5 ms·

If unions are a good idea, and we're all in theory smart, why aren't we unionizing more? Why is it something we allow to be set aside; the organized effort to a

If unions are a good idea, and we're all in theory smart, why aren't we unionizing more? Why is it something we allow to be set aside; the organized effort to advocate for our needs? Are unions anti-startup? are startups anti-union? or is it really just a PG ideology trickling down? What can we do to bring about unionization efforts to the industry?

adventured 9y ago
A technology worker earning $85,000 to $250,000 sees almost zero benefit from the inherent restrictions that come with union membership. It's a step down. Technology workers are overwhelmingly served by being free agents that can constantly seek out superior opportunities, as there has been significant competition for their labor going back half a century. If there were a big surplus of technology workers, or if technology workers were being substantially underpaid and seeing a dearth of benefits, then a union would/could be beneficial to that scenario. Where there's substantial labor scarcity, unionization is not only unnecessary but it's harmful (it brings with it plenty of problems and bureacracy).
- rockinghigh 9y ago
  How would a union harm employees?
  - chairmanwow 9y ago
    It would force the organization to its knees in my opinion. Unions for work in showbiz are ridiculous in that they restrict people to members of a specific union; e.g. All adjustments to an actor'a appearance must be done by the appropriate member of the cast, insofar as a sound guy couldn't brush a hair off of the shoulder of an actor. Imagine the same craziness applied to which kinds of code you would be able to work on. I don't see the need for crippling the actions that enable our employers from innovating quickly for what amounts to more beaurecracy.
    - Bahamut 9y ago
      To be fair, companies are well capable of adding extremely crippling bureaucracy to development processes without union help.
    - sitkack 9y ago
      Imagine ... is not an argument. It is fabricating a non-existent scenario. I can imagine a whole lot of things non of which factor into whether labor should collectively bargain for better conditions. This whole thread is made from 93.4% paper tigers and straw men.
      - peoplewindow 9y ago
        It is an argument and it is not a straw man, because that argument is based on historical precedent. It's simply observing what has happened repeatedly in the past and pointing out it'd likely happen again. There are no logical fallacies there - if you believe the future would be different to the past, despite implementing the same policies, it's on you to argue why.
        sitkack 9y ago
        I am not going to argue on the merits of unions based another union and industries separation of duties taken out of context. It is an argument killing trope, "look at the ridiculous separation of job responsibilities in the film unions!" OMG, What would happen if we took this to the extreme in tech? Imagine, in a world where one person types statements and another enters semicolons. If you can't solve this problem, unions are bad. It has no bearing on the validity of labor collectively bargaining for better conditions.
      - Eridrus 9y ago
        I am curious what your ideal software engineering union would look like. I'm personally quite opposed to unions since they all seem to abuse their power in the long run, but I am curious what you would want a union to do for you.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
  - nerfhammer 9y ago
    Everyone expects to change jobs every 2 years. Unions don't help you get a new job, they help you keep your old one. Changing jobs would probably be more difficult.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      If a union can work for actors (SAG-AFTRA) who often change jobs many times a year, they can work for people who only change jobs every few years. Unions don't have to be limited to a single company, they can organize across a whole industry. For example, AFL-CIO represents >12 million workers, far more than any individual company employs.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    Things unions often do, historically: • Require employees to strike even if they don't want to / can't afford to. • Prevent employees being fired, for any reason or under any circumstances. • Harass or even force non-members to join. • Get involved with extreme-left politics and use union fees to fund the union leader's own political views / ambitions, regardless of the views of the workers themselves. • Segregate workers into types, and attack the workers themselves if they do the "wrong kind" of work. The attendant removal of any flexibility cripples working speed and causes great frustration. For instance imagine being ticked off or even fined because you wrote a Docker config or created a monitoring dashboard, and that's the job of devops only, not developers. • Block any kind of labour saving automation. Imagine being told you weren't allowed to deploy a script that checked your dependencies for CVEs because that was Joe's job and he's been doing it by hand for the last six months, so he's going to keep doing it by hand for the next 10 years. Now imagine that any task that anyone ever mentions is immediately given to a human to do instead of waiting for it to be scripted, so effectively nothing can ever be automated. • Losing interest in advocating for workers rights. These examples may sound absurd but unions of all types across all industries have engaged in this kind of behaviour in the past. It's a power thing. Because unions use their power to fight the government they can often get laws passed in their favour, granting them even more power, giving them even less incentive to work for the workers instead of themselves, etc.
unethical_ban 9y ago
Because people are pussies who are afraid of risk. At the moment, I still appreciate the idea of unionizing to improve the voice of non-management in certain decisionmaking, and especially for salaried workers, I think a group mentality making sure people aren't getting abused on hours is great! But is it worth the risk to talk about it? After all, I've been told you might get fired by management! Oh my, well, I'd have to elect members, and sign papers... let's just keep working.
- dreta 9y ago
  If you’re not affraid of risk, why not start your own company.
  - unethical_ban 9y ago
    I didn't say I'm not afraid of risk. Yes, I can be self-critical!
nerfhammer 9y ago
Because you expect to have a completely different set of coworkers every 11 months and everyone dreams of running their own company.
sjg007 9y ago
Because we are not actually that smart. We are probably too smart to understand that collective bargaining looks at the survival as a group which protects it’s members. Most technologists are young and haven’t experienced hardships that would have been resolved readily by a union. These hardships include disparate health care (less likely to impact the youth), vacation time, involuntary separation, retirement etc...
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I knew a friend: pretty smart guy who was working on his masters, hated his field and decided to go to trucking. He's been in a union for decades. He talked about union vs non-union drivers. A lot of companies will tell you all this crap about how union shops pay less, lay off tons of people, etc. etc. He told me union trucking agencies do tend to lay a lot of people off after the busy seasons, but their contracts allow them to take other loads during those times, and many of them get hired right back on in a month or two. If you really compared union and non-union shops and factor in benefits and healthcare, you come out way ahead in union shops. He talked about FexEx and all the videos they put out showing they're a better company to work for and how you can go from truck driver to pilot. He told me UPS is a union shop and they spend less money on that bullshit advertising and more giving their workers benefits, better wages and hours. (FedEx is non-union and UPS is union right? I might have this backwards ..was a long time ago.. anyway...). I watched him debate with a hard core, franchise owning (he owned like 8 Jimmy John's), libertarian, anti-union guy at brunch once and they had a really good rational argument about unions.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    I agree. People need to talk to their friends in a union and ask if they regret it. My union friends have great benefits and love it.
    - peoplewindow 9y ago
      Depends if your friends are managers I guess. My father worked his way up into management in a union shop in the 70s and 80s. The union was completely insane and basically declared war on the company. It was hacking computers, stealing mail, working with the cleaners to rummage through wastebaskets looking for corporate info they could blackmail management with. And of course they kept interrupting service to the customers via strikes. The solution was simple enough in the end. The company replaced the striking workers with machines. But lots of people's lives were harried and disrupted in the intervening years.
RodericDay 9y ago
Many developers often go "Gosh, I wish I could do software the right way, securely and using the right technology, but if I say anything I will just get fired and replaced by someone else". If you had a union maybe you would feel more confident standing up to your supervisor and telling them "No I won't do this shady/immoral/incorrect thing". It's important to consider the ways in which lawyers and doctors have "professional organizations" that play one of the biggest roles unions do (gatekeeping, professional code enforcement). It's why they can sometimes say "No, I won't put profit ahead of my choosing the correct procedure".
InclinedPlane 9y ago
People don't always act in their own long-term self-interest. Also, unions have a lot of flaws that can blind people to their benefits.
dagw 9y ago
If unions are a good idea, and we're all in theory smart, why aren't we unionizing more? Because 'we' all think we're way better than the average coder. There will be winners and losers in any collective bargaining scenario, and we're all convinced that we're the special one that can get a much better deal arguing out own case. 'We' don't want to be dragged down to the median by a bunch of dead weight 'losers'.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  And if salaries are going to be dragged down to the median, then 50% of people are right to not want that.
  - dagw 9y ago
    Realistically collective bargaining leads to a dual effect of the median salary rising while at the same time more people will end up earning closer to that new median. So it's hard to put a percentage on how many will 'suffer'. But that fear of not being rewarded for your perceived potential is very real.
  - dagw 9y ago
    Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, collective bargaining is about more than just salary. Non salary aspects like paid vacation days, generous sick leave policy, paid overtime, maternity/paternity leave policy etc. etc. can also positively effect people even if their salary doesn't increase.
gaius 9y ago
Classic unions probably wouldn’t work in tech - you would never get people to accept a seniority system - but if we went for a mediaeval style guild that could work very well
dreta 9y ago
I’ll never unionise simply because I think it’s immoral to strong-arm your employer when they’re the one to take the burden, and risk of running a company, while offering me the benefits of a stable job. If you don’t like your situation, you can always leave, and find something better, or start your own business.
lolsal 9y ago
I used to own my own business - we were a small software development and consulting shop. It was much cheaper to pay some Ukrainian folks a very good hourly rate. If I commonly had to deal with unionized developers in the US it would likely not ever be worth the time or money.

adventured 9y ago

A technology worker earning $85,000 to $250,000 sees almost zero benefit from the inherent restrictions that come with union membership. It's a step down. Technology workers are overwhelmingly served by being free agents that can constantly seek out superior opportunities, as there has been significant competition for their labor going back half a century. If there were a big surplus of technology workers, or if technology workers were being substantially underpaid and seeing a dearth of benefits, then a union would/could be beneficial to that scenario. Where there's substantial labor scarcity, unionization is not only unnecessary but it's harmful (it brings with it plenty of problems and bureacracy).

rockinghigh 9y ago
How would a union harm employees?
- chairmanwow 9y ago
  It would force the organization to its knees in my opinion. Unions for work in showbiz are ridiculous in that they restrict people to members of a specific union; e.g. All adjustments to an actor'a appearance must be done by the appropriate member of the cast, insofar as a sound guy couldn't brush a hair off of the shoulder of an actor. Imagine the same craziness applied to which kinds of code you would be able to work on. I don't see the need for crippling the actions that enable our employers from innovating quickly for what amounts to more beaurecracy.
  - Bahamut 9y ago
    To be fair, companies are well capable of adding extremely crippling bureaucracy to development processes without union help.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Imagine ... is not an argument. It is fabricating a non-existent scenario. I can imagine a whole lot of things non of which factor into whether labor should collectively bargain for better conditions. This whole thread is made from 93.4% paper tigers and straw men.
    - peoplewindow 9y ago
      It is an argument and it is not a straw man, because that argument is based on historical precedent. It's simply observing what has happened repeatedly in the past and pointing out it'd likely happen again. There are no logical fallacies there - if you believe the future would be different to the past, despite implementing the same policies, it's on you to argue why.
      - sitkack 9y ago
        I am not going to argue on the merits of unions based another union and industries separation of duties taken out of context. It is an argument killing trope, "look at the ridiculous separation of job responsibilities in the film unions!" OMG, What would happen if we took this to the extreme in tech? Imagine, in a world where one person types statements and another enters semicolons. If you can't solve this problem, unions are bad. It has no bearing on the validity of labor collectively bargaining for better conditions.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      I am curious what your ideal software engineering union would look like. I'm personally quite opposed to unions since they all seem to abuse their power in the long run, but I am curious what you would want a union to do for you.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  Everyone expects to change jobs every 2 years. Unions don't help you get a new job, they help you keep your old one. Changing jobs would probably be more difficult.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    If a union can work for actors (SAG-AFTRA) who often change jobs many times a year, they can work for people who only change jobs every few years. Unions don't have to be limited to a single company, they can organize across a whole industry. For example, AFL-CIO represents >12 million workers, far more than any individual company employs.
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  Things unions often do, historically: • Require employees to strike even if they don't want to / can't afford to. • Prevent employees being fired, for any reason or under any circumstances. • Harass or even force non-members to join. • Get involved with extreme-left politics and use union fees to fund the union leader's own political views / ambitions, regardless of the views of the workers themselves. • Segregate workers into types, and attack the workers themselves if they do the "wrong kind" of work. The attendant removal of any flexibility cripples working speed and causes great frustration. For instance imagine being ticked off or even fined because you wrote a Docker config or created a monitoring dashboard, and that's the job of devops only, not developers. • Block any kind of labour saving automation. Imagine being told you weren't allowed to deploy a script that checked your dependencies for CVEs because that was Joe's job and he's been doing it by hand for the last six months, so he's going to keep doing it by hand for the next 10 years. Now imagine that any task that anyone ever mentions is immediately given to a human to do instead of waiting for it to be scripted, so effectively nothing can ever be automated. • Losing interest in advocating for workers rights. These examples may sound absurd but unions of all types across all industries have engaged in this kind of behaviour in the past. It's a power thing. Because unions use their power to fight the government they can often get laws passed in their favour, granting them even more power, giving them even less incentive to work for the workers instead of themselves, etc.

unethical_ban 9y ago

Because people are pussies who are afraid of risk. At the moment, I still appreciate the idea of unionizing to improve the voice of non-management in certain decisionmaking, and especially for salaried workers, I think a group mentality making sure people aren't getting abused on hours is great! But is it worth the risk to talk about it? After all, I've been told you might get fired by management! Oh my, well, I'd have to elect members, and sign papers... let's just keep working.

dreta 9y ago
If you’re not affraid of risk, why not start your own company.
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  I didn't say I'm not afraid of risk. Yes, I can be self-critical!

nerfhammer 9y ago

Because you expect to have a completely different set of coworkers every 11 months and everyone dreams of running their own company.

sjg007 9y ago

Because we are not actually that smart. We are probably too smart to understand that collective bargaining looks at the survival as a group which protects it’s members. Most technologists are young and haven’t experienced hardships that would have been resolved readily by a union. These hardships include disparate health care (less likely to impact the youth), vacation time, involuntary separation, retirement etc...

djsumdog 9y ago
I knew a friend: pretty smart guy who was working on his masters, hated his field and decided to go to trucking. He's been in a union for decades. He talked about union vs non-union drivers. A lot of companies will tell you all this crap about how union shops pay less, lay off tons of people, etc. etc. He told me union trucking agencies do tend to lay a lot of people off after the busy seasons, but their contracts allow them to take other loads during those times, and many of them get hired right back on in a month or two. If you really compared union and non-union shops and factor in benefits and healthcare, you come out way ahead in union shops. He talked about FexEx and all the videos they put out showing they're a better company to work for and how you can go from truck driver to pilot. He told me UPS is a union shop and they spend less money on that bullshit advertising and more giving their workers benefits, better wages and hours. (FedEx is non-union and UPS is union right? I might have this backwards ..was a long time ago.. anyway...). I watched him debate with a hard core, franchise owning (he owned like 8 Jimmy John's), libertarian, anti-union guy at brunch once and they had a really good rational argument about unions.
- sjg007 9y ago
  I agree. People need to talk to their friends in a union and ask if they regret it. My union friends have great benefits and love it.
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    Depends if your friends are managers I guess. My father worked his way up into management in a union shop in the 70s and 80s. The union was completely insane and basically declared war on the company. It was hacking computers, stealing mail, working with the cleaners to rummage through wastebaskets looking for corporate info they could blackmail management with. And of course they kept interrupting service to the customers via strikes. The solution was simple enough in the end. The company replaced the striking workers with machines. But lots of people's lives were harried and disrupted in the intervening years.

RodericDay 9y ago

Many developers often go "Gosh, I wish I could do software the right way, securely and using the right technology, but if I say anything I will just get fired and replaced by someone else". If you had a union maybe you would feel more confident standing up to your supervisor and telling them "No I won't do this shady/immoral/incorrect thing". It's important to consider the ways in which lawyers and doctors have "professional organizations" that play one of the biggest roles unions do (gatekeeping, professional code enforcement). It's why they can sometimes say "No, I won't put profit ahead of my choosing the correct procedure".

InclinedPlane 9y ago

People don't always act in their own long-term self-interest. Also, unions have a lot of flaws that can blind people to their benefits.

dagw 9y ago

If unions are a good idea, and we're all in theory smart, why aren't we unionizing more? Because 'we' all think we're way better than the average coder. There will be winners and losers in any collective bargaining scenario, and we're all convinced that we're the special one that can get a much better deal arguing out own case. 'We' don't want to be dragged down to the median by a bunch of dead weight 'losers'.

Eridrus 9y ago
And if salaries are going to be dragged down to the median, then 50% of people are right to not want that.
- dagw 9y ago
  Realistically collective bargaining leads to a dual effect of the median salary rising while at the same time more people will end up earning closer to that new median. So it's hard to put a percentage on how many will 'suffer'. But that fear of not being rewarded for your perceived potential is very real.
- dagw 9y ago
  Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, collective bargaining is about more than just salary. Non salary aspects like paid vacation days, generous sick leave policy, paid overtime, maternity/paternity leave policy etc. etc. can also positively effect people even if their salary doesn't increase.

gaius 9y ago

Classic unions probably wouldn’t work in tech - you would never get people to accept a seniority system - but if we went for a mediaeval style guild that could work very well

dreta 9y ago

I’ll never unionise simply because I think it’s immoral to strong-arm your employer when they’re the one to take the burden, and risk of running a company, while offering me the benefits of a stable job. If you don’t like your situation, you can always leave, and find something better, or start your own business.

lolsal 9y ago

I used to own my own business - we were a small software development and consulting shop. It was much cheaper to pay some Ukrainian folks a very good hourly rate. If I commonly had to deal with unionized developers in the US it would likely not ever be worth the time or money.