* Vocational training: unions in our area run schools to train craftsman (e.g. carpenters). This increases productivity and screens for quality.
* Shifting workforce: Construction companies expand/contract as they get big jobs. The union is a clearinghouse that enables tradespeople to switch between companies as they expand/contract. The union also helps by running benefit programs that travel with the workers.
* Commodity-ish labor: Most carpenters have about the same productivity, so it makes sense to negotiate their compensation in bulk. Unions don't work as well when productivity/value varies greatly between workers.
I also worked as an apprentice carpenter for several summers during college. I wouldn't say that the carpenters I worked with had a glowing view of the union. They seemed suspicious that the union reps were corrupt, and talked about how they would "shut down the job" over minor union infractions. They also believed the "hall" was corrupt/political in how it matched carpenters who were out of work to jobs. Several were also contemptuous of what they saw as the union discouraging hard work (if you were working hard, you were "ruining the job.")
The main point I am trying to make is that unions are complex from both the employer and employee side.
Unions are definitely complex, it's not a silver bullet to solve issues in the workplace. But at its core it's a group of people negotiating as a unit: the rest is just the natural evolution of a group where some power has been attained. More members means more organization needed to keep everything straight, and more organization means more barriers to joining. Once there's a real structure to the power a union gets, it's subject to the same people problems as an other organization.
Welders or house framers take designs from engineers and (mostly) work to spec. I have to be the architect, engineer, and builder, usually only based on the approved visible UI, or rough description of a problem.
With remote work, computer science is much more global, so someone could easily be trained by a union and then go work for a company that doesn't support the union.
Interestingly, this is one of my Dad's main complaints about unions these days: That our city trains great carpenters, but then they are recruited away to non-union areas.
One of the economic failure modes of strong unions is excessive credentialisation and a dualised labour market. I’m most familiar with unions in Ireland and we definitely have some of that. A plastering apprenticeship is either three or four years. Learning to plaster is at most a six month job. Se situation with tiling. For a knowledge worker example more directly relevant to programmers the teachers’ unions really push credentialisation and dualistation. During the recent economic downturn the government wanted to decrease the wage bill so the teacher unions doubly shafted aspirant teachers. They negotiated a doubling in the length of teacher certification, from a one year Higher Diploma in Education to a two year M.Ed. and a lower pay scale for teachers hired after a certain date. Education in pedagogy doesn’t even have any demonstrable effect on teacher effectiveness so this was pure waste with no benefit. Even before that in Ireland a permanent job as a teacher is fantastic but it will take the average new graduate of a teacher training programme at three to five years of substitute work, with no paid holiday or other benefits to get one, if they ever do.
In the U.K. with its easier entry and lower credential requirements [1] getting a job is easy but the working conditions are comparatively dreadful.
Unions generally make things better for those on the inside by making them worse for those on the outside.
[1] Do you have a psychology degree and want to teach Math? Do a conversion course and you can.
It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such...
https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate...
If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well.
I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG.
I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job.
If your are making over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point...
https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c...
Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.
One advantage of software as a relatively ill defined career is that you can acquire responsibilities that look like software engineering without actually having a software job. Would my first employer have let me tinker around with the server (when my job was mostly Excel based) if it would have run afoul of union rules?
Unions are best when practitioners in a field vary a lot in quality and desirability. When anybody can be quickly trained to do work, unions have to rely on physical means to help their members. That's why Taylorism/Fordism destroyed the unions.
Tech is an ideal place for unions skillwise, the problem is how easily offshorable the work is. A tech union would have to be a world union.
If there was a programmer's union that let you join as a union employee, you could take salary concessions for the union-mandated retirement plan contributions, and have both parties wind up ahead simply on tax-efficiency metrics. $110k salary and $100k salary + $10k retirement plan contribution cost the exact same to the company, but the latter has a lower overall tax burden on the employee.
Though it may not seem like safety is a big concern in tech right now, there are areas where it will be of concern. For example, Unions may be a good method to force safety concerns in self-driving cars and in IoT devices. Unions may help with health-care data and privacy. Unions may help with other forms of sensitive information like in judicial work and military work.
I'm not saying that unions are the only way to force safety, but they have been an effective force for safety in other areas in the past. Their effectiveness should not be discounted out of hand.
His company employs one full time person whose job is to improve safety. The guy runs safety competitions (days without a serious accident) with prizes, does reviews, researches equipment and practices, etc.
He will also tell you that the biggest safety improvement they ever made was drug testing. He resisted it for a long time because he feared it would be difficult to hire people, but after they did it he became a big advocate of it.
Quitting right off the bat or folding like a wet biscuit after realizing that they do have power over you are not ways of pushing back.
There are laws that work has to be assigned to union shops, etc
The other side of the same coin is, for example, ISP local monopoly laws.
1. Tech is not a space where training can help improve worker's quality? Or is it just something that people are expected to do on their own and people who don't suffer?
2. You might be surprised to learn about the number of contractors in tech.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but I'm not even sure I concede that programmers have that large a differential.
I still have yet to see genuine scientific evidence that this differential exists in programming.
Or, alternatively, I don't concede that there isn't a 10x difference in master vs apprentice carpenters.
Tech workers feel pretty good here in the US because they are compensated better than most. The time to organize is now, not after worker supply has increased or during a recession when workers are more desperate. We have real issues (Ageism, Working Conditions, etc) that we'll never be able to address individually.
I'm not convinced that is the case, nor is it an either or (union or corporate powers).
Your protection by the union depends on what the union negotiates... beyond that their ability to effect change pretty much stops there. Then you are again at the mercy of your employer. I've had first had experience with "oh yeah they can do that" union situations.
Also premature organization IMO is much like premature optimization, more likely to be a bigger problem and miss any real issues.
I'll just say I don't think unions or the concept of a union needs to be perfect to generally have a positive effect. Maybe I'm naive.
I can see your point about premature unionization, but I do think we need to think about the future. I think there's a sense among tech workers that this period of high demand won't last. Maybe not unions now, maybe not unions in a traditional sense, maybe we do need to think of some kind of new paradigm better suited to tech work than say, a carpenter's union, but something.
> beyond that their ability to effect change pretty much stops there.
Is that true? You can't negotiate even further by yourself? I think you do.
If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.
Ironically, not only do tech workers aren't worried about this, they embrace it and encourage it. An enormous amount of work is being done to lower the bar, make things more accessible, reduce the need for diplomas and certifications, downplay the value of experience, etc. Basically ensuring that they'll see significant competition in the future (those initiatives don't help "a little". They literally change the landscape of the industry).
So it's a bit hard to convince people that they should work to protect their job when they're already working so hard to do the opposite (with the well being of others in mind, of course)
20 years ago the internet was less than 0.01% of global GDP. Tech will continue eating industries that are structured unfairly.
Yes I know there are outliers but the vast majority of entrants are BSC grads.
Look at the discussion here: lots of people arguing against unions, saying they're just plain bad, or they're good in some industries but not in tech, or we just don't need them, or whatever.
And not to say that these arguments are wrong, but....
Hands up, how many of you think that it's a good idea to run a business with employees as a sole proprietorship?
I'm pretty sure there are no hands up. The first thing you do when you're going to create a business with employees is to organize. This is so ingrained that we don't even think about it. When was the last time you saw "Ask HN: do I need to incorporate?" Of course you do. There are many questions around where to do it and what type of corporation to create and what ownership structure you want to use and so forth, but there's no question about whether it's a good idea.
When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and we come up with many reasons why this may not be a good idea.
When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "corporation" and nobody takes even a moment to wonder whether or not this is a good thing to do.
If workers are better off without organization, maybe the same is true on the management side? Instead of big companies, we should have individual managers on their own, employing a team as a sole proprietor.
When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing.
When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing.
Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to unions and are mostly created for legal reasons, not for anything related to collective negotiation?
Inside a company, the management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees, including compensation. But employees talking together about maximizing their compensation is considered scandalous, harmful or even unethical. The practice is even given special names "organizing" and "unionizing" and is certainly considered unusual.
Corporations acting together are not analogous to a union because, legal fictions aside, corporations are not people.
But the activities of humans working together inside a cooperation to maximize some benefit, say a promotion or higher personal profit buy cutting employee costs vs a group of employees seeking a pay increases, seems a credible analogy.
You say that corporations aren’t created for collective negotiation. When was the last time you bought something from a corporation? Did you negotiate with individual members of that corporation on the price? Do you get individual cashiers to bid for your business? Of course not, because the organization they belong to insists on handling price negotiation in a consistent fashion across the company.
I suspect a lot of the negative attitude toward unions comes from an incorrect assumption that a union must be a monopoly (or perhaps monopsony is the right term). I think that’s why you immediately jumped to “cartel” for the analogous organization on the other side. There’s no reason a single union has to represent all workers in a field, any more than a single company has to be the only employer in a field.
The above is sort of a lie -- in the case of the tech industry, there is a lot of competition for workers. Since everyone wants to hire SWEs, I have more negotiating power than other industries. If Google doesn't hire me, I could (presumably) get a job at Amazon, Facebook, a startup, etc.. Since I could find other offers, I wouldn't have much to lose if I don't take Google's offer, and Google will therefore have an incentive to offer me better comp. Because of the above, it's not clear to me that tech workers need a union right now.
In other industries, labor is a buyer's market. If there is only one or two employers in a region, then those employers can choose to not hire any one laborer. Not hiring one laborer might mean that an employer's capital is deployed slightly inefficiently, which is again unfortunate, but nobody will lose sleep over it. But since that one laborer has no alternatives, they must work for a lower wage or risk destitution. This is a big problem in academia, where it's very difficult for grad students to switch schools (admissions offices reduce student mobility) and there is only one employer -- the school.
So unions are not analogous to cartels for selling labor -- they are not necessary when there is a balanced labor market, like in tech. But for markets which favor employers, they may often be necessary to protect workers.
Cartels are not collective bargaining - they are collective price fixing by market suppliers. Employee unions negotiate with employers, while supplier cartels do not negotiate with market consumers. Not the same by a long shot.
Also, if you look at the history of corporations, they are originally created to give the capital contributors equal share in the control of the company. Hence the word shares.
For example, you could front your ship for a spice voyage to India, while other people front the crew and funds for supplies, and you would have a percent control of the endeavor equal to the value of your ship. Voting shares today are not much different, just scaled appropriately.
No, we call that illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
This actually has some interesting incentives.
That keeps people idealistic, vocal and demanding of the behavior from their employer/bosses. This is not the norm in other business functions. Unfortunately.
I think right now were in a "golden age" where the latter group still holds power and can command decent salary. I'm convinced this will start to change in 2-3 years and a lot of people who came in for that golden age are going to face a shocking reality that they aren't as privileged as they thought they were.
With the fall of the second group software companies will have much more leverage across the board and we'll see darker and darker patterns prosper.
I think instead of looking for a past era solution we should look for a completely new solution set. Why not work on creating open systems. May be instead of getting a leverage over employers, tech people should contribute and create parallel systems. Which instead of creating monopolies help anyone challenge the status quo easily. I think it already happens to a great degree with many engineers and even companies contributing their tooling, research and solutions to open source.
May be we just need to accelerate that trend?
We totally should walk away from zero sum view. So not employer vs us. But how do we make sure that engine for innovation and opportunities keeps on running and keep on creating new companies
At the same time, companies endlessly bemoan that they can't find enough people, so there's a big push for immigration to fill the gaps, bootcamps, etc.
Maybe those people that are anti-union because they consider themselves too skilled really are skilled, however the two issues I described above will definitely hit anyone from mid level downwards.
You're describing what Beverly J. Silver's "Forces of Labor" [1] refers to as "marketplace bargaining power," one of labor's "structural" (ie endemic) sources of political leverage.
> Marketplace bargaining power can take several forms including (1) the possession of scarce skills that are in demand by employers, (2) low levels of general unemployment, and (3) the ability ofworkers to pull out of the labor market entirely and survive on nonwage sources of income.
Marketplace bargaining power is valuable, but it's not perfect, safe, infallible, or free to exercise--especially if one is here on a precarious visa.
Additionally, as the tech job marketplace expands into the global economy, marketplace bargaining power approaches 0 (think: outsourcing).
> Labor's marketplace bargaining power has been undermined by the mobilization of a world-scale reserve army of labor, creating a global glut on labor markets. Moreover, to the extent that the global spread of capitalist agriculture and manufacturing is undermining nonwage sources of income and forcing more and more individuals into the proletariat, marketplace bargaining power is undermined further.
Tech workers are then left with other sources of structural bargaining power, which we had better not neglect:
That's okay until you are "old" or "average"--and that next job isn't coming.
Then you will wish that there were some unions around to help you.
A union is forever.
I look out my window and watch the birds fly by and wonder why a human like me needs a boss, or a "job creator" or some other euphemism.
It's hard for me to comprehend someone so slavishly minded to conceive of a concept like "don't like your boss, get another one". Sometimes I ponder what is going on in the minds of "men" who conceive such a notion, just like I sometimes see a homeless man in the gutter drinking a bottle of wine and wondering what is going through his mind.
I call this out because I see a steady stream of NYT articles that focus on big tech in a negative way.
Big tech has its problems and should be regulated. On the other hand, I question the NYT and their motive. This clearly isn’t honest journalism but NYT focusing on companies that are now directly competing with the NYT.
Edit: article I was referring to https://fair.org/home/sidney-embers-secret-sources/
The democratic party is a big-tent and demands consensus. When all of these connected folks eyeroll at the guy, it hints that he would have trouble governing. An "out-there outsider guy" persona works for the GOP because the GOP is a political machine party... some state senator from North Dakota would kill kittens on TV if instructed to.
The NYT is decidedly _not_ leftist. Slightly-liberal leaning maybe, but in no way leftist. They supported the Iraq war of all things.
I honestly can't think of a paper that leftists are more critical of... Maybe the Washington Post?
This is definitely my feeling. When I can just open up LinkedIn and browse all the unsolicited interview requests I get, I don’t end up feeling like I really need a union to protect my current job - I can always just leave and go somewhere else if I’m unhappy.
That said, if someone asked me to vote for it I might do that, but I wouldn’t put the effort into organizing myself.
You think you can, and hopefully you actually can, but your employer might have other ideas... https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...
I'll expand on that slightly - the point is that employers are not beyond illegally getting together to restrict our access to alternative jobs. While it feels like we can just get a new role with a couple of phone calls, we might not be getting the best deal for ourselves regardless.
A common refrain, and not entirely incorrect. It's true that I personally lean on marketplace bargaining power when making politically risky workplace decisions, e.g. pushing for a product or process change.
It has its limits, however, as I've lightly addressed in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384306
Right now, I’m not on a visa and the job market only seems to get hotter and hotter, so for now I feel pretty good about it. Definitely recognize that could change.
Cartels and price-fixing agreements are extremely lucrative, which is why they were commonplace until outlawed by antitrust legislation, and why cartels like OPEC still operate today. Unions and collective bargaining are no different. Unions are equivalent to a cartel of labor-suppliers, and collective bargaining is identical to price-fixing.
Just like with cartels and price-fixing agreements, unionizing would likely benefit the average tech worker. It would also have an extremely bad effect on innovation, bureaucracy, and cost-of-tech-development which would spill over to consumers in the form of higher prices.
I'm in favor of breaking up big corporations, as well as implementing a wealth tax, raising the top tax rates, and strengthening the social safety net. But I don't think encouraging the formation of cartels and price-fixing agreements is in society's best interests.
Furthermore, a lot of software companies are filthy rich. If anything, American corporations are squeezing the last drops of profit through creative (read borderline criminal) accounting, outsourcing, faux-contracting and other creative arrangements. Said additional profit is not shared with the employees, invested in society or used in any productive way.
How is it benefiting anyone that Apple is buying back stock for example or that they have hundreds of billions parked somewhere?
Another solution to add to the ones you mentioned can be the promotion of founding tech companies run as worker cooperatives, similar to Mondragon in Spain. If tech companies leadership will flirt with anti-hierarchial management fads like flat organizations and holocracy, why not putting their equity where their mouth is and allowing the workers themselves to own the means of production?
That's where collective bargaining could come in handy in software. There needs to be some recourse for when shitty companies abuse its employees.
This can happen for a number of reasons:
1. In cases of specialized skills (like working at a factory where you've trained on a particular machine). 2. In cases of natural or artificial monopolies (like working for a federal government). 3. In cases where companies and workers incentives are misaligned (like that of a construction worker).
Probably more that I'm missing.
I don't see how the current software engineer market meets this condition.
There are more open software engineering jobs than there are software engineers. If my employer mistreats me, I'll leave and go to a different company, and likely I can find a job just as good very easily.
I'm not sure how a union would benefit me personally.
Is the ideal model of employment the "job-for-life," or not. If not, how many of a "traditional" union's norms still make sense?
Personally, im not really sure where I stand on tech unions. I suspect that certain things would be better if unions were more present. Work-life balance, unpaid overtime and always-available-on-email problems would probably be better. I suspect on-the job training would be better too. This is an area where our industry is insane. How is it even possible that tech companies do less training than wharehouses?
I was trained to drive a forklift for a part time summer job. 6 days paid training out of a total<60. 13 years in tech, and at best I've been offered "do a MOOC or something in your spare time."
OTOH, I don't think most of us want unions deciding who gets hired/fired/promoted, want seniority systems or a lot of traditional union stuff like that.
But I also find my self largely wanting to leave out of a desire for a new challenge, learn something new. It would be way to easy to stay stagnant at a company and than find yourself forced to deal with new technology in a new role, that for everyone else is old technology (and there is a limit to how much you can realistically do that for side projects). Not that it does not happen anyways.
I don't see any way a Union could (or should) address this.
Pretty easy to see how unions could address both of those issues. This might not work in favor of aggressively job-hopping careerists, but would probably work for everyone else in the International Brotherhood of Codeslingers.
That workplaces are universally intolerable after 2-3--as is accepted industry common knowledge--is not a matter of individual preference, but systemic inadequacy of workplace conditions.
Burnout is not a personal problem, it is an institutional pandemic.
> One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.
-- Carol Hanisch, "The Personal Is Political", in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation
Despite all the claims on HN on how good life is for software engineers, our field has very high burnout rates and it's very ageist.
Unions make sense when labor doesn't have any power. Do programmers have enough power? I'd say yes. Maybe not across the board but -- in general -- yes. We aren't coal miners, that's for sure.
Do programmers in general tech startups have enough power? I’d say yes too. Do programmers in the gaming industry have enough power? Definitely not.
In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.
"Only?" It can itself, become a nexus of plutocratic power. The best antidote to corruption is transparency and the dispersal of power.
Unions are (at least supposed to be) democratically run, so if tech workers don't want to sit in the same position for 45 years until they can collect a pension, their union doesn't need to negotiate for that. They can use that leverage for something else.
Putting that together, your modernized union might be an industry-wide organization that acts both for collective bargaining and as a placement agency. They could bargain for making switching companies easier - maybe employers need to support specific benefits providers so workers don't need to switch. And they could use their network to improve bargaining - a big part of strike preparation is making sure everyone is taken care of ahead of time; the union could secure job offers for workers who can't afford to go on strike.
Nobody cares much about that any more.
If you want to see a modern union, check out The Animation Guild.[1] Local 839, IATSE. They represent most of the major studio animators in Hollywood. Although they've tried, they have not been able to organize game developers.
It's about fear. Try to organize a union in the US and you will probably be fired. Even though that's illegal. WalMart has closed down stores that voted in a union. Uber workers have a strike scheduled for July 15, but it probably won't do much in the US.
1. Everybody's complaining about how they don't want to be promoted to management after a certain age and remain an IC.
2. Very few people, proportionally, are actually promoted to management.
3. Management vs worker is alive and well in all domains, this can be seen as the years pass in the attitudes of those promoted to management. It's the nature of the job, not the education.
The app can optionally take the next step and help employees become a legal union but before that it can function as basically anonymous Slack with polls that allow for majority opinions to be discussed openly and safely.
Even issues like "95% of employees think the coffee machine is shit we need it fixed" can be addressed more quickly.
I have no interest in joining a union but I absolutely take all of the salary information I can get my hands on into account when negotiating my pay.
This is my observation too, right now there is simply a correlation that doesn't have to be.
It doesn't matter that you get paid a comfortable amount, and that another startup delivers snacks all day, and another startup delivers catered food to you: you aren't getting paid what you are worth to these companies.
The board members are just the VCs and the founders and they aren't in a position to change that. The fraction of a fraction of a percent equity that they told you "was a generous amount" after feeding your face has nothing to do with what a more equitable amount could be. Doesn't give you any information about all the scenarios in which you would get nothing because the strike is too high and the preferred shares liquidity preferences are too onerous.
Even the cash component of tech compensation could likely be 75-150% higher. This has nothing to do with the stagnating wages in other sectors, we are working with this generation's largest and fastest growing companies and could accelerate comp growth and other changes.
its okay if the average moves up, and transparency increases on stock options and the liquidity preferences of preferred shareholders. this is only currently relevant to non-public companies, and this article was about startups so thats fitting
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzJO6ELjJT9/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzJP9nlDA5c/
Thinking that unions are going to have an effect is like believing flies effect pigs.
Thats been the MO for people at Big Oil, Big Pharma and Wall Street for a long time now. People are in deep denial about the state of affairs.
These are "too big to fail" systems with too much momentum built up behind them, for a trajectory change.
The last thing I want is to let those same people formally represent me in a union. Given the current climate, those are very likely to be the people who would be running it.
Is it so, or my memory is playing tricks with me?
I am well off, have a flexible work life balance, and I enjoy my job. There is nothing that a union would bring to the table for me.
If there was a union in Silicon Valley in the early 80s, we would be no where close to where we are today. Look at the stark difference between a Silicon Valley worker vs someone working at Boeing or other unionized shops.
Sometimes HN is a caricature.
