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.
Instead companies talk about how much they can afford to pay for salaries. Frequently they talk about increasing the cost of employees from the point of view of expanding. Should we hire more people? Will it improve the business? Should we increase salaries? Will it allow us to attract better employees?
When companies are talking about reducing or restricting the cost of employees, it's usually in the context of solving problems in the company. The company is losing in money in some areas. Should we lay off employees? Can we negotiate a pay freeze or a pay cut until the company can get in better shape? Will we lose too many employees if we do that? Will we lose our best employees if we do that?
The biggest problem I have with unions (being one of the few programmers who has actually worked as a programmer in a union) is that in my experience is the conversations almost never discuss the health of the company. They only discuss strategies for maximizing pay, benefits or ensuring that layoffs are impossible.
I honestly believe that the attitude of "They are doing it so we have to too!" is a thing that destroys companies. The Us vs. Them approach helps nobody. Yes, if you have no choice and the company you are working for has decided that they want "Us vs. Them" and you can't convince them to join you in making the company and it's employees successful, I can completely see the point of a union. For me, that's a last resort. I'll try everything I can to fix the problem a different way before I'll say, "We're going to organise so that we can effectively compete with you". This includes simply quitting my job and finding another one.
Or to be more clear: I greatly value working at a company where I wouldn't ever think of organising a union. I value working at a company where the company values me and sees it as a cooperative venture. I don't want to work for a company that views me as an adversary or as someone they need to manipulate. That's why I don't want a union. In my fairly long career I've worked for both kinds of companies, so I know both exist.
For example[1], empirically the presence of a union does not correlates with a bad workplace or failing business because the bulk of last half of the twentieth century saw widespread union membership yet was dominated by enormous growth in both production and quality of life along side high job satisfaction. While the last 40 years with declining union membership has seen slower GDP growth and in some cases quality of life reversal. So unions can't be causing the problem.
And the Us vs Them attitude is certainly close to catastrophic. But people aren't going to go through the effort, stress and risk of forming a union unless there are already some never addressed grievances in the first place. The antagonism would have to precede the talk of unionizing not be caused by the appearance of the union. And after the fact, there is at least some small chance of discussing, explaining and solving the problems. But I too would bail long before it got that broken. But for tight labor markets, with few and poorly run industries, this choice doesn't exists.
[1]in western countries and Japan
Those topics may dominate the discussions, but unions can be a way to leverage worker power for the good of the organization as well. How many times has a company turned out to have leadership that refuses to heed the concern of engineering, mandating development by sales bullet point and failing to allocate the necessary time to maintain product quality? How often does management order prioritize the wrong choices, leading to fiscal straits where the workforce suffers? How often are the concerns of the rank and file ignored, either dismissed at all-hands or filed away by powerless HR orgs? And how often do we hear stories of tech companies with toxic dysfunctional cultures?
There is at least some precedent for unions forcing leadership to be aware of market realities:
The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market, and in a market as competitive as tech, this is particularly true. Management can decide what tier of employee they want to target when they set hiring budgets and salary ranges, they can decide how risk averse they want to be with losing top talent with retention bonuses and benefits, but they don’t get to directly “minimize the cost of employees” in that sense.
Only a set of companies colluding together can act to minimize the cost like that, for example what we saw in the past with anti-poaching agreements, which the big tech companies were sued for successfully.
The individual corporation vs union analogy is highly tortured. Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.
Absolutely. And in a sufficiently abusive environment, none of that will happen. It is a terrible thing when executive staff destroy a company by creating a toxic environment. But employees would rather be improving the orginization since they need the company to survive and everyone would rather work with smart people than someone they have to carry.
But I know of cases where employee pressure in tech has slowed AI use in warfare and stopped physical abuse toward workers. I hear theory about it being bad but where has it made things worse?
>The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market
If that were true then negotiating would be irrelevant. And previous salary would not be the primary determiner of your next offer. And there would not be formulaic pay raise percentages that rewards those people who changes jobs frequently over those who say on and so are in fact more valuable but less savvy.
More than that, labor prices have as much to do with housing prices as anything else (from which extra expense neither employer nor employee benefits). That is not the tech market.
So skill availability is only tangentially related to compensation. The market favors a set of behaviors other than technical skill such as negotiation and job hopping. And ironically for the job hopper, who is selected _for_ by this system, would have minimum interest in the companies success.
>Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.
Being incorporated has nothing to do with analogy. Or even to being called a company. It has to do with some communication being acceptable while other similar communication is not. It's also a specific description of the friction that emerges anywhere only a subset of people decide the allocation of revenue to the whole group including themselves. In this case, in a work place.
Which becomes more suspicious when the opposition to full participation in decision making is on moral grounds or is followed by implicit threats rather than showing how the arrangement is best for everyone.
