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> but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate That's not necessary. A large portion of corporate tech in Germany is unionized, a

> but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate That's not necessary. A large portion of corporate tech in Germany is unionized, and union jobs have hard salary ceilings (and also, of course, salary floors). But a company is allowed to offer a worker a non-union contract. They just always have to allow a worker to decline and take a union contract instead. In real life, this means many team leaders and senior engineers and practically all managers/directors are on non-union contracts. Non-union contracts that on paper are strict worse than the highest union contract get killed by the union. But when you make the jump, you usually have to do some math. Because leaving the union contract means you go from 35h/week with compensated overtime to unlimited overtime, so you might get screwed anyway if you're not careful.

ElevenLathe 3y ago
Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members. Are those members ostracized by the real workers? In the US, taking a management position means quitting the union -- workers don't want management in their meetings, and management don't trust anyone in the union so would never promote you anyway.
- pbmonster 3y ago
  > Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members. Of course! From a theory perspective, it's completely clear: just because capital gives some workers a mediocum of power over other workers doesn't mean that those managers suddenly have different interests than the people they lead. They still need to sell their labour to survive, after all. > Are those members ostracized by the real workers? So much for theory. In the real world, bad managers exist everywhere. In union shops, they are probably reigned in much more than elsewhere, because they quickly find themselves in mediation meetings between workers, union and management every time their workers realize that they actually do have rights, and that those are violated by management frequently. Those guys are ostracised, whether they have a membership card or not. But yeah, managers can easily get into situations where their own performance metrics would suffer if they follow union directives, so conflict of interests are not uncommon. Just like humans everywhere, they somehow live with the cognitive dissonance. As an example, I worked in a production plant where the floor boss would go through quite a bit of paperwork to hire scabs from a temp agency during union strikes, because missing production deadlines was unthinkable to him. Normally a pro-union guy, glad to take the union-negotiated salary increases, not a bad boss, but seeing that his production lines never stopped was his job, and so he did just that.

ElevenLathe 3y ago

Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members. Are those members ostracized by the real workers? In the US, taking a management position means quitting the union -- workers don't want management in their meetings, and management don't trust anyone in the union so would never promote you anyway.

pbmonster 3y ago
> Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members. Of course! From a theory perspective, it's completely clear: just because capital gives some workers a mediocum of power over other workers doesn't mean that those managers suddenly have different interests than the people they lead. They still need to sell their labour to survive, after all. > Are those members ostracized by the real workers? So much for theory. In the real world, bad managers exist everywhere. In union shops, they are probably reigned in much more than elsewhere, because they quickly find themselves in mediation meetings between workers, union and management every time their workers realize that they actually do have rights, and that those are violated by management frequently. Those guys are ostracised, whether they have a membership card or not. But yeah, managers can easily get into situations where their own performance metrics would suffer if they follow union directives, so conflict of interests are not uncommon. Just like humans everywhere, they somehow live with the cognitive dissonance. As an example, I worked in a production plant where the floor boss would go through quite a bit of paperwork to hire scabs from a temp agency during union strikes, because missing production deadlines was unthinkable to him. Normally a pro-union guy, glad to take the union-negotiated salary increases, not a bad boss, but seeing that his production lines never stopped was his job, and so he did just that.