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> I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer. There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop i
by majormajor 4y ago
> I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer.
There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect. I never asserted that everyone in Hollywood is better off than the average engineer at any particular company, or whatever dumb strawman you want to come up with.
You dismiss the role of unions for the highly-compensated in Hollywood but ... do you have no curiosity about why they exist? Why the superstars aren't constantly trying to tear down the union? Can you imagine no world where the superstars were worse off if they had been the victim of more predatory behavior early in their career before they were superstars?
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I'm not fully sure I even agree that SV startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world. SV startup culture in particular is VERY well-capitalized companies, greatly lowering the risk for founders.
You will see a lot of people in that world complain about it being hard to hire - they don't want to compete with bigtech salaries. The salary/equity difference between founders and employees means the latter group is often shouldering as much or more risk, without as many chances to take money off the table. So, typically, you get inexperienced kids who don't need great health plans or benefits and will work for less money. Easy to see ways a union could be mutually beneficial there - no need for every startup to have to worry about company-provided health and benefits, for instance.
Management being worried about a strike seems perfectly fine - employees are in exactly that position regarding being laid off constantly in most of the US (at-will employment). So employees know not to fuck around, generally. Maybe it could be a better thing if managers similarly had to respect their employees a bit more - maybe it would prevent a lot of the "let's hire a bunch of new people during a pandemic just in case this weird blip turns out to be a permanent change, however unlikely that seems otherwise!" idiocy that started a bunch of this at FAANG companies, if "we can just lay them off easily if needed" isn't as easy as all that.
- roenxi 4y ago> There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect. But the argument today is literally that we should be homogenising the practices of the market which pays employees well with the practices of the market that is famous for forcing women to sleep with people for opportunities. I refuse to back down on this point - that is a terrible strategy and we should not do that. We should be doing the opposite of what Hollywood does in this instance. The evidence is overwhelming. I would not choose to work in Hollywood if I wanted to make money and be paid well. None of us would, I suspect, since this is a tech forum. I would rather be working for Red Hat, even with this round of layoffs.
- majormajor 4y ago[flagged]