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Personally, it came from working for a massive union (government, not US) for many years. The downsides are real: hard to fire bad performers, your merits don't

Personally, it came from working for a massive union (government, not US) for many years. The downsides are real: hard to fire bad performers, your merits don't matter at all (the guy doing the bare minimum job description gets the same raises as you), wayyy too much focus on seniority (for promotions, vacation selection, etc), and overall just too many rules (for example, "unlimited vacation" works great with my current employer but would absolutely not work under a union.. sick days have to be tracked, PTO banks calculated down to the quarter hour, etc). On the plus side, we paid like $15/month so I'm not sure why Amazon is trying to scare people with the "union dues" argument. And it was nice to have the option for "representation" in HR-like meetings. There's definitely pluses and minuses, but (having worked on both sides) it's not for me.

duckfang 6y ago
> hard to fire bad performers In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. > your merits don't matter at all They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases. > wayyy too much focus on seniority At least that's measurable, and better than managerial decisions of "I like this person" or "I don't like you". Been there and done that. And with a crummy manager in a union job, you at least have the union steward to represent you. Non-union, you have the unemployment line. > overall just too many rules (example: unlimited PTO) Really? You use unlimited PTO as an example?!? It's complete utter trash it's unlimited by simply not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that. You'd also likely get the axe if you took off every Friday as PTO. I would much rather have fair delineated and straight-forward rules for all to see and vote on, than the touchy-feely sounds good but not real faux-rules like 'unlimited PTO'.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  You're making union shops and the people who support them sound so depressing and indifferent to their jobs and careers that I really don't want to be anywhere near either. >In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Personally I'll take risk of getting fired over having to spend 8 hours a day dealing with utter idiots. Not spending 8 hours a day miserable is worth a lot to me personally. >And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. Exactly, you have the option and path for getting a better pay through your own efforts. In a union industry you don't. New job will pay the same as the old one based on union rules.
- parliament32 6y ago
  And like I said, there's up and downsides, and it really depends on what you want out of your career. Some people want the 9-5 clock-in-clock-out with well-defined rules and tasks, scheduled raises and all that, so they can focus on their real life. Others actually like the work they do, and are comfortable working hard to get four promotions in a year and "messiah" treatment from management. I'm sure there are bad non-union employers as you mentioned, but honestly in startup-land you're a lot more likely to have experiences like I described than otherwise. >unlimited PTO This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.
  - duckfang 6y ago
    > This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management. Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine. Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited". But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)? The outlier is obviously ridiculous.. But what isn't? And that's where we see results like https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-deceptive-ploy-in-todays-workplace https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-... where the "Unlimited PTO" is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO. But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*
specialist 6y ago
> the downsides are real: hard to fire bad performers, your merits don't matter at all Which work environments are merit based? Which employers fire bad performers?
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I've found all the companies I worked at rewarded merit and fired bad performers. Of course the systems were imperfect but on average both happened.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    I find it really surprising that you think this happened at all companies you've worked at. In my experience, the difference between good and bad companies was exactly how much they recognised merit and fired bad performers. Note that "bad performance" is very team specific, if I'm shoved into a spaghetti DS code base and told to not write tests or refactor, then I will definitely end up as a poor performer. And unfortunately, people being people, lots of managers/leads make decisions based on unexamined emotional states, which tends not to lead to rewarding merit.
- brianwawok 6y ago
  Most smaller startups, because it's literally do awesome work or shut down. Trading/finance, because it's either outsmart the rival trading firms, or lose your entire stack in 1 day.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Could I restate your view as: Competition keeps orgs and people honest. The economics book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity suggests orgs use something like NPV to assemble as a basket of competing efforts to tackle problems. The strategy of prematurely picking winners, come hell or high water, always struck me as sub-optimal.
    - brianwawok 6y ago
slantedview 6y ago
That unions can be bad is not news to anyone. But what's clear is not having unions is much, much worse. A simple comparison of wealth vs union membership tells it all: https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1369433256907710470/photo/1 https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1369433256907710470/photo...
- busterarm 6y ago
  I wouldn't exactly take Robert Reich's word for it...It's not so clear at all. There's plenty of other variables to consider here and he just graphed two of them. Corporate taxes were much higher. Also it looks like share of income going to the top 10% hasn't really changed much at all in the last 100 years. 40% +/- 10%. That needle hasn't moved very far.
  - slantedview 6y ago
    Not his graph. It comes from an EPI report: https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-bargaining/ https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-ba...
    - busterarm 6y ago
      It's still just cherry picking 2 variables to graph together that may or may not be related. Correlation != Causation.
      - slantedview 6y ago
        If you care to read the article you'd find links to a more detailed study that demonstrates the exact portion of income inequality that is known to have been caused by de-unionization.
        busterarm 6y ago
        That's not how this works. There's no study here showing how they were able to discount all other variables and show a provable link between A and B. This is data cherry-picked to support a conclusion and published by a lobby group (a pro-union one and publihed on labor day, no less. It's flashy!). You may agree with said conclusion, but this is research presenting a theory not a proof. There is no causation being shown here. It's a possible theory, but that is all that it is.
SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
I worked WITH UAW for years, I too personally saw pretty much every Union complaint out there. So, IDK, I’m never surprised how many people there are to tell me my experiences are wrong. I’m not qualified to say if they have a place still, but I know anyone pretending it’s all rainbows hasn’t actually suffered like I have.
ineptech 6y ago
I think that the value of a lot of unions is obscured by how well-established they are. Historically, unions are a solution to a specific problem - the employer can (for one reason or another) get away with jerking employees around and treating them badly. But if you form a union, and the employer is forced to stop some of their the worst behaviors, and then it stays that way for a generation or two, it feels like the union serves no purpose. To take government work as an example: you mentioned some minuses that are very obvious. But you didn't mention what I consider one of the biggest pluses: not having to fear losing your job because the mayor/governor/etc flipped parties. That still happens in leadership positions, but it used to happen to rank-and-file workers as well; I believe it's the public employee unions that stopped that. I don't work for Amazon and I don't have a dog in this fight, but it would've been very interesting to see what happened if this site had unionized. It's not really clear to me whether/how much Amazon is jerking its workers around; are there plants really unsafe, are people really miserable, should they be paid more? Having one site unionize for a couple of years would probably answer those questions better than a million forum posts.
- woah 6y ago
  > not having to fear losing your job because the mayor/governor/etc flipped parties Rewarding supporters with cushy jobs (and firing the old workers) en mass is known as patronage and is a minor abuse of power, akin to corruption. Well-developed democracies take steps to prevent it, not because it's bad for the workers, but because it is bad for the fabric of government. The US enacted these reforms more than 100 years ago, starting with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform act. Public sector unions had very little to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...
- tangjurine 6y ago
  I think a lot of the obscuring is intentionally done by corporations who seem to be run by sociopaths. It seems likely that corporations actively make workers feel like a union would be useless.
notabee 6y ago
I guarantee you that the people at the top of companies understand well that good paying positions are popularity contests. It's the people who just have a strong need to feel that merit matters that they can typically gull into working like dogs for table scraps. Granted, I have seen the other side of things, and free riders are a problem. It sucks when you care about doing things right and don't get anything better than the people who just dial it in. But there are always going to be free riders: either people who figure out how to game the system because they're just there for a paycheck, or people who run the system and soak up all the value while delivering little, because their family knows the right people at the country club. Now, when a company is new, small, and nimble like a startup, you can control the nepotism and free riding somewhat, but any bigger shop it's just going to get baked into the system either way. Try to really solve this problem, and you'll threaten those with real power and get shut down. Sometimes you get leapfrog moments from companies like SpaceX that demonstrate just how much drag the corruption has caused on progress, but they're more the exception that proves the rule. And, any comments about Elon as an individual aside, the powers that be have not been shy about using a bunch of media mouthpieces to spread FUD about disruptors like SpaceX and Tesla. (Again, not going to even touch on whether those are good or bad companies, or whether Elon is a good or bad person. But they are causing a ruckus in their respective industries.) So again, you may be doing a lot better than some people at your job, and that's commendable. But it will be used to manipulate you more often than not, because you care.
DC1350 6y ago
> hard to fire bad performers Why do you care about this as an employee? You get nothing when somebody else makes the company more money.
- furyofantares 6y ago
  > Why do you care about this as an employee? You get nothing when somebody else makes the company more money. Compensation often includes stock; so you do get something when somebody else makes the company money. And if nothing else, the company doing well may help you feel job security and be better able to make plans for your future. You also may enjoy making the best product you can. When another employee gets in the way of that, it can make it harder to enjoy your work.
- bendbro 6y ago
  Because I actually want to make an impact at my job and constantly carrying idiots on my back is a horrible experience. Thankfully my workplace is not unionized and I have great team members. Whether union or non-union workplaces can encourage that, I don't know, but that is an example of why an employee would care.
- makoz 6y ago
  I guess to some extent it's about some aspect notion of "fairness". Another concern would be if their poor performance spills over into my own role and that prevents me from pursuing more interesting tasks that are more aligned with my growth/interests. More practically, if I'm working at a place where my team has fixed head count I'd rather us have the ability to replace someone who's not contributing to the success of the team.
  - notabee 6y ago
    This can definitely be a burden, though on the flip side of the coin if the team is constantly churning due to cooking under a performance magnifying glass all the time, you still end up with lots of newbies who only just get up to speed enough to contribute for a bit before moving on because it's miserable. So sometimes it's better to deal with the problem you know, and just move them out of the critical path.
Varriount 6y ago
Aren't things like time tracking, etc. union-specific though?
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Not at all.
standardUser 6y ago
I think it is important to note that you are describing some unions, not all unions. Being locked into one caricature of what a union should look like is a huge driver of anti-union sentiment. People learn to think that this is the only version of a union that does or can exist, because anti-union messaging pounds these points over and over. By every metric, unions provide massive, tangible benefits to most members. The question should be, how can we retain or enhance those benefits while also minimizing the well-known downsides?
- juancampa 6y ago
  > By every metric, unions provide massive, tangible benefits to most members Mind citing your source or perhaps one example of a good union? I'm genuinely curious
  - standardUser 6y ago
    Here is a quick one from the Bureau of Labor Statistics... https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf This report from. US House committee has a bunch of links too... https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/PRO%20ACT%20-%20By%20the%20Numbers.pdf https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/PRO%20ACT%20-%20By%2...
courtf 6y ago
I agree with all this, but it's not like the alternative actually solves these issues. Instead of a boring list sorted by seniority it becomes a boring list sorted by arbitrary internal politics. There isn't a company on earth that can accurately determine who the top performers are once we start talking about any mildly subjective role. Programming performance is especially difficult to quantify, mostly because the people doing the bean counting have no idea what programming really consists of.

duckfang 6y ago

> hard to fire bad performers In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. > your merits don't matter at all They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases. > wayyy too much focus on seniority At least that's measurable, and better than managerial decisions of "I like this person" or "I don't like you". Been there and done that. And with a crummy manager in a union job, you at least have the union steward to represent you. Non-union, you have the unemployment line. > overall just too many rules (example: unlimited PTO) Really? You use unlimited PTO as an example?!? It's complete utter trash it's unlimited by simply not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that. You'd also likely get the axe if you took off every Friday as PTO. I would much rather have fair delineated and straight-forward rules for all to see and vote on, than the touchy-feely sounds good but not real faux-rules like 'unlimited PTO'.

marcinzm 6y ago
You're making union shops and the people who support them sound so depressing and indifferent to their jobs and careers that I really don't want to be anywhere near either. >In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. Personally I'll take risk of getting fired over having to spend 8 hours a day dealing with utter idiots. Not spending 8 hours a day miserable is worth a lot to me personally. >And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. Exactly, you have the option and path for getting a better pay through your own efforts. In a union industry you don't. New job will pay the same as the old one based on union rules.
parliament32 6y ago
And like I said, there's up and downsides, and it really depends on what you want out of your career. Some people want the 9-5 clock-in-clock-out with well-defined rules and tasks, scheduled raises and all that, so they can focus on their real life. Others actually like the work they do, and are comfortable working hard to get four promotions in a year and "messiah" treatment from management. I'm sure there are bad non-union employers as you mentioned, but honestly in startup-land you're a lot more likely to have experiences like I described than otherwise. >unlimited PTO This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.
- duckfang 6y ago
  > This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management. Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine. Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited". But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)? The outlier is obviously ridiculous.. But what isn't? And that's where we see results like https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-deceptive-ploy-in-todays-workplace https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-... where the "Unlimited PTO" is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO. But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*

specialist 6y ago

> the downsides are real: hard to fire bad performers, your merits don't matter at all Which work environments are merit based? Which employers fire bad performers?

marcinzm 6y ago
I've found all the companies I worked at rewarded merit and fired bad performers. Of course the systems were imperfect but on average both happened.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I find it really surprising that you think this happened at all companies you've worked at. In my experience, the difference between good and bad companies was exactly how much they recognised merit and fired bad performers. Note that "bad performance" is very team specific, if I'm shoved into a spaghetti DS code base and told to not write tests or refactor, then I will definitely end up as a poor performer. And unfortunately, people being people, lots of managers/leads make decisions based on unexamined emotional states, which tends not to lead to rewarding merit.
brianwawok 6y ago
Most smaller startups, because it's literally do awesome work or shut down. Trading/finance, because it's either outsmart the rival trading firms, or lose your entire stack in 1 day.
- specialist 6y ago
  Could I restate your view as: Competition keeps orgs and people honest. The economics book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity suggests orgs use something like NPV to assemble as a basket of competing efforts to tackle problems. The strategy of prematurely picking winners, come hell or high water, always struck me as sub-optimal.
  - brianwawok 6y ago

slantedview 6y ago

That unions can be bad is not news to anyone. But what's clear is not having unions is much, much worse. A simple comparison of wealth vs union membership tells it all: https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1369433256907710470/photo/1 https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1369433256907710470/photo...

busterarm 6y ago
I wouldn't exactly take Robert Reich's word for it...It's not so clear at all. There's plenty of other variables to consider here and he just graphed two of them. Corporate taxes were much higher. Also it looks like share of income going to the top 10% hasn't really changed much at all in the last 100 years. 40% +/- 10%. That needle hasn't moved very far.
- slantedview 6y ago
  Not his graph. It comes from an EPI report: https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-bargaining/ https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-ba...
  - busterarm 6y ago
    It's still just cherry picking 2 variables to graph together that may or may not be related. Correlation != Causation.
    - slantedview 6y ago
      If you care to read the article you'd find links to a more detailed study that demonstrates the exact portion of income inequality that is known to have been caused by de-unionization.
      - busterarm 6y ago
        That's not how this works. There's no study here showing how they were able to discount all other variables and show a provable link between A and B. This is data cherry-picked to support a conclusion and published by a lobby group (a pro-union one and publihed on labor day, no less. It's flashy!). You may agree with said conclusion, but this is research presenting a theory not a proof. There is no causation being shown here. It's a possible theory, but that is all that it is.

SV_BubbleTime 6y ago

I worked WITH UAW for years, I too personally saw pretty much every Union complaint out there. So, IDK, I’m never surprised how many people there are to tell me my experiences are wrong. I’m not qualified to say if they have a place still, but I know anyone pretending it’s all rainbows hasn’t actually suffered like I have.

ineptech 6y ago

I think that the value of a lot of unions is obscured by how well-established they are. Historically, unions are a solution to a specific problem - the employer can (for one reason or another) get away with jerking employees around and treating them badly. But if you form a union, and the employer is forced to stop some of their the worst behaviors, and then it stays that way for a generation or two, it feels like the union serves no purpose. To take government work as an example: you mentioned some minuses that are very obvious. But you didn't mention what I consider one of the biggest pluses: not having to fear losing your job because the mayor/governor/etc flipped parties. That still happens in leadership positions, but it used to happen to rank-and-file workers as well; I believe it's the public employee unions that stopped that. I don't work for Amazon and I don't have a dog in this fight, but it would've been very interesting to see what happened if this site had unionized. It's not really clear to me whether/how much Amazon is jerking its workers around; are there plants really unsafe, are people really miserable, should they be paid more? Having one site unionize for a couple of years would probably answer those questions better than a million forum posts.

woah 6y ago
> not having to fear losing your job because the mayor/governor/etc flipped parties Rewarding supporters with cushy jobs (and firing the old workers) en mass is known as patronage and is a minor abuse of power, akin to corruption. Well-developed democracies take steps to prevent it, not because it's bad for the workers, but because it is bad for the fabric of government. The US enacted these reforms more than 100 years ago, starting with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform act. Public sector unions had very little to do with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...
tangjurine 6y ago
I think a lot of the obscuring is intentionally done by corporations who seem to be run by sociopaths. It seems likely that corporations actively make workers feel like a union would be useless.

notabee 6y ago

I guarantee you that the people at the top of companies understand well that good paying positions are popularity contests. It's the people who just have a strong need to feel that merit matters that they can typically gull into working like dogs for table scraps. Granted, I have seen the other side of things, and free riders are a problem. It sucks when you care about doing things right and don't get anything better than the people who just dial it in. But there are always going to be free riders: either people who figure out how to game the system because they're just there for a paycheck, or people who run the system and soak up all the value while delivering little, because their family knows the right people at the country club. Now, when a company is new, small, and nimble like a startup, you can control the nepotism and free riding somewhat, but any bigger shop it's just going to get baked into the system either way. Try to really solve this problem, and you'll threaten those with real power and get shut down. Sometimes you get leapfrog moments from companies like SpaceX that demonstrate just how much drag the corruption has caused on progress, but they're more the exception that proves the rule. And, any comments about Elon as an individual aside, the powers that be have not been shy about using a bunch of media mouthpieces to spread FUD about disruptors like SpaceX and Tesla. (Again, not going to even touch on whether those are good or bad companies, or whether Elon is a good or bad person. But they are causing a ruckus in their respective industries.) So again, you may be doing a lot better than some people at your job, and that's commendable. But it will be used to manipulate you more often than not, because you care.

DC1350 6y ago

> hard to fire bad performers Why do you care about this as an employee? You get nothing when somebody else makes the company more money.

furyofantares 6y ago
> Why do you care about this as an employee? You get nothing when somebody else makes the company more money. Compensation often includes stock; so you do get something when somebody else makes the company money. And if nothing else, the company doing well may help you feel job security and be better able to make plans for your future. You also may enjoy making the best product you can. When another employee gets in the way of that, it can make it harder to enjoy your work.
bendbro 6y ago
Because I actually want to make an impact at my job and constantly carrying idiots on my back is a horrible experience. Thankfully my workplace is not unionized and I have great team members. Whether union or non-union workplaces can encourage that, I don't know, but that is an example of why an employee would care.
makoz 6y ago
I guess to some extent it's about some aspect notion of "fairness". Another concern would be if their poor performance spills over into my own role and that prevents me from pursuing more interesting tasks that are more aligned with my growth/interests. More practically, if I'm working at a place where my team has fixed head count I'd rather us have the ability to replace someone who's not contributing to the success of the team.
- notabee 6y ago
  This can definitely be a burden, though on the flip side of the coin if the team is constantly churning due to cooking under a performance magnifying glass all the time, you still end up with lots of newbies who only just get up to speed enough to contribute for a bit before moving on because it's miserable. So sometimes it's better to deal with the problem you know, and just move them out of the critical path.

Varriount 6y ago

Aren't things like time tracking, etc. union-specific though?

pseudalopex 6y ago
Not at all.

standardUser 6y ago

I think it is important to note that you are describing some unions, not all unions. Being locked into one caricature of what a union should look like is a huge driver of anti-union sentiment. People learn to think that this is the only version of a union that does or can exist, because anti-union messaging pounds these points over and over. By every metric, unions provide massive, tangible benefits to most members. The question should be, how can we retain or enhance those benefits while also minimizing the well-known downsides?

juancampa 6y ago
> By every metric, unions provide massive, tangible benefits to most members Mind citing your source or perhaps one example of a good union? I'm genuinely curious
- standardUser 6y ago
  Here is a quick one from the Bureau of Labor Statistics... https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf This report from. US House committee has a bunch of links too... https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/PRO%20ACT%20-%20By%20the%20Numbers.pdf https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/PRO%20ACT%20-%20By%2...

courtf 6y ago

I agree with all this, but it's not like the alternative actually solves these issues. Instead of a boring list sorted by seniority it becomes a boring list sorted by arbitrary internal politics. There isn't a company on earth that can accurately determine who the top performers are once we start talking about any mildly subjective role. Programming performance is especially difficult to quantify, mostly because the people doing the bean counting have no idea what programming really consists of.