7 ms·

I'm sympathetic to the idea, but I've also yet to encounter a decent pitch. Pitches I've heard so far: * A union could support privacy efforts * A union could

by Kalium 7y ago

I'm sympathetic to the idea, but I've also yet to encounter a decent pitch. Pitches I've heard so far: * A union could support privacy efforts * A union could support other unions * A union could advance political goals * A union could impose moral rules for projects members are allowed to work on None of these are actually reasons I'd want to sign up for an organization where the core value proposition is surrendering autonomy for collective bargaining to improve my working conditions. These are the pitches of people who want to use the political power and funds of a union for their personal political goals. I want to hear a unionization pitch that's grounded in things relevant to my work. No more overweening unions trying to do everything and sacrificing the workers, thanks. I remember Detroit.

shantly 7y ago
A union could ensure better QOL for tech workers by: 1) capturing more of the value the workers create for them, vs. for capital, in direct dollar compensation or in other benefits, by bargaining from a much stronger position than individual workers, and 2) providing easier and more even access to counsel, support, and protection against all sorts of personal and professional abuses, at work, Where #2 is a bucket that holds a whole bunch of really nice stuff, including ensuring management doesn't fail to provide what was won in #1 in lots of small ways that aren't worth fighting for an individual but are for a larger group. Basically the same core things any well-functioning union provides.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Do we live on the same planet? Tech jobs are insanely awesome compared to basically every other job out there. I've consulted for unicorns, the amenities for employees are ridiculous. Employees are incredibly sought after and can (and many do) regularly shop themselves around for better offers.
  - shantly 7y ago
    That doesn't mean there isn't more value to extract for workers—very probably there is—or more that could be done to even out availability of things like parental leave, for example, or that an easy, cheap, acceptable route to professional and legal counsel & insurances outside the direct control of the company one is working for wouldn't be very valuable—and besides, the overwhelming majority of tech jobs aren't the kind you're talking about, even restricting ourselves to the US. [EDIT] more to the point, if your company doesn't say things like "you know, this contract pays really well, no need to negotiate for more even if we think we could get it" there's no reason employees should have that kind of attitude about their pay & work conditions.
  - CharlesColeman 7y ago
    They get those amenities because the people employing them are making so much more money off of them that the cost is easy to swallow.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      So what? The existence of someone else's profit is not justification for it to be taken. The moral justification for unions is that they prevent mistreatment of employees, not that they can transfer as much of the company's profit as possible to employees.
      - shantly 7y ago
        Do you also oppose companies negotiating "unfair" contracts that extract "too much" of some other company's profit? [EDIT] I mean... wow, is it immoral if an individual negotiates with the aim to gain as much pay as possible, or only if workers band together to do so more effectively?
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        I would oppose a cartel of companies acting in a way that extracts too much money from consumers. We have a whole area of law for dealing with this. Unions are a cartel of employees who use the threat of financial harm to limit the freedom of employers and individual workers from freely entering into mutually beneficial work arrangements. I think this is justified if the purpose is to prevent employers from exploiting workers. I don't think it's justified if their sole purpose is to use power to extract more value from the employer.
        shantly 7y ago
        > Unions are a cartel of employees who use the threat of harm to limit the freedom of employers and individual workers from freely entering into mutually beneficial work arrangements. Individual workers are in a weaker negotiating position than employers, so without a union it's highly likely that, on average, they are receiving lower compensation than they might absent that weaker bargaining position (the short-version explanation being that, in the typical case, it harms an employee more to miss an opportunity than for a company to pass on an employee, simply due to the nature of the two entities). I don't see why employees being in a weak bargaining position does not cause "harm" but their banding together to be in a stronger position does, nor why, given that position, they should be expected to voluntarily make worse deals than they could. Further, we collectively choose, via government, to permit such a thing as a corporation to exist in the first place, so in my view there's no natural or moral argument for the state of their being in a better negotiating position than labor, and even if we go on to arrange things such that they are made weaker than labor, somehow—not just equal or less-dominant—it's gonna take more than the simple fact of things being that way to convince me they're being harmed in some sense that should make me feel bad for them or that some moral wrong is being committed. I don't think corporations, provided their privileges and their very existence by force of law, are being particularly harmed in some sense worthy of moral assignment by having to deal with strong collective bargaining entities for labor, nor that we can call gains in negotiations made by those labor entities unfair or immoral if they aim to gain the best deals they can without also having to label much of Capitalism as such (I might follow you down that road, actually, as I'm not sure it's wrong and it seems, at first glance, consistent, at least).
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Where does the money from to fund those amenities? The surplus generated from their wage labor. You can pay someone $300,000 a year and expect to make $400,000 from their contributions. It can absolutely be the case the workers are well treated and still be losing their surplus value.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      As I replied in another comment, the moral justification for unions is to prevent mistreatment of workers, not to transfer as much of the wealth created by a company to its employees as possible.
      - Pfhreak 7y ago
        I'm not sure who defines 'the moral justification for unions' but I see a moral justification just from balancing the power dynamic between the company and the individual worker. Negotiating as a single worker against a company one has profound disadvantages. > prevent mistreatment of workers, not to transfer as much of the wealth created by a company to its employees as possible. The wealth is created by the workers, not the company. And some would argue that keeping too large of a share of that wealth is, in fact, a mistreatment of workers.
        shantly 7y ago
        Moreover, I'm finding this notion that some economic actors have more "moral" right to a big slice of the profit-pie than others really hard to pin down. As in, it sure seems like the idea collapses as soon as you breathe in its direction, unless I'm missing something big. [EDIT] that is, I don't follow why it's fine (presumably) for companies to seek to maximize returns, negotiating as a large block of people pooling their labor and capital, but not for workers to do that.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        I own a business. I have undertaken lots of work and risk to get this business off the ground. Why should someone else, who has risked nothing, be entitled to anything other than a reasonable work environment and wages that both parties agree to if I decide to hire them?
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Things I'd consider in addition to the two excellent items you mentioned: 3) Negotiating better IP control. Side projects, open source, etc. are locked down at various companies. 4) Better treatment for oncall. I know folks who have had to work for 17 consecutive hours for an incident and got nothing. 5) Better treatment for crunch -- tech workers in games have this particularly bad, but it's not limited to just that industry. 6) Salary minimums 7) More control over how the company outsources/contracts with workers 8) All sorts of other side benefits that could be collectively funded -- union libraries, training, networks, publications, resources for new professionals, discounts on union developed software, etc. 9) Parental leave, sick time, and other basic benefits Edit: 10) Ensure and oversee processes to protect people who end up on the public stage. If you believe cancel culture is a thing, maybe having a union rep on hand and an established process for managing firings would be in your best interest. 11) Forced arbitration is another thing I'd consider talking with a union about. So many people have this notion of a labor union built on what it means in an industrial context. But there's plenty of other models that could be applied where you don't have to, for example, promote people based on seniority. I wish it was easier to talk about this stuff without people hand waving away the idea immediately.
mrobot 7y ago
Couldn't the union have some sort of democratic structure for deciding what political goals are popular and enforced? In that case it wouldn't really be any one person's political goals.
- thu2111 7y ago
  That's what a political party is. The reason these (ex) Googlers are trying to pressure Google's management to drop certain projects is because they know they can't win the argument to eliminate America's borders at the national or even state level via the normal political process. Their goals are not popular and people do not want them to be enforced, hence the dubious and unethical strategies these activists-cum-workers rely on.
  - mrobot 7y ago
    Maybe the case for many political matters but there are indeed many things which DO have broad political support that are not currently practiced by large corporations. A union might help for those cases.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      Which ones do you have in mind?
      - mrobot 7y ago
        Any abusive practices with broad aversion in population. I would have to think of all the examples. I know there are things many don't want Facebook to be doing. Someone below said this: `e.g. "want facebook to stop listening in on your conversations? FB Local 404 did that for you" or "Sick of Instacart stealing your shoppers' tips? So is the Instacart Developers' Guild" and so on.`
        thu2111 7y ago
        I don't know who Instacart are but Facebook don't listen in on your conversations, do they? WhatsApp has end to end encryption and FB Messenger is getting it. I asked for examples because this sort of wafer thin anti-corporate virtue signalling is insufficient to convince me to pick a fight with my own employer in 'solidarity'. Like most of the population I don't worry about Facebook or Google invading my privacy, instead I enjoy their free services. If they did something I really hated I'd just stop using them: there are other search engines and Facebook isn't especially critical. I already use it much less than I used to. Nothing they're doing justifies being labelled as abusive, let alone taking explicit action.
Frondo 7y ago
A union could also put an end to crunch time, a union could ensure better pay (or pay at all, to hear some salaried people talk about it) for on-call time, a union could protect politically unpopular people from arbitrary firing (i.e. they could be fired, but it would have to follow a process), a union could give workers a seat on the board (codetermination, as it's called), a union could establish a slimmer pay gap between workers and management/shareholders. A union does not mean: pay/rank based solely on seniority, that you can't plug in your own equipment on your desk, that do-nothing people stick around forever. These are a few of the popular disparagements of unions that are not a built-in function of a unionized workplace.
- Kalium 7y ago
  Better pay, better conditions, and protections against arbitrary firing are all reasonable pitches. Why has nobody I've worked with ever thought that far? Rhetorical, I suppose. Probably too many DSA meetings. Seniority pay, strict work rules, tenure, and more are all products of the incentives around contract negotiation. Those incentives can easily turn toxic. They're the results of needing to have something to bring back to the membership as a victory over Management, producing the equivalent of pork barrel spending. As you say, these are not built-in. They're just failure modes of a particular political system.
stefan_ 7y ago
You literally just need to scroll up a few lines. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our [anti-competitive, wage suppressing] policies.

by Kalium 7y ago

shantly 7y ago

A union could ensure better QOL for tech workers by: 1) capturing more of the value the workers create for them, vs. for capital, in direct dollar compensation or in other benefits, by bargaining from a much stronger position than individual workers, and 2) providing easier and more even access to counsel, support, and protection against all sorts of personal and professional abuses, at work, Where #2 is a bucket that holds a whole bunch of really nice stuff, including ensuring management doesn't fail to provide what was won in #1 in lots of small ways that aren't worth fighting for an individual but are for a larger group. Basically the same core things any well-functioning union provides.

toasterlovin 7y ago
Do we live on the same planet? Tech jobs are insanely awesome compared to basically every other job out there. I've consulted for unicorns, the amenities for employees are ridiculous. Employees are incredibly sought after and can (and many do) regularly shop themselves around for better offers.
- shantly 7y ago
  That doesn't mean there isn't more value to extract for workers—very probably there is—or more that could be done to even out availability of things like parental leave, for example, or that an easy, cheap, acceptable route to professional and legal counsel & insurances outside the direct control of the company one is working for wouldn't be very valuable—and besides, the overwhelming majority of tech jobs aren't the kind you're talking about, even restricting ourselves to the US. [EDIT] more to the point, if your company doesn't say things like "you know, this contract pays really well, no need to negotiate for more even if we think we could get it" there's no reason employees should have that kind of attitude about their pay & work conditions.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  They get those amenities because the people employing them are making so much more money off of them that the cost is easy to swallow.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    So what? The existence of someone else's profit is not justification for it to be taken. The moral justification for unions is that they prevent mistreatment of employees, not that they can transfer as much of the company's profit as possible to employees.
    - shantly 7y ago
      Do you also oppose companies negotiating "unfair" contracts that extract "too much" of some other company's profit? [EDIT] I mean... wow, is it immoral if an individual negotiates with the aim to gain as much pay as possible, or only if workers band together to do so more effectively?
      - toasterlovin 7y ago
        I would oppose a cartel of companies acting in a way that extracts too much money from consumers. We have a whole area of law for dealing with this. Unions are a cartel of employees who use the threat of financial harm to limit the freedom of employers and individual workers from freely entering into mutually beneficial work arrangements. I think this is justified if the purpose is to prevent employers from exploiting workers. I don't think it's justified if their sole purpose is to use power to extract more value from the employer.
        shantly 7y ago
        > Unions are a cartel of employees who use the threat of harm to limit the freedom of employers and individual workers from freely entering into mutually beneficial work arrangements. Individual workers are in a weaker negotiating position than employers, so without a union it's highly likely that, on average, they are receiving lower compensation than they might absent that weaker bargaining position (the short-version explanation being that, in the typical case, it harms an employee more to miss an opportunity than for a company to pass on an employee, simply due to the nature of the two entities). I don't see why employees being in a weak bargaining position does not cause "harm" but their banding together to be in a stronger position does, nor why, given that position, they should be expected to voluntarily make worse deals than they could. Further, we collectively choose, via government, to permit such a thing as a corporation to exist in the first place, so in my view there's no natural or moral argument for the state of their being in a better negotiating position than labor, and even if we go on to arrange things such that they are made weaker than labor, somehow—not just equal or less-dominant—it's gonna take more than the simple fact of things being that way to convince me they're being harmed in some sense that should make me feel bad for them or that some moral wrong is being committed. I don't think corporations, provided their privileges and their very existence by force of law, are being particularly harmed in some sense worthy of moral assignment by having to deal with strong collective bargaining entities for labor, nor that we can call gains in negotiations made by those labor entities unfair or immoral if they aim to gain the best deals they can without also having to label much of Capitalism as such (I might follow you down that road, actually, as I'm not sure it's wrong and it seems, at first glance, consistent, at least).
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Where does the money from to fund those amenities? The surplus generated from their wage labor. You can pay someone $300,000 a year and expect to make $400,000 from their contributions. It can absolutely be the case the workers are well treated and still be losing their surplus value.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    As I replied in another comment, the moral justification for unions is to prevent mistreatment of workers, not to transfer as much of the wealth created by a company to its employees as possible.
    - Pfhreak 7y ago
      I'm not sure who defines 'the moral justification for unions' but I see a moral justification just from balancing the power dynamic between the company and the individual worker. Negotiating as a single worker against a company one has profound disadvantages. > prevent mistreatment of workers, not to transfer as much of the wealth created by a company to its employees as possible. The wealth is created by the workers, not the company. And some would argue that keeping too large of a share of that wealth is, in fact, a mistreatment of workers.
      - shantly 7y ago
        Moreover, I'm finding this notion that some economic actors have more "moral" right to a big slice of the profit-pie than others really hard to pin down. As in, it sure seems like the idea collapses as soon as you breathe in its direction, unless I'm missing something big. [EDIT] that is, I don't follow why it's fine (presumably) for companies to seek to maximize returns, negotiating as a large block of people pooling their labor and capital, but not for workers to do that.
        toasterlovin 7y ago
        I own a business. I have undertaken lots of work and risk to get this business off the ground. Why should someone else, who has risked nothing, be entitled to anything other than a reasonable work environment and wages that both parties agree to if I decide to hire them?
Pfhreak 7y ago
Things I'd consider in addition to the two excellent items you mentioned: 3) Negotiating better IP control. Side projects, open source, etc. are locked down at various companies. 4) Better treatment for oncall. I know folks who have had to work for 17 consecutive hours for an incident and got nothing. 5) Better treatment for crunch -- tech workers in games have this particularly bad, but it's not limited to just that industry. 6) Salary minimums 7) More control over how the company outsources/contracts with workers 8) All sorts of other side benefits that could be collectively funded -- union libraries, training, networks, publications, resources for new professionals, discounts on union developed software, etc. 9) Parental leave, sick time, and other basic benefits Edit: 10) Ensure and oversee processes to protect people who end up on the public stage. If you believe cancel culture is a thing, maybe having a union rep on hand and an established process for managing firings would be in your best interest. 11) Forced arbitration is another thing I'd consider talking with a union about. So many people have this notion of a labor union built on what it means in an industrial context. But there's plenty of other models that could be applied where you don't have to, for example, promote people based on seniority. I wish it was easier to talk about this stuff without people hand waving away the idea immediately.

mrobot 7y ago

Couldn't the union have some sort of democratic structure for deciding what political goals are popular and enforced? In that case it wouldn't really be any one person's political goals.

thu2111 7y ago
That's what a political party is. The reason these (ex) Googlers are trying to pressure Google's management to drop certain projects is because they know they can't win the argument to eliminate America's borders at the national or even state level via the normal political process. Their goals are not popular and people do not want them to be enforced, hence the dubious and unethical strategies these activists-cum-workers rely on.
- mrobot 7y ago
  Maybe the case for many political matters but there are indeed many things which DO have broad political support that are not currently practiced by large corporations. A union might help for those cases.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Which ones do you have in mind?
    - mrobot 7y ago
      Any abusive practices with broad aversion in population. I would have to think of all the examples. I know there are things many don't want Facebook to be doing. Someone below said this: `e.g. "want facebook to stop listening in on your conversations? FB Local 404 did that for you" or "Sick of Instacart stealing your shoppers' tips? So is the Instacart Developers' Guild" and so on.`
      - thu2111 7y ago
        I don't know who Instacart are but Facebook don't listen in on your conversations, do they? WhatsApp has end to end encryption and FB Messenger is getting it. I asked for examples because this sort of wafer thin anti-corporate virtue signalling is insufficient to convince me to pick a fight with my own employer in 'solidarity'. Like most of the population I don't worry about Facebook or Google invading my privacy, instead I enjoy their free services. If they did something I really hated I'd just stop using them: there are other search engines and Facebook isn't especially critical. I already use it much less than I used to. Nothing they're doing justifies being labelled as abusive, let alone taking explicit action.

Frondo 7y ago

A union could also put an end to crunch time, a union could ensure better pay (or pay at all, to hear some salaried people talk about it) for on-call time, a union could protect politically unpopular people from arbitrary firing (i.e. they could be fired, but it would have to follow a process), a union could give workers a seat on the board (codetermination, as it's called), a union could establish a slimmer pay gap between workers and management/shareholders. A union does not mean: pay/rank based solely on seniority, that you can't plug in your own equipment on your desk, that do-nothing people stick around forever. These are a few of the popular disparagements of unions that are not a built-in function of a unionized workplace.

Kalium 7y ago
Better pay, better conditions, and protections against arbitrary firing are all reasonable pitches. Why has nobody I've worked with ever thought that far? Rhetorical, I suppose. Probably too many DSA meetings. Seniority pay, strict work rules, tenure, and more are all products of the incentives around contract negotiation. Those incentives can easily turn toxic. They're the results of needing to have something to bring back to the membership as a victory over Management, producing the equivalent of pork barrel spending. As you say, these are not built-in. They're just failure modes of a particular political system.

stefan_ 7y ago

You literally just need to scroll up a few lines. Please make a public example of this termination within the group. Please also make it a very strong part of new hire training for the group. I want it clear that we have a zero-tolerance policy for violating our [anti-competitive, wage suppressing] policies.