where employee power doesn't just come from the threat of holding out labor, but from actual ownership.
Even something as simple as allowing worker reps to have a seat at the board, codetermination, would be innovation for the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
Also, no political donations from member dues please? I can already donate to whomever I want and might be amenable to follow union guidance if I see how that will make my life better. But for example, I am fine with Biden, however I am not sure if I want to support Harris reelection campaign in 2024 (let's be real about the inevitable). Have to at least see who the other candidate is, maybe DeSantis is lesser of two evils? In any case, there is no way I am paying thousands of dollars in dues every year to support candidates and causes I might oppose. For better wages / benefits / job security, maybe.
https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/03/issue-16/
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2011/04/25/mo...
https://www.protocol.com/china/china-tech-companies-unions
I don't know if unions could actually affect hiring or retention, but they can protect benefits, the sort of things that might go away during an economic downturn.
> An in a long roundabout of thing, most of the time an overzealous union or two can be found close to the heart (root cause if you will) of the recession.
That's certainly not the case of a tech recession, if one was to happen this year.
> If you are good at what you do, your unemployment period is negligibly small. Call it an unpaid vacation.
It's not a matter of unemployment. In harsh times, who knows what direction the industry will move towards as labor power disappears, in contrast to the past two years. Perhaps some firms might start moving towards 996, even. There are a lot of good things everyone took for granted during the good times, and in bad times, who knows how it'll change. This is simply a "memento mori" sort of caution as we appear to be on the onset of bad times.
> This IT unionizing thing getting pushed more and more
Is it really? Software is an industry that has been around for perhaps half a century? Any chatter towards unionization in the field seems as hypothetical as it always been, except at a few companies, so the usual anti-union alarmism is as hysterical as ever in a field as anti-union as this.