5 ms·

Don’t want what, a leg to stand on? A seat at the table to bargain with your betters? How is some random data point about your wife’s experience evidence agains

Don’t want what, a leg to stand on? A seat at the table to bargain with your betters? How is some random data point about your wife’s experience evidence against collective bargaining? What do you see as the downside? “Gee, sure we have a say in our benefits and my salary is way higher, but there’s this one coworker who doesn’t pull their weight.” As opposed to life in a non-union shop, where it’s a workers paradise and everyone shows up ecstatic to hit the code mines first thing on Monday.

danielrpa 6y ago
That's right, I don't want the same thing you want. The point here being that if you want the union experience, you should create/join an union and try to negotiate collectively along other like-minded individuals. But please let me exercise my freedom of negotiating directly with an employer by myself. The main problem of unions is when they want to force everybody else to play by their rules, often disproportionally benefitting union leaders and the "old guard".
deanCommie 6y ago
This is going to be controversial and slightly classist, but... There is work that is utility work and there is work that isn't. I don't mean skilled or unskilled. A common dunk on the distinction between the two is something like "I'd love to see the CEO of <so and so> try a day on the line of <so and so> and see if they still want to call it unskilled labour." No, where I differentiate is jobs where ANYONE can learn the skills, and others where NOT anyone can. These are by the way not purely academic skills, they are some where the differences are physical, though these days there is fewer and fewer of those as humanity got super good at making tools. Basically I'm saying there are jobs where maybe the CEO wouldn't be able to figure it out on day 1, but with standard training, they would be able to do the job. And with EXPERIENCE they would be able to get better and better. These are the jobs where salaries should be set by a union, and where your salaries rise directly correlated with experience. Now let's get to the classist and controversial part. I don't believe software engineering is like that. Yes, many more people COULD if given the opportunity, and education, and investment. But not EVERYONE can. And not everyone learns at the same pace. I've been in the industry for 15 years since I graduated with my undergrad, and I've been junior, and I've been senior, and I've seen new grads come in and grow, and thrive, and become promoted to senior. And I've seen juniors come in, and struggle, and tread water, and be managed out. For the exact same job. I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars. I am 100% against unions for software development.
- badlucklottery 6y ago
  >I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars. Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist. Pay/promo by seniority isn't some innate property of unions, it's a response to a lack of pay increases by management. If management keeps union members happy with their pay, the members have no reason to vote in leadership that asks for pay by seniority and have a lot of reasons to avoid it.
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    > Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist. Yes, just look at Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars. > I am 100% against unions for software development I'm not sure what you think the first has to do with the second. Outside of public sector unions (where the actual limiting factor is civil service law more often than union preferences), union arrangements for non-blue-collar jobs often support exactly what you describe. I mean, you don't seen any cap to the capacity for differential and sometimes meteoric progression in film/tv acting despite the dominance of SAG-AFTRA, an AFL-CIO-affiliated union, in that space, do you?
- newbie789 6y ago
  I've seen this discussion play out multiple times on this site and it's always informative! Full disclosure: I've said on here before that I don't particularly have any issue with the ability to unionize, and I'm not in a position to tell anyone what's right or wrong one way or another. If people unionize and it has a positive outcome, great! If not, that sucks! It, like many professional moves, boils down to choice and I'm not here to give career advice, especially not to an industry as a whole. If you don't mind, could you elaborate on what parts of your statement are explicitly classist in your estimation? I genuinely don't understand your point. Which jobs would you suggest every person could eventually excel at equally because of the tools that have been invented? What about those jobs is so universally accomplishable that all humans are made truly equal less experience? I agree that businesses should have the ability to promote based on seniority or skill! Limiting that wouldn't be efficient! Do all unions preclude that flexibility by the very concept of their existence? I could imagine that in some cases it could be possible to create an agreement that serves all parties as best as possible. >Yes, many more people COULD if given the opportunity, and education, and investment. But not EVERYONE can. And not everyone learns at the same pace. Sorry. I genuinely do not understand this statement. It's a statistical fact that not every person can develop the same skillset and inhabit the same role at the same time, yes. I'm not really clear about what that has to do with anything, considering that most large and valuable projects require multiple people with multiple skillsets to realize their potential. Sorry, I'm a bit baffled by this. Could you elaborate a bit on your "classist" idea for software development a little further as far as how the entire profession should not take part in unionizing "100%" which I take to mean across all businesses and projects?
stale2002 6y ago
> What do you see as the downside? The downside is being forced into a collective bargain agreement, if I wanted to work at whatever company was a union shop. I would much rather negotiate for my own contract. Which is something that I currently do, right now, regarding my tech job employment contract. It has worked out pretty work for me. I've received significant pay raises, that I do not think I would get if I were forced into collective bargain agreements. > As opposed to life in a non-union shop I work in a "non-union" shop, in tech, and I make significantly more money than any other example of a "union shop" tech job that I have ever been able to find in the industry. Feel free to let me know about any "union shop" programmer jobs, that will pay me more than the 300k plus that I make right now. Maybe I'll even consider it. > A seat at the table to bargain with your betters? I already do bargain with my employers. And it has resulted in me getting a lot of money for my efforts. Let me know when those union jobs can get me more than 300k, for someone with ~10 years experience, lol. And, to be perfectly honest, I haven't even been optimizing as much as I could for salary. If I really was doing that, I could probably go work in finance/quant, and get another 50% raise (Yes, really... I have peers and friends, that have gotten to that) I don't think any "union shop" tech jobs that exist in the world, right now, match up with that. I am not even trying to brag, or anything here. The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  "If I joined a more powerful group, I'd vote myself a pay cut, so more powerful groups are bad" I'm not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment. Unions don't mean you have to vote yourselves a pay limit anymore than Democracy voting in a minimum wage means everyone in the country must earn the minimum wage. Unions don't mean that poor workers cannot be 'punished' with unemployment anymore than Democracy means criminals cannot be punished. A union is employees pooling forces for the benefit of employees, what else even makes sense? How can you on the one hand say your current coworkers are so awful that you don't want to co-negotiate with them, and the reason you don't want to do that is because then you'd have to work with them? If they are awful and not being fired right now, anti-unioning isn't getting them fired, is it? > The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though. Dan Luu estimates on his blog that one piece of work he did saved his employer millions, yet he got no extra money for it. How do you know that 300k is as much as you could possibly get if all of you 1% exceptional people worked together? What makes you think that a union of top tier tech workers would get the same results as a union from a steel works? Why do so many people from the "United" States, living under the benefit of a massive combined armed-forces strong-arming the planet, think that combining forces is a dumb idea for dumb people which can't work ... when the people who get paid most (CEOs, board members) act together against lower level employees to keep that being the case? That's getting into Michael O'Church territory, but you're talking about your salary when you could be inverting the structure of the company putting tech people right on top, or something.
s3r3nity 6y ago
Last I checked doctors, who aren't unionized in the US and are more essential than nurses, are doing just fine.
- starpilot 6y ago
  Honest question: is nuance lost on HN? Is everything now just polarized viewpoint vs. outlier anecdote, over and over again? Do we only care about first-order ideas/effects and think that a once-off event discredits institutions that are centuries old?
  - pb7 6y ago
    They're not outliers, they're counterexamples and fairly strong ones at that. Police unions and teachers unions, on the other hand, are both great examples of how unions can be a detriment to society.
- jxramos 6y ago
  Makes me think about Milton Friedman's talk about airline pilots and the American Medical Association, rebranded as a union, and his question of Who are the strongest unions in the United States. Which unions in the United States are strongest in the sense of having been most successful in raising the wage rates, the earnings of their members? https://youtu.be/_L69YcXsdEg?t=478 https://youtu.be/_L69YcXsdEg?t=478
- idrios 6y ago
  Yeah but doctors are a unique entity. There's little need for doctors to do collective bargaining because there's barely anybody who could take their job, so they already have a lot of bargaining power. If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency, suddenly there would be a glut of competition and doctors would surely need to unionize. Conversely, if software development required an arduous, expensive, hyper-restrictive license, there would be no need for software developers to unionize either
  - s3r3nity 6y ago

danielrpa 6y ago

That's right, I don't want the same thing you want. The point here being that if you want the union experience, you should create/join an union and try to negotiate collectively along other like-minded individuals. But please let me exercise my freedom of negotiating directly with an employer by myself. The main problem of unions is when they want to force everybody else to play by their rules, often disproportionally benefitting union leaders and the "old guard".

deanCommie 6y ago

This is going to be controversial and slightly classist, but... There is work that is utility work and there is work that isn't. I don't mean skilled or unskilled. A common dunk on the distinction between the two is something like "I'd love to see the CEO of <so and so> try a day on the line of <so and so> and see if they still want to call it unskilled labour." No, where I differentiate is jobs where ANYONE can learn the skills, and others where NOT anyone can. These are by the way not purely academic skills, they are some where the differences are physical, though these days there is fewer and fewer of those as humanity got super good at making tools. Basically I'm saying there are jobs where maybe the CEO wouldn't be able to figure it out on day 1, but with standard training, they would be able to do the job. And with EXPERIENCE they would be able to get better and better. These are the jobs where salaries should be set by a union, and where your salaries rise directly correlated with experience. Now let's get to the classist and controversial part. I don't believe software engineering is like that. Yes, many more people COULD if given the opportunity, and education, and investment. But not EVERYONE can. And not everyone learns at the same pace. I've been in the industry for 15 years since I graduated with my undergrad, and I've been junior, and I've been senior, and I've seen new grads come in and grow, and thrive, and become promoted to senior. And I've seen juniors come in, and struggle, and tread water, and be managed out. For the exact same job. I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars. I am 100% against unions for software development.

badlucklottery 6y ago
>I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars. Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist. Pay/promo by seniority isn't some innate property of unions, it's a response to a lack of pay increases by management. If management keeps union members happy with their pay, the members have no reason to vote in leadership that asks for pay by seniority and have a lot of reasons to avoid it.
- Fnoord 6y ago
  > Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist. Yes, just look at Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
dragonwriter 6y ago
> I want to be able to promote quickly people who succeed and show an aptitude, and maturity. I want to encourage and incentivize those people to keep reaching for the stars. > I am 100% against unions for software development I'm not sure what you think the first has to do with the second. Outside of public sector unions (where the actual limiting factor is civil service law more often than union preferences), union arrangements for non-blue-collar jobs often support exactly what you describe. I mean, you don't seen any cap to the capacity for differential and sometimes meteoric progression in film/tv acting despite the dominance of SAG-AFTRA, an AFL-CIO-affiliated union, in that space, do you?
newbie789 6y ago
I've seen this discussion play out multiple times on this site and it's always informative! Full disclosure: I've said on here before that I don't particularly have any issue with the ability to unionize, and I'm not in a position to tell anyone what's right or wrong one way or another. If people unionize and it has a positive outcome, great! If not, that sucks! It, like many professional moves, boils down to choice and I'm not here to give career advice, especially not to an industry as a whole. If you don't mind, could you elaborate on what parts of your statement are explicitly classist in your estimation? I genuinely don't understand your point. Which jobs would you suggest every person could eventually excel at equally because of the tools that have been invented? What about those jobs is so universally accomplishable that all humans are made truly equal less experience? I agree that businesses should have the ability to promote based on seniority or skill! Limiting that wouldn't be efficient! Do all unions preclude that flexibility by the very concept of their existence? I could imagine that in some cases it could be possible to create an agreement that serves all parties as best as possible. >Yes, many more people COULD if given the opportunity, and education, and investment. But not EVERYONE can. And not everyone learns at the same pace. Sorry. I genuinely do not understand this statement. It's a statistical fact that not every person can develop the same skillset and inhabit the same role at the same time, yes. I'm not really clear about what that has to do with anything, considering that most large and valuable projects require multiple people with multiple skillsets to realize their potential. Sorry, I'm a bit baffled by this. Could you elaborate a bit on your "classist" idea for software development a little further as far as how the entire profession should not take part in unionizing "100%" which I take to mean across all businesses and projects?

stale2002 6y ago

> What do you see as the downside? The downside is being forced into a collective bargain agreement, if I wanted to work at whatever company was a union shop. I would much rather negotiate for my own contract. Which is something that I currently do, right now, regarding my tech job employment contract. It has worked out pretty work for me. I've received significant pay raises, that I do not think I would get if I were forced into collective bargain agreements. > As opposed to life in a non-union shop I work in a "non-union" shop, in tech, and I make significantly more money than any other example of a "union shop" tech job that I have ever been able to find in the industry. Feel free to let me know about any "union shop" programmer jobs, that will pay me more than the 300k plus that I make right now. Maybe I'll even consider it. > A seat at the table to bargain with your betters? I already do bargain with my employers. And it has resulted in me getting a lot of money for my efforts. Let me know when those union jobs can get me more than 300k, for someone with ~10 years experience, lol. And, to be perfectly honest, I haven't even been optimizing as much as I could for salary. If I really was doing that, I could probably go work in finance/quant, and get another 50% raise (Yes, really... I have peers and friends, that have gotten to that) I don't think any "union shop" tech jobs that exist in the world, right now, match up with that. I am not even trying to brag, or anything here. The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though.

jodrellblank 6y ago
"If I joined a more powerful group, I'd vote myself a pay cut, so more powerful groups are bad" I'm not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment. Unions don't mean you have to vote yourselves a pay limit anymore than Democracy voting in a minimum wage means everyone in the country must earn the minimum wage. Unions don't mean that poor workers cannot be 'punished' with unemployment anymore than Democracy means criminals cannot be punished. A union is employees pooling forces for the benefit of employees, what else even makes sense? How can you on the one hand say your current coworkers are so awful that you don't want to co-negotiate with them, and the reason you don't want to do that is because then you'd have to work with them? If they are awful and not being fired right now, anti-unioning isn't getting them fired, is it? > The numbers I am throwing around are pretty standard, for people working at top tech companies, and I know this because this is what many of my personal friends, with the same level of experience as me are making. None of them work at "union shops" though. Dan Luu estimates on his blog that one piece of work he did saved his employer millions, yet he got no extra money for it. How do you know that 300k is as much as you could possibly get if all of you 1% exceptional people worked together? What makes you think that a union of top tier tech workers would get the same results as a union from a steel works? Why do so many people from the "United" States, living under the benefit of a massive combined armed-forces strong-arming the planet, think that combining forces is a dumb idea for dumb people which can't work ... when the people who get paid most (CEOs, board members) act together against lower level employees to keep that being the case? That's getting into Michael O'Church territory, but you're talking about your salary when you could be inverting the structure of the company putting tech people right on top, or something.

s3r3nity 6y ago

Last I checked doctors, who aren't unionized in the US and are more essential than nurses, are doing just fine.

starpilot 6y ago
Honest question: is nuance lost on HN? Is everything now just polarized viewpoint vs. outlier anecdote, over and over again? Do we only care about first-order ideas/effects and think that a once-off event discredits institutions that are centuries old?
- pb7 6y ago
  They're not outliers, they're counterexamples and fairly strong ones at that. Police unions and teachers unions, on the other hand, are both great examples of how unions can be a detriment to society.
jxramos 6y ago
Makes me think about Milton Friedman's talk about airline pilots and the American Medical Association, rebranded as a union, and his question of Who are the strongest unions in the United States. Which unions in the United States are strongest in the sense of having been most successful in raising the wage rates, the earnings of their members? https://youtu.be/_L69YcXsdEg?t=478 https://youtu.be/_L69YcXsdEg?t=478
idrios 6y ago
Yeah but doctors are a unique entity. There's little need for doctors to do collective bargaining because there's barely anybody who could take their job, so they already have a lot of bargaining power. If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency, suddenly there would be a glut of competition and doctors would surely need to unionize. Conversely, if software development required an arduous, expensive, hyper-restrictive license, there would be no need for software developers to unionize either
- s3r3nity 6y ago