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How are extremely in-demand tech workers not "maintaining fair pay & benefits"? Surely if they were not being paid "fairly" (not sure what that means anyways, i

How are extremely in-demand tech workers not "maintaining fair pay & benefits"? Surely if they were not being paid "fairly" (not sure what that means anyways, if not market price) they could just leave, as there are plenty of tech jobs in NYC where Kickstarter is based.

Someone1234 7y ago
You're misquoting. I was explaining a union's purpose, I didn't claim tech workers were underpaid. Plus "fairness" could also refer to inter-employee compensation at the same company (e.g. men and women). Additionally if the union expands beyond highly compensated tech' workers (e.g. Customer Service, QA, janitorial, etc) it could help them negotiate better pay and benefits.
- jamiequint 7y ago
  Re: enforcing fairness, that argument is still asinine, if women were underpaid relative to men at the same company surely they could find many other companies willing to pay them a fair wage (and hopefully they would sue their former employer as well)
  - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
    It might behoove you to read a bit more about the well-documented nature of employment discrimination in the tech industry. Women are systematically underpaid and denied raises and promotions compared to men, which tends to make their cases weaker when going to a new company as well.
    - jamiequint 7y ago
      It might behoove you to not make baseless assumptions about other people's knowledge.
      - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        If the question about why women just don't go work at another company when they're given unequal pay was legitimate, then I think it's fair to assume there was a knowledge gap. If it was a bad faith question, of course, there's not much I can do about that!
        jamiequint 7y ago
        Unless you're wrong about the mechanics of the pay gap, which you are.
        Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        There is still a pay gap after you adjust for pregnancy, which I'm pretty sure is what you're thinking of.
        manfredo 7y ago
        It's harder to account for things like the price of benefits and measuring the amount of time spent on things like oncall. As a concrete example, when Google analyzed their wages they actually noticed that they were underpaying men.
        Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        It is illegal to discriminate on benefits coverage between women and men, so whether women are using their benefits more is wholly irrelevant. This is like saying that older people should make less because they get sick more--utter nonsense. Benefits coverage at a company is in any case designed to be pooled to reduce the risk. Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point. Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less. Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.
blackearl 7y ago
I bet a union would have been able to more quickly sniff out the Apple/Google wage fixing that was happening a few years back.

Someone1234 7y ago

You're misquoting. I was explaining a union's purpose, I didn't claim tech workers were underpaid. Plus "fairness" could also refer to inter-employee compensation at the same company (e.g. men and women). Additionally if the union expands beyond highly compensated tech' workers (e.g. Customer Service, QA, janitorial, etc) it could help them negotiate better pay and benefits.

jamiequint 7y ago
Re: enforcing fairness, that argument is still asinine, if women were underpaid relative to men at the same company surely they could find many other companies willing to pay them a fair wage (and hopefully they would sue their former employer as well)
- Jweb_Guru 7y ago
  It might behoove you to read a bit more about the well-documented nature of employment discrimination in the tech industry. Women are systematically underpaid and denied raises and promotions compared to men, which tends to make their cases weaker when going to a new company as well.
  - jamiequint 7y ago
    It might behoove you to not make baseless assumptions about other people's knowledge.
    - Jweb_Guru 7y ago
      If the question about why women just don't go work at another company when they're given unequal pay was legitimate, then I think it's fair to assume there was a knowledge gap. If it was a bad faith question, of course, there's not much I can do about that!
      - jamiequint 7y ago
        Unless you're wrong about the mechanics of the pay gap, which you are.
        Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        There is still a pay gap after you adjust for pregnancy, which I'm pretty sure is what you're thinking of.
        manfredo 7y ago
        It's harder to account for things like the price of benefits and measuring the amount of time spent on things like oncall. As a concrete example, when Google analyzed their wages they actually noticed that they were underpaying men.
        Jweb_Guru 7y ago
        It is illegal to discriminate on benefits coverage between women and men, so whether women are using their benefits more is wholly irrelevant. This is like saying that older people should make less because they get sick more--utter nonsense. Benefits coverage at a company is in any case designed to be pooled to reduce the risk. Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point. Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less. Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.

blackearl 7y ago

I bet a union would have been able to more quickly sniff out the Apple/Google wage fixing that was happening a few years back.