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This is fantastic news. Well done, Amazon employees! I'm glad to see that Amazon's anti-union propaganda was taken for the nonsense that it is. Hopefully the e
by equality 5y ago
This is fantastic news. Well done, Amazon employees! I'm glad to see that Amazon's anti-union propaganda was taken for the nonsense that it is.
Hopefully the employees of other Amazon warehouses will be inspired to do the same, after this win for workers.
- 1270018080 5y agoTheir software engineers should, too. You don't actually have to get pipped, get pinged 24/7, and be ground to dust and thrown away to be a successful software engineer.
- equality 5y agoI very much agree. Every worker should unionize, for the good of us all. Far too much power has been ceded to companies pushing for abusive working practices, that are now largely culturally normalized.
- dymk 5y agoWell, no, I can bargain individually better than a group could try to on my behalf.
- netizen-936824 5y agoSo you can singlehandedly get a corporation to improve their working conditions? That's incredible
- dymk 5y agoThe company caters to _me_, not the other way around. Welcome to being in a high-demand job.
- MartinCron 5y agoI guess that's good if you only care about you?
- dymk 5y agoCorrect. I don't care that other people don't learn to bargain their own highly paid, highly in-demand jobs to be even better.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
- hnaccount141 5y agoThe tech job market is favorable for workers for now. That will most likely not always be the case.
- netizen-936824 5y agoTech is not the only field that people have jobs in. Consider the Amazon warehouse workers that just unionized which is the topic of this article
- throwaway684936 5y agoYour mistake is thinking a large corporation gives a single flying fuck about you as an individual employee (who's proven themselves rowdy by trying to bargain).
- xyzzyz 5y agoEvery single time I put a notice in a large corporation, they tried to bargain with me to stop me from quitting, offering raises and improved working condition, eg. projects with more leadership roles. So no, they do care in some industries, especially when the cost of hiring a single worker is higher than Amazon warehouse workers entire yearly pay.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> mistake is thinking a large corporation gives a single flying fuck about you as an individual employee You aren't negotiating against the corporation. You're negotiating against the people who determine your compensation. (This is a seemingly-minor, oft-overlooked and enormously-important distinction.) Many on this forum have leverage over those people. (Some over the corporation.) For those people, unionization could be a net negative. Recognizing that doesn't mean the idea isn't worth pursuing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zjaffee 5y agoThere are certainly areas where this isn't true in the tech industry. It's very rare that an engineer can just say that they will no longer be willing to do on call work for example while staying on a team that maintains an online service. You can always ask for more money, but that's not everything that would be on a negotiating table.
- hmfrh 5y agoYou probably think that you do, but in reality you don't. Large corporations have been proven to fix wages for tech workers[1]. There's literally no way that you could have any possible way of bargaining your way around that as a single person. [1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297/tech-giants-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit?t=1648836290791 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...
- dymk 5y agoLooks like the US government "bargained" for me there, without the need for a union.
- striking 5y agoSure, but there's no guarantee they'll do that in every case or at every employer. Here there was a smoking gun, so the government could easily act on it; do you think that'd be the case for everyone in our field?
- ejb999 5y ago>>There's literally no way that you could have any possible way of bargaining your way around that as a single person. Actually you do, by walking across the street and getting a big fat raise to join a different company. That is one of many reasons engineers by and large don't feel a need to have someone else bargain for them - they negotiate with their feet.
- smachiz 5y agoIf you clicked the Parent's link, you would have seen it was discussing the anti-poaching collusion / wage fixing that was going on. You couldn't walk across the street, because the company across the street agreed not to hire employees from the other company across the street. The free market isn't always free.
- beastman82 5y ago
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoUnions are helpful in two scenarios: 1) When workers want systemic reform of an organization. 2) When workers are more-or-less interchangeable. Software engineers aren't interchangeable at all compared to a factory worker, which is why they have such great individual bargaining power and why (historically) they don't really feel a huge need for a union to represent them. Today, software workers have a bit more interest in unionizing because they want to change their organization's high-level goals (e.g. environmental responsibility, not making tools for warfare, hiring diversity, etc). But both scenarios apply to Amazon warehouse workers, and union representation would almost certainly be a massive benefit for them.
- amrocha 5y agoDevelopers are absolutely interchangeable. If they weren't then job hopping every 2 years wouldn't be the optimal career strategy.
- Jiejeing 5y agoSaying that software engineers are not interchangeable is being delusional. We have some bargaining power because this is a skilled office job where the demands outweighs the supply and our added value to the business is many times what we get paid. But many SWE job hob every two years or so at best, and they absolutely get replaced without a second thought.
- rajin444 5y agoThe responses you got are borderline religious. Pro union people need to acknowledge and be up front about the cons of a union. It’s just another entity with power over a group of people and suffers from the same pros and cons. It’s not a panacea. Deriding legitimate concerns is not how you convince people, and makes it look like you have an agenda.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoConvincing staunch anti union folks that a union would help them is like trying to convince a Southern Baptist god doesn't exist. You don't bother, you organize folks who recognize the benefit and understand the tradeoffs, people who don't think of them as individual exceptionalists. Wanting better pay and benefits for workers is an agenda, and if making that clear isn't enough (even after accounting for a cons of collective bargaining, union costs, etc), ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
- dymk 5y agoYou'd be mistaken to think I'm some staunch anti-union person - I think it's great that these warehouse workers unionized! I think the benefits far outweigh the cons for them. Difference between them and myself is, we work completely different jobs, in completely different markets, with completely different incentives.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoBut it's not just about yourself; it's about your colleagues and others in the same industry. Your incentives are not their incentives, and their work experience is not your work experience. Important points to remember imho about why people might desire collective bargaining in order to have better pay and working conditions. Setting pay aside for a moment (which is admittedly a complex topic in this context), not everyone has the ability, agency, or leverage to obtain better working conditions (without collective bargaining).
- changoplatanero 5y agoI wouldn't mind for my pro-union co-workers to form a union but the part I hate is that they have the power to force me to pay their organization which I don't support and they also have the power to negotiate my employment contract without my consent.
- slg 5y agoUnions of professional athletes are some of the most successful unions in the US. These are people that are highly paid and have very specific skills that can't easily be replaced. These are people who already spend as much as 15% or 20% of their salary paying others to negotiate on their personal behalf. Yet these athletes still want a union to represent them as a collective class. I don't know if the general software developer really needs a union. Some niches certainly do. Game developers are the obvious example of a group of workers who are treated worse than people with comparable skills who do comparable work in other industries. But the idea that we don't need a union because we are already paid well, we are skilled, or we can negotiate for ourselves is naive. Anytime an industry is as wildly profitable as the tech industry is, workers can benefit from a union.
- peanuty1 5y agoWithout the NBA union, players like Labron James would make much more than they do today.
- slg 5y agoMaybe, but there are also a few hundred non-LeBron like players in the NBA. You can argue that the union negotiates away the rights of players like LeBron to benefit those few hundred players. But you can also argue that LeBron is only in the position to make as much money because the union has been fighting for him before he was even born. Would the NBA have free agency, guaranteed contracts, and players making tens of millions of dollars a year without the union? Plus LeBron would be a near billionaire even without cashing a single game check. He makes way more money from being an ambassador of the game than from the game itself. Therefore he has a vested financial interest in the health of the league overall and the hundreds of other players in the NBA. Back to software development, the question is are you the LeBron James of software development? Are you one of the handful of the best developers on the planet? If you are, I can totally understand why you might be against a union. If you aren't, you could probably benefit from a union.
- peanuty1 5y ago
- zer0-c00l 5y agoUnless you are at the top echelon of ICs at your org (principal engineer or something equivalent), I guarantee you that you are viewed by your organization as nothing more than a replaceable "resource". To think otherwise is inexperience, or delusion. If you ever get the opportunity to observe what goes on during org-wide planning or engineer leveling, it'll be a bit of a wake up call when you see how little anyone cares about you as an individual.
- munk-a 5y agoThat's awesome - I'm a skilled laborer who isn't really comfortable bargaining on my own behalf. Do you mind sharing your people skills while I share my engineering skills so that we can both get a better outcome overall?
- VirusNewbie 5y agoI will fight tooth and nail to keep our industry from unionizing. One can simply look at the public school system and how well it performs with one of the strongest unions in the country. You don't have well paid teachers (except those who have been teaching for a long time, at the detriment to new teachers),you don't serve the children well and you now have to navigate both a career and politics of a union. Unions benefit those who play the social game more so the job requirements, as it allows for an alternative power structure to be climbed. Those are the exact people I love being able to avoid in the software field.
- striking 5y agoHave you worked somewhere (big enough to no longer support a flat hierarchy) where there were no office politics or social games? I don't think unions are the cause of that.
- wowokay 5y agoYes. Office politics can exist anywhere, the problem is people. But unions can cause more of it, just like Diversity & Inclusion, or minority incentive programs. The point is things get in the way of the work.
- wowokay 5y ago1000% agree. Unions promote individual rights at the expense of the customer, product, and company. In reality they facilitate corruption and union rights over individual rights. I understand everyone wants to feel valued at their company, but value should be evaluated on merit and unions essentially lower the bar to keep more people paying dues and less product/service running efficiently. WE ALL HAVE THE OPTION TO FIND A BETTER JOB! The automotive industry is a great example of how unions made factory operating conditions worse. Employees had piece rates and controlled their time and pay. I.E. get 100 parts done in 4 hours get paid the same as someone who takes 8 hours to make 100 parts. Then unions stepped in, now everyone works 8 hours, with half the work force slacking to fill the time.
- 5y ago
- javert 5y agoHN is not a political forum. I get that we like to talk politics here, and that's all well and good. But having someone make a brand new account to make a political opinion post that has little to no intellectual content seems like it should be unwelcome.
- hyperbovine 5y agoWell, cast a downvote then.
- zenexer 5y agoGiven that many people are likely putting their jobs on the line by voicing support for unions, it’s unfair to forbid new accounts from taking place in these discussions.
- javert 5y agoI don't think the conclusion you reach follows from the premises. There is unfairness in the world. That does not mean that HN is obligated to be a soapbox for all unfairness. Anyway, comments on HN should be intellectually substantive. That one was not. Yes, we should discuss this on HN. No, we should not have brand new accounts posting cheap opinion comments that are devoid of intellectual content.
- zenexer 5y agoNot every comment needs to be intellectually substantive. It's okay to be human and express some excitement now and then.
- javert 5y agoThe problem is that political comments lead to unpleasant flame wars. Sure, people can express excitement. I didn't speak against that. You're doing a bait and switch by presenting it that way. Expressing excitement is very different than starting a political flame war. Instead of having new accounts post empty pro-union comments and the anti-union people having to argue against them, it's better if we just not talking about that---unless it's an intellectually substantive conversation, in which case it's fine. That's all I'm asking---I know it's too much for you to give.