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Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights

Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.

pixl97 2y ago
Heh, it terrifies me at times of how clueless of the past the general population is. We're already at the point in history where people like Bezos and Musk want to return to company cities with their own non-cash payment systems. The 1800's were horrific. It was not the industrial revolution alone that made things better. People had to fight and die in the labor movement for better outcomes for us now.
Cyph0n 2y ago
Unbelievable that this had to be spelled out. Do people actually think that current working conditions and employee rights were bestowed upon us by benevolent capitalists?
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  When it comes to tech workers, not by benevolent capitalists, but by greedy capitalists. Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there really is a huge difference in individual programmer capability, and in winner-take-all/most markets, capitalists were willing to pay outsized amounts for those they deemed higher quality workers (meaning able to create higher quality/better/faster etc. products). We're at an inflection point now both with the general maturity of the Internet, and with AI, that the ability to capture huge parts of the market is less dependent on the skills of individual software engineers/product managers, etc. When you are less able to differentiate the quality of your labor against your peers, that is when unions become more desirable.
  - Cyph0n 2y ago
    We were talking about where worker rights came from in general. And the answer to that is unions.
    - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      Only when this thread got sidetracked. The article and comment that started this thread are about tech industry unions. I can fully appreciate the role unions played by improving working conditions in the past and still come to the conclusion that I wouldn't want them for (most) tech industry workers now.
      - Cyph0n 2y ago
        I think we are already past the point where unions would be valuable. Did you miss out on the continuous layoffs and forced RTO?
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
IMO that's a pretty irrelevant example when it comes to today's tech unions and ignores the thrust of the commenter's question. Yes, unions were responsible for changing the factory working culture in the past. But I know tons of people that work in tech jobs now that have to be some the cushiest jobs in the history of the planet. Yes, there is stress, not a lot of job security, and the standard corporate BS, but tech employees are generally paid quite well with great perks (obviously, depending on the company). The people who work at these companies aren't accidentally falling into vats at meat processing plants a la The Jungle, so unions need to convince them what the benefit would be to them now.
franktankbank 2y ago
> Do you have children as your colleagues? Well...
legitster 2y ago
Unionization, mandatory schooling, and work-life balance are all collective outcomes of industrialization and urbanization. Claiming that one caused the other is silly oversimplification.
icedchai 2y ago
I've had plenty of colleagues that act like children.
achenet 2y ago
Not sure why this is downvoted. A quick read up on the history of the labor movement will show that it started because people didn't want to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in factories anymore. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day International workers day started as a protest to get 8 hour days.

Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.

pixl97 2y ago

Heh, it terrifies me at times of how clueless of the past the general population is. We're already at the point in history where people like Bezos and Musk want to return to company cities with their own non-cash payment systems. The 1800's were horrific. It was not the industrial revolution alone that made things better. People had to fight and die in the labor movement for better outcomes for us now.

Cyph0n 2y ago

Unbelievable that this had to be spelled out. Do people actually think that current working conditions and employee rights were bestowed upon us by benevolent capitalists?

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
When it comes to tech workers, not by benevolent capitalists, but by greedy capitalists. Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there really is a huge difference in individual programmer capability, and in winner-take-all/most markets, capitalists were willing to pay outsized amounts for those they deemed higher quality workers (meaning able to create higher quality/better/faster etc. products). We're at an inflection point now both with the general maturity of the Internet, and with AI, that the ability to capture huge parts of the market is less dependent on the skills of individual software engineers/product managers, etc. When you are less able to differentiate the quality of your labor against your peers, that is when unions become more desirable.
- Cyph0n 2y ago
  We were talking about where worker rights came from in general. And the answer to that is unions.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    Only when this thread got sidetracked. The article and comment that started this thread are about tech industry unions. I can fully appreciate the role unions played by improving working conditions in the past and still come to the conclusion that I wouldn't want them for (most) tech industry workers now.
    - Cyph0n 2y ago
      I think we are already past the point where unions would be valuable. Did you miss out on the continuous layoffs and forced RTO?

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

IMO that's a pretty irrelevant example when it comes to today's tech unions and ignores the thrust of the commenter's question. Yes, unions were responsible for changing the factory working culture in the past. But I know tons of people that work in tech jobs now that have to be some the cushiest jobs in the history of the planet. Yes, there is stress, not a lot of job security, and the standard corporate BS, but tech employees are generally paid quite well with great perks (obviously, depending on the company). The people who work at these companies aren't accidentally falling into vats at meat processing plants a la The Jungle, so unions need to convince them what the benefit would be to them now.

franktankbank 2y ago

> Do you have children as your colleagues? Well...

legitster 2y ago

Unionization, mandatory schooling, and work-life balance are all collective outcomes of industrialization and urbanization. Claiming that one caused the other is silly oversimplification.

icedchai 2y ago

I've had plenty of colleagues that act like children.

achenet 2y ago

Not sure why this is downvoted. A quick read up on the history of the labor movement will show that it started because people didn't want to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in factories anymore. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day International workers day started as a protest to get 8 hour days.