5 ms·
It's almost as if engineers should get together and advocate for themselves as a group.
by cbryan 11y ago
It's almost as if engineers should get together and advocate for themselves as a group.
- retbull 11y agoWhat UNION'S? Who would do that? What a crazy concept. We obviously are smarter than all of our coworkers and they will advocate for the wrong things.
- hueving 11y agoYes, unionize to sacrifice the larger population of qualified people for the gain of those lucky enough to get a union position.
- skylan_q 11y agoUnions don't confer benefits to people not in their union and actually increase costs to them by putting up barriers to entry. Nations can do the exact same thing with immigration policies with respect to citizens and non-citizens. A union in this case would benefit the majority, but at the cost of people not in the union. Tighter/more strict immigration would benefit the people in the country in terms of reducing downward wage pressure, but it would remove opportunity for people abroad/non-citizens.
- logfromblammo 11y agoSo long as you don't say the "u" word....~ A lot of specialist workers need to get together and rebuild their labor cartels. The pendulum has swung very far from center, and it needs to be pushed back a bit. As it is now, very few specialists have enough clout to arrest the current momentum, and software professionals, hardware professionals, healthcare workers, and engineers are likely the only ones that wouldn't be scoffed out of the room if they threatened a general strike. The good times should last quite a few years before the new unions become too corrupt to be worth keeping. But after that, we still might be able to keep the 6-hour workday and obligatory foos-pong tables.
- bobby_9x 11y ago"As it is now, very few specialists have enough clout to arrest the current momentum, and software professionals, hardware professionals, healthcare workers, and engineers are likely the only ones that wouldn't be scoffed out of the room if they threatened a general strike." ..and why would they strike? This group is probably in the top 10% of workers paid in the US. I find it a little strange that a group that has the most power, money, and benefits even thinks about striking.
- Apocryphon 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Actors_Guild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Actors_Guild https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_Players_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_Playe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_Players_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_Players_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Players_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Basketball_Players_As... Not to mention, unions/professional associations for doctors, lawyers, etc.
- bobby_9x 11y agoSoftware developers already have the best benefits, a union will not be an improvement.
- logfromblammo 11y agoWell, they wouldn't. Collective bargaining is dead in the US. The only ones with any real ability to reverse that are too content to use that power.
- gozur88 11y agoOr not. I certainly wouldn't want to be part of a union.
- greenyoda 11y agoI don't think that joining a union would be advantageous to me either. But the words "advocate for themselves as a group" don't necessarily imply unions or collective bargaining. It could mean forming political action groups. If big companies spend a lot of money on lobbyists to put their ideas in front of politicians, why shouldn't their employees do the same?
- gozur88 11y agoIsn't that what, say, IEEE and ACM are?
- skylan_q 11y agoI honestly don't know, but haven't they been advocating for "lowering" of borders?
- gozur88 11y agoI couldn't say. Presumably if they are that's at the behest of the members.
- greenyoda 11y agoMy impression of IEEE and ACM are that they're more oriented toward academia (e.g., publishing peer-reviewed journals) and less oriented toward the average working programmer. We might do better with an organization that's primarily focused on improving working conditions rather than propagating technical information. I think there's room for both kinds of organizations.
- whybroke 11y agoIs that because you personally have such enormous bargaining power (inspite of a flood of STEM workers)? Or is it because employers always spontaneously pay the highest wages they possibly can and never, ever treat employees unethically let alone break the law? Or is that because the current political system is so very, very good at protecting the interests of employees or because market forces do it so very, very, well?
- beatpanda 11y agoIt's almost as if the tech industry was seeded early on with a reflexive, self-destructive libertarianism that prevents them from thinking of themselves as part of a group. If you were trying to inoculate an entire industry from unionizing early on, you couldn't have done a better job.