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There is a well-known strategy by which employees can exert influence over their employer and change the decisions it makes. It is called a union. Unionization
by nrook 7y ago
There is a well-known strategy by which employees can exert influence over their employer and change the decisions it makes. It is called a union. Unionization has been slow for various reasons in the tech sector; when it comes to rich, well-known companies, people don't want to go through the effort to unionize and get more money when they already are being paid a lot. But if workers want to influence decisions like these, they're going to have to organize.
- xeromal 7y agoPeople complain when they're unhappy and most tech people are happy enough to not complain. That's how revolutions work on a micro and macro scale.
- godzillabrennus 7y agoUnions have historically tended to reward seniority over merit. Tech workers should work to solve that if they organize. I think a lot of problems caused by unions trace back to that. Unions should come back to help recreate the middle class.
- CydeWeys 7y agoIt's not clear to me why tech unions would do this. People keep bringing this up, but there's no reason tech unions would ever have to be structured in this particular manner. Given that, I don't find it a compelling argument against unionization in our sector. Most importantly, of all the people who are working on organizing the tech sector, to my knowledge none of them are trying to implement tenure-based seniority or pay scales.
- killface 7y agoEvery developer thinks their salary will be dragged down to "the average" -- aka they think they're all above-average. Libertarianism was the cancer of our generation.
- shados 7y agoThere's no reason they have to be structured this way, but unions usually work through voting, and the tech sector has a LOT of pretty shitty people coasting, and they'll get a vote that's worth the same as anyone else's. They'll vote to protect their coasting.
- wvenable 7y ago> It's not clear to me why tech unions would do this. As soon as you have a union, you have 2 groups. People are who are in the union and people who are not. Tenure-based seniority obviously benefits people who are in the union to the determent of those not yet part of the union. It's probably a solvable problem but I think it's pretty obvious why most unions end up with seniority-based policies; It's the natural consequence of a democratic organization.
- catalogia 7y agoI think, at least traditionally, unions have tended to reward seniority over merit because seniority is something that can be tracked with relative objectivity, while merit is something a bit slippery to nail down. Of course the business owner has strong opinions on what constitutes employee merit. To the business owner, the merit of an employee is largely a proxy for whatever is profitable for the business. That's fine for the business, but if the union uses that same metric as merit, they'd become little more than a proxy for the intention of the business owners. For a union to be merit-based rather than seniority-based, they'd need to find a measure of merit that was in the interest of the workers, not the business.
- pas 7y agoThe job of the union is to take the business interests and then keeping that as a constraint, maximizing labor's share of income. This usually directly means having the right people in the right places, to do an effective job, so there's not much time wasted. (Which is their time.) And so on. Unions shouldn't try to keep everyone on board, they should simply counteract shareholder pressure to keep labor costs down. Of course, the union should help members to retrain and then should help those members to find their place where they can contribute value. Of course, the union can and should represent the political values of its members.
- detcader 7y agoAre GitHub's decisions being made by AI robots that only respond to purely quantitative monetary incentives? It's real people on the other side of the issue. I don't see how sending letters and working with the press is worthless...
- jcampbell1 7y agoUnions are majority rule democratic. When I worked at a plant for one of the big 3, the candidates the union submitted for trades promotions were universally white men. The union didn’t look out for women or minorities particularly well because the majority rules. People assume a tech union will lead to things being somehow more just, but be careful for what you wish for. James Damore might just have the votes.
- tomohawk 7y agoDid they do secret ballots, or did they do public votes like voice or card check?
- jcampbell1 7y agoInternal union elections were secret ballot.
- walshemj 7y agoWhat is a trades promotions - is this jargon for the executive ?
- jcampbell1 7y agoNo, going from an assembly worker to a skilled trade like an electrician fixing robots. Compensation roughly doubles.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gok 7y agoHm so you think a GitHub union would be less likely to work with a unionized government agency?
- ken 7y agoYes. Organizing doesn't mean you fire everybody and hire new pro-union workers. It's the same people. They're just given a more direct power structure for dealing with management. When you take people who are already vocally upset with the company's ICE contracts, and give them negotiating power with management, you're not going to suddenly see them turn pro-ICE just because they have a union and ICE also has a union. That makes no sense.
- gok 7y agoWhy do you think no major union is boycotting ICE?
- thundergolfer 7y agoI hope in future engineers aren't reflexively thinking "compensation" and "promotions" when it comes to Unions. What's happening with Github here is clearly a labor power vs capital+management power problem. It's the same thing with the Google sexual harassment problem and the Facebook disinformation problem. Without organised labor power, the employees are realising they've had to sell out their values for a wage.