13 ms·

Before anyone brings up the "I want to be paid for my skill, not my seniority," I'd just like to point out: If you formed a union at your workplace, you and yo

by Frondo 12y ago

Before anyone brings up the "I want to be paid for my skill, not my seniority," I'd just like to point out: If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that. And a few other things I think are worth saying... A union is a legal framework for the employees (who have no ownership stake in the business, despite putting their time and energy into the business day after day) to recast some of the power imbalance in their favor; since many of us here are employees, and not owners, we should be looking out for our interests. Aaand...a union isn't a "let's all be lazy and wreck businesses" framework; that's a bit of nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades.

forrestthewoods 12y ago
"you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that" False. People who worked there before you decided the rules. Once you have an entrenched senior workforce the probability that they will vote themselves less power or money is remarkably low. It's basically the same problem as NIMBYism.
- heydenberk 12y ago
  I'm very strongly pro-union, but this is an indisputable fact. If labor is to make a comeback in the 21st century, this is an important lesson that needs to be learned.
  - bduerst 12y ago
    Interesting. How would you set up a union system that is self improving? Normally organizations need to compete to survive, with the more ineffectual falling off. You can't necessarily have unions compete for members, because the power of the union is in how many members it has and fractioning them would diminish their authority.
    - heydenberk 12y ago
      In general, self-improving institutions operate by setting goals, evaluating those goals with metrics and iterating on the underlying model so as to improve those metrics. I know that's a simplistic answer, but I lack the specific understanding of how unions currently work to provide better insight.
    - minthd 12y ago
      There are unions in the nordic countries. They generally work quite well and don't hurt those countries competitiveness - those nations are quite competitive. I believe Germany is also highly unionized. So maybe we should learn from them ? And BTW in all those countries one thing about those unions is that they are highly responsible - they understand the market realities and understand that people need to justify salries or else there would be layoffs.
      - bnolsen 12y ago
        no. hard working europeans leave europe to escape the system where they have little hope of bettering themselves in the european system. lots of them showed up in china working as part of outsource or manufacturing firms. talked to several myself.
      - pgeorgi 12y ago
        http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/volkswagen-s-sort-of-union-in-tennessee http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/volkswagen... describes the tension of having a company with German-style union-values operate in the US.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - ealexhudson 12y ago
    I don't think it's the case that people will stay in the same employ for many years like they used to; unionised or not. People expect to change jobs much more often.
- cynicalkane 12y ago
  Right now the above post looks about -2 despite being absolutely correct. Downvoting informed people is the worst way to express disagreement. It contributes nothing, and makes your side look bad.
  - bsder 12y ago
    It deserves the downvotes because it ignores reality. Many of the steelworkers unions in the early 80's went out of their way to try to get people retired so that the younger people would still have jobs. They also worked very hard to get people transferred to other sites to reach the point where they could retire even if it meant sacrificing some salary. Or, for something more recent, many of the unions involved with Hostess took several rounds of cuts before finally standing up and taking a hard line that eventually led to the bankruptcy. And, it looks like Hostess is going to be better off because of it. The downvotes are well warranted because he spewed propaganda instead of citing real facts.
- bandushrew 12y ago
  Unions that are well run frequently recognise the realities of business finances, and there are multiple examples of unions that have indeed voted to take a pay cut, if you care to go looking.
- task_queue 12y ago
  It's the same problem businesses have everywhere, except the good ones know how to weed it out. Same rule applies to unions.
- HaloZero 12y ago
  Doesn't voting for a board control in the Union allow for this? Like you have 4-5 people in charge but they have to be elected by the body of the Union.
- SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
  In a blog entry by Micheal O. Church [1], he argues that in the companies that most need unionization, the downsides like wage normalization and seniority rules are already in place, and adding unionization to the mix almost can't make things worse. He also provides examples of unionized industries where "star performers" have no wage limits -- that the only limit is in the minimum pay for a position. And he points out the many ways a union could support programmer rights (for instance, the right to own personal projects), and kill damaging practices like stack ranking. We need something. That much is clear. Whether it's a professional guild or a union, I'm not sure. But the status quo is awful for most of us. [2] [1] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/it-might-be-time-for-software-engineers-especially-in-silicon-valley-to-unionize/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/it-might-be-... [2] I'm actually one of the "1%" who is quite well compensated, but I think more of us should be compensated based on our abilities. And I do want to get rid of the "we own your free time projects" rules everywhere; I consider those to be morally reprehensible. Edit: Added "unionized" to the second paragraph to make it clear what I meant.
  - refurb 12y ago
    But the status quo is awful for most of us. No offense, but I think that statement is ridiculous. You admit you're in the top 1% of income earners in the US and you choose to use the word "awful" for your predicament?
    - edwinnathaniel 12y ago
      He's the 1% and the "awful for most of us" is for the 99%.
    - Igglyboo 12y ago
      Just because he's rich doesn't mean he can't sympathise with or understand the plight of the middle class, just like most people understand and sympathize with the plight of the poor.
      - refurb 12y ago
- mc32 12y ago
  This reminds me how senior pilots will vote against raises for junior pilots so the senior pilots can preserve or increase their pay[1] [1]http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
task_queue 12y ago
A union is a corporation for laborers. When you are a lone skilled worker negotiating with a company, the cards are in their hands every time. You are replaceable. Divide and conquer works great if you want to depress the earnings of entire industries. As professionals, we need to recognize that we are being given the shaft as a whole and unless we have some solidarity, negotiating truly fair market rate compensation is a pipe dream.
- topkai22 12y ago
  "The cards are in their hands every single time"- that's not true for high skill workers. If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you can often negotiate from a position of strength. That's one of the reasons IT workers get paid so well. The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs- the factory laborer, highly scripted call center worker, the warehouse picker. They can capture a lot more through collective action because while they can easily be replaced individually losing them en masse is catastrophic.
  - chronid 12y ago
    If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you have incompetent management and they should be replaced. Single point of failure and all that. What happens when you are ill/away and a critical bug must be fixed, or a critical system goes down and must be restored? I predict a lot of pizza's boxes around the office. And you working remotely like mad while ill or from the beach/sky resort. A lot of screaming, too. :)
  - makeitsuckless 12y ago
    Except the reality is that we are not getting paid "so well". Given the scarcity and value of our skills, we're getting screwed. We're not very good at negotiating as individual professionals, and we're being taken advantage of on a massive scale.
    - MCRed 12y ago
ams6110 12y ago
A union will remove any ability for you to stand out. You will be paid the same as the worst or best worker, on the basis of some kind of seniority/job description parameters worked out by the union leadership and the company management. It may get you a little more than you get now, but it also removes any reward for excellence. You will be unable to negotiate a raise or promotion directly with your managers. If you're unhappy with your compensation, move to someplace where you get a better deal. You are worth whatever you agree to work for. If you want a union, fine. I don't suggest that you shouldn't have one. But it will limit your upside, a lot. Even if it offers some minimal protection on the downside.
- learnstats2 12y ago
  This matches my experience, unfortunately. I worked in an industry with notoriously low pay, and I felt that the union removed my ability to negotiate my pay. Meanwhile, my workplace was paying for (and I was stuck dealing with) union-protected incompetence.
  - chronid 12y ago
    To bring a counterpoint, it does not match mine (but I do not live in the USA). My salary is actually higher that the minimum (established by collective agreement) for my job. The union just negotiates the lower bound. If your company values you more than that, they can always pay you more. Or promote you. Nothing stops them to do so.
    - ptaipale 12y ago
      I guess this depends on local legislation. It is possible that in some places the law/collective agreement says that you cannot pay more.
    - maxharris 12y ago
      Nothing stops them to do so. Except the fact that at any given moment, the company only has $X to pay you from, and the union makes it so that they have some amount less: $X - n.
Shivetya 12y ago
No you don't. Your union bargains away your value and your only option is to not vote yes to the contract only to have them tell you its the best you can get and the majority votes for it. Most of the time your representatives don't want to rock the vote and work to protect themselves more than you. Your just a worker to them, they see themselves on the same level with the people they negotiate with, not you. Your hyperbole doesn't provide any real reason to form a union other than you don't like where you work. Honestly go somewhere else. Really. You won't be happy after a union gets there and likely you will be paying dues equivalent to an hour or more a month to be a member. anecdotal part comesnext Having been a member of a union shop before and having quite a few family in the Midwest I would switch employers or careers before creating or joining one. I cannot for the life of me equate professional and union in the same sentence.
- cdcarter 12y ago
  Still anecdata but I've worked in three locals and have NEVER felt like my job steward or the union leadership aren't working to protect me. If they were, they wouldn't get re-elected. Of course, I work in an industry where the unions are strong and members actually vote.
cperciva 12y ago
If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that. Yes, but I am more skilled than my colleagues. Unions inherently negotiate on behalf of the median worker who was employed at the time that the contract negotiations took place. As other people have pointed out, the fact the unions negotiate for current employees rather than future employees contributes to the "screw the new guy" phenomenon; the fact that unions negotiate for the median worker can result in them undervaluing their high-productivity workers. This is why unions are effective primarily in low-standard-deviation-productivity fields: If the best secretary in the office is 10% more productive than the median, but the union manages to raise the median secretary's income by 20% compared to the market clearing rate, then every secretary benefits. However, if the top software developer is 10x as productive as the median...
- fnordsensei 12y ago
  If they do their job, they negotiate the minimum wage and benefits. Nothing prevents you from getting more than that if you're skilled, but it does in fact prevent the new guy from being screwed over if done properly.
- te_chris 12y ago
  You say that now, just you wait until supply of programmers catch up.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Yep. It has always amazed me how my peers can assume that their pay should be proportionate to their value in one breath while ranting about unions in the next. I mean, it's one thing to realize that the supply/demand situation for programmers currently makes unions unnecessary, but it's quite another to slam people in other fields for doing what they have to in order to secure the same damn privilege (getting paid according to value). The opportunity to make this extremely modest dream a reality is not some kind of right inherent to the free market! It's something we're going to have to fight for once supply/demand equilibrium has been reached.
rayiner 12y ago
But it's not propaganda. Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits while completely ignoring the needs of the cities they serve. How police unions are key in protecting bad cops, like unions everywhere protect bad workers. They're functionally no different than the unions that destroyed GM, etc. I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.
- goldbeck 12y ago
  I note that the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions. It's worth considering that public-sector and private-sector unions are different beasts. For one thing, private-sector unions are facing off against corporations - both trying to maximize their own value, and so one might hope a balance is achieved. In the public-sector, unions are trying to maximize their own value, but the government is (hypothetically) trying to maximize public good, so it's not really a fair balance. Private-sector unions have been hugely helpful in the US. This article touches on it in an interesting way: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-cost-of-a-decline-in-unions.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-t...
  - pdonis 12y ago
    > the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions He also brought up the United Auto Workers, which is not.
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Yes, but only his complaints about the public sector unions were reasonable enough to address.
      - pdonis 12y ago
        > only his complaints about the public sector unions were reasonable enough to address. I don't understand. His complaint is basically that public sector unions and private sector unions have the same problems.
Symmetry 12y ago
If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that. This is theoretically true for a lot of things such as pay by seniority but it isn't true for everything. In the bad old days some people used union requirements as a way of keeping minorities out of certain industries. Laws were passed to fix this, but those same laws sometimes mean that if your coworker is incompetent then even if management and most union members want them gone then the union is still obligated to fight to let your coworker keep their job. It can be hard to talk about unions in general when unions in the US and Sweden and Japan end up working so differently.
paulhauggis 12y ago
"Aaand...a union isn't a "let's all be lazy and wreck businesses" framework; that's a bit of nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades.." This sounds great in theory, but here is what I've seen in practice: 1) Very difficult to fire someone which almost always leads to a court case. Poor employees should be able to be terminated, for the benefit of everyone, not shuffled around the company wasting money and resources. 2) Unions becoming as powerful or more powerful than many large companies which leads to the same type of corruption. Most Union leaders get millions in bonuses every year, yet we don't see anyone protesting on Wallstreet. 3) Guaranteed raises for unionized employees, even if it means the company will go out of business or can't compete any longer in the market place. 4) Inflated wages. A worker doing a job that requires little education or skill can do should not be paid > $100,000/year. In the 90s, I knew mechanics making $150,000/year working 3 day work-weeks. The unions forced the companies to have 2 people working the job of 1 person. 5) You can't get raises based only on merit. If you want a raise, many other people need to get raises in your department or it just won't happen. My previous company went to a trade show in Vegas and we rented a booth. We were required to pay $500 for a union guy to unfold a table and another couple thousand to essentially plug in a computer. Why would I want more of this inefficiency? More examples: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/vegas-union-blocks-ufc-ny-ve-found-point-154302763.html http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/vegas-union-bloc... Ever wonder why the UFC isn't in New York? The Culinary union. When people choose not to be in a union, many unions decide to use under-handed tactics to force a company to support them. It's just one group looking to have power over another. They generally aren't looking out for your best interest, only to use your status as an employee to have leverage and power over a company. This is a forum for startups. Do you actually think it would be easy to start a company if you had to go through miles of red tape and essentially a court case to let a poor employee go? It would change the entire startup scene for the worst. The glut, waste, and inefficiency is why I despise unions. You can tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I've seen it too many times in the last 20 years to believe you.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
I'm really believing we need a professional association or guild. With merit-based professional rankings. I think a big contributor to the problem of programmers being underpaid is that there's no distinction between the clinic assistant and the brain surgeon. We're all just "programmers" or at best "software engineers". If there were an official distinction, then it might be easier to demand higher salaries for the higher skilled positions.
- rwallace 12y ago
  I am not entirely without sympathy for the idea of a union modeled after those in e.g. Hollywood; I can see reasonable arguments on both sides. But the guild that controls the medical profession has turned out to be a disaster of such epic proportions that I am stunned any sane person would consider it anything other than a grim cautionary tale. Any other setup would be better than that. (Beware of the temptation to let the high status of medicine influence one's opinion of the institutions by which it is run.)
benihana 12y ago
>If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that. Only if someone before me hadn't decided them first. And even if I decide them, what about the people who come after me? They're forever beholden to the context that I created the rules under.
- mch82 12y ago
  Rules and leadership get renegotiated periodically, just like a company's board of directors and shareholder ballot initiatives are voted on periodically. A rule set is not a permanent structure.
  - peteypao 12y ago
    Except that it is. How likely are the current rules going to be completely revised? It would probably takes countless years for anything to change.
netcan 12y ago
I agree that many of the slogan laced perspectives are shallow. Unionisation and the whole complex that comes with it is not narrow. A lot of effort and thought has gone into it. A lot of smart people. But it's also true that unions themselves have causes problems, often at a very macro level. Unions can have their own interests, independent of the interests of their members. I don't know where I stand. I think there is a real problem in negotiation position of employees and employers. An employer negotiates often, their stakes are lower and they can optimize. I think we would be seeing improved "labour conditions" like working hours, holidays and other points if the negotiation process was efficient, but we are not. Generally, the less restricted the market, the longer the conventional hours, the fewer the number of days off and the lower the job security. I think it's probably inefficient. I don't think unions have offered a perfect solution. Often it's not even good enough or better than nothing. I think we need to keep looking. The left needs new ideas.
asuffield 12y ago
I'd like to make a subtle but critical adjustment to your statement: "A union is a legal framework for the employees which has the ability to recast the power balance and can do it in their favour, if it so chooses." Unions are definitely capable of doing this thing, and some do it. They do not necessarily do this thing, and some do not. The common failure mode is that an entrenched union is run by a group of people who act very much like company management, profit immensely from this arrangement, and remain in power by employing forms of the pirate ship loot splitting strategy. (The pirate ship captain must propose a split of the loot, which the crew votes on. If they vote in favour, the loot split goes ahead, and if not then the captain is thrown overboard. The correct solution is to divide the loot equally between 51% of the crew including the captain, and allocate none to the rest.) The worst unions are definitely not a framework for laziness, but they do tend to be bad for businesses as their primary function is to suck money out of the company and give it to union leaders. The best unions make everybody better off, including the employers. Some companies have internalised the functions of the best unions, because they realised that this makes everybody better off, so don't have any real need for unions. Some companies have internalised the functions of the worst unions and are engaged in an asset-stripping operation. There is a tendency for older unions to be worse than newer ones. Setting up a union will almost certainly be good for the people who set it up. Joining an established union may or may not be good for you; if you're thinking about joining a union then research this union carefully and figure out if they're going to be good for you. Keep in mind that bad unions tend to be extremely political and will be surrounded by propaganda - look for clear evidence of outcomes. If you're thinking about unionising in your workplace, please think carefully about this problem and how you're going to make sure that your union is one of the good ones. If you're thinking about running a company, please think carefully about how to be one of the companies that already does the work of the good unions.
frostmatthew 12y ago
> nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades It doesn't sound like you have any actual first-hand experience with unions. I'll admit unions played a significant role in improving the workplace for everyone, and we should all be thankful for their contributions 50+ years ago. But they are now primarily self-serving organizations that exist for the benefit of the union itself. Before becoming a developer I worked in hotels (as a banquet manager), let me give you some examples of the types of things unions now fight for: * a dishwasher cannot wash pots and a potwasher cannot wash dishes * only an electrician can change the batteries in a TV remote or change a lightbulb * when it's busy your manager(s) cannot help you * re-hiring of employees who were terminated because they were caught stealing or physically assaulting other employees The better an employee is the less they benefit from a union. It results in good employees not getting paid as well as they could be and bad employees sticking around because it's difficult (or impossible) to fire them. We could certainly benefit from the types of professional association lawyers[1] and doctors[2] have, but those are quite different than unions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- phaemon 12y ago
  Unions do not fight for any of the things you listed. Frankly, you don't seem to know what a union actually does. Let's take your last example: * re-hiring of employees who were terminated because they were caught stealing or physically assaulting other employees If a person in the company physically assaulted another person then how could they be rehired? Were they working from prison after criminal charges were brought? Were they allowed back into the building, ignoring the restraining order that was obtained? Ohh...what you mean is that the business didn't bother with any of those legal niceties and thought they could accuse someone of assault and fire them, without involving the law. Yeah, you don't get to do that. And most people would be glad of that if some manager decided to fire them due to a personal grudge and gave the reason as assault, with no evidence at all.

by Frondo 12y ago

forrestthewoods 12y ago

"you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that" False. People who worked there before you decided the rules. Once you have an entrenched senior workforce the probability that they will vote themselves less power or money is remarkably low. It's basically the same problem as NIMBYism.

heydenberk 12y ago
I'm very strongly pro-union, but this is an indisputable fact. If labor is to make a comeback in the 21st century, this is an important lesson that needs to be learned.
- bduerst 12y ago
  Interesting. How would you set up a union system that is self improving? Normally organizations need to compete to survive, with the more ineffectual falling off. You can't necessarily have unions compete for members, because the power of the union is in how many members it has and fractioning them would diminish their authority.
  - heydenberk 12y ago
    In general, self-improving institutions operate by setting goals, evaluating those goals with metrics and iterating on the underlying model so as to improve those metrics. I know that's a simplistic answer, but I lack the specific understanding of how unions currently work to provide better insight.
  - minthd 12y ago
    There are unions in the nordic countries. They generally work quite well and don't hurt those countries competitiveness - those nations are quite competitive. I believe Germany is also highly unionized. So maybe we should learn from them ? And BTW in all those countries one thing about those unions is that they are highly responsible - they understand the market realities and understand that people need to justify salries or else there would be layoffs.
    - bnolsen 12y ago
      no. hard working europeans leave europe to escape the system where they have little hope of bettering themselves in the european system. lots of them showed up in china working as part of outsource or manufacturing firms. talked to several myself.
    - pgeorgi 12y ago
      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/volkswagen-s-sort-of-union-in-tennessee http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/volkswagen... describes the tension of having a company with German-style union-values operate in the US.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- ealexhudson 12y ago
  I don't think it's the case that people will stay in the same employ for many years like they used to; unionised or not. People expect to change jobs much more often.
cynicalkane 12y ago
Right now the above post looks about -2 despite being absolutely correct. Downvoting informed people is the worst way to express disagreement. It contributes nothing, and makes your side look bad.
- bsder 12y ago
  It deserves the downvotes because it ignores reality. Many of the steelworkers unions in the early 80's went out of their way to try to get people retired so that the younger people would still have jobs. They also worked very hard to get people transferred to other sites to reach the point where they could retire even if it meant sacrificing some salary. Or, for something more recent, many of the unions involved with Hostess took several rounds of cuts before finally standing up and taking a hard line that eventually led to the bankruptcy. And, it looks like Hostess is going to be better off because of it. The downvotes are well warranted because he spewed propaganda instead of citing real facts.
bandushrew 12y ago
Unions that are well run frequently recognise the realities of business finances, and there are multiple examples of unions that have indeed voted to take a pay cut, if you care to go looking.
task_queue 12y ago
It's the same problem businesses have everywhere, except the good ones know how to weed it out. Same rule applies to unions.
HaloZero 12y ago
Doesn't voting for a board control in the Union allow for this? Like you have 4-5 people in charge but they have to be elected by the body of the Union.
SomeCallMeTim 12y ago
In a blog entry by Micheal O. Church [1], he argues that in the companies that most need unionization, the downsides like wage normalization and seniority rules are already in place, and adding unionization to the mix almost can't make things worse. He also provides examples of unionized industries where "star performers" have no wage limits -- that the only limit is in the minimum pay for a position. And he points out the many ways a union could support programmer rights (for instance, the right to own personal projects), and kill damaging practices like stack ranking. We need something. That much is clear. Whether it's a professional guild or a union, I'm not sure. But the status quo is awful for most of us. [2] [1] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/it-might-be-time-for-software-engineers-especially-in-silicon-valley-to-unionize/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/it-might-be-... [2] I'm actually one of the "1%" who is quite well compensated, but I think more of us should be compensated based on our abilities. And I do want to get rid of the "we own your free time projects" rules everywhere; I consider those to be morally reprehensible. Edit: Added "unionized" to the second paragraph to make it clear what I meant.
- refurb 12y ago
  But the status quo is awful for most of us. No offense, but I think that statement is ridiculous. You admit you're in the top 1% of income earners in the US and you choose to use the word "awful" for your predicament?
  - edwinnathaniel 12y ago
    He's the 1% and the "awful for most of us" is for the 99%.
  - Igglyboo 12y ago
    Just because he's rich doesn't mean he can't sympathise with or understand the plight of the middle class, just like most people understand and sympathize with the plight of the poor.
    - refurb 12y ago
mc32 12y ago
This reminds me how senior pilots will vote against raises for junior pilots so the senior pilots can preserve or increase their pay[1] [1]http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

task_queue 12y ago

A union is a corporation for laborers. When you are a lone skilled worker negotiating with a company, the cards are in their hands every time. You are replaceable. Divide and conquer works great if you want to depress the earnings of entire industries. As professionals, we need to recognize that we are being given the shaft as a whole and unless we have some solidarity, negotiating truly fair market rate compensation is a pipe dream.

topkai22 12y ago
"The cards are in their hands every single time"- that's not true for high skill workers. If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you can often negotiate from a position of strength. That's one of the reasons IT workers get paid so well. The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs- the factory laborer, highly scripted call center worker, the warehouse picker. They can capture a lot more through collective action because while they can easily be replaced individually losing them en masse is catastrophic.
- chronid 12y ago
  If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you have incompetent management and they should be replaced. Single point of failure and all that. What happens when you are ill/away and a critical bug must be fixed, or a critical system goes down and must be restored? I predict a lot of pizza's boxes around the office. And you working remotely like mad while ill or from the beach/sky resort. A lot of screaming, too. :)
- makeitsuckless 12y ago
  Except the reality is that we are not getting paid "so well". Given the scarcity and value of our skills, we're getting screwed. We're not very good at negotiating as individual professionals, and we're being taken advantage of on a massive scale.
  - MCRed 12y ago

ams6110 12y ago

A union will remove any ability for you to stand out. You will be paid the same as the worst or best worker, on the basis of some kind of seniority/job description parameters worked out by the union leadership and the company management. It may get you a little more than you get now, but it also removes any reward for excellence. You will be unable to negotiate a raise or promotion directly with your managers. If you're unhappy with your compensation, move to someplace where you get a better deal. You are worth whatever you agree to work for. If you want a union, fine. I don't suggest that you shouldn't have one. But it will limit your upside, a lot. Even if it offers some minimal protection on the downside.

learnstats2 12y ago
This matches my experience, unfortunately. I worked in an industry with notoriously low pay, and I felt that the union removed my ability to negotiate my pay. Meanwhile, my workplace was paying for (and I was stuck dealing with) union-protected incompetence.
- chronid 12y ago
  To bring a counterpoint, it does not match mine (but I do not live in the USA). My salary is actually higher that the minimum (established by collective agreement) for my job. The union just negotiates the lower bound. If your company values you more than that, they can always pay you more. Or promote you. Nothing stops them to do so.
  - ptaipale 12y ago
    I guess this depends on local legislation. It is possible that in some places the law/collective agreement says that you cannot pay more.
  - maxharris 12y ago
    Nothing stops them to do so. Except the fact that at any given moment, the company only has $X to pay you from, and the union makes it so that they have some amount less: $X - n.

Shivetya 12y ago

No you don't. Your union bargains away your value and your only option is to not vote yes to the contract only to have them tell you its the best you can get and the majority votes for it. Most of the time your representatives don't want to rock the vote and work to protect themselves more than you. Your just a worker to them, they see themselves on the same level with the people they negotiate with, not you. Your hyperbole doesn't provide any real reason to form a union other than you don't like where you work. Honestly go somewhere else. Really. You won't be happy after a union gets there and likely you will be paying dues equivalent to an hour or more a month to be a member. anecdotal part comesnext Having been a member of a union shop before and having quite a few family in the Midwest I would switch employers or careers before creating or joining one. I cannot for the life of me equate professional and union in the same sentence.

cdcarter 12y ago
Still anecdata but I've worked in three locals and have NEVER felt like my job steward or the union leadership aren't working to protect me. If they were, they wouldn't get re-elected. Of course, I work in an industry where the unions are strong and members actually vote.

cperciva 12y ago

If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that. Yes, but I am more skilled than my colleagues. Unions inherently negotiate on behalf of the median worker who was employed at the time that the contract negotiations took place. As other people have pointed out, the fact the unions negotiate for current employees rather than future employees contributes to the "screw the new guy" phenomenon; the fact that unions negotiate for the median worker can result in them undervaluing their high-productivity workers. This is why unions are effective primarily in low-standard-deviation-productivity fields: If the best secretary in the office is 10% more productive than the median, but the union manages to raise the median secretary's income by 20% compared to the market clearing rate, then every secretary benefits. However, if the top software developer is 10x as productive as the median...

fnordsensei 12y ago
If they do their job, they negotiate the minimum wage and benefits. Nothing prevents you from getting more than that if you're skilled, but it does in fact prevent the new guy from being screwed over if done properly.
te_chris 12y ago
You say that now, just you wait until supply of programmers catch up.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Yep. It has always amazed me how my peers can assume that their pay should be proportionate to their value in one breath while ranting about unions in the next. I mean, it's one thing to realize that the supply/demand situation for programmers currently makes unions unnecessary, but it's quite another to slam people in other fields for doing what they have to in order to secure the same damn privilege (getting paid according to value). The opportunity to make this extremely modest dream a reality is not some kind of right inherent to the free market! It's something we're going to have to fight for once supply/demand equilibrium has been reached.

rayiner 12y ago

But it's not propaganda. Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits while completely ignoring the needs of the cities they serve. How police unions are key in protecting bad cops, like unions everywhere protect bad workers. They're functionally no different than the unions that destroyed GM, etc. I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.

goldbeck 12y ago
I note that the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions. It's worth considering that public-sector and private-sector unions are different beasts. For one thing, private-sector unions are facing off against corporations - both trying to maximize their own value, and so one might hope a balance is achieved. In the public-sector, unions are trying to maximize their own value, but the government is (hypothetically) trying to maximize public good, so it's not really a fair balance. Private-sector unions have been hugely helpful in the US. This article touches on it in an interesting way: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-the-cost-of-a-decline-in-unions.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/nicholas-kristof-t...
- pdonis 12y ago
  > the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions He also brought up the United Auto Workers, which is not.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Yes, but only his complaints about the public sector unions were reasonable enough to address.
    - pdonis 12y ago
      > only his complaints about the public sector unions were reasonable enough to address. I don't understand. His complaint is basically that public sector unions and private sector unions have the same problems.

Symmetry 12y ago

If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that. This is theoretically true for a lot of things such as pay by seniority but it isn't true for everything. In the bad old days some people used union requirements as a way of keeping minorities out of certain industries. Laws were passed to fix this, but those same laws sometimes mean that if your coworker is incompetent then even if management and most union members want them gone then the union is still obligated to fight to let your coworker keep their job. It can be hard to talk about unions in general when unions in the US and Sweden and Japan end up working so differently.

paulhauggis 12y ago

"Aaand...a union isn't a "let's all be lazy and wreck businesses" framework; that's a bit of nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades.." This sounds great in theory, but here is what I've seen in practice: 1) Very difficult to fire someone which almost always leads to a court case. Poor employees should be able to be terminated, for the benefit of everyone, not shuffled around the company wasting money and resources. 2) Unions becoming as powerful or more powerful than many large companies which leads to the same type of corruption. Most Union leaders get millions in bonuses every year, yet we don't see anyone protesting on Wallstreet. 3) Guaranteed raises for unionized employees, even if it means the company will go out of business or can't compete any longer in the market place. 4) Inflated wages. A worker doing a job that requires little education or skill can do should not be paid > $100,000/year. In the 90s, I knew mechanics making $150,000/year working 3 day work-weeks. The unions forced the companies to have 2 people working the job of 1 person. 5) You can't get raises based only on merit. If you want a raise, many other people need to get raises in your department or it just won't happen. My previous company went to a trade show in Vegas and we rented a booth. We were required to pay $500 for a union guy to unfold a table and another couple thousand to essentially plug in a computer. Why would I want more of this inefficiency? More examples: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/vegas-union-blocks-ufc-ny-ve-found-point-154302763.html http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/vegas-union-bloc... Ever wonder why the UFC isn't in New York? The Culinary union. When people choose not to be in a union, many unions decide to use under-handed tactics to force a company to support them. It's just one group looking to have power over another. They generally aren't looking out for your best interest, only to use your status as an employee to have leverage and power over a company. This is a forum for startups. Do you actually think it would be easy to start a company if you had to go through miles of red tape and essentially a court case to let a poor employee go? It would change the entire startup scene for the worst. The glut, waste, and inefficiency is why I despise unions. You can tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I've seen it too many times in the last 20 years to believe you.

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SomeCallMeTim 12y ago

I'm really believing we need a professional association or guild. With merit-based professional rankings. I think a big contributor to the problem of programmers being underpaid is that there's no distinction between the clinic assistant and the brain surgeon. We're all just "programmers" or at best "software engineers". If there were an official distinction, then it might be easier to demand higher salaries for the higher skilled positions.

rwallace 12y ago
I am not entirely without sympathy for the idea of a union modeled after those in e.g. Hollywood; I can see reasonable arguments on both sides. But the guild that controls the medical profession has turned out to be a disaster of such epic proportions that I am stunned any sane person would consider it anything other than a grim cautionary tale. Any other setup would be better than that. (Beware of the temptation to let the high status of medicine influence one's opinion of the institutions by which it is run.)

benihana 12y ago

>If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that. Only if someone before me hadn't decided them first. And even if I decide them, what about the people who come after me? They're forever beholden to the context that I created the rules under.

mch82 12y ago
Rules and leadership get renegotiated periodically, just like a company's board of directors and shareholder ballot initiatives are voted on periodically. A rule set is not a permanent structure.
- peteypao 12y ago
  Except that it is. How likely are the current rules going to be completely revised? It would probably takes countless years for anything to change.

netcan 12y ago

I agree that many of the slogan laced perspectives are shallow. Unionisation and the whole complex that comes with it is not narrow. A lot of effort and thought has gone into it. A lot of smart people. But it's also true that unions themselves have causes problems, often at a very macro level. Unions can have their own interests, independent of the interests of their members. I don't know where I stand. I think there is a real problem in negotiation position of employees and employers. An employer negotiates often, their stakes are lower and they can optimize. I think we would be seeing improved "labour conditions" like working hours, holidays and other points if the negotiation process was efficient, but we are not. Generally, the less restricted the market, the longer the conventional hours, the fewer the number of days off and the lower the job security. I think it's probably inefficient. I don't think unions have offered a perfect solution. Often it's not even good enough or better than nothing. I think we need to keep looking. The left needs new ideas.

asuffield 12y ago

I'd like to make a subtle but critical adjustment to your statement: "A union is a legal framework for the employees which has the ability to recast the power balance and can do it in their favour, if it so chooses." Unions are definitely capable of doing this thing, and some do it. They do not necessarily do this thing, and some do not. The common failure mode is that an entrenched union is run by a group of people who act very much like company management, profit immensely from this arrangement, and remain in power by employing forms of the pirate ship loot splitting strategy. (The pirate ship captain must propose a split of the loot, which the crew votes on. If they vote in favour, the loot split goes ahead, and if not then the captain is thrown overboard. The correct solution is to divide the loot equally between 51% of the crew including the captain, and allocate none to the rest.) The worst unions are definitely not a framework for laziness, but they do tend to be bad for businesses as their primary function is to suck money out of the company and give it to union leaders. The best unions make everybody better off, including the employers. Some companies have internalised the functions of the best unions, because they realised that this makes everybody better off, so don't have any real need for unions. Some companies have internalised the functions of the worst unions and are engaged in an asset-stripping operation. There is a tendency for older unions to be worse than newer ones. Setting up a union will almost certainly be good for the people who set it up. Joining an established union may or may not be good for you; if you're thinking about joining a union then research this union carefully and figure out if they're going to be good for you. Keep in mind that bad unions tend to be extremely political and will be surrounded by propaganda - look for clear evidence of outcomes. If you're thinking about unionising in your workplace, please think carefully about this problem and how you're going to make sure that your union is one of the good ones. If you're thinking about running a company, please think carefully about how to be one of the companies that already does the work of the good unions.

frostmatthew 12y ago

> nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades It doesn't sound like you have any actual first-hand experience with unions. I'll admit unions played a significant role in improving the workplace for everyone, and we should all be thankful for their contributions 50+ years ago. But they are now primarily self-serving organizations that exist for the benefit of the union itself. Before becoming a developer I worked in hotels (as a banquet manager), let me give you some examples of the types of things unions now fight for: * a dishwasher cannot wash pots and a potwasher cannot wash dishes * only an electrician can change the batteries in a TV remote or change a lightbulb * when it's busy your manager(s) cannot help you * re-hiring of employees who were terminated because they were caught stealing or physically assaulting other employees The better an employee is the less they benefit from a union. It results in good employees not getting paid as well as they could be and bad employees sticking around because it's difficult (or impossible) to fire them. We could certainly benefit from the types of professional association lawyers[1] and doctors[2] have, but those are quite different than unions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association

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phaemon 12y ago
Unions do not fight for any of the things you listed. Frankly, you don't seem to know what a union actually does. Let's take your last example: * re-hiring of employees who were terminated because they were caught stealing or physically assaulting other employees If a person in the company physically assaulted another person then how could they be rehired? Were they working from prison after criminal charges were brought? Were they allowed back into the building, ignoring the restraining order that was obtained? Ohh...what you mean is that the business didn't bother with any of those legal niceties and thought they could accuse someone of assault and fire them, without involving the law. Yeah, you don't get to do that. And most people would be glad of that if some manager decided to fire them due to a personal grudge and gave the reason as assault, with no evidence at all.