Construction unions etc are hyper corrupt and reward tenure over effort. I can’t imagine what a union would do with Google money.
Traditional unions and tech unions are pretty different indeed. But unions stand to be one possible tool to help remediate some of the problems unique to tech. For non-managers, this change can often be difficult to influence otherwise. Nothing says they have to mirror construction unions, anymore than management in tech has to mirror construction management
In addition to having a stronger voice around working conditions (which are pretty awful in some tech fields like game development), they also stand to help workers have a stronger guiding voice on decision making. There is valid critique against tech that too rarely does anyone ask if something should be done; not just if it can be done.
Speak for yourself. My partner is a horticulturist, a job which involves rather a lot of manual labour, and was one of the union reps for the Botanic Gardens at which he worked for a while.
And I still think unions are a very good idea.
Maybe this is a non-American view, and his counterpart unionized horticulturists in the US are all taking bribes on the side. But I can't see it. It feels like the problem is that construction unions - which, yep, got pretty notorious for corruption - are the only unions people know about, not the ones quietly working to fight for their members' rights.
Unions are a way for workers to have more bargaining power in their workplace. When one employee sits at a table with their boss, exactly one person is in charge, and exactly one person is at risk of being fired. When multiple workers stand together, they can withhold their valuable labor from their employer. The tables are much more even, and more fruitful bargaining process can take place.
That's just two parties haggling, classic market stuff.
Also I've never actually been a member of the union but that does seem to have mattered in my career as by law every employee has to be treated the same if you are a union member or not here (Finland).
> Construction unions etc are hyper corrupt and reward tenure over effort.
There is no reason why the tech union has to be like that. The union is made out of its members so they pretty much decide its course.
Similarly, I have numerous members of my extended family who worked or still work in government Union roles. Most hate their union, due to the aforementioned petty politics, some have moved to private industry and become much happier, and notably the only one happy with their union is deeply involved in it.
When people say tech should unionize I wonder what is so appealing about being compensated less, having opportunities for internal progression gated by seniority, and giving your job an extra thick layer of social harassment and stress.
But then, I live in Canada, and we have some fairly decent basic employment rights and social supports.
"Sorry, I can't merge this pull request, these config files are managed by the DevOps union and only they can review this code."
"I know the system is down and our customers are failing, but we don't work weekends."
"I can't give you a raise because you are maxed out for your 4 years of time put in here. Everyone with 4 years time gets paid exactly the same rate."
"Sorry you are getting laid off - these other (less skilled) people have more time here than you. We lay off based on seniority."
"I know we hired you to work in R&D, but are now being assigned to ads."
"We need to meet a completely arbitrary deadline so that I can increase my yearly bonus, so you are working this weekend. Isn't it great that programmers are exempt from overtime pay?"
"I can't give you a raise because our promotion matrix, developed without any worker input, says you do not meet the requirements. It is a completely objective system based on scores your managers have given you. No, you can not know how those scores are arrived at."
"Sorry you are getting laid off. Because a black box machine-learning algorithm chose you."
"Sorry, we need long 24h oncall shifts to keep the service up. No, we won't pay you extra."
"Sorry, we are shutting down your team. No severance, by the way."
"No, we won't share the minutes for the meeting the managers had to discuss your promotion where we rejected you. Try again next time."
"I know that Bob is paid $50,000 more than you despite being at the same level and with less experience. No, we won't give you a raise."
I think in tech they would be better used to help us control what we are working on and the conditions in which we do it. For example, you could use your collective power to push for
- eliminating creepy tracking from the software you work on that execs wants to put in
- open sourcing more of your work
- eliminating addictive dark patterns
- requiring engineers’ sign-off on deadlines to avoid unrealistic ones foisted upon you
- working on projects that seem meaningful and useful for the world instead of what will make your investors the most money
and a million other things specific to your context
Yet I personally don't see the need for this tool in tech. The labor market has been red hot for years with demand exceeding supply and numerous options for each worker. Firms and their management seem exceedingly responsive (sometimes to a fault) with regard to addressing worker requests.
Sure there are still plenty of suboptimal tech employers and no firm is ever perfect for every worker. Yet worker choice seems to be sufficient to let tech workers find a firm that meets their requirements.
Some people are still choosing employers that many of us would reject, yet those workers are likely just prioritizing different things. Some people want to maximize their pay or progress more quickly in their career. Some people might even want to center work in their lives and seek a demanding employer. Whatever; to each their own.
Having your business choose projects based on what engineers think is neat rather than what the business needs seems like a profoundly terrible idea. If your employer's goals don't match the stuff you want to do, get a different job. You're not entitled to use Facebook compute (or whatever) to pursue your passion project. There is more than one company in the world.
- Allowing people to become unproductive and still get paid.
- Protecting sexual harassers.
- Blocking marginalized people from joining the company.
- Enriching union bosses.
- Propping up organized crime.
If you think “but that would never happen”, American unions have a long, long history of doing all those things.
At the very least I'd be curious to hear about a union (not guild or association) where the profession does not involve significant manual labor, where it makes more money per worker.
I work in a company where employees are distributed globally. Certain timezone and language coverage is needed. Guess what? The employees that live in low cost-of-living areas get paid less money for doing literally the same work. On one hand, it's nice that the company acknowledges rent/mortgages cost more in certain areas and that will eat into employees' paychecks, but on the other hand, it is painfully clear that the value I produce for my company is hardly related to my paycheck. My paycheck is determined by what similar workers in my field are being paid in my area. That's it.
If this is the case why would anyone join? If this is not the case, where are the examples of such? There are plenty of examples of this outside of tech. For example in Chicago teachers in the union make more money than non-union teachers. Pretty easy to look up.
All 3 are the same thing with different name (and much better PR departments)
Americans don't have a history of bad unions, they have a history of unions being gradually eliminated (along with rising wages and improving working conditions), and are exposed to constant anti-union propaganda. 15% tops of the workforce is unionized, 98% of the people who complain about unions either have absolutely no experience of them, or their experience of them consists entirely of stories that their reactionary grandfather used to tell them about the lazy bum they couldn't fire.
They should be fighting for things like: paid overtime or paid oncall, ip rights for side projects, smoothing off the four year cliff, better parental leave (at least ät Amazon), more transparency in performance reviews, etc.
In effect tech workers control the means of production because computers are commodities and their knowledge is the means of production. Because if this their share of the putouts are enormous compared to most industries. It’s why besides massive checks we are granted RSUs to ISOs, generous time off and parental leave, free healthcare, etc.
The power tech workers have won’t change until there is a larger supply than there is demand. At that point your union is useless since scabs will be hired globally and there’s no picket line to cross.
Tech workers however do control the means of production since their knowledge is their own property. The computer they work on is a mere commodity and irrelevant to the means of production.
Because the means of production are owned by the worker, they demand an extremely large share of the outputs in the form of paychecks many standard deviations above average labor, first class healthcare, stock grants which has made hundreds of thousands of us wealthy, and other first class benefits.
What can a union do other than lay claim to your ownership of the means of production?! You control that and a union would love to get a piece.
I'll grant that working in tech often means more control and flexibility than other professions, and the pay is usually decent. But at the end of the day, tech workers are creating value for their bosses, and the bosses are the ones who benefit and tell the workers what to do. A unionized workforce would tip the balance a little more in favor of workers (and a worker-owned cooperative would flip the script entirely). A strong union ran by the rank-and-file would be awesome for tech workers.
