3 ms·

>>1) Payscale I don't get how this is a "con" of working for a hypothetical union. Why couldn't a collective bargaining agreement create better wages? Why coul

by moate 7y ago

>>1) Payscale I don't get how this is a "con" of working for a hypothetical union. Why couldn't a collective bargaining agreement create better wages? Why couldn't a union help prevent a sudden layoff in the first place? >>2) Demand Some professional skills are currently in demand, which currently makes changing employers easier. Again, saying "Well if my job sucks, I can just go get a different job" might be true today, but it might not be as easy tomorrow. Also, this isn't a "con" but an alternative solution to the same problem a union would solve. If your job is enjoyable and paying you well (ideally what the union should be doing) then why do you need to change jobs? >>Upward and lateral mobility -- In a union shop, mobility is often rigidly defined by seniority There's no reason for this to be needed. You can make a union without this problem. NFL players don't make more money because they're older, they make more money because they provide more value to their teams. They're also in a union. Bad unions exist. Good unions also exist. Why not just say "if we're going to make a tech sector union, we need to make it a good union that meets most people's needs" instead of saying "some unions can be bad, so never make a union"?

derekp7 7y ago
Payscale is a pro for unions where the labor is fairly uniform. It is a con in professions where an individual can get much higher salary by providing much higher value to the employer than his/her peers. Example: if I was in a union shop, and I consistently found ways to optimize the machine I'm working on to decrease defects and increase output, that is a benefit to my employer. But my employer may not be allowed to give me a promotion for that work, because I've only been there for 2 years, whereas another employee who just does the minimum necessary work and has been there 10 years will get the promotion instead of me. Whereas when I do this as a Unix/Linux systems engineer, I get constantly rewarded. Or I build up my track record and take those skills to a higher paying employer. And yes, good and bad unions exist. It is quite possible that bad unions tend to form around certain types of professions (factory machine operator, teachers unions, etc). Whereas actors, sports teams, etc. have more in common with high tech workers (individual contributions can have outsized impact), so it is possible that a "good" union would form around the tech industry. Personally, I'd like to see something more like a trade guild, which sets a base set of guidelines that their members have to follow, and also minimal acceptable standards that employers would need to follow in order to be able to higher quality workers from the guild. The benefit to the employer is that the guild would basically give them workers that are of at least a known minimum skill level for a given position.
- moate 7y ago
  Here's the thing about payscale: Mathmatically speaking, you're probably not exceptional. That's just how statistics work. Most people are going to be somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Yes, there is a minority on either end who are being held back or lifted up by this, but that's just not how these things work. I think that devs are frequently on the higher side of intelligence relative to the population at large and therefor think they're exceptional. Pay scales smooth things out across the company but you could look at it as a greater good as it guarantees a greater benefit to those starting out who are making the least. Even if greed is your sole motivation, the assumption that a meritocracy will exist and you will be rewarded for your hard and above average work isn't always the case. The general idea is that there is always an inherent imbalance between an individual employee and their employer after an organization reaches a certain size (I don't think unions really need to exist in <10 employee situations). As organizations get larger, the loss of a single employee gets less and less painful to the company while staying the same for the employee. To counter the imbalance collective bargaining serves as a maximize the pain on employers for performing actions against their labor. Let's just clear something else up: "Guild" and "Union" do have specific structural nuances, but are also both used to generally describe "labor collectives/organized labor". You say you want a trade guild but think a union is potentially problematic. I say they're basically the same thing. This is a semantics discussion about how best to organize and structure your labor collective.

by moate 7y ago

derekp7 7y ago

Payscale is a pro for unions where the labor is fairly uniform. It is a con in professions where an individual can get much higher salary by providing much higher value to the employer than his/her peers. Example: if I was in a union shop, and I consistently found ways to optimize the machine I'm working on to decrease defects and increase output, that is a benefit to my employer. But my employer may not be allowed to give me a promotion for that work, because I've only been there for 2 years, whereas another employee who just does the minimum necessary work and has been there 10 years will get the promotion instead of me. Whereas when I do this as a Unix/Linux systems engineer, I get constantly rewarded. Or I build up my track record and take those skills to a higher paying employer. And yes, good and bad unions exist. It is quite possible that bad unions tend to form around certain types of professions (factory machine operator, teachers unions, etc). Whereas actors, sports teams, etc. have more in common with high tech workers (individual contributions can have outsized impact), so it is possible that a "good" union would form around the tech industry. Personally, I'd like to see something more like a trade guild, which sets a base set of guidelines that their members have to follow, and also minimal acceptable standards that employers would need to follow in order to be able to higher quality workers from the guild. The benefit to the employer is that the guild would basically give them workers that are of at least a known minimum skill level for a given position.

moate 7y ago
Here's the thing about payscale: Mathmatically speaking, you're probably not exceptional. That's just how statistics work. Most people are going to be somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Yes, there is a minority on either end who are being held back or lifted up by this, but that's just not how these things work. I think that devs are frequently on the higher side of intelligence relative to the population at large and therefor think they're exceptional. Pay scales smooth things out across the company but you could look at it as a greater good as it guarantees a greater benefit to those starting out who are making the least. Even if greed is your sole motivation, the assumption that a meritocracy will exist and you will be rewarded for your hard and above average work isn't always the case. The general idea is that there is always an inherent imbalance between an individual employee and their employer after an organization reaches a certain size (I don't think unions really need to exist in <10 employee situations). As organizations get larger, the loss of a single employee gets less and less painful to the company while staying the same for the employee. To counter the imbalance collective bargaining serves as a maximize the pain on employers for performing actions against their labor. Let's just clear something else up: "Guild" and "Union" do have specific structural nuances, but are also both used to generally describe "labor collectives/organized labor". You say you want a trade guild but think a union is potentially problematic. I say they're basically the same thing. This is a semantics discussion about how best to organize and structure your labor collective.