14 ms·

I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern. Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45

• notkaiho 7y ago
  You worked in a union shop once. Not necessarily a representative unionised workplace, just the one you were in. Yet 'in your experience' they are not optimal.
  • nosefrog 7y ago
    Why don’t you contribute to the conversation by talking about your own experience with unions?
    • notkaiho 7y ago
      Because my experience with unions is along the lines of the other far-downvoted comments in this thread, i.e. positive ;)
    • jdkee 7y ago
      I’ll bite. My colleagues and I ran a IBEW union shop for about a dozen years up through the dot-com bust. We had over 150 union electricians building out data centers, running fiber optics along railroad tracks, installing low-voltage datacom, etc. We had a few electricians from the local pool who: 1. Would not show up on time. 2. Did sloppy work. 3. Lied about their work hours on timesheets. 4. Refused to stay updated on building codes, technology changes, fire protection codes. 5. Were rude to customers. And we would fire them for cause and they would show up in our shop a year later as it was their turn to be rotated through again. That said, the union gave us flexibility to scale up or down our workforce as needed to meet project deadlines. And provided us with trained, skilled and motivated workers. YMMV.
      • Frondo 7y ago
        I can't get too worked up that there are some bad electricians (and I'm imagining that this is true for any field) who are also union members. My brother in law's a solo residential electrician who occasionally does a little commercial work. Been doing this for 20+ years. He works hard to keep up with codes, always spends the time on the job to do the work to good standards, etc. His observation is probably 80% of the homes he's come into, whether done by the homeowner or by a previous electrician, the work is shoddy to the point of being dangerous. I'm honestly not at all surprised if there are bad union electricians, it seems like there are a LOT of bad electricians out there. Sucks that they're rotating through the union hiring pool, though. I'm sure that was super frustrating.
    • wanderingjew 7y ago
      While not the grandparent post, I can add some of my own experiences with unions: Once, when workers in Chicago supported a general strike in support of an eight-hour workday, police shot and killed a number of workers. [1]. Someone threw dynamite into a crowd. A lot of people died, but we got that eight hour workday. Another time, workers protested for higher wages, but the company owners hired private security and killed a hundred workers. The army was called in, and private planes hired by the company dropped bombs on the workers [2]. And who can forget the time the richest man on Earth hired private security as strikebreakers after a collective bargaining agreement failed? [3]? Interestingly, these workers were already part of a union, but the owner unilaterally withdrew recognition of the union. A few people died (private security...), and the collective bargaining agreement ultimately failed. I suggest you make yourself aware of the trials unions have been through over the past two hundred years. Capital will always repress labor by any means necessary, and parroting the lines given to you by capital is implicit support. This makes you a de facto class traitor. United Bootlickers isn't a union, and even if they were, the benefits wouldn't be that great. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
      • lawnchair_larry 7y ago
        Great, what does that have to do with the tech industry And please take inflammatory terms like “bootlicker” to your antifa meetup. We are adults.
      • rukittenme 7y ago
        I mean this as politely as it can be meant. And, I'm not contributing this point to make a jab at you or your political ideology. I think you need to seek professional medical help. You're contributing "personal experiences" from 150 years ago. You're hand-waving domestic terrorism because it achieved a political end you agree with. You're accusing people of being "traitors" (a capital offense) for acknowledging the negative aspects of the union they were a member of. At some point, you have spiraled out of control. You need to seek help. This is not a normal way to communicate with people.
    • ilikehurdles 7y ago
      OK. My wife's medical workers union won her 5 weeks of vacation, free health insurance, someone advocating for reasonable hours who she could report abuses to without fear of repercussion, healthy food in the cafeteria, oh and she got a stipend to buy whatever computing devices she wanted. No one locked away her monitor cable or prevented her from working for a week so they could plug in a power strip. No armed union rep came to her door to force her to sign the paperwork or hand over the fees. Her union fees were like a couple hundred bucks a year or something, but her pay in that position was also higher than it would have been at any other hospital in the region.
• crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  You Do know that there's more than 1 way to set up a union, right? There are such things as professional unions (think old European guilds) that also enforce competency and much more.
  • wellthisisgreat 7y ago
    somehow I seriously doubt the people from that article will add any competency laws or requirements to the workers to their union at all.
• claudeganon 7y ago
  That's a cool anecdote. Meanwhile, unions across Europe won massive increases in standards of living for all workers, from better leave, healthcare, safety protections, to even blocking the wealthy from having control over their democracies through militant, labor-backed political parties.
  • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    I'm not sure that last part is really a recommendation. What if I don't agree with the political positions of my union's leadership?
    • dsr_ 7y ago
      Then you vote to change the positions, and if necessary the leadership. When you work for a contractor working for a corporation, you work for the contractor. When you work for a union working for a corporation, you work for the union. The difference is that the contractor isn't even notionally on your side, and the union is, at least in theory.
      • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        I wouldn't work for a corporation that organized "militant, corporate-backed political parties" either.
        • claudeganon 7y ago
          Then your probably going to have to work for yourself, if you’re in the US anyway. Even small companies do this through the US Chamber of Commerce.
• nradov 7y ago
  A friend of mine worked as a developer at defense contractor with mostly union employees. One time they moved him to a different cubicle. Due to union work rules he literally had to wait two days for a union electrician to come by and plug his desktop computer into the wall socket. Just ridiculous.
  • duxup 7y ago
    Personally I had to wait a week to move desks until an electrician carried my desktop two desks over. He didn't move my monitor ... that wasn't included in the rules.
  • jtbayly 7y ago
    I ran into this sometimes when I worked conferences. We weren’t allowed to plug in our equipment, though we had paid for a power drop and it was sitting there. Of course, nobody was there to do it, so I would just plug it in. If they want to come by later and unplug it and plug it back in, they can feel free.
  • dd36 7y ago
    I had same issue at a large investment bank. I don’t blame the union so much as the negotiated rules. De minimis items shouldn’t need union unless there’s a safety or liability issue.
  • kstrauser 7y ago
    I've personally seen this exact same thing. I was raised pro-union. I'm still very pro-union. Stuff like this is just batty, though.
  • zipwitch 7y ago
    Was that "union rules" or "the way the company had agreed to comply with their agreement with the union"? Because 'work to rule' can be a double-edged sword, and in my experience companies just love to blame their own chosen behavior on the union. "We have to fire you if you're late five times this quarter, because the union" really means "after we frequently and arbitrarily abused employees under the excuse of 'attendance' the union insisted we have a uniform attendance standards and this is what we came up with".
• mason55 7y ago
  > Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison. There is nothing inherent in unions that make them operate like that.
  • joncrane 7y ago
    It's something inherent in human nature, unfortunately.
    • jrochkind1 7y ago
      There are ALL SORTS of inefficiencies and insanity and laziness and treating people like garbage most of us have experienced at non-union workplaces, of course. That union shops may seem to be subject to extra risks of of certain types of nonsense doesn't mean they aren't a win overall. But yeah, to be honest, some people with unions find they need to struggle with union leadership over some things. It's generally a lot better overall than struggling with your boss.
    • Mangalor 7y ago
      A union is simply an agreement between workers and management. Agreements can be modified to prevent such faults when both parties enter in good faith.
  • zip1234 7y ago
    I had a uncle that was a bricklayer and moved somewhere that bricklayers were in demand so that he could get paid more. He was not a union member. When the union found out he was doing the same work for slightly less, they sent some people over to threaten his life if he didn't join union or leave. He left.
    • WilliamEdward 7y ago
      What's with the anecdotes on this thread? The OP was trying to make substantive statements about unions in general and why anecdotes are ineffective in describing them, and your counter was to provide yet another anecdote?
• jdkee 7y ago
  Millions of people across the U.S. benefit from collective bargaining, such as increased wages, health benefits and retirement security, yet one anecdotal off-topic post gets upvoted.
  • azinman2 7y ago
    Probably because it resonates as a real problem despite the upsides.
    • dd36 7y ago
      An easily solved problem.
      • rukittenme 7y ago
        Please solve it then. Start with AT&T's union. I await your results.
        • dd36 7y ago
          The employees can request it be fixed in the next contract. Of all things though, I'm not sure that it's worth the effort relative to other things.
          • rukittenme 7y ago
            > Of all things though, I'm not sure that it's worth the effort relative to other things. So its not easily solved...
    • Apocryphon 7y ago
      Or perhaps it reinforces preconceived notions?
      • azinman2 7y ago
        It matches my own experience and anecdotes that others have told me from their experiences. I don’t think it’ll be hard to find similar stories out there...
• dubcanada 7y ago
  This is a very strangely specific comment. I am not saying if I agree or disagree, it just seems that you had a rather specific instance. Unions don't mean anything you said above, all a union does is have a strong-arm against the "company". And gives the company a way of communicating with everyone. Unions don't make rules like what you experienced, a large amount of unneeded employees with nothing to do convince unions to do that.
  • jcims 7y ago
    This is an extremely common pattern with union practices in the US. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22that%27s+not+your+job%22+union https://www.google.com/search?q=%22that%27s+not+your+job%22+...
    • Goronmon 7y ago
      The search results I'm seeing for that don't seem relevant to the discussion. Did you actually have any evidence to the "This is an extremely common pattern with union practices in the US." or were you just taking a shot in the dark here to support your own bias?
      • jcims 7y ago
        No evidence that you would (or should) be satisfied with, just direct personal experience as a member of the Teamsters (Local 284), years of indirect personal experience working in HVAC and building two homes (IBEW and Carpenters union) and many personal anecdotes from my brother (CWA) and wife (NEA). My point is this. There are some common pathologies in the way unions tend to operate (or at least old unions that have ossified over time) in the US that have nothing to do with the underlying objectives of collective bargaining. This step for Kickstarter is a huge victory for organized labor in the USA and they are likely to receive aggressive input from other American labor unions as to how they should operate. In my opinion the employees at Kickstarter accept this input at their own peril. This shouldn't just be a new union, this should be a new type of union and one indicator of success would be strong objection to their charter from one or more existing unions in the US. For the record I have no philosophical objection to unions or collective bargaining at all. I do have material concerns around how they tend to operate in the US.
• amyjess 7y ago
  Any union in the tech industry is going to resemble professional unions such as Hollywood unions or sports unions much more than the punch-clock unions seen in manufacturing and government.
  • ilikehurdles 7y ago
    This goes against the anti-union propaganda, though. I'm sure if we unionize, some mafioso from "corporate" will come down to my home office 8 US states away to plug in my monitor before I'm allowed to work. /sarcasm What an absolute joke of a discussion. Rather than discussion how actual professional unions operate in our fields, instead we're talking about punch-clocks and strict schedules (which I had plenty of in non-union shops) and over-bureaucratic corporates.
  • lawnchair_larry 7y ago
    No, it will look nothing like those. The industries have virtually nothing in common.
• duxup 7y ago
  My experience with US unions was similar. They're just another layer of bureaucracy that is NOT required to respond to you as an individual in any way. I've had lots of poor experience with US unions protecting the lowest denominator at the expense of everyone else. They seem to focus on very specific rules that came up in specific situations applied to everything possible and end up just creating a web that is no different than an employer's web of bureaucracy ... albeit much slower / resistant to change. I've seen a lot of strange posts about how a union will help with X, Y, Z. They can only help with what they've negotiated, and those rules are restrictions on you as well as the employer. In the US if you've got a fairly simple job that's probabbly OK and a net positive. A nuanced job / people with lots of different skill sets / moving quickly ... those rules can be a nightmare. Those rules apply to what you can or can't do as much as they apply to what your employer wants to do. I've heard European unions are notably different, I'm highly skeptical of anyone's ability to emulate that as the help most tech union drives in the US seem to be getting is from traditional US unions.
  • Balero 7y ago
    The experience I have had with UK unions is very different from this, and the other descriptions of unions in the US. I only had a few interactions with them (in a union capacity, the rep was a normal worker as well). These were things like: Getting some new equipment for the break room (kettle and mugs), pushing some new health and safety process (developed alongside the company), and then the yearly meeting, which was along the lines of: "We tried to get X% pay increase, but we ended up only getting X-y% increase. We're organising events for this charity this year. If you want to get involved please get in touch". I get the feeling that, in general, in Europe unions and companies work together with a co-operative relationship. Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.
    • duxup 7y ago
      It's certainly a more antagonistic relationship from what I've heard from folks in Europe. The worst part is IMO that least with my experience Union leadership is often pretty poor and despite being people who actually work those jobs, they're not very knowledgeable or capable about even the job. It's unfortunate.
• azinman2 7y ago
  It’s all pros and cons. This is very much one of the big negatives of unions. That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time. In an era of massive income inequality, it’s a loss. I wish there was a way to get best of both worlds. —- I’ve always felt ESD stuff is way overhyped. I’ve handled a ton of electronics over decades without any ESD protection, and never had an issue. I just touch metal once before starting in while seated.
  • pathseeker 7y ago
    > That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time. Not in the tech industry. Salaries in software have outpaced any union environment just through competition for labor and a booming economy rewarding technology.
    • azinman2 7y ago
      It’s a relatively nascent industry, and this wealth is not equally distributed. We don’t know what it’ll look like in ten, twenty years. You cannot assume the world will continue to be as is.
    • daotoad 7y ago
      River boat pilots once could say the same thing. As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers". Conditions change.
      • refurb 7y ago
        Yeah, and look what happened to the auto unions. They made a deal to protect the income of the senior members and hung the junior members/new hires out to dry.
      • sigstoat 7y ago
        > River boat pilots once could say the same thing. > As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers". and to the extent that unions protected those jobs any longer than they were necessary, society as a whole was harmed.
• mc32 7y ago
  Tech companies in NYC (the likes any one would recognize) who have DCs in NYC area are affected. If you’ve worked with them in infra you’ll have come across issues like so and so left for the day. They’ll be back tomorrow and so on. It could be as simple as flicking a switch.
• 1_2__4 7y ago
  This is absolutely bog-standard anti-union propaganda. This could have been written in the 1960s.
• dogecoinbase 7y ago
  > I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern. Please keep HN comments substantive.
• mempko 7y ago
  If you don't think there is waste and ridiculous rules without unions, you need to work for any medium to large company. Large/medium sized companies are run with tiny fiefdoms where the more people working under you means more power. You don't need unions to have people do bullshit and useless wasteful work.
  • dd36 7y ago
    Agreed. All people protect their realm regardless of unions.
• Jweb_Guru 7y ago
  I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this reads like poorly disguised anti-union propaganda, but it does. In my experience with startups--which is a bit more extensive than yours is with union workplaces--"ambition and taking on responsibility" are rewarded only when it's convenient, and those rewards are often removed or withheld for arbitrary or personal reasons that have nothing to do with your quality of work. The fact that your bosses can (and do) fire startup employees at a moment's notice without any real consequences to themselves would probably concern you more than whether the employees... worked regular eight hour days (wait, why is this being spun as a negative?), were you in an industry where jobs were tighter.
  • Goronmon 7y ago
    The only thing missing is the comment starting with "I'm not anti-union, but..."
• overthemoon 7y ago
  Sounds like a crummy union. Anyway, what's wrong with keeping mediocre, unmotivated employees employed? What's so great about ambition? This is tongue in cheek, but I feel like plenty of people, with good justification, would think of their jobs in exactly the terms you describe, with words like "serve" as in a prison sentence.
• cactus2093 7y ago
  > One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served" I really dislike any kind of system that more tightly couples people's well-being to their employer. Government regulations on industries like safe working conditions can be great and really help to protect people. No matter what company you work at, they'll protect you. But a company union, where I am only protected as long as I work in this one place, just isn't appealing to me. If I get transfered to a bad manager, or any number of other things happens that makes the job a little worse, now I have to worry about leaving the union, maybe throwing away the number of years I've been working towards my next promotion, etc. Similarly, I really dislike employee healthcare plans for being a huge hurdle to anyone who wants to leave a job and work for themselves, or work part-time to spend more time with their kids, or take on any number of other flexible work options. I don't buy that the only possible choices are either to have no protections and continue to erode the middle-class standard of living, or force everyone to work 40-hours a week full-time at a big corporation the rest of their lives to have decent conditions. I really hope other alternatives like UBI start to catch on more.
• Goronmon 7y ago
  Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. What's wrong with "mediocre" employees staying employed?
  • manfredo 7y ago
    Because now other employees have no motivation to put in anything more than mediocre work. The reality is people are motivated primarily by self interest. If advancement and retention is based on seniority rather than merit, people have no incentive to put in more than the minimum work.
    • SkyBelow 7y ago
      This is assuming they were already based on merit and not on nepotism and favoritism. In comparison to those, seniority might be a reasonable alternative.
      • manfredo 7y ago
        Competition will bring success to the company that fosters an engaged and motivated workforce. Even in national unions, they are still subject to foreign competition. Sure, the free market isn't immune to nepotism or favoritism. But unions more often than not institute practices that give the same rewards to mediocrity as excellence - to the effect that the latter either put in less work or change jobs.
        • SkyBelow 7y ago
          In either case the company risks losing to a more focused company valuing meritocracy and contribution over either nepotism or seniority. And we see this happen when starts rise up to the top. But our current system gives a lot of protection to existing players, be it through regulatory capture or be it through more natural phenomena like brand recognition taking time to decay even in the face of numerous bad products (in the world of games, look at how many people are still looking forwards to TES6 despite the issues with FO76). There is also some cases where valuing meritocracy is only the best option when employees are willing to leave, but many employees are very stuck to their existing jobs. This is why pay raises do not keep up with the price of new hires. Consider the case where the cost to hire a new employee goes up 6% year over year while the company raises go up 1% year over year, potentially losing out to even inflation. The reasoning is that the extra costs to hire the few people who leave to another company to capture the 5% difference is smaller than the 5% savings for each person who does not leave. To some extent, unions help to balance out the issue where most people are not perfectly rational actors.
• vharuck 7y ago
  Sounds more like the union added contract terms preventing the business from hiring somebody for position X and "asking" or even "allowing" them to do the tadks if position Y (which might pay more than X). A lot of times, rules are cryptic and complex because they were adapted to prevent a workaround.
• commandlinefan 7y ago
  Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training.
  • Apocryphon 7y ago
    Don't forget HR covering up harassment and discrimination until stories are leaked to the media!
• LarryDarrell 7y ago
  It takes time, but you'll find that most of the ambitious and motivated people you'll meet are also mediocre. The successful ones tend to also have had luck on their side.
• spoovy 7y ago
  In the UK unions have generally become thinly-veiled extortion rackets. Rail workers unions are the most infamous example, whose train drivers generally receive massively inflated salaries and working conditions compared to similarly-skilled peers thanks to decades of legalised blackmail. The strikes are always about working conditions or health & safety on the surface, but they always end with a whopping pay rise, quietly accepted. I also have direct experience of a very historic and well known union which repeatedly issued false statements in the national news media a couple of years ago with the intention of removing a government minister. Of course they claimed it was about health & safety, but internal documents showed it was purely to force him from his job because he was messing with their overtime bonus rates.
• erik998 7y ago
  Those were my initial feelings as well. I guess the issue comes down to focusing on software development as a skill and having that skill rewarded in manner you can count on. Our industry is really similar to actors. They have SAG and their guild negotiates with the MPAA. So every studio needs to belong to MPAA. Every year they negotiate the daily/weekly minimum rates for actors with SAG. They are pretty flexible with different rates for indy films vs big budget films. It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such... https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate.. https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate.... If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well. I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG. I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job. If your are making over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point... https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c.. https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c.... Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.
  • notyourday 7y ago
    > Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well. Unless you want to spend most of your life waiting tables and bartending while looking for another part time gig at some software house, this is the last thing that you want.
• apexalpha 7y ago
  This seems like a cartoonishly simple respresentation of what a union can do. Why would one have no incentive to excel? Our union creates entire promotion matrixes for excelling employees. Comparing it to a prison... Are you a worker or a shill for corporate?
  • dang 7y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack, and please don't insinuate shillage or astroturfing on HN. I know you probably didn't mean it literally, but it's still against the guidelines. Your comment would be fine without the last sentence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • preinheimer 7y ago
    I worked (years ago) for the UFCW as a worker at a grocery store. All of the union that was exposed to me as a part timer was: - hours go out by seniority - raises happen at set intervals regardless of quality of work - that guy selling pot out of the backroom will be protected until they catch him stealing a rotisserie chicken - 0.x% of my paycheck goes to the union. - I got paid less, and received raises less often than I did when I worked at Walmart. Now there's lots more to them then that, but they certainly failed to sell me on the concept as a teenager, despite having me as quite the captive audience.
    • domikazi 7y ago
      Yep. I had this same experience when I was working at a grocery store. I didn't want to join a union, because the idea of my 16 year old ass having to pay $20 dollars a paycheck to somebody for a job I was gonna have for 4 months during the summer sounded asinine. Well, the "union-boss" at my store informed me that if I didn't join then I wouldn't be put on the schedule or get any hours. So I joined just to get hours, and lost a few hundred bucks that summer so the old women who had been cashiers for 30 years could get their raises.
      • maxk42 7y ago
• vkou 7y ago
  I've worked once in a non-union shop, where I wasn't allowed to move my computer from my old desk to another. I was expected to unplug all my stuff, label it, put all my personal effects and peripherals into a crate, label it, and sign out. Then, I was supposed to come back the next day, and set everything up. In one of these moves, my new desk was twelve feet away from my old desk. (In seven years of working at this non-union shop, I have had my desk moved 9 times.) What conclusion can we draw from this anecdote, combined with the one by the parent poster? Why does one gather positive karma, while the other negative?
• wcfields 7y ago
  > About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies. I say this as a non-union IT Tech who works at convention centers and trade-shows regularly and really wishes at times I could just grab a hole saw to make the mouse-hole to run my cables through: It's not your job. If there was a need for more NICs to be installed the company needs to pay for the necessary labor to make that happen. Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back? > Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison. Great! Not everyone has to be motivated to work or excel! I come to my job, do the job, and go home. It's a business transaction.
  • xur17 7y ago
    > Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back? They are not being forced to sweep the floors, sometimes people are choosing to step slightly outside of their role to do something when it is more efficient for them to do it rather than inefficiently finding and having someone else do it. If I make a small mess, I can: 1. stop working, contact the janitor, and ask them to clean it up, or 2. grab a broom, take 2 minutes and clean it up, and continue working In most cases 2 is the better option, and most good workers would prefer to just do 2.
    • wcfields 7y ago
      I think you missed the point of adding additional responsibilities. In my example the electricians did not make the mess, but they, however, walk around the facility a lot so why not give them a broom so they can clean up messes on their way. Unchecked is how you lead to companies squeezing 3 jobs out of one person.
• xkemp 7y ago
  A union is run rather democratically. It will tend to reflect the attitudes of its membership, i. e. your coworkers. In some old industry on a downward slope, employees will tend to be older and risk-averse, and so will the union. Tech Unions will tend to be rather different. Don't get hung up on this concept of "union". Look around the office and imagine what you and the ten people you see might want to ask from management. It could be "no open-plan offices", or maybe it's better options for working remotely, budget for conferences, free choice of OS, whatever...
• biztos 7y ago
  But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well? I get that it would be frustrating to not do your own hardware setup as a techie. Just like it must be frustrating sometimes to not do your own lighting as a camera operator in Hollywood. But in Hollywood they've collectively decided they want an industry that supports actual lighting experts, and that there should be a career path from "junior lighting person" to "sought-after lighting expert" that isn't constantly at risk from self-appointed jacks of all trades and also bean counters. Sure there are other negative aspects: it's hard to get started, a lot of production gets moved to other places (countries) where they don't have unions, etc. But in principle it looks to me like unionized Hollywood does a pretty good job, considering the challenges, of enabling careers for a lot of the people who are necessary for good filmmaking but by themselves wouldn't have, say, the power of Brad Pitt (a member of the Screen Actor's Guild of course like almost all famous actors).
  • _sbrk 7y ago
    > But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well? I'm not concerned about any specific job, including my own. I will learn, adapt, and excel at whatever I need to do to survive.
  • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    That is the reasoning, and it's exactly why it concerns me. I'm imagining a world where the national SRE union comes by, and tells me I should never write any monitoring code or change any configuration flags because that's an SRE's job I'm taking.