12 ms·

This is the sort of thing that makes me very sympathetic to unions. Imagine if the entire disney IT workforce stood up at once and said "ok, we all leave, now.

by geebee 11y ago

This is the sort of thing that makes me very sympathetic to unions. Imagine if the entire disney IT workforce stood up at once and said "ok, we all leave, now." What would happen to Disney's IT systems? This is almost a perfect example of divide-and-conquer, where a united and powerful single actor (a corporation) picks off workers one by one. I'm pretty sure, at this point, that IT workers will never unionize. I'd say that people who see the value in a union will probably just go into other fields (like nursing, where unions have actually successfully threatened strikes over exactly this issue).

jonlucc 11y ago
I think if it becomes clear that nurses and other unionized jobs are indeed safe after IT gets hurt badly, there may be some backlash. There has been a very careful and successful demonization of unions in the US.
- hga 11y ago
  Given the crime associated with unions, the featherbedding, the simple observation of how union dominated companies and whole industries abjectly failed in the post-post-WWII era, well, let's just say they did all the demonization needed to themselves.
  - geebee 11y ago
    Keep in mind, unions were just performing a public service. They were acting badly so that people could see just how low a bar you could set for people to still prefer unions over corporations. Honestly, though, unions missed the mark in this case, they vastly overestimated how high the input would have to be to get to get a "true" from public boolean is_more_ethical_than_corporation(int union_ethics). EDIT: hga - I can't reply, which is probably a good thing. I got a little overly sarcastic there. It doesn't help discussion, my apologies.
    - hga 11y ago
      Wow, when I started coming of political age in the very late '60s and read about the murder of Joseph Yablonski, his wife and daughter, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Yablonski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Yablonski), I had no idea the game was so deep.... Oh, yeah, no long afterwords, this local murder of a John Galt (yep, for real) happened: http://ozarks-history.blogspot.com/2014/06/i-44-truck-explosion.html http://ozarks-history.blogspot.com/2014/06/i-44-truck-explos...
  - misterbee 11y ago
    Are we overlooking the crime associated with corporate management, the featherbedding, and how non-union company employees abjectly failed to thrive in the -- what's a "post-post-WWII era" anyway?
    - hga 11y ago
      How many murders can you cite ordered by the management or even committed by the rank and file of Fortune 20 or so companies (equivalent to the United Mine Workers or Teamsters I mention in two incidents in another reply in this sub-thread)? Any comments from Jimmy Hoffa? Post-WWII is a strong period for unionized employees and companies, with much of the competition suppressed by war time damage, and the playing field less tilted toward unions by the Taft-Hartley Labor Act of 1947. Post-post is after that, when many if not most unionized US industries declined, e.g. steel and auto.
prostoalex 11y ago
> Imagine if the entire disney IT workforce stood up at once and said "ok, we all leave, now." What would happen to Disney's IT systems? The outsourcing company would then submit a new bid covering a broader range of IT systems.
- geebee 11y ago
  I don't know how things work at disney, but my guess is that at most companies with even mildly complex IT systems governing operations, things would collapse in an extremely damaging way long before an outsourcing company would be able take over operations. I think that within about 15 minutes of a general IT strike, the electric fence would go out, the velociraptors would escape, and the jedi knights would start to wish those were real light sabers.
  - smileysteve 11y ago
    > I think that within about 15 minutes of a general IT strike, the electric fence would go out, the velociraptors would escape, and the jedi knights would start to wish those were real light sabers. I got a good laugh at this, seeing it as a reference with the velociraptors but only realizing that all of those things are in their park as I finished the sentence.
    - Avshalom 11y ago
      ...Jurassic Park are a universal property
- yourapostasy 11y ago
  I have wide experience with a very broad variety of companies' disaster recovery infrastructures, for over a decade. To date, without exception, not a single one of those DR infrastructures and plans include a provision for, "...and we lose X% of IT staff in a random distribution all at once during the DR incident, where X>30". This has implications. 1. The probability of 30+% of the IT staff suddenly not working the next day is considered vanishingly low, even in DR contexts where they routinely deal with low probability events. 2. Even if (1) was to come about, IT management pretty universally agrees with each other that IT staff are generally replaceable on short notice without irreversible consequences to the organization. The case for organizational data disappearing and causing irreparable harm to the organization is pretty well established and accepted by IT management. It is not at all clear to me that even if an IT union entrenched itself in a major company, that a mass walkout would be taken that seriously, because I haven't yet seen the case made and accepted that IT organizational staff disappearing causes the same or greater harm. The corollary implication is that IT organizations commit more process capital to retention of the bits sitting on spinning rust than to staff retention. Staffing spend remains an overwhelming percentage of the annual budget of most IT organizations, and if it isn't well-accepted that this staff disappearing all at once causes catastrophic damage, then I can't be surprised when there is so much assiduous effort at reducing that spend. I don't agree with this mainstream IT management outlook on the matter, but most IT management is constrained to what they can demonstrate in financials and budget spreadsheets to senior management. Slowly degrading capabilities don't show up in those sheets until very late in the game.

by geebee 11y ago

jonlucc 11y ago

I think if it becomes clear that nurses and other unionized jobs are indeed safe after IT gets hurt badly, there may be some backlash. There has been a very careful and successful demonization of unions in the US.

hga 11y ago
Given the crime associated with unions, the featherbedding, the simple observation of how union dominated companies and whole industries abjectly failed in the post-post-WWII era, well, let's just say they did all the demonization needed to themselves.
- geebee 11y ago
  Keep in mind, unions were just performing a public service. They were acting badly so that people could see just how low a bar you could set for people to still prefer unions over corporations. Honestly, though, unions missed the mark in this case, they vastly overestimated how high the input would have to be to get to get a "true" from public boolean is_more_ethical_than_corporation(int union_ethics). EDIT: hga - I can't reply, which is probably a good thing. I got a little overly sarcastic there. It doesn't help discussion, my apologies.
  - hga 11y ago
    Wow, when I started coming of political age in the very late '60s and read about the murder of Joseph Yablonski, his wife and daughter, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Yablonski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Yablonski), I had no idea the game was so deep.... Oh, yeah, no long afterwords, this local murder of a John Galt (yep, for real) happened: http://ozarks-history.blogspot.com/2014/06/i-44-truck-explosion.html http://ozarks-history.blogspot.com/2014/06/i-44-truck-explos...
- misterbee 11y ago
  Are we overlooking the crime associated with corporate management, the featherbedding, and how non-union company employees abjectly failed to thrive in the -- what's a "post-post-WWII era" anyway?
  - hga 11y ago
    How many murders can you cite ordered by the management or even committed by the rank and file of Fortune 20 or so companies (equivalent to the United Mine Workers or Teamsters I mention in two incidents in another reply in this sub-thread)? Any comments from Jimmy Hoffa? Post-WWII is a strong period for unionized employees and companies, with much of the competition suppressed by war time damage, and the playing field less tilted toward unions by the Taft-Hartley Labor Act of 1947. Post-post is after that, when many if not most unionized US industries declined, e.g. steel and auto.

prostoalex 11y ago

> Imagine if the entire disney IT workforce stood up at once and said "ok, we all leave, now." What would happen to Disney's IT systems? The outsourcing company would then submit a new bid covering a broader range of IT systems.

geebee 11y ago
I don't know how things work at disney, but my guess is that at most companies with even mildly complex IT systems governing operations, things would collapse in an extremely damaging way long before an outsourcing company would be able take over operations. I think that within about 15 minutes of a general IT strike, the electric fence would go out, the velociraptors would escape, and the jedi knights would start to wish those were real light sabers.
- smileysteve 11y ago
  > I think that within about 15 minutes of a general IT strike, the electric fence would go out, the velociraptors would escape, and the jedi knights would start to wish those were real light sabers. I got a good laugh at this, seeing it as a reference with the velociraptors but only realizing that all of those things are in their park as I finished the sentence.
  - Avshalom 11y ago
    ...Jurassic Park are a universal property
yourapostasy 11y ago
I have wide experience with a very broad variety of companies' disaster recovery infrastructures, for over a decade. To date, without exception, not a single one of those DR infrastructures and plans include a provision for, "...and we lose X% of IT staff in a random distribution all at once during the DR incident, where X>30". This has implications. 1. The probability of 30+% of the IT staff suddenly not working the next day is considered vanishingly low, even in DR contexts where they routinely deal with low probability events. 2. Even if (1) was to come about, IT management pretty universally agrees with each other that IT staff are generally replaceable on short notice without irreversible consequences to the organization. The case for organizational data disappearing and causing irreparable harm to the organization is pretty well established and accepted by IT management. It is not at all clear to me that even if an IT union entrenched itself in a major company, that a mass walkout would be taken that seriously, because I haven't yet seen the case made and accepted that IT organizational staff disappearing causes the same or greater harm. The corollary implication is that IT organizations commit more process capital to retention of the bits sitting on spinning rust than to staff retention. Staffing spend remains an overwhelming percentage of the annual budget of most IT organizations, and if it isn't well-accepted that this staff disappearing all at once causes catastrophic damage, then I can't be surprised when there is so much assiduous effort at reducing that spend. I don't agree with this mainstream IT management outlook on the matter, but most IT management is constrained to what they can demonstrate in financials and budget spreadsheets to senior management. Slowly degrading capabilities don't show up in those sheets until very late in the game.