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No we don’t. We are probably the most privileged workers in the world. If we are mistreated, we can quit and get another job down the street, likely with a rais

No we don’t. We are probably the most privileged workers in the world. If we are mistreated, we can quit and get another job down the street, likely with a raise. It’s not worth trading for all the bullshit that comes along with unions.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
debt 7y ago
You’re saying that now when times are good. Ain’t gonna be this way forever.
HarryHirsch 7y ago
If we are mistreated, we can quit and get another job down the street, likely with a raise This isn't the case, the wage-fixing cartel that Google was part of is proof.
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  That’s already illegal without unions, so it’s not something that unionizing would fix.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    It's something that a union would notice and blow the whistle on much sooner than individual employees talking to each other.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    When it comes to large corporations the law has no teeth. Organized labour is a different way of power, at least it can't lead to worse outcomes.
    - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
      Both the DOJ antitrust action under the Sherman act as well as the civil class action prevailed in the tech workers wages case, so that seems to indicate ample teeth on that particular issue. And they didn’t even require union dues to fund another giant political bureaucracy, deducted from all of our paychecks in perpetuity, to do it. Also, organized labor only gains it’s power through contract law and state law (especially in non-right-to-work states, where it’s illegal to opt out of a union and cross the picket line), so this argument doesn’t really work.
      - gamblor956 7y ago
        Unions get most of their power from their ability to organize mass collective action. Their leverage in contract negotiations comes entirely from their ability to organize mass action. Their rights under state law are derived entirely from their political power arising from their ability to organize mass action. And notably, with respect to the SV anti poaching case: the companies won that case because they ended up paying only a few thousand dollars to each affected worker instead of the hundreds of thousands per employee they would have owed if the case hadn't settled for pennies on the dollar. A union absolutely would have protected its employees from being exploited so badly. (And note--unions can be organized to respect individual bargaining power, like they are with the SAG, where they set minimum pay scales and benefits but not maximums.)
mrobot 7y ago
As others are stating, there is more to unions than pay and working conditions, so being privileged doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. What bullshit do you foresee?
elicash 7y ago
Some issues are across the industry. In a union, you get to decide what you and your coworkers want to bargain about. It's just organizing coworkers so you have a bigger ability to change things than you'd have all alone.
odiroot 7y ago
That's the same mentality that longshoremen had before the shipping container and coal miners had before we started importing cheap coal from the East and switching to green energy.
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  A union would not have solved that. Instead, it would likely accelerate it, like it has with the UAW. Unions don’t fix the economics of globalization. Plus, I am not concerned that something similar will happen anyway.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- macinjosh 7y ago
  So a union's purpose is to stop any human progress because it might temporarily inconvenience a subset of the population? I am told a switch to green energy is necessary to save the climate. Shipping containers enabled affordable products to be sold globally which has improved the standard of living for many. Should we ban modern modes of transport so all the horse drawn carriage factory employees can get their jobs back?
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    That's an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the utility of unions. Yes, unions add some friction to an overnight change that is made by grinding up the futures and fates of a company's workforce. That doesn't need to mean it "stops all human progress," for example, it can manifest instead as a requirement that company switching to green energy take a chunk of the money from efficiency gains to give their coal miners comfortable retirements.
jahaja 7y ago
If the mistreatment is for example regarding an individual's behaviour, usually some manager, it's much better to talk to a union rep than HR for obvious reasons.
coldcode 7y ago
Unions as an abstract idea are valuable; however the implementation is often a nightmare of protectionism. Also unions value conformity which is not exactly a programmer strong suit. Imagine the horrible processes you are stuck in today and double or triple them. I have worked in union places with reasonable interactions between management and labor and places where you were required to negotiate with 4 unions to move a box from one cube to another. Programmers also tend to be idealistic and unions are often hard core realists which might wind up disappointing to work for. I am not convinced any existing union would be able to represent a large group of programmers as opposed to a large group of longshoreman without the programmers jumping ship.
commandlinefan 7y ago
Doctors, lawyers and actors all have unions, and their ranks include higher paid, more privileged workers than most tech folks could dream of.
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  SAG doesn’t exist for the movie stars. It’s for the nobodies and the up-and-comers to avoid getting screwed by excessive unpaid work for “exposure” or who get squeezed into long term contracts before they have star power. I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    SAG protections also benefit movie stars. It was created by a group of stars to challenge the enormous commercial leverage of the studios back in the "studio system" era of Hollywood. Stars have surprisingly little leverage against studios. Only a few actors can consistently sell a movie regardless of quality--currently, only Dwayne Johnson and Tom Cruise. When stars have leverage in negotiations, it's generally because other putative participants (usually investors or producers) have hinged their participation on the participation of one or more specific actors. I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers. Almost all public sector lawyers belong to a union. This includes those working for the county, state, and federal governments in a legal capacity, as well as those working at most major cities. The same is generally true of doctors working for the public sector. Notably, in contrast to the legal field, there are a number of doctors unions for doctors employed by private sector employers.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Doctors and lawyers have professional organizations that rate limit entry to their field that functions as a qausi-union in some respects but really doesn't do any collective bargaining with employers. Actors have a union.
  - 7y ago
Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
That abundance of software jobs might be the case in SV, but definitely not in other places of the world.
ixwt 7y ago
I've heard some horror stories from the video game industry. They're probably one of the tech industries that could benefit greatly from unionization.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Counterpoint: if even the most privileged workers in the world are unionized, it's a strong signal that unionization should be for everybody who is employed by a boss.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  Why are you starting your argument with the assumption that unions are good for everyone? That's a very strong statement without any qualifications behind it. I think unions historically have sometimes been great, and sometimes horrible. Two examples of unions actually making the world a worse place are the police unions and the teachers' unions in the United States. If you wonder why we can't fix police corruption, it's because the union protects them - so you can't have both. If you wonder why we can't fix education, it's because the union actively defends teachers that are demonstrably bad for learning (and have visible apathy to the point of sleeping in class while "teaching" students) - so you can't have both. There's more to the world than worker's rights.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrobot 7y ago
    Police aren't workers, they are something entirely different since they would participate in anti-union activity. What is wrong with teacher's unions?
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      I don't know how you can say police aren't workers - they absolutely are. People are police for their jobs. The teacher's unions protect teachers at the expense of students. Basically the union doesn't care - at all - about teaching students (it's for the teachers, after all). They only care about stopping teachers from getting fired. It's our youth that suffer from receiving a shitty education. The assumption that "the teacher is always right" is profoundly damaging to our youth. The decline of the American education system (below college) is well studied. https://hechingerreport.org/third-indication-u-s-educational-system-deteriorating/ https://hechingerreport.org/third-indication-u-s-educational... Just to throw out a counterpoint, there are some who feel the education system is not declining, although I disagree. I encourage you to come to your own conclusions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/10/15/how-are-americas-public-schools-really-doing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/10/15/how-are-... There's a movie about it if you want to watch it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/ Yes, it's a documentary with an angle, but there's enough information in there to convince me.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

debt 7y ago

You’re saying that now when times are good. Ain’t gonna be this way forever.

HarryHirsch 7y ago

If we are mistreated, we can quit and get another job down the street, likely with a raise This isn't the case, the wage-fixing cartel that Google was part of is proof.

lawnchair_larry 7y ago
That’s already illegal without unions, so it’s not something that unionizing would fix.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  It's something that a union would notice and blow the whistle on much sooner than individual employees talking to each other.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  When it comes to large corporations the law has no teeth. Organized labour is a different way of power, at least it can't lead to worse outcomes.
  - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
    Both the DOJ antitrust action under the Sherman act as well as the civil class action prevailed in the tech workers wages case, so that seems to indicate ample teeth on that particular issue. And they didn’t even require union dues to fund another giant political bureaucracy, deducted from all of our paychecks in perpetuity, to do it. Also, organized labor only gains it’s power through contract law and state law (especially in non-right-to-work states, where it’s illegal to opt out of a union and cross the picket line), so this argument doesn’t really work.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      Unions get most of their power from their ability to organize mass collective action. Their leverage in contract negotiations comes entirely from their ability to organize mass action. Their rights under state law are derived entirely from their political power arising from their ability to organize mass action. And notably, with respect to the SV anti poaching case: the companies won that case because they ended up paying only a few thousand dollars to each affected worker instead of the hundreds of thousands per employee they would have owed if the case hadn't settled for pennies on the dollar. A union absolutely would have protected its employees from being exploited so badly. (And note--unions can be organized to respect individual bargaining power, like they are with the SAG, where they set minimum pay scales and benefits but not maximums.)

mrobot 7y ago

As others are stating, there is more to unions than pay and working conditions, so being privileged doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. What bullshit do you foresee?

elicash 7y ago

Some issues are across the industry. In a union, you get to decide what you and your coworkers want to bargain about. It's just organizing coworkers so you have a bigger ability to change things than you'd have all alone.

odiroot 7y ago

That's the same mentality that longshoremen had before the shipping container and coal miners had before we started importing cheap coal from the East and switching to green energy.

lawnchair_larry 7y ago
A union would not have solved that. Instead, it would likely accelerate it, like it has with the UAW. Unions don’t fix the economics of globalization. Plus, I am not concerned that something similar will happen anyway.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
macinjosh 7y ago
So a union's purpose is to stop any human progress because it might temporarily inconvenience a subset of the population? I am told a switch to green energy is necessary to save the climate. Shipping containers enabled affordable products to be sold globally which has improved the standard of living for many. Should we ban modern modes of transport so all the horse drawn carriage factory employees can get their jobs back?
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  That's an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the utility of unions. Yes, unions add some friction to an overnight change that is made by grinding up the futures and fates of a company's workforce. That doesn't need to mean it "stops all human progress," for example, it can manifest instead as a requirement that company switching to green energy take a chunk of the money from efficiency gains to give their coal miners comfortable retirements.

jahaja 7y ago

If the mistreatment is for example regarding an individual's behaviour, usually some manager, it's much better to talk to a union rep than HR for obvious reasons.

coldcode 7y ago

Unions as an abstract idea are valuable; however the implementation is often a nightmare of protectionism. Also unions value conformity which is not exactly a programmer strong suit. Imagine the horrible processes you are stuck in today and double or triple them. I have worked in union places with reasonable interactions between management and labor and places where you were required to negotiate with 4 unions to move a box from one cube to another. Programmers also tend to be idealistic and unions are often hard core realists which might wind up disappointing to work for. I am not convinced any existing union would be able to represent a large group of programmers as opposed to a large group of longshoreman without the programmers jumping ship.

commandlinefan 7y ago

Doctors, lawyers and actors all have unions, and their ranks include higher paid, more privileged workers than most tech folks could dream of.

lawnchair_larry 7y ago
SAG doesn’t exist for the movie stars. It’s for the nobodies and the up-and-comers to avoid getting screwed by excessive unpaid work for “exposure” or who get squeezed into long term contracts before they have star power. I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  SAG protections also benefit movie stars. It was created by a group of stars to challenge the enormous commercial leverage of the studios back in the "studio system" era of Hollywood. Stars have surprisingly little leverage against studios. Only a few actors can consistently sell a movie regardless of quality--currently, only Dwayne Johnson and Tom Cruise. When stars have leverage in negotiations, it's generally because other putative participants (usually investors or producers) have hinged their participation on the participation of one or more specific actors. I’d like to see stats on union participation among doctors and lawyers. I’d bet it’s vanishingly small, especially for lawyers. Almost all public sector lawyers belong to a union. This includes those working for the county, state, and federal governments in a legal capacity, as well as those working at most major cities. The same is generally true of doctors working for the public sector. Notably, in contrast to the legal field, there are a number of doctors unions for doctors employed by private sector employers.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Doctors and lawyers have professional organizations that rate limit entry to their field that functions as a qausi-union in some respects but really doesn't do any collective bargaining with employers. Actors have a union.
- 7y ago

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago

That abundance of software jobs might be the case in SV, but definitely not in other places of the world.

ixwt 7y ago

I've heard some horror stories from the video game industry. They're probably one of the tech industries that could benefit greatly from unionization.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Counterpoint: if even the most privileged workers in the world are unionized, it's a strong signal that unionization should be for everybody who is employed by a boss.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
Why are you starting your argument with the assumption that unions are good for everyone? That's a very strong statement without any qualifications behind it. I think unions historically have sometimes been great, and sometimes horrible. Two examples of unions actually making the world a worse place are the police unions and the teachers' unions in the United States. If you wonder why we can't fix police corruption, it's because the union protects them - so you can't have both. If you wonder why we can't fix education, it's because the union actively defends teachers that are demonstrably bad for learning (and have visible apathy to the point of sleeping in class while "teaching" students) - so you can't have both. There's more to the world than worker's rights.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mrobot 7y ago
  Police aren't workers, they are something entirely different since they would participate in anti-union activity. What is wrong with teacher's unions?
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    I don't know how you can say police aren't workers - they absolutely are. People are police for their jobs. The teacher's unions protect teachers at the expense of students. Basically the union doesn't care - at all - about teaching students (it's for the teachers, after all). They only care about stopping teachers from getting fired. It's our youth that suffer from receiving a shitty education. The assumption that "the teacher is always right" is profoundly damaging to our youth. The decline of the American education system (below college) is well studied. https://hechingerreport.org/third-indication-u-s-educational-system-deteriorating/ https://hechingerreport.org/third-indication-u-s-educational... Just to throw out a counterpoint, there are some who feel the education system is not declining, although I disagree. I encourage you to come to your own conclusions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/10/15/how-are-americas-public-schools-really-doing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/10/15/how-are-... There's a movie about it if you want to watch it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/ Yes, it's a documentary with an angle, but there's enough information in there to convince me.