> Earlier this month, after five years of organizing, security officers for companies including Facebook, Google, and Genentech, many of whom were making between $12 and $14 an hour, ratified their first union contract. They won wage increases of up to $1.20 per hour, better health care, and, for the first time, paid holidays.
How is this rational? Do Facebook and Google believe they are facing no advanced persistent threats capable of bribing someone who lives in the Bay Area on $12/hour?
I mean, if a guard lets you in, what are you gonna do, steal a laptop which is encrypted and requires 2FA? The only places which might have richer targets are research and prototyping facilities which I imagine have additional safeguards.
And unless you're in some government building or a Wall St bank, hard drive encryption is rare.
Get me past the security guard anywhere else on the east coast? And I'll get you anything you need past that.
The real purpose of security guards is to raise the cost of an attack, in terms of the number of people needed to carry out an attack. A larger attack party translates into the jackpot being divided into more payouts, and therefore the jackpot needs to be larger in order to justify the attack, not to mention the increased risks involved with coordinating a larger-scale attack (keeping opsec etc.). One security guard is easily subdued by a lone wolf attacker, or avoided. Multiple teams of roving security guards need much more coordination to subdue or avoid, without raising an alarm.
Even if you are interested in bribing a security guard, again, a single security guard doesn't provide much protection, but the more security guards on each shift, besides the amount of money needed to bribe all of them, each additional guard raises the risk of the bribe being reported and the attack failing.
Precisely because many security guards are needed for effective security, the ease of training new security guards, and the ease of hiring new ones, are security guard wages relatively low.
Why should the company be blamed when people keep lining up to work for the wages on offer?
Does anyone buying bananas at Safeway just randomly decide to pay more than the asking price? Of course not. It’s the same with companies.
Not easy if you live paycheck-to-paycheck, which most such people do. Can't afford the time it takes to find a better-paying job, or more likely, retrain before searching for such a job.
Just because a vulnerable person allows you to take advantage of them, doesn't make it ok.
If you can see that your employees are struggling to survive (and on $15/hr in Silicon Valley, you can about guarantee that they are) it would be in your best interest to give them a raise. But most of all, it's the human thing to do.
We don't have to live in a world where everyone is angling to squeeze every last drop from everyone else.
Why work at large Bay Area tech: - Free catered breakfast, lunch and dinner - Free gourmet coffee - Free snacks - Free drinks - Free company merch: t-shirts, backpacks, jackets, tickets to events, etc. - Nice offices - Nice bathrooms
Added value per day = $75+
Why work at Target: - $3 more per hour
Added value per day = $24 (assuming 8 hour shift)
By your argument, it doesn't; a single well-placed argument from you can have all the security guards from Google tomorrow and someone helpful in every aisle at Target.
And I can't tell you much about bananas but in my first tech job out of college my management sat me in a room one day and said, "We think you're doing a good job so we're going to pay you more." Apparently this is called a "raise" and is not uncommon? There must be some rationality behind it, even though I've never give a so-called "raise" to a banana.
I've also avoided working anywhere that thinks you can only be professional if you're wearing a button down shirt and / or a tie, so I don't doubt that some places might benefit.
Edit: to be clear, I've never advocated for a union, and I doubt I ever will so long as I am fortunate enough to choose my employer, rather than the other way around. This is why, I am guessing, so many tech workers don't bother attempting to unionize.
Think of it as insurance. When misfortune strikes - it will be too late.
Edit: one could argue the difference between a professional association and a union is a matter of degrees. A professional association certainly seems an easier sell. Possibly a professional association with aspects of a union could be considered.
Why wouldn't you want a contract with your employer? Top executives have contracts and professional athletes have contracts. My contract is I can be fired at any time for any reason, or no reason.
As far as why software engineers haven't unionized, I think this answer at the top about sums it up https://www.quora.com/Should-Silicon-Valley-software-enginee...
Not surprisingly I work in tech. I'm not morally opposed to unions - I just don't see how they would make my life any better.
Just because you're paid well compared to other sectors doesn't mean that you're being properly compensated.
Of course this doesn't apply to well run startups with good leaders, but the truth is in my experience, they are rare and few.
The whole industry could benefit, much like the men who worked under American tycoons of the 18th century in steel mills, oil fields and other shitty conditions, software engineering is engineering period.
Just because you can't hold and physically touch the output from software engineers doesn't mean that it's somehow less demanding or not deserving of the same unionization that other laborers/engineers have access to.
At the very least, collective assistance could be very useful at Google in negotiating fair compensation for new hires and in sustaining that fairness over time based on performance data.
After all, Google has huge quantities of data to let them decide on compensation, the employees have extremely little and unevenly distributed access to similar data, and it doesn't feel like there is much opportunity to recover lost wages if you realize you've been underpaid compared to peers (aside from discrimination on illegal grounds).
I presume the same would help at other tech companies.
None of this requires the stereotypical fossilized rigidity that give unions a bad name, and I wouldn't want that either. Even in the US NLRA system that's not at all required.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596221
Also:
"Even if you don't believe in unions, unions are necessary to force the hand of government. Bismarck instituted a welfare state in Germany to undercut the popularity of socialism and the left. You need unions to get to a stronger safety net, even if the powers-that-be are establishing it in opposition to them."
> The tipping point came in January, when management offered additional stock to a handful of high-level male engineers, including Westergard. Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, ...
On the one hand, this sounds to me like they're probably struggling financially, and the unionization efforts would have put them in a worse spot. This is pure speculation, however, because the article kept focusing on the gender of the employees. Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism.
> “It became increasingly clear that their strategy was divide and conquer—flatter a handful of us in the hopes that we would go along with their plans, and not put up a fight when they fired half of our co-workers,” Westergard adds.
But seriously, what were they thinking? How could they have been so blatant?
> In mid-January, after most of the unit signed authorization cards to be represented by the union, Lanetix was informed and the union filed papers with the NLRB. Ten days later, the engineers were fired.
Rather, I wish the article had bothered to answer your question. I can hypothesize all day that they were in financial trouble and making rash decisions as a result, but the author didn't bother trying to find the truth, only present a narrative.
This seemed pretty clear in the article? They tried to buy off senior male employees with extra stock options last minute.
>Maybe that really is the story, but so many details were left out to focus on the narrative that we won't know without better journalism.
It felt like there was a fair amount of detail to me. If anything, it exposed how much sexism in tech is something management sees as a useful wedge to divide and conquer workers.
Either way, it's impossible to know, because without more details all we are left with is the agenda of an author who isn't interested in presenting the truth (or providing sufficient evidence to support it).
Edit: consider the following scenario: you have a team of male developerd; maybe they were friends when they pitched the idea for a product to you. After a few months, there's a big backlog, and they want to hire junior developers to train and take off some of the pressure. To embrace diversity, you hire a bunch of women who recently graduated from a boot camp to round out your all white male staff.
Fast forward a year. Everyone has become a tight knit team, but the pressure to deliver mounts. Instead of getting faster, they're all bogged down with refactors and endless pull request revisions of things that aren't working out. You are running out of money, so you decide to cut the junior developers, and try to bribe the senior devs with some of the cost savings to make up for all the extra hours they'll now be working. Uh oh! You're only firing the women! They all band together, oblivious to the fact that you literally won't be able to keep them all on.
I'm not saying this is what happened. What happened could have been pure sexism and anti-labor mentality. BUT pushing such an agenda without KNOWING that is the case here doesn't do anyone any favors.
Spot on.
That doesn't make sense to me... I think it's more likely that tech workers get higher salaries because they were/are in high demand, not to prevent unionization.
Employees suspected Lanetix planned to fire lower-level female engineers, many of whom graduated from Hackbright, an all women’s coding boot camp
I am generally skeptical about bootcamps. In my experience they typically only teach very specific skills, but don't teach fundamental concepts. That makes it hard to pick up new skills, which is required from software engineers. Is it possible that this is the reason Lanetix was planning on firing them?
EDIT: I took a look at the website of Hackbright. I'm very skeptical about this bootcamp. The bootcamps is 16k for 12 weeks. They seem to teach full-stack programming in 8 weeks (python, flask, postgres, html, css, javascript, jquery, git). That gives students about a half a week per technology.
The last four weeks seem to be reserved only for interview prep and computer science fundamentals that are needed for interviews.
Their website implies that the skills they teach will empower students to work at famous tech companies, e.g. "Companies that use Python include Google, Yelp and Dropbox to name a few. Mastering Python here will help you start thinking like an engineer. You can feel confident that you’ll walk out of the door ready to tackle any engineering role.".
The inverse is exactly that, though. Higher wages give certain skilled individuals enough personal comfort to the point that they don't feel they need to stick their neck out for some group of randos. Sure, that $125k job with a small sack of RSUs looks pretty on paper, but break it down with all of the extra-curricular obligations, the occasional long week that happens a little too often, housing costs, commuting, and it doesn't look too appealing.
Once you have enough 'highly' paid individuals in a group -- we'll cut the number at $100k, even though that's the poverty level in the Bay Area -- then a backbuilding narrative begins to create itself, that because 'everyone' is at a a certain level, it's kind of just okay.
The trope of high demand, low supply of qualified individuals is pervasive in tech recruiting, to the point where some of the same individuals being oppressed question if there's an actual problem. It could also be explained away as that we're all just that unique and special, but that's stitching together another reality entirely.
Instead of agreeing that fellow humans are being oppressed, we tech workers muse and question the merit of sticking together, for one another. We question the quality of one's skills or ability to comprehend with not another thought. We even sometimes question if we're overly compensated, when overt actions or results would prove otherwise.
Not the history that I learned. That's the kind of quip you get off of libertarian blogs. The real world labor movement was just a wee bit more nuanced and important. We're literally about to celebrate Labor Day for a reason that doesn't have much to do with "mafia-like structures".
I don't think unionizing was going to save their jobs though. Looks like the business wasn't doing too well, and they were trying to jettison their juniormost engineers. The whole thing was probably going to go under.
What's the full story here?
Layoffs typically happen when a company has cashflow issues preventing it from meeting payroll. "Low level" (read: low paid) employees of any kind are _not_ the first on the chopping block, but on the contrary, the higher paid employees who each cost x3-4 times or more.
Moreover, why would they get rid of most/all female engineers like that? Among other problems, that would expose them to an open-and-shut discrimination case, since sex is a protected class.
This, in conjunction with the fact they decided to pay the senior engineers even more, tells me there's something more to this story.
Maybe I’m just hopelessly jejune but I find it hard to believe in 2018 moustache-twiddling top-hat wearing Capitalist fatcats were like bwahahaha let’s sack all the women.
Of course they absolutely deserve to be sued into oblivion, I just don’t see the gender angle, correlation is not causation.
Edit: oh I see, they were hired from a gender-segregated bootcamp. So sexism is baked into the company’s DNA.
But we're richer now, well-fed and well-entertained, so although the concentration is greater than ever (cf agrarian or industrial times), it's not as motivating.
Joint Statement of Solidarity with Unjustly Fired Lanetix Workers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16293823 (3 comments)
https://medium.com/@techworkersco/joint-statement-of-solidar...
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Lanetix engineers bring case to NLRB claiming firings were illegal retaliation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469573 (1 comment)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/coders-wa...
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Tech company Lanetix fired software engineers seeking to organize, union claims
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16504247 (91 comments)
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-tech-company...
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Software Engineers Fired for Attempt to Unionize
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815822 (10 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16817501 (10 comments)
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unioniza...
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Labor Board Backs Startup Engineers (at Lanetix) Who Were Fired for Unionizing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875865 (no comments)
https://www.wired.com/story/labor-board-backs-startup-engine...
