4 ms·

Salaries aren't the only thing unions are good for. I'd be very interested in a job that had cast-iron guarantees about working hours, on-duty overtime, no open

by untog 8y ago

Salaries aren't the only thing unions are good for. I'd be very interested in a job that had cast-iron guarantees about working hours, on-duty overtime, no open offices, stuff like that.

soheil 8y ago
Why can you not ask for those things directly for the company you want to work for? I’m not getting my office? no thank you. I have to be on page duty in the middle of the night? No thank you. There are companies that offer all those maybe you sacrifice salary a bit. Someone has to pay the cost, I don’t think unions magically can give you the same salary or more at the same time you getting everything you wish for above. And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia.
- ahelwer 8y ago
  As someone who has pushed back against on-call overreach, all it achieved was a negative remark on my next performance review. The company attempted to make an "intermediate-severity" class of incident, where on-call workers were required to respond between the hours of 8 am and midnight (the next-lowest severity required response only during business hours, and the next-highest required 24 hour response - both reasonable if applied reasonably). Of course this new severity class was instantly abused to enact permanent crunch time. Even my humble suggestion of changing it from 9 am to 11 pm so I could have time for 8 hours of sleep with buffer time on each end was shot down. Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
  - soheil 8y ago
    > Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
    - ahelwer 8y ago
      Many workers putting their labor on the table is a much, much stronger negotiating position than a single worker putting their labor on the table. This is the entire thesis of unions.
      - soheil 8y ago
        I am asking whether it is legitimate or not, I can't help but think how incredibly well it also applies to gangs when I hear that argument. If more money is paid to individual employees just because they demanded the added cost to the employer makes them inherently less competitive and therefore able to earn less and therefore pay said employees lower wages over time or go out of business.
        ahelwer 8y ago
        It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally? The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Any money not going to the workers ought to be justified, rather than the negation. So to turn the question around: why are management & shareholders entitled to such a large share of what the workers produce? The answer is because management & shareholders are more powerful than any single worker, and this is abused to take more than their share. No moral justification is given or even considered. To unionize is to relatively equalize this power relation.
        soheil 8y ago
        > It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally? I mean is it rational. > The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Completely disagree. I believe most of the value of a company is created by the vision of its founding team and the execution of its leadership not the numerous workers along the hierarchy. I also think the 80-20 rule maybe a good way to identify how much value creation should be attributed to a group of workers ie on average most likely 80% of the value is created by 20% of workers.
- geofft 8y ago
  Leverage. As an individual, the response of the company is likely to be "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." If hundreds of people are saying the same thing, we're in a better negotiating position. It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
  - soheil 8y ago
    > "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
    - geofft 8y ago
      Capitalism is definitely working as intended; I'm not disputing that. But there are two catches: 1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that. 2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
- untog 8y ago
  > And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia. Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism? The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request. But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
  - soheil 8y ago
    > Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism? I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes. > But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.
mmmmmmmmm 8y ago
Are employees really going to strike to get out of an open plan office, though? I hate my open plan office but I would never give up even a week's salary to protest it.

by untog 8y ago

Salaries aren't the only thing unions are good for. I'd be very interested in a job that had cast-iron guarantees about working hours, on-duty overtime, no open offices, stuff like that.

soheil 8y ago

Why can you not ask for those things directly for the company you want to work for? I’m not getting my office? no thank you. I have to be on page duty in the middle of the night? No thank you. There are companies that offer all those maybe you sacrifice salary a bit. Someone has to pay the cost, I don’t think unions magically can give you the same salary or more at the same time you getting everything you wish for above. And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia.

ahelwer 8y ago
As someone who has pushed back against on-call overreach, all it achieved was a negative remark on my next performance review. The company attempted to make an "intermediate-severity" class of incident, where on-call workers were required to respond between the hours of 8 am and midnight (the next-lowest severity required response only during business hours, and the next-highest required 24 hour response - both reasonable if applied reasonably). Of course this new severity class was instantly abused to enact permanent crunch time. Even my humble suggestion of changing it from 9 am to 11 pm so I could have time for 8 hours of sleep with buffer time on each end was shot down. Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
- soheil 8y ago
  > Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
  - ahelwer 8y ago
    Many workers putting their labor on the table is a much, much stronger negotiating position than a single worker putting their labor on the table. This is the entire thesis of unions.
    - soheil 8y ago
      I am asking whether it is legitimate or not, I can't help but think how incredibly well it also applies to gangs when I hear that argument. If more money is paid to individual employees just because they demanded the added cost to the employer makes them inherently less competitive and therefore able to earn less and therefore pay said employees lower wages over time or go out of business.
      - ahelwer 8y ago
        It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally? The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Any money not going to the workers ought to be justified, rather than the negation. So to turn the question around: why are management & shareholders entitled to such a large share of what the workers produce? The answer is because management & shareholders are more powerful than any single worker, and this is abused to take more than their share. No moral justification is given or even considered. To unionize is to relatively equalize this power relation.
        soheil 8y ago
        > It would help here if you clarified what you mean by "legitimate"; do you mean morally? I mean is it rational. > The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Completely disagree. I believe most of the value of a company is created by the vision of its founding team and the execution of its leadership not the numerous workers along the hierarchy. I also think the 80-20 rule maybe a good way to identify how much value creation should be attributed to a group of workers ie on average most likely 80% of the value is created by 20% of workers.
geofft 8y ago
Leverage. As an individual, the response of the company is likely to be "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." If hundreds of people are saying the same thing, we're in a better negotiating position. It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
- soheil 8y ago
  > "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Capitalism is definitely working as intended; I'm not disputing that. But there are two catches: 1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that. 2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
untog 8y ago
> And if they do promise that maybe at best it’s their marketing PR and at worst look what communism did in Russia. Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism? The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request. But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
- soheil 8y ago
  > Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism? I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes. > But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.

mmmmmmmmm 8y ago

Are employees really going to strike to get out of an open plan office, though? I hate my open plan office but I would never give up even a week's salary to protest it.