Unionization is for losers. If you're not confident in your skills and your value on the market then you want to artificially restrict employment options for your potential competitors.
Hard to find anything remotely unbiased, or that does even a passable job at trying to remove confounding factors between the rate of unionization and commonly cited benefits like the rise in worker safety (which is overwhelmingly driven by rising standard of living). Got any economically literate reading recommendations?
If your argument is “consider this anecdote”, and you can’t imagine historical analysis of economic questions other than through non-quantitative hand-selected case studies, you’re falling into the same trap.
While I agree directionally with your stance, the argument is that businesses collude against workers (eg Apple/Google case) so workers might as well collude against businesses.
Well, in many professions unions demand that you only hire unionized workers. Hire one person person who is not a member, and the union workers will go on strike. Sometimes it even get's codified into the law, that you have to consult unions on everything.
Most unions demand standardized pay scales, maybe varying with seniority or experience. Slichter et alii (1960) say wage standardization is the most widely heralded union wage policy. Freeman (1980, 1984) showed that wages compress due to wage standardization at union shops.
Because wage dispersion and inequality is lower, if you consider your skills and experience extraordinary, you will not be getting pay commensurate with your perceived value to the company at a union shop. That provides a moat of sorts for incumbent workers against "rockstars," "10x," and higher-skilled workers deciding to join the company.
Slichter, S. H., Healy, J. J., and Livernash, E. R. (1960). _The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management_.
Freeman, R. B. (1980) "Unionism and the dispersion of wages," _Industrial and Labor Relations Review_.
Freeman, R. B. (1984), "Longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions," _Journal of Labor Economics_
If I decide to improve my skills and negotiate a 2x raise with my employer or another employer I don’t want to have to be limited by some additional bureaucracy trying to tell me what my employment contract should be
Aren't unions overwhelmingly the driving force behind senority-based pay? Honest question. Like, I think teacher's unions are strongly against pay-for-performance.
At the exon 101 level, that sounds much more like a job for insurance, savings, or gov’t. (There are generally much lower deadweight losses from transfers compared to keeping people working jobs that are no longer economically net positive.) The better pro-union arguments I know are about balancing negotiating leverage due to many fewer employers than workers.
I don’t want seniority based pay. I want value based pay.
If I join a company and day one I’m the top performer I’d want to negotiate a better package for myself and I don’t want other people meddling in my negotiation unless I explicitly hire them to
"The maximum player salary is based on the number of years that player has played and the total of the salary cap. The maximum salary of a player with 6 or fewer years of experience is either $25,500,000 or 25% of the total salary cap (projected for 2017–18), whichever is greater. For a player with 7–9 years of experience, the maximum is $30,600,000 or 30% of the cap, and for a player with 10+ years of experience, the maximum is $35,700,000 or 35% of the cap.[19][33] There is an exception to this rule: a player is able to sign a contract for 105% of his previous contract, even if the new contract is higher than the league limit.[34]"
Not once in my life have I heard or seen unions imterfering in any way or form with negotiations with an employer for better than union conditions. Unions negotiate global basics and of course allow better individual contracts.
Is it actually common for high-performing union members to have better deals? In my (limited) experience, the unions tend to advocate for the long-term membership, who are often below-average performers.
Yes. Usually wage ranges are negotiated. Negotiate before you join the company and make sure you understand your contract. If you are not sure, ask your union's representative or, of course, a lawyer specialized in labour law. Labour law is complex and you definitely want a specialist to answer your questions.
Don't trust the first google hits, especially if you are in the US. Disinformation by union busters is very common around here.
In a system that is hyper focused in growth like US and even more Silicon Valley, unions don’t seem to make a lot of sense for neither party. And the proof is there, huge businesses and astronomical salaries.
I would say though this only benefits part of the society and comes with huge drawbacks too.
You should read the article. He talks about how worker leverage has dissipated, making it not-so-easy to negotiate that 2X raise versus in the past. It's kind of the point.
See also, the surge in recent tech layoffs (which he cites in the article).
If worker leverage has dissipated then IMO that’s because they’re providing less relative value. If you can provide your employer more value they will pay you more
The biggest argument against unionizing, as someone who has seen the scene a tiny bit, is that you might put in a lot of effort for a unionization effort that fails.
Running a unionization campaign is a lot of work and can even entail taking some risks. If people at your company are pretty happy, if management is responsive, if benefits haven't been eroded yet, if lots of people have a strong libertarian bent, then you might not be able to convince enough people. Even when unionization is the best long term course for the workers as a whole, if the actual campaign is futile it's the best course for you as an single person not to get involved in a campaign.
not enough conference rooms, open office floor plan, RTO, interviews being scheduled at 8am the next day at 5pm the day before; death march code projects, scrum meetings, t-shirt sizes. there are pain points we just kind of accept as how things are done that don't really have to be.
If upper management has never pulled any shenanigans to their benefit at the expense of any of their employees (programmers get special treatment), I wanna know where you work so I can apply, but unfortunately, that's just not believable of a large corporation.
From what I can measure from most HN posting at least, I have had the a relatively uncommon experience in that I've both worked in a union (carpenter's union, doing acoustic ceilings in SF) and worked as an engineer in SV. Of course my experience with both may not be exemplary of all.
If I had stayed with the acoustic ceiling job, I would be doing the exact same thing I was doing then, for a bit more money. I may or may not have inherited more responsibility if people more senior to me retired, moved, changed jobs, or died. Really this would be capped though, as company ownership has nothing to do with the labor, so if you start your own company, what you are doing has little to do with you having been in the union (IDK how this applies to contracts for city jobs and all that). If I invented a magic spell that installed an acoustic ceiling for $1 in 2 seconds, I would have been actively encouraged to destroy it or hide it. The union ethos I was in was to promote mediocrity, not accidentally provide too much benefit to your employer or customer. I really don't know where this idea that unions would stop mass layoffs comes from that is brought up on HN all the time, but that's simply not true, union people find themselves out of work all the time, and it's very hard to do any job on the side if you are hoping you get picked out of the pool to work a job. Really worst of all, which is the prime driver that got me to leave, is I knew exactly what this path would look like for years to decades in the future - many people promote that as a positive (which makes sense as most people are scared of risk and change), but I found it soul crushing.
I won't go into my engineering career other than it has completely changed my life for the better both financially and just in general leading a rewarding life, and operating without whatever safety net I had in the union (which was basically nothing anyway) is not even a passing thought I've ever had.
Have any other posters either pro or anti union actually worked in a union? Curious about your experience and thoughts.
they probably won't negotiate higher pay or better WLB, they'll just waste the negotiating power on a bunch of political horseshit (specifically a tech union). For example the alphabet one pushing BDS
as a dev, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of incentive to join one (except maybe in parts of industry that get a shittier bargain like gamedev)
In general the people like Doctorow or journalists more generally push tech unions not because they think it will benefit tech workers economically but because unions further their own political agenda
Cory Doctorow, blogger, journalist, and science fiction author, talking authoritatively about the technology industry, products, business strategy, etc.
His "enshittification" observation—i.e. his primary thesis WRT what's wrong with Tech—resonates as objectively true, and I've yet to see anyone offer a compelling counter.
Bait and switch is more that the advertised value is never provided.
Enshittification is more of a specific process in which the value is actually initially provided to all parties. This is generally done at a loss to the company, which is well-funded.
When, as a result, the company obtains a monopoly or nearly so, it then begins to claw back all of the value for itself. First from the end user. Then from other partners (e.g. advertisers). The end result is a shitty experience for everyone but the now very profitable company, but by then there are limited options.
Of course, that's the simplified version. Doctorow goes into a lot more detail, claiming it's a frequently run playbook in the tech industry and offering many compelling examples.
49 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadIf you've read anything by him before, you will already have a sense of what he writes in this opinion piece.
As always, he's very much in favor of unionization by tech workers, including engineers.
Read about the Great Railroad Strike of 1977.
If your argument is “consider this anecdote”, and you can’t imagine historical analysis of economic questions other than through non-quantitative hand-selected case studies, you’re falling into the same trap.
It would be a mistake to take historical accounts at face value. They are written by humans, not some objective entity.
> you want to artificially restrict employment options for your potential competitors.
Because wage dispersion and inequality is lower, if you consider your skills and experience extraordinary, you will not be getting pay commensurate with your perceived value to the company at a union shop. That provides a moat of sorts for incumbent workers against "rockstars," "10x," and higher-skilled workers deciding to join the company.
Slichter, S. H., Healy, J. J., and Livernash, E. R. (1960). _The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management_.
Freeman, R. B. (1980) "Unionism and the dispersion of wages," _Industrial and Labor Relations Review_.
Freeman, R. B. (1984), "Longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions," _Journal of Labor Economics_
If anything, the tech industry should be leading the world in new ideas and methods (and dare I say it...technology) to organize labor.
I'm coming into it more from the other side, unionization as a way buffer against (and maybe negotiate something other than) sudden mass layoffs.
If I join a company and day one I’m the top performer I’d want to negotiate a better package for myself and I don’t want other people meddling in my negotiation unless I explicitly hire them to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_salary_cap#Individual_cont...
"The maximum player salary is based on the number of years that player has played and the total of the salary cap. The maximum salary of a player with 6 or fewer years of experience is either $25,500,000 or 25% of the total salary cap (projected for 2017–18), whichever is greater. For a player with 7–9 years of experience, the maximum is $30,600,000 or 30% of the cap, and for a player with 10+ years of experience, the maximum is $35,700,000 or 35% of the cap.[19][33] There is an exception to this rule: a player is able to sign a contract for 105% of his previous contract, even if the new contract is higher than the league limit.[34]"
Don't trust the first google hits, especially if you are in the US. Disinformation by union busters is very common around here.
I would say though this only benefits part of the society and comes with huge drawbacks too.
See also, the surge in recent tech layoffs (which he cites in the article).
Running a unionization campaign is a lot of work and can even entail taking some risks. If people at your company are pretty happy, if management is responsive, if benefits haven't been eroded yet, if lots of people have a strong libertarian bent, then you might not be able to convince enough people. Even when unionization is the best long term course for the workers as a whole, if the actual campaign is futile it's the best course for you as an single person not to get involved in a campaign.
If I had stayed with the acoustic ceiling job, I would be doing the exact same thing I was doing then, for a bit more money. I may or may not have inherited more responsibility if people more senior to me retired, moved, changed jobs, or died. Really this would be capped though, as company ownership has nothing to do with the labor, so if you start your own company, what you are doing has little to do with you having been in the union (IDK how this applies to contracts for city jobs and all that). If I invented a magic spell that installed an acoustic ceiling for $1 in 2 seconds, I would have been actively encouraged to destroy it or hide it. The union ethos I was in was to promote mediocrity, not accidentally provide too much benefit to your employer or customer. I really don't know where this idea that unions would stop mass layoffs comes from that is brought up on HN all the time, but that's simply not true, union people find themselves out of work all the time, and it's very hard to do any job on the side if you are hoping you get picked out of the pool to work a job. Really worst of all, which is the prime driver that got me to leave, is I knew exactly what this path would look like for years to decades in the future - many people promote that as a positive (which makes sense as most people are scared of risk and change), but I found it soul crushing.
I won't go into my engineering career other than it has completely changed my life for the better both financially and just in general leading a rewarding life, and operating without whatever safety net I had in the union (which was basically nothing anyway) is not even a passing thought I've ever had.
Have any other posters either pro or anti union actually worked in a union? Curious about your experience and thoughts.
as a dev, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of incentive to join one (except maybe in parts of industry that get a shittier bargain like gamedev)
In general the people like Doctorow or journalists more generally push tech unions not because they think it will benefit tech workers economically but because unions further their own political agenda
So, it's far more interesting than a pro-union rant.
His "enshittification" observation—i.e. his primary thesis WRT what's wrong with Tech—resonates as objectively true, and I've yet to see anyone offer a compelling counter.
Yeah, it's similar, but not really that.
Bait and switch is more that the advertised value is never provided.
Enshittification is more of a specific process in which the value is actually initially provided to all parties. This is generally done at a loss to the company, which is well-funded.
When, as a result, the company obtains a monopoly or nearly so, it then begins to claw back all of the value for itself. First from the end user. Then from other partners (e.g. advertisers). The end result is a shitty experience for everyone but the now very profitable company, but by then there are limited options.
Of course, that's the simplified version. Doctorow goes into a lot more detail, claiming it's a frequently run playbook in the tech industry and offering many compelling examples.