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This claim is disputed by, like, many unions. Tenure based promotions/compensation is one, but certainly not the only approach that unions use.
I imagine that this is not popular with many employees, and so it cannot be a part of their initial pitch — as you said, not the only approach unions use.
If established unions support seniority-based promotions but nascent ones don't publicly support them, it would follow that they must develop into supporting seniority-based promotions. This is possibly one of those issues where a union gets power and then takes overarching, unpopular measures that rid the company of anyone who wants to work harder and be promoted faster.
If you have evidence that unions don't support seniority-based promotions, I would love to see it! I haven't had a chance to gather data, so I'm only speaking anecdotally.
There are a number of well known counterexamples, sports and acting unions/guilds for example.
> If you have evidence that unions don't support seniority-based promotions
I've yet to see any tech union advocate for this position, and they generally advocate against it. Tech Workers Coalition and the Alphabet Workers Union are the two I know of in this case.
> If established unions support seniority-based promotions but nascent ones don't publicly support them
This isn't really correct. Unions in certain fields support seniority based promotions. But on the other hand, certain professional fields support seniority based promotions without unions. Like medical and legal fields have non-union professional associations that afaik don't advocate for any sort of tenure based compensation. Despite that the most sought-after biglaw companies use a mostly-tenure based compensation process. The medical field uses an unholy combination of merit (exams and matching) and tenure (residency).
> This is possibly one of those issues where a union gets power and then takes overarching, unpopular measures
It's unclear how this could happen. Unions are democratic. The members vote on things. They generally cannot take unpopular measures[*]. It may be that there is a majority in some industries that prefer tenure based seniority.
[*]: Ok the exception here is if in a "Right-to-Work" state people refuse to join the union, but it still has a majority membership and is therefore NLRB recognized, so you have say, 51% employees in the union, and those 51% have a directional bias. For example, everyone who supports tenure based compensation is a union member, and they make up 26% of the company, and 52% or so of the union. Then they vote and win and the union contract includes this clause. The fix here, of course, is for other people who don't support this to join the union. But then they don't want to because of the idea that unions are bad and support unpopular policies.
> There are a number of well known counterexamples, sports and acting unions/guilds for example.
I can't imagine how promotions would apply to areas like sports and acting the same as it applies to typical careers that have ladders, so I wouldn't cite it as a well-known counter-example.
> I've yet to see any tech union advocate for this position, and they generally advocate against it. Tech Workers Coalition and the Alphabet Workers Union are the two I know of in this case.
With regards to the Tech Workers Coalition, they want "explicit criteria to achieve (promotions)" [1] which would necessarily involve more red tape and likely a seniority-basis, as not every employee can be promoted.
> Despite that the most sought-after biglaw companies use a mostly-tenure based compensation process.
This is a reason why I elected not to go to law school, and a contributing factor for several people I know who moved from law to tech. The lack of this is what makes tech unique and adopting the homogeny of another un-meritocratic industry should certainly be avoided.
I don't see how this follows. Much the same way that you can have transparent pay even though people are paid differently, you can have transparent promotion criteria that aren't simply "John has worked here longer".
I am absolutely able to recognize that the more senior ICs I work with have larger scopes of work and often more challenging projects. My reading of this is that there should be clear job ladders that are used and checked against during promotions (and for example you're given feedback stating that XYZ is why you aren't performing at th e next level yet).
Google, for example, is aspirationally already doing this. There's a job ladder and you're rated agains the ladder. In my case, this has meant that I've gotten promoted almost 2x as fast as some of my coworkers on my team.
The aspirational part is that sometimes the feedback isn't in line with the rubric, and criteria can be different across the company (this is sort of a necessary evil of having a big company, a 1-size-fits-all rubric is difficult.)
I'm honestly, really not sure how it follows that since not everyone can be promoted you must use tenure as the metric. As long as you can define some set of criteria that defines "Senior" vs "Junior", you should promote all of the people who meet the criteria. If that's all of your employees, perhaps you need to rethink the criteria, or perhaps you have a bunch of "Senior" employees. At that point, deciding which ones to not promote is going to be crappy no matter what: tenure is an option, but the alternatives are usually "who the boss likes the most" which isn't really any better. But again, this comes down to at this point the company has failed to provide explicit criteria to achieve promo, because people who achieve them aren't being promoted anyway.
