It always seems to degenerate into an "us vs them" sort of thing whenever I talk to them about where they work. Why would I ever work some place where things are so adversarial?
You also end up with this 3rd party involved in everything, creating all kinds of "rules" to make things "fair". Want to go on vacation? To make things "fair", the most senior people get to pick their times first, and the new guys get the not-so-good times. Don't care about the union's bullshit "industrial action" and just want to work and earn some money? Get used to being called a "scab". You get the point - it becomes more about knuckling under to what the union wants than getting work done or having a career.
Maybe because the employer... made things "adversarial" by creating unhealthy / untenable / inadequately compensated working conditions in the first place?
You also end up with this 3rd party involved in everything, creating all kinds of "rules" to make things "fair".
If that's your concern, then the solution -- the only solution -- is to provide attractive (or at least reasonable) enough working conditions so that your employees don't even think of unionizing. As if they're just doing it because they're bored and have some unconscious desire for more complication in their lives or something.
The implicit message behind your critique is that employees who seek to unionize must be basically kind of stupid for not seeing the downsides to going the unionization route. When in reality... it's just a tradeoff. And a tradeoff they see little resource but to take, in view of the unreasonable working conditions (and essentially, if-you-don't-like-it-then-go-fuck-yourselves) negotiating stances taken by their employers.
All I know from friends/family is all a union does is put another group of people over you to tell you what to do. Only, these guys don't really have anything to do with the business. Their interests are not aligned with the business or even with yours. As time goes by, they just use their position to further their own other interests and power.
These are the lessons we already learned about unions, and why they're so unpopular these days.
That's the point, "us vs them" is pretty good upgrade from "me vs them"
No matter how great your workplace is, it's already us vs them whether you want to admit it or not. That's the nature of the beast.
But a huge step down from "Us"
I liken this to undeveloped understandings of interpersonal relationships. One is given the impression early in life that all disagreements are bad and must be avoided. This can manifest in pathological conflict avoidance, ending in a blowup. Healthy relationships require explicit communication and prompt discussion of problems, which we can safely assume will inevitably occur.
The relationship between you and your employer is not one of family, and if you think of it that way you're setting yourself up for a rude awakening when the layoffs flow.
Both terms are just other ways of saying "groupthink."
Would you have preferred it if that money was never in your paycheck in the first place?
Who can say what workers' conditions were like before the union existed? Without knowing the industry, it's hard to say that they did nothing for you, but knowing capitalists and owners in general, it's really hard to say they did nothing for you.
Every workplace is adversarial, it's you versus the C-suite who profit from the surplus value created by your labor. A union just evens out the bargaining power between you and them.
I guess it depends on the equity split. Very early engineers with, say 0.1% vested of a unicorn still feel like owners to me, in addition to being workers.
What if you're better than the majority of "us". I can negotiate a better deal for myself than they can get or justify; now I subsidize the group for "the greater good".
This is not why unions where created. They were to address the monopoly of power when all employees could offer was their labour. This is definitely not the case in the western white-collar labour market.
Have you considered that the adversarial workplace is the reason for unionizing in the first place?
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
Even if the workplace is not adversarial, any union will try to preserve the conditions that necessitate its continued existence.
No union ever said "Wow, this new CEO and management are super fair and reasonable. We are no longer necessary, let's dissolve and let them take the reigns."
Unions don't try to organize happy work places because they know how hard it is to do even when people are treated poorly. It's not worth the effort as people are not motivated to organize. Suggesting that people are going through the long hard process of unionizing for no real reason suggests a lack of understanding of the process and the pushback from management that happens.
People don't unionize for the fun of it. It's a long hard slog that often fails.
It's just anecdotal but my SO was involved at her union because she wanted to make a difference. It was at our provincial government, thus it represent 43 000 members in that case, which to me make it pretty much needed to have a union.
Once at a reunion for the representative, they still had a bit of time left scheduled, so some of them suggested to go do an impromptu manifestation in front of a bank. In case it wasn't clear, the bank isn't government owned. From what she told me, a big majority of them went.
Have you considered that union representative may be an interesting place for adversarial people to go, thus pushing an adversarial relation?
It is "us vs them". They just apparently understand that a lot better than you.
> Don't care about the union's bullshit "industrial action" and just want to work and earn some money? Get used to being called a "scab".
If all that's happening is you get called a scab then count yourself lucky. That's a sign that things aren't that bad yet.
(And the Award for Thread's Most Inflammatory Analogy goes to...)
How's your open plan office? Do you like it? Can you do anything about it? Unions can help.
It always seems to degenerate into an "us vs them" sort of thing whenever I talk to them about where they work.
Even before this news, half a year ago, I pegged Kickstarter as a company ridden with "ideological possession." The clock is ticking, as far as I can tell.
If you're like the vast majority of people working here you get paid a shitload of money and other benefits and have your pick of where to work.
Unionized employees often work in fields that aren't quite so rosy.
Because it literally is after companies become a certain size. You have a small start up of 3-10 people, you might all be friends and working together for the betterment of the whole. You get past that size, and hierarchy happens. And then it is labor vs management. This doesn't mean that the goals can't align, but there are key points where they don't.
You think you're special and better than someone else, so you should get to pick whatever time off you want. The union doesn't care and has to create some version of fair because it represents several other people. If you work in a union company without being a part of the union, you're actively undermining the union's ability to assist it's members, and being called a scab is the price you have to pay.
You don't seem to understand what the value is that a union provides. They're not perfect. There will again be places where the needs/goals of a single individual will be at odds with the needs/goals of the union. This doesn't make them a net negative.
You keep believing in your exceptional nature, that you're better than average and therefor would be dragged down by the (hypothetical) union. Statistically speaking, you're probably wrong.
I recently came across an interesting talk by Richard Wolff at Google [1] which suggests that a great solution would be the democratization of the work place in the form of worker coops. It’s actually a tried and true model that works well in a variety of contexts. It would probably solve the problem you outline as well as make labor mistreatment a lot less common.
You're now in the business of providing workers for companies that produce stuff. If they want access to your workers, they sign a contract with your company. If some workers don't like working for some particular company, transfer them to places where they like to work.
You've now created a private union that operates on a consensual basis rather than a coercive / adversarial basis.
Unions exist to counter an existing adversarial and coercive economic relationship with counter-coercion.
It's kind of like saying that instead of using tanks to fight a war you should use really persuasive arguments because then you don't have to use "coercion".
Heck this is what is done in India and other countries as well, to get around worker protection rules.
Keep several rota of workers, employ them at firm X. When the 9.999 years of work are up, “switch” the workers to a new firm.
Thus dodging the legal test which states that any worker who has worked at a role for more than 10 years at a single company, is a de facto employee and should be given pension and other recognitions.
Your design degenerates to this situation. The same way Uber degenerated from ride sharing and using surplus resources to people barely squeezing by.
For workers in general a UBI that decreases the supply of workers thus increasing their bargaining power.
For example, to finance a UBI large companies like would maybe be taxed more but that money would be evenly distributed across the company, thus, only marginally affecting Sergeys and Larrys position relative to their workers or society. They still remain in control, even though the population at large may have a little more wiggle room. Thus, UBI seems like a great way to make the status quo more tolerable but it wouldn’t really threaten accumulated power. That’s why basically everone in silicon valley is for it. Something like co-ops on the other hand bake in a lot more accountability and checks and balances into companies. This would also affect the distribution of power. But I wouldn’t say that this would be the obvious thing to push for or any kind of silver bullet. As I wrote in another comment, there are multiple sides to these problems (e.g., company and society level).
Thank you for engaging with this question, hope you find some value in my response!
The biggest problem is that I and many others see unions as short-sightedly protecting workers while their companies and industries die around them. The last real bastion of union workers in the US is the government and no one is calling their employment model effective.
It’s important to look at both of these sides when considering solutions, I guess I didn’t really do this in my comment. So thank you for this important insight!
To offer some additional thoughts on this, I can recommend the thought provink book Radical Markets by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. They present quadratic voting (next to some other ideas) as one means of arriving at better regulatory outcomes. To me it’s not a complete or perfect solution but certainly interesting and maybe one piece of the puzzle :)
In general, I would argue for more diversity in company structures and better education about alternative organizational models (i.e., talk more openly about the pros and cons of all forms of organization - not only from a profit making but a societal perspective). It seems to me that there is a strong dogma of how things need to be done in start ups. But maybe I am wrong, I am still working at a German University so maybe I am misrepresenting the situation in your country.
i don't think there have been times in tech when employees were paid and overall treated better than today (maybe the boom 20 years ago comes somewhat close). Even more, I think tech employees situation today beats any other mass employment situation in the history of humankind.
See, for example https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-apple-contract-wor...
I'm one of the software engineers who was fired for organizing a union at a SF/DC based startup last year. The National Labor Relations Board found in our favor and we won a large cash settlement. But what we wanted was a union. Seeing others pick up the torch is extremely gratifying. Below are some links to news coverage of our case.
https://gist.github.com/bwestergard/a77744dc6f3095fd3fb769dd...
If anyone has questions about the process, I'm happy to answer what I can.
I’m a little annoyed that using the word courage made me twitch for a second because of how much “bravery” and “courage” everyone is getting commended for these days, but I think you’re an example of what every day courage can look like.
You knew what the repercussions could be, I doubt you were so independently wealthy that losing your salary meant little, and you publicly stood for what you believe in for the greater good of those around you.
Even after all the crap you’ve probably had to deal with, I hope you feel positively about your efforts.
Time and perspective are a funny thing... Coming up as young adult and professional engineer I saw unions as a relic that definitely served for positive change (way back in dinosaur times), grew fat and complacent (if not even complicit), and did more harm to the market in general than they did to benefit their members today.
Now I site here (still relatively young, thank you) at 37 with young family, having co-founded a company that employs dozens, losing sleep over how much things like health insurance cost for my employees, and my stance on unions has softened up quite a bit.
Markets and investors have perverted corporate incentives to a degree that moral leadership can be considered downright mismanagement. I’ve heard managers and other founders complain that “if I pay to train them, they’re just going to walk out the door”, etc. My little sister is in year 3 of her software development career and I can’t believe some of the crap I have had to tell her to watch out for, or worse, how to handle as it’s happening to her.
I read about things like the IBM layoffs of “old” workers, then see people I used to work with struggle to get hired (totally not because of their age, of course!) when I know how capable they are and my blood boils.
I still don’t know if unions are the answer. Maybe they’re part of it, but I believe we’ve got a generation (or two) of spineless and/or immoral corporate leadership to survive before things get back on the right track.
Management has the right at a workplace to make any decisions, whether someone in non-management sees fit. Can't people who are frustrated with the company just go pursue a position elsewhere?
"People didn’t even want that much more time off, or that much more time not on call. They just wanted to know where they stood. They didn’t want to have to engage in highly personalized bargaining all the time. It wasn’t that there were rules that favored management — there were simply no rules, and this ambiguity worked in management’s favor."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unio...
What?
There is no constitutional right for management to make decisions. Management are people with certain forms of influence over the company; workers are other people with other forms of influence over the company.
The only way in which there's a "right" is "might makes right" - that management, when they want to make a decision, can force that decision to happen, and workers can't. The point of a union is to change this calculus. If the workers say, do what we want or we'll leave, there's no question of whether they have the "right" to say that. They have the power. The question is whether it's socially acceptable for workers to say they have that power.
The relationship between a company's stockholders and a company's employees is part competitive and part collaborative. Ignore either at your own peril.
It would be better to solidify these things before the industry takes a nose dive.
Historically, management (factory owners) was dragged into the streets and beaten to death (yikes) when excessive inequality was reached. This is an improvement (and hopefully management would see the benefit of treating labor as a partner, not a resource to be consumed).
Some are. You're probably imagining some Python engineer who is making $140k and can work normal hours, drink craft beer and take advantage of "unlimited time off" policies and such.
Think about operations staff who are doing mission critical work, like discovering and removing spam clusters. People like that often make an hourly wage, often are expected to pick up extra volume as a company grows, and are often the target of layoffs and wage controls because they are considered "variable cost" not "overhead".
Also think about people doing traditionally woman's jobs, like customer support or office support. These people make or break customer relationships, make or break team dynamics, or set the bar for content quality. But senior people on those teams often make less than junior engineers right out of school, because companies can exploit the popular idea that these kinds of workers are just less important.
Even coders, especially in production-based industries like video games or special effects, can work under semi-abusive conditions. Many of these firms dramatically staff up and down cyclically which gives employees little bargaining power.
So it comes off as just the usual lefty political signalling, not the start of a real movement.
Software employers are not yet collaborating to avoid unions, as employers associations in other sectors have historically. There is not yet an organized blacklist for outspoken activists.
Unions are certified by card check or secret ballot. In either case, no future employer will ever know whether you supported unionization in a former job. You will always have plausible deniability, and its illegal to ask outright.
$775k for 15 people especially SF based I wouldn't exactly call that a large cash settlement considering what happened, rep damage, time to find new work, etc.
Just had expectations of at least a year salary per person.
But your point stands: this is a weak remedy, and completely out of line with international norms.
Doesn't this kill a company?
1. I do my best work when my colleagues are also doing their best work. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job if I can't use the leverage of having teammates. I will be happier if the company can compensate all of my coworkers well and make them happy and hire good coworkers - both in terms of intrinsic motivation / happiness and in terms of whether the company is profitable enough to compensate me as my performance deserves.
2. I'm a lot better at doing the work than negotiating for the salary I deserve. There are plenty of people in this industry who are the other way around.
I think this statement is used as an anti-union argument here a lot, and it speaks to the ego that many engineers/developers have. "Top performers" are single-digits in a lot of even medium sized organizations, and chances are that an individual employee falls outside of this "top performer" category even if they think they are one. The unions work for the majority. This means that the unions probably work for you.
Everyone wants to say they hire the top 1% of top 1% but in reality that's not possible, and most of them are sucked up in some pretty strange places or by big companies with lots and lots of incentives to throw at them.
How many people in this thread honestly DON'T see themselves as a "top" contributor? Tech is like Lake Woebegone... all the kids are above average.
The majority of information I see online about software unions tends to be either anecdotal, or generalized across every industry rather than focused on a specific one (ie, on average, unions across all industries get X% higher pay).
This is being applied to a single company, so people who think it's terrible have no shortage of other places to go. It's high profile enough that Kickstarter trying to shut it down will get public blowback, so there's a better than average chance that they end up taking its demands seriously. It'll give at least one very tangible data point of, "here's what a software union in a software company looks like." And even if it does crash and burn, maybe we'll get some Kickstarter competitors out of it from prior employees.
I see very little downside. Let's have at least one trial somewhere, even if it's not perfect, that gives us at least some preview about what a US-based software union will look like.
Then go work elsewhere. I'm sure your co-workers won't miss the "what about mine???" attitude.
My concern with the anti-union rhetoric in the USA is that we then turn to the government to protect workers. I think it's a lot better to have a union vs government as long as that union isn't protected from competition like they are today.
If we can introduce competition into unions then they might better serve the workers and the company.
I've worked at plenty of companies which had huge inefficiencies (meetings 6hrs a day, forty approvals to get anything done etc etc), which held back individual success and were generally not meritocracies.
I think you find that all organisations with many humans involved all have inefficiencies but the media seems to love painting unions as the inefficient ones.
I'm a member of union (Australia) as a web developer, it doesn't interfere with my day to day working, negotiations or my work ethic but it's like having a backup lawyer in case there are problems with the workplace and I need some advice.
Work less? Or work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week? There are plenty of examples out there of people who think that is the bare minimum.
> They directed the members to engage in behavior that was best for the union while bad for the workers and the company.
Of course, that is what a strike is, but a necessary evil.
Seems fair to do the opposite.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-unions-exploiting-their-emp...
I've worked for several unions and, at least in my experience, most union staff actually are unionized.
Of course, like any kind of organisation, whether it's a company, a business, a charity, a religion, or a political party, people will attempt to score themselves the best position and also improve the position of the organisation. This isn't a unique problem with unions, but with any kind of organisation, it's all money and power at the end of the day.
Unions in the US are democratic institutions, so if there is a problem with your union you can change things.
The US has such a workaholic culture, with lack of sleep and lack of life outside of work being endemic. Less work is a good thing!
But they get overtime. From the IATSE contract with Disney:
"... all time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Except as otherwise herein provided: Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 ½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification."
"Crunch time" gets very expensive for employers.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/22/17149822/gdc-2018-igda-rou... [2] https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ [3] https://animationguild.org/
[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2017-06-07/nhk-pro...
[2] https://kotaku.com/an-insider-s-look-at-working-in-the-anime...
People who want to make games (or discover dinosaur bones, or paint, or do other professions that are correlated with a deep, almost-aesthetic, passion) are competing with other people just like them. Since they tend to be so passionate about these things, they bid each other down. They work just a few more hours a week without pay then the next guy, just because they would so much rather build video games than standard dev work.
And before you know it, the field is treated worse. But it's an equilibrium worse, brought about by rational agents trading off work-life balance for work-passion.
The all too common path seems to be enter the industry for a few years, endure crap that none of your friends that do similar jobs outside of the industry endure for a lot less money, actually want to plan for the future at some point, then get a job outside of the industry, and even though you love games, you just can't go back to getting mistreated.
That was what I did, and lots of other coworkers I had, and is why the industry seems to have a huge dearth of senior talent.
So the people who would be most willing to unionize are no longer in the industry to do so.
Judging by the gamer-centric media, it seems like most of them hate the industry and most of the major companies in it. They love small developers, they love making games, they love their Twitch streamers, but they hate the companies with a burning passion.
Unfortunately, that passion often gets channeled into harassing women and minorities instead of going anywhere productive.
- You don't have to be a union member to get nearly all the benefits of the union -- including the pay scale from its collective bargaining, access to legal representation, health insurance benefits, and being able to attend regular union meetings. Basically, the only thing a non-member can't do is vote. (I see on our worker list today that fewer than half of our workforce today are actually union members.)
- Legally, they can't even require members to pay dues, though I imagine everyone here does, because it's inexpensive, and benefits all workers, including yourself. That's why one would vote to unionize in the first place!
These rules can and almost certainly do differ according to your union, local, contract, and state and federal law.
Unless someone responding here has specific knowledge of OPEIU, Local 153, their Kickstarter contract, or New York labor law, I would not place any trust in it. Many of these answers sound more like anti-union FUD than facts from the Kickstarter United contract.
They _could_ require that _after_ joining Kickstarter either join the union or pay equivalent dues.
If you're in a right to work state neither fees or membership is required.
Kickstarter is in NY, which is not a right-to-work state. So you may as well join the union, because you have to pay dues.
I think it's more like you join a company, and there is a set RoE for both the company and the union to talk to you about the union, and joining the union as an individual is usually, politics aside, a strong option because of all the extra benefits and protections union workers receive.
The American union tradition / behavior seems quite different than what I hear about elsewhere.
I'm interested in the European systems, but very very wary of the US systems. Too many US unions are really just bureaucracies on their own, emphasize seniority for pay, advancement, and etc, and seem to limit options for workers in terms of flexibility. And to some extent american unions become their own bureaucracy serving the folks embedded in that bureaucracy. Granted for some jobs that probabbly is ok, but for technical things, I'm very wary about flexibility and etc.
My experience with American unions has been highly disappointing and I'm skeptical about their ability to handle a more technical / fast changing world.
Join the union at your job, ask why there isn't a union at your job if there isn't one, find a freelancer's union if you're not working for The Man, give some of your time/money/skills to people fighting for unions...
If that’s the route people think things should go it’d be a big cultural shift from the status quo.
The unions in other countries have done great things for workers. In Germany, most employed individuals get 6 weeks of vacation and 35 to 40 hour a week contracts.
People are scared they're salary is going to go down the hole for some reason. A tech union can exist with pay scales that match current peoples compensation.
Articles like this really put into perspective how strong the American perspective is here.
I suspect like some folks here, my personal (negative) interactions with unions have turned me off of unions in general. I worked at an unionized shop when I first graduated and while I recognize some of the positives the union brought, there were also many downsides.
Some examples:
- Nepotism. We had an open position we couldn't fill for over a year because one of the union leader's son was graduating soon and that position was reserved for him.
- General complacency. Raises and promotions for the most part weren't based on performance, but rather tenure. Many people start off ambitious but end up just doing the minimum over time because there is no reward in trying too much.
- Strange (from my perspective) rules. I couldn't have more than one CAD going at one time, and because CAD is backlogged the turn around time was super long. This meant for long stretches of time I couldn't do any work. But I also couldn't leave. I read a lot of wikipedia pages during this time.
Eventually I got super bored, didn't see any growth potential and wasn't learning much so I left.
I assume not all unions are like this, but I do hear things similar to this from others (many on this thread) quite often as well.
I don't know of any industry where this doesn't happen. Certainly in tech there's plenty of anecdata about nepotism in hiring, no unions required.
> General complacency. Raises and promotions for the most part weren't based on performance, but rather tenure. Many people start off ambitious but end up just doing the minimum over time because there is no reward in trying too much.
Again, this doesn't differ much from non-union industry. Anecdotally (I know) almost every silicon valley tech company seems to have poor ratings in their internal polls for "we fire/retrain low performers". This isn't a problem that is unique to unions, nor can I see any evidence that it's worse in unionized workplaces.
Here's a fact about unions: Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages. [1]
According to the paper you referenced, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in private industries and under the category "Management, professional, and related occupations" employees earned more actually – $35.70/h – compared to workers represented by unions, who earned an average of $32.95/h.
I would assume the majority of software engineers work in private industries, thus would fall under the aforementioned category, and as a result would actually earn more by not joining a union. Am I missing something here?
Furthermore, it's unclear whether those wages include other types of compensation, such as stock grants and bonuses for example, in which case the difference would be even greater.
Of course this is anecdotal and I don't have data to prove one way or the other. All I can say is, given the choice I'd rather not be in an union for my next job.
I think if we want unions to be more common place and more embraced, a good place to improve are some of the ones we currently have.
Couldn't this be because you raise the wages of all the underperformers and lower the wages of the top performers?
If you have a team where a few rockstars make $100K and the average and underperformers make $60K, the average pay could be said to increase if you simply make everyone's wage $72K. But that sucks for the top performers and really is only a good deal if you are at or below average.
Dutch unions, as far as I know, negotiate employment contracts, employment standards and general working conditions with employers and the government. A lot of Dutch economic decisions are made in a committee with representatives of the government, employer organisations, and the unions. In many industries there are standards about what someone in a certain position should get paid, but hiring, promotions and bonuses are based on performance.
Union membership is also not mandatory, but some employers encourage it, and unions provide services for their members.
This seems to me like the right way to do unions, but stories about unions in other countries (the US in particular) often come across as completely nuts.
Thus the powers unions obtain not only in the US but also for instance the UK, is entirely predictable - nothing stops them taking over the firm and unions are very frequently run by open communists who see it as a moral imperative to do so.
A good example is Unite in the UK, run by Len McCluskey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_McCluskey
In a speech at the 2010 Durham Miners' Gala he said political developments in Cuba and Venezuela should be better known, and suggested the reason they were not was because of "the fear of the good example".
Not surprisingly when major unions are led by people who think Venezuela is a "good example", people learn that unions are bad news!
You do need a union if you want to have a voice in those issues though
What on earth does the 2016 election have to do with wealth inequality (or unions for that matter)? Inequality has been on the rise for decades and Clinton was also a member of the 1%. This seems like a non-sequitur.
I don't really understand the purpose of the unionization effort, beyond the facade of just wanting to in some way "fit in" with a social movement.
Sanders is in the 1% as well.
The Great Recession and subsequently Occupy Wall Street were early reactions to the symptoms that started heavily in the 2000s but really has been in play since the 70s. Share of GDP is a steady downtrend [1]. Velocity of money fell of a cliff in 2000s [2]. US GINI coefficient has increased steadily [3]. Inequality definitely became more of an issue in 2016 election but not much has been done to help it, it will continue to be an issue until UBI or GDP share changes.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/2/16720952/s...
That can vary wildly. And just like other industries, there can be management abuses - like demanding regular, unpaid overtime, substandard wages, sexism, unreasonable behavior, etc. Think about all the basically permanent contractors working for tech companies that might not have healthcare or other benefits, etc.
Allowing company management to organize and act as a collective while not doing so as an employee puts you at a disadvantage in every negotiation and conflict.
Also it'd be nice if some of the more powerful workers here could organize and help lobby for things like parental leave and minimum vacation for all workers, including those without so much clout.
Moderate hour expectations don't always hold during "crunch time"; Facebook and Google have large swaths of their employee base who are subject to the schedules of the large annual developer conferences (F8, Google Cloud Next, Google I/O). There have been internal mandates where employees were forced to work weekends for entire quarters.
I personally found this as a first step toward a perception shift about tech from which we can all benefit.
Unions for instance can help fight this constant non extra paid "after-hours" working culture that force you to do all-nighters and all this kind of crazy shits just because the industry is seen as a bunch of nerds that are that passionate about programming that stay long hours just for the sake of love/passion for the job itself.
My sister thought this was ridiculous, how was she supposed to setup her classroom and answer questions afterwards? Unfortunately her boss warned her that coming early and staying late was not allowed.
Once unions start adding work rules like this you'll see a push to disable after-hours emails, banning weekend work, etc. So while the trope of the lazy union worker is deeply flawed, there are some problems for workers who want to go above and beyond (and while most non-tech workers don't get extra compensation for unpaid overtime, tech workers who go above and beyond actually are rewarded with equity)
So the school was expecting teachers to come in early to setup, not paying them for those hours and punishing those that didn't. This isn't a problem created by labor unions, it is a problem created by exploitative companies. And when the company decided how they would address the issue they decided that pre-class preparation wasn't worth paying for.
There are some differences as you said. If you're an auto factory that goes on strike, the management is likely still making money—they have all the cars made yesterday and the day before to sell. Of course, the pressure would rise much quicker in a factory vs a tech company; where the latter could presumably float itself for a few weeks, the former would start losing money within days.
Certain types of work-to-rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) would bring most tech companies to their knees in a matter of minutes. It wouldn't just gum up the works as it would in industry, it could literally put systems into failure states.
You're mistaken in thinking that a walkout is the only, or even primary, method of direct action organized collectives can employ.
Here are 197 others: https://www.aeinstein.org/nonviolentaction/198-methods-of-no...
Perhaps the causation is reversed, and industries with terrible working conditions and low raises tend to attract unions to empower the workers to change those conditions?
People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.
Tell that to anyone whose workplace unionizes against their wishes and lives in a "closed shop" state. (Yes, closed shops are illegal, but agency fees lead to essentially the same thing).
Being forced to pay a fee to a union that does not represent you and that you did not vote to join is absolute bullshit.
Of course they do. The difference is that they are tricked into thinking they won't be worse off by the union organizers pretending that it's unlikely everyone will completely lose their job.
What I have heard a couple times now from relatives of union members is that senior people who know union leadership sometimes end up on “disability”, meaning there is nothing wrong with them but they don’t work and get paid. They have doctors in the loop to certify the disability. I have no idea if this is actually widespread.
My own personal reluctance with joining a union is that I feel like I do pretty well negotiating for myself.
Having said that, perhaps a tech worker’s union could result in 30-hour four-day workweeks with reasonable minimum vacation, and that would be worthwhile if it became the industry norm.
As an attendee, nobody minds if you move the non-union chair, but if you so much as move a union chair a few feet to join an adjacent table, expect to be reprimanded.
These things are harder to negotiate for than salary and would be healthy for the industry.
A voluntary organization that less than 25% of people in the industry are members of, and which doesn't seek recognition by the NLRB?
That's very different from a union.
It's only at big factories that they show up when more than X number of people are fired and do a big show out of that. Meanwhile, all the employees not working for big factories paid their union fees and saw nothing back. It's often a platform to launch their political careers.
Luckily, they are not mandatory anymore and now employees have to opt-in which was a great change. They have to work to earn respect and those fees back... but I'm not seeing much movement in that direction. So far they have been going the legal route, trying to cancel the changes to the law (and have lost).
In theory, the concept of unions is great but in practice, at least here, it was a terrible thing, from my IT bubble perspective.
Some of our states go a step further and have introduced measures that seek to directly attack the ability of employees to collectively bargain, to remove the power organized labor has against management. These are called "right to work states".
Generally speaking, RTW states have lower pay on average, they are less educated on average, and their workers have less benefits from their businesses (parental leave, vacation time, healthcare benefits, etc), they have less recourses against employer bad behavior (both as a function of RTW attacking collective bargaining, and from the reality that the same politics that are against unions also are very anti-labor, anti-minimum wage, anti-regulation of labor marketplace all together, so there are far less public resources and regulators to assist with claims). If you're an employer, this probably sounds great. Labor is cheaper and you can fire them whenever you want for no reason at all on the drop of a dime AND there is no pesky government regulator to come waste your time and money investigating. "Easy come easy go" is one of the most common management philosophies from small and medium business owners in my RTW state, from my experience.
From the perspective of an American: you choose a liberal/blue/union state when you want good infrastructure, highly educated and competent staff, and little turnover. You choose a conservative/red/anti-union state when you're planning to take advantage of your staff, you don't care about higher turnover, you want to pay below-national-market rates as a rule, and you don't care as much about the individual quality of each employee. There's a reason why tech companies don't pick the South and when they do they require billions in literal free cash to do so.
It is what it is, but the slow death of the union in the United States correlates quite perfectly with the slow death of the American middle class in terms of wealth and income gains per year.
If tech unions are new organizations by, for, and of tech workers, they might result in positive change for tech workers. If they fall in line with AFL-CIO et al., stand by for trouble.
Better pay and benefits - my maximum out of pocket was lower than most deductibles. Democratizes the workplace - really helps keep management in check. You get real job security - firing is much less arbitrary with a steward fighting for you.
However, if people aren't active in union elections, bargaining etc. it can get really stale really fast
Pros (mostly the employees perspective):
- Greatly increased negotiating power (We all got paid way more than I expect we would have if we weren't unionized)
- Pooling of resources to acquire shared resources (e.g. labor lawyers)
- Generally the ability to appeal decisions like "you're fired"
- Selling point when hiring (since unionized tech companies are rather rare, and everyone claims it's hard to attract talent, I'd expect this to be valuable to the company)
Cons:
- That increased negotiating power is wielded by people you often don't quite agree with.
- It's more bureaucracy, which means more inefficiency
- Generally less ability to negotiate for yourself
- While job security for yourself is obviously a feature, job security for under-performing colleagues can actually really suck. Working with, and fixing the messes made by people who just don't care is not fun.
1. You are required to pay a certain amount (either percentage or flat fee, I'm not sure) of your paycheque into a new political organization, the union
2. You are entitled to periodically vote on the who to elect to leadership of the union
3. The leadership of the union represents the entirety of the staff at the company in any and all negotiations and disputes with management. The leadership of the union will engage in collective bargaining with management, establishing a single working contract that encompasses every employee<->employer relationship in the company.
So, right now, in a non-unionized company, if you go to work there, you and the company negotiate a contract which is the terms of your working relationship. Frequently, the company will dictate the terms of the contract and then you will exercise some marginal negotiation power regarding, say, pay or vacation time or whatever, although (especially for specialists and highly paid staff) these are far more open to negotiation, generally, than people think.
When you do this, this is a private relationship between you and your employer. Your coworkers are not involved. They have their own private individual relationships with the employer that have nothing to do with yours. Their contracts could be radically different from yours. That's between them and the company.
What a union does is get in between you and the employer, and collectivizes all of those individual negotiations into one larger, general negotiation. So now, instead of you negotiating a private contract with the employer, the union will negotiate a general contract that applies to _all_ staff, and then you will sign that contract.
The main argument in favour of unions like this is that by collectivizing the bargaining, it gives them negotiation power. So imagine, for instance, that you are getting a job at Google. As an individual, if you don't like the contract Google is giving you, you can demand dramatic changes to it. And then Google will laugh at you, spit in your face, and kick your ass out the door, because they're one of the richest corporations on the planet and you dare to think that _you_ can dictate terms to _them_? But, if the staff at Google were unionized, suddenly it's different. Suddenly, when the union pushes back on Google and demands drastic changes, Google has to negotiate in good faith. This is because the union represents _all_ of the employees; if the union threatens to walk away from the negotiation, then _all_ of Googles employees stop working. Google might be able to kick any individual out the door, but if the entirety of Google's staff stops working suddenly there are massive problems.
So why might you not want a union? Well, there's a few reasons. One might be obvious from the previous paragraph. Say you are quite happy with your current job at Google, but some of the unions _other_ members are unhappy and are demanding change. Eventually, negotiations come to an impasse. The union threatens to walk away. If they do that, you _must_ stop working. The fact that you are quite happy with your job doesn't matter. You are bound by their collective agreement, and they just suspended their collective agreement.
More generally, unions take a distributed, private, individual process and turn it into a politicized, public, collective process. This can reduce the company's flexibility to make different arrangements with different groups of people, and if you are someone who benefits from such a different arrangement you might rationally be opposed to this. Additionally, if you are someone who is heavily skeptical of the ability of political processes to make effective decisions, you might not want a board of elected union activists making decisions on your behalf.
Unions also cost money. I admit I don't know how much they cost; for all I know it's $5 per paycheque. But fees can be substantial; a long time ago, back when I was a clerk at Safeway, my salary was $7.50/hr and my union dues were $1.25/hr. This was almost 20% of my (pre-tax!) pay. If you feel that the benefits you get from collective bargaining do not outweigh your unions dues, you might start to wish you were not a member of the union
(Note that, generally, when your workplace votes to unionize, you are _required_ to pay those dues, regardless of whether or not you wish to become a member of the union. In some states, Republicans have succeeded in passing what are known as "Right-to-work laws", which prohibit unions from collecting fees involuntarily from non-members. However, California has no such laws).
Another reason why you might be opposed to unions, which might sound absurd at first glance, is that by fighting for the best interests of all of their members, they may sacrifice the best interests of some of their members. Because most unions are national-scale, with various chapters for different companies, your local union chapter may occasionally require you to do things that sacrifice your own best interest in order to support a remote chapter (striking in solidarity is one example: The union calls a nationwide strike even though there's nothing wrong with your particular office). A union might decide to make strategic sacrifices. Perhaps a union is in dispute with an employer that has multiple offices. A union might negotiate very aggressively in one office, overplaying their hands and ultimately losing substantially for the workers in that office, in order to credibly signal their resolve for when they are negotiating in the second office. Even though this is better overall, you probably don't think so if you're laid off because you were unlucky enough to work in office #1.
Finally, unions can cripple an industry with excessive demands. Unions may gain concessions from employers that are economically unsustainable. Eventually, this can cause the company to go out of business as more nimble competitors are able to perform better in the market than the unionized company is. In some dramatic cases, the company may decide that dealing with the union is too much trouble, and shut down operations in a given area entirely, putting all of the members out of a job.
A very real fear that I have is that I observe that a lot of the success of Silicon Valley is driven by a culture of work. Some might say _over_-work. Maybe this is not healthy for the people doing it, but it certainly seems that a key component of many tech companies' success is people working weekends and evenings when the situation demands it. One likely outcome of tech unionization, if I was to guess, is unions collectively enforcing a strict 40-hour work week, no exceptions. This sounds great, overworking is a scourge on all of us. It sounds great, right up to the point where a bunch of un-unionized starts who are burning the midnight oil start offering dramatically better products than the unionized established company, who can't compete because they can't leverage as much manpower towards their projects due to contractual limits on working hours.
I run a 17 person company and I've heard employees mention that they think all companies should be unionized even if there aren't currently any problems that the union would seek to address. I strongly support the big tech companies unionizing and so it would be hypocritical of me to be opposed to it for my own company, but at the same time it seems like the overhead for such a small company would be really significant and I'm not sure what it would accomplish given that I'm not aware of current employees having any demands that we haven't satisfied already.
Even if nothing comes of it, I think it's an interesting thought experiment.
What is a structural force that defines class in America?
Racism is structural in a number of ways:
There is also a lot of structure around consumerism, debt, and the like, though this is split between societal/cultural structures and government/business structures.
The idea that unions are inherently, universally good is just as silly as the idea that unions are inherently, universally bad.
EDIT: Instead of replying to everyone individually. Over the last ~15 years I've held jobs from tech support to network engineer to full stack developer. In each of them I have noticed that recent college grads are almost always clueless, and basically have to start from scratch. These are kids with massive student loan debt that could have started working earlier and learned through an apprenticeship.
Have you talked to anyone who does professional entertainment/movie work about their thoughts on unions?
Unions are expensive, corrupt, and don't actually do much to help most of the workers. The unionized workers hire contractors to do the real work for many features, and are parasitic organizations that mostly just drive up the cost of making movies.
There was recently an article in the Times about a local NYC union president who's office is decorated with such high-end fixtures & furniture that he has a second office on another floor just to appear more humble. I can't find it at the moment...
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18273318/kickstarter-ceo-...
Specifically, the issue of defection.
The company can make it very easy for users to defect or FORCE them to defect.
They can give bonuses to people not in the union (with plausible reasons for the bonuses so it's not illegal) or do what Walmart does and simply shut down the entire store in that location to prevent the union forming.
We need some way to solve this problem ...
It's called solidarity, and respect for your co-workers.
The term for this "class consciousness." It's not that the value isn't there, it's that you don't see it.
e-Mail, instant messaging, etc. Any form of communication makes unionizing easier.
"We support the right of private employers and employees to choose whether or not to bargain with each other through a labor union. Bargaining should be free of government interference, such as compulsory arbitration or imposing an obligation to bargain." https://www.lp.org/platform/
With Patreon raising prices and now this, maybe someone will crowdfund an alternative.
I don't think that is even remotely an accurate statement, unless EVERY company with a website is now a "tech company".
I took a peek at the data object in https://www.kickstarter.com/team
And to me it looks like an art company, with very little focus on tech.
"favorite category" counts by # team members Art: 32 Film & Video: 29 Design: 27 Publishing: 15 Games: 14 Technology: 8 Music: 5 Comics: 3 Food: 3 Photography: 2 Theater: 2 null: 2 Journalism: 1
# of backed projects by "favorite category" Film & Video: 6264 Design: 2372 Games: 2325 Art: 2238 Technology: 1228 Publishing: 777 Theater: 310 Music: 181 Food: 119 Comics: 44 Photography: 28 Journalism: 5 null: 0
I would add that I find it incredibly ironic for a "creative" company to have such rigid categories for what it deems "creative".
Maybe I'm being presumptuous but being a tech company and all aren't the employees are already relatively pampered?
The problem in both cases is simply due to a misalignment of personal goals/compensation within the company.
When it's "working right" The CEO can defend their "not randomly firing employees" as being too expensive due to their unionized status. Converse is that the union can accept that some employees need to go to be replaced with other employees in another field to reflect the world changing (and help relocate/pay off/re-train as needed).
In summary - plans rarely work out and ideally there's an internal buffer/slush-fund to cover this. When you're publicly traded, there's always going to be somebody demanding you cash in this buffer to the shareholders in the short term. Unionization provides a nice external buffer.
Unions were designed for a market where employers were taking advantage of job scarcity and insecurity, and where changing jobs often meant difficult re-training for new equipment and methodologies, which was often provided by unions. That does not exist today, at least in the software industry; a solid GutHub account is a much better certification than any training or even a university diploma.
My point is that, for the majority of software people, traditional unions can barely give any benefits over the power they can have themselves. And for the best people it can even provide disadvantages by lowering the standards.
Unions increase the importance of political skills over performance. If you do work but are bad at politics you’ll do worse in a union shop. Plus the nepotism and collusion between management individuals and union leadership to the detriment of shareholders, customers, and young workers is disgusting.
The only people who benefit are old underperformers in management and union leadership. They form coalitions of mutual support and screw the rest of us.
Screw unions. They are for useless people that don’t trust their own abilities.
They are only useful if the oligarchs block market competition for labor. But we aren’t there yet ... and we can be vigilant by supporting action taken against instances of collusion. Unions are no cure. They are like caking dung on the wound.
Add federal minimum vacation time too, 20 days at least.
"but but my margins!!!"
What has happened with Microsoft's union?
Anyone with an insider knowledge want to elaborate?
Can someone explain what the Kickstarter employee's hope to gain? “promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table,” sounds very left wing in an already left wing company in a left wing area.
