I worry that tech workers may be under-informed about what a union may mean. A union can be in many ways similar to a corporation with its own power structure and demands.
Just 4 examples from my time in a union shop:
1) Pay raise and promotion via seniority only
2) Being warned by the shop steward that I was "working too fast"
3) Heavy coercion to contribute to specific political candidates
4) Going on strike for reasons I didn't agree with
Maybe a tech union would turn out better somehow. I for one would not want to go back to that situation.
A union is a beast unto itself, and much like companies, unions vary a great deal between themselves and your specific experiences don't generalize across all unions, anymore than my experience working for a CPG company generalizes across the industry.
To counter your anecdote, my mother spent years working under a telecom union when I was younger and never had any such issues. Employees sure were grateful however to have someone on their side when it came time to negotiating severance around lay-offs.
As a thought experiment though: Why do we allow corporations to exist then, if we actively oppose unions for behaving in the same way as corporations?
You draw a straight parallel between union behavior and corporate behavior. By that same argument then, I will argue that if unions are bad, corporations are bad for the same reason and corporations should be abolished.
Unions have their own goals that are more than just "the interests of Kickstarter employees". So in fact, there will be times when issues are important to Kickstarter employees but are not important to their union. Or important to the union but not very many employees. And then what?
I thought the whole point of unions was to represent interests of employees? If the Kickstarter employees' issues are not important to their union, why would they unionize?
I think that people need to think about the distinctions between a white-collar union and a blue-collar union.
A blue-collar union, like the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), can essentially treat each person as known amount of performance and bargain as such. There is relatively little difference between trained employees on a production line. So the UAW can bargain for things like promotion by seniority only, which provides a reasonable balance to keep managers from playing favorites. There's not a whole lot you can do to set yourself apart when you are stamping out door panels and robots do the welding for you, so promotion on merit isn't as important. Take a look at the tone of this UAW web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to avoid bad things: https://uaw.org/organize/no-union-no-rights/
For white-collar unions, such as the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), there often is a demonstrable difference in the quality of work that trained employees do, so they don't want to get rid of merit based consideration, but they do want to ensure that their employees are treated fairly. Take a look at the tone of this SPEEA web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to achieve more good things: http://www.speea.org/Join_Our_Union!/Benefits_of_SPEEA.html
The Kickstarter union shouldn't model themselves after the UAW, but more like SPEEA. I don't know what the employees are proposing, but I fear that a lot of people assume that the Kickstarter employees are trying to start a mafia within the organization that controls what all the employees can do. That's probably not the case, they should make sure that two people with the same merit are given the same fair shakes. They shouldn't be telling people to code fewer lines per day because they don't want to give the company free labor.
Things like requiring workers to support certain political candidates is what makes some people dislike unions. It's one thing for a union to endorse a candidate because they support policies favorable to union workers, it's another thing to coerce your employees to vote a certain way.
Things like striking even if you don't agree with them however, is a good part of the union and is how it gains its bargaining power. If people were free to just pick and choose the issues that they supported, then there wouldn't be a point of a union. Assuming the union is not corrupt, you should strike in solidarity with your other union members. If you show support for them today even if you don't necessarily agree, they might show support for you tomorrow even if they don't necessarily agree.
What about unions that are more like a trade guild, which sets standards for its members which make dealing with a union member more of a known quantity than hiring a random person off the street? I'm thinking of things like a union electrician or plumber.
This could serve to minimize the need for interview gimmicks, since the union itself would enforce standards through its own certification process.
Pro or con of the union idea, I hope get they nailed for firing those two organizers. Firing someone and claiming poor performance makes me not want to support them anymore. I won't give them a cent.
I’ve not met either the Kickstarter management nor the people that were fired, but isn’t it possible that these folks knew they were poor performers and were on borrowed time with the company? They may have wanted to start a union that could bargain on their behalf with a lot more power.
I’m not saying that unions created in good faith are bad, but there are union leaders that give off a vibe of self-enrichment. Kind of like political lobbies- some are good, some are bad.
I don’t know if we should take the fired employees’ word for why they were fired. I’ve seen too many “bottom 5%ers” make up excuses why they were fired when the reality is that they plain couldn’t hack it. I’ll reserve judgement until there is a court case or a settlement. If it really is a slam-dunk case like the Twitter-verse makes it out to be, there are lawyers that are begging to help these poor souls.
I hadn't thought of it until I read your comment, but when I worked for the government, the people who were MOST familiar with the contract, the rules, the exact things that I could ask them to do and the things they were allowed to refuse... were the worst teammates.
There was a lot of really good people at the government. And they never talked about their contract. But then the two worst employees on the team were very, very familiar with their rights down to the letter.
There's some type of correlation there. The more you know the exact wording of the union contract, the more you talk about it, the less interested you are in serving the end customers to the best of your abilities.
If someone asks you to do something, and your default answer is that it's not in your contract, you're not approaching things in the right way.
The lack of unions in the industry is making me leave. It’s going to leave out many of its current employees to dry: I want something better than the word of an entrepreneur.
If a tech company I worked for unionized, I would leave. I’m not in a single company town where everyone has worked at the same place their entire lives. Tech companies face fierce competition for talent, and it has worked out quite nicely for the employees.
I wouldn’t want some outside organization coming in and forcing me to pay dues, demanding changes to the structure of the company, devaluing my equity, and making it impossible to fire poor performers that make my job harder.
Unless the union negotiates an exclusive hire contract with the company (very difficult unless the union controls most of the labor supply), you can simply not join the union.
I always find these things arguments a bit weird. Lets look at the concerns
> forcing me to pay dues
Don't join. No dues, no help from the union.
> demanding changes to the structure of the company
As an employee you have no say in the structure of the company and it may restructure at any moment. As a union member at least have some say in what the union pushes for. It seems like this is arguing for no control instead of some.
> devaluing my equity
How?
> making it impossible to fire poor performers that make my job harder.
Again how? A union can't stop a company from firing someone (barring contracts the company may have signed with the union). A union can assist the fired employee in things like negotiating severance, or mounting a legal challenge if the employee was discriminated against.
As someone who just witnessed a mass-layoff, I wonder how much better off the employees might be if they had someone on their side, negotiating severance, notice periods etc.
Everything a union does is paid for out of member dues. They don't have infinite resources to spend in constant legal battles challenging the clearly legal firing of a shitty employee, and if the did waste member dues like that, they'd quickly find themselves no members. If the union isn't representing your interests, just leave it. It'll quickly run out of members and money and become toothless.
It seems pretty shallow to pin the qualities of an unhealthy union on all unions. Some unions are great, others are not, and healthy unions only require one simple ingredient: maintenance and attention, like most things.
Unions are just an avenue for bargaining. In my experience, which has only been in a healthy union with people who take an interest in the value it provides, it has been so liberating! It encourages us to discuss things in the open that would have always been closed-door conversations before, and I never worry about whether I am being taken advantage of. I honestly don’t even make much money for a software engineer, but I love the domain I work in and having the union has made my work relationships just feel less exploitative. It feels less like work.
Amen to that. Engineering is unique in that both experience and talent is required, and is valued. IMHO, that plus competition is enough security for me. I don't need another layer of bureaucracy "helping" me be less productive. By raising barriers to entrance, barriers to change, and by protecting the entrenched a union would totally devalue my worth.
It is interesting that they didn't stop their active KickStarter campaign and pushed people to not pull their donations. It would be nice for them to walk the walk, they did create a petition in response... If I were the CEO I would feel pretty safe about moving forward with the same policies.
"We were unable to continue promoting our campaign, because every time we did, people criticized us for partnering with an anti-union company, which you have now admitted you are. As a result of our inability to promote the campaign in good conscience, our fundraiser has made far less money than it otherwise could have. "
Open Collective is an alternative to 501(3)(c) for some orgs.
I wonder if an Open Collective -esque model could work for employees as an alternative to unions?
I applaud the benefits that early unions brought to workers, but what have they done lately(as in decades) I. Terms of creating/capturing value?
My experience with unions was an an employee of Amazon.com in the 90’s and witnessing the horrible things WashTech and it’s supporters did to my staff in a failed attempt to gain access to Amazon distribution centers.
It would be cool if there was a very light digital network model by which employees could collectively engage with company management/leadership.
As well as far less adversarial, more akin to collaborative labour/leadership relationship as found in Germany.
It works great for the Screen Actor’s Guild and the rest of the film industry. They set minimum wages and use their market power to radically restrict entry so that there’s less competition from outsiders, by not working with firms that employ non-members and expelling members that do.
Any Software Professionals Guild could do the same, reduce the supply of competitors and punish people who employed any entry level workers who didn’t have the connections to get in.
One benefit, for current members, is that you can increase the cost of membership for new members. So you start off letting boot camp graduates work, then restrict it to Bachelor’s holders, (who must be taught by members of course), then to a Master’s.
You see the ever increasing credentialism in physiotherapy in the US, where you’re now required to have a “professional doctorate”. Pure waste given that it’s an apprenticeship in Germany and a Bachelor’s everywhere else.
Most of the motion picture and television world, which is also responsible for producing digital content, and also has wide disparities in talent between people with similar titles, is unionized.
The film industry is the best example of why the software industry should be unionized.
A critical purpose of film industry unions is taking a responsibility for their talent. The software industry hiring practices need this very bad.
With the film industry, it is hard to get into the unions. It takes a lot of work and networking, and proving one’s self worthy, but considering the hiring hell that the software industry is experiencing, the film industry union structure would be a blessing.
Nathan: "Would not voluntarily recognize a union even if the vast majority of workers signed in support of one."
The CEO's statement he referenced: " If a majority of the staff in an appropriate bargaining unit votes in favor of a union in an NLRB election, we will fully respect that choice and negotiate in good faith toward a collective bargaining agreement."
Those statements seem to be opposite of each other?
NRLB elections are legally binding, so the CEO statement there is basically "we will follow the law".
The process Nathan is referring to is something a lot less formal where they pass around a petition to form a union and it gets a bunch of signatures. Not recognizing such a petition is consistent with Kickstarter's stance of not supporting unions.
Apparently there's also a 50% rule where if 50% sign authorization cards for the union then they can ask to be recognized directly (https://definitions.uslegal.com/a/authorization-card/), but nobody seems to be discussing that, probably because actual support for the union is low and getting even the 30% for an election will be difficult. In May there were 28 public supporters (https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/evjb47/workers-accuse-kic...), but KS has 152 employees so they'd need 18 more employees just for an election.
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Just 4 examples from my time in a union shop:
Maybe a tech union would turn out better somehow. I for one would not want to go back to that situation.To counter your anecdote, my mother spent years working under a telecom union when I was younger and never had any such issues. Employees sure were grateful however to have someone on their side when it came time to negotiating severance around lay-offs.
You draw a straight parallel between union behavior and corporate behavior. By that same argument then, I will argue that if unions are bad, corporations are bad for the same reason and corporations should be abolished.
A blue-collar union, like the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), can essentially treat each person as known amount of performance and bargain as such. There is relatively little difference between trained employees on a production line. So the UAW can bargain for things like promotion by seniority only, which provides a reasonable balance to keep managers from playing favorites. There's not a whole lot you can do to set yourself apart when you are stamping out door panels and robots do the welding for you, so promotion on merit isn't as important. Take a look at the tone of this UAW web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to avoid bad things: https://uaw.org/organize/no-union-no-rights/
For white-collar unions, such as the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), there often is a demonstrable difference in the quality of work that trained employees do, so they don't want to get rid of merit based consideration, but they do want to ensure that their employees are treated fairly. Take a look at the tone of this SPEEA web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to achieve more good things: http://www.speea.org/Join_Our_Union!/Benefits_of_SPEEA.html
The Kickstarter union shouldn't model themselves after the UAW, but more like SPEEA. I don't know what the employees are proposing, but I fear that a lot of people assume that the Kickstarter employees are trying to start a mafia within the organization that controls what all the employees can do. That's probably not the case, they should make sure that two people with the same merit are given the same fair shakes. They shouldn't be telling people to code fewer lines per day because they don't want to give the company free labor.
Things like requiring workers to support certain political candidates is what makes some people dislike unions. It's one thing for a union to endorse a candidate because they support policies favorable to union workers, it's another thing to coerce your employees to vote a certain way.
Things like striking even if you don't agree with them however, is a good part of the union and is how it gains its bargaining power. If people were free to just pick and choose the issues that they supported, then there wouldn't be a point of a union. Assuming the union is not corrupt, you should strike in solidarity with your other union members. If you show support for them today even if you don't necessarily agree, they might show support for you tomorrow even if they don't necessarily agree.
This could serve to minimize the need for interview gimmicks, since the union itself would enforce standards through its own certification process.
I’m not saying that unions created in good faith are bad, but there are union leaders that give off a vibe of self-enrichment. Kind of like political lobbies- some are good, some are bad.
I don’t know if we should take the fired employees’ word for why they were fired. I’ve seen too many “bottom 5%ers” make up excuses why they were fired when the reality is that they plain couldn’t hack it. I’ll reserve judgement until there is a court case or a settlement. If it really is a slam-dunk case like the Twitter-verse makes it out to be, there are lawyers that are begging to help these poor souls.
There was a lot of really good people at the government. And they never talked about their contract. But then the two worst employees on the team were very, very familiar with their rights down to the letter.
There's some type of correlation there. The more you know the exact wording of the union contract, the more you talk about it, the less interested you are in serving the end customers to the best of your abilities.
If someone asks you to do something, and your default answer is that it's not in your contract, you're not approaching things in the right way.
Deleted Comment
I wouldn’t want some outside organization coming in and forcing me to pay dues, demanding changes to the structure of the company, devaluing my equity, and making it impossible to fire poor performers that make my job harder.
I always find these things arguments a bit weird. Lets look at the concerns
> forcing me to pay dues
Don't join. No dues, no help from the union.
> demanding changes to the structure of the company
As an employee you have no say in the structure of the company and it may restructure at any moment. As a union member at least have some say in what the union pushes for. It seems like this is arguing for no control instead of some.
> devaluing my equity
How?
> making it impossible to fire poor performers that make my job harder.
Again how? A union can't stop a company from firing someone (barring contracts the company may have signed with the union). A union can assist the fired employee in things like negotiating severance, or mounting a legal challenge if the employee was discriminated against.
As someone who just witnessed a mass-layoff, I wonder how much better off the employees might be if they had someone on their side, negotiating severance, notice periods etc.
Everything a union does is paid for out of member dues. They don't have infinite resources to spend in constant legal battles challenging the clearly legal firing of a shitty employee, and if the did waste member dues like that, they'd quickly find themselves no members. If the union isn't representing your interests, just leave it. It'll quickly run out of members and money and become toothless.
Unions are just an avenue for bargaining. In my experience, which has only been in a healthy union with people who take an interest in the value it provides, it has been so liberating! It encourages us to discuss things in the open that would have always been closed-door conversations before, and I never worry about whether I am being taken advantage of. I honestly don’t even make much money for a software engineer, but I love the domain I work in and having the union has made my work relationships just feel less exploitative. It feels less like work.
Do you think the competition for talent for them is more or less fierce than it is for you?
Dead Comment
"We were unable to continue promoting our campaign, because every time we did, people criticized us for partnering with an anti-union company, which you have now admitted you are. As a result of our inability to promote the campaign in good conscience, our fundraiser has made far less money than it otherwise could have. "
I wonder if an Open Collective -esque model could work for employees as an alternative to unions?
I applaud the benefits that early unions brought to workers, but what have they done lately(as in decades) I. Terms of creating/capturing value?
My experience with unions was an an employee of Amazon.com in the 90’s and witnessing the horrible things WashTech and it’s supporters did to my staff in a failed attempt to gain access to Amazon distribution centers.
It would be cool if there was a very light digital network model by which employees could collectively engage with company management/leadership.
As well as far less adversarial, more akin to collaborative labour/leadership relationship as found in Germany.
Any Software Professionals Guild could do the same, reduce the supply of competitors and punish people who employed any entry level workers who didn’t have the connections to get in.
One benefit, for current members, is that you can increase the cost of membership for new members. So you start off letting boot camp graduates work, then restrict it to Bachelor’s holders, (who must be taught by members of course), then to a Master’s.
You see the ever increasing credentialism in physiotherapy in the US, where you’re now required to have a “professional doctorate”. Pure waste given that it’s an apprenticeship in Germany and a Bachelor’s everywhere else.
This doesn't sound very similar to the market for Software Engineers where there is a shortage of skilled labour.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
A critical purpose of film industry unions is taking a responsibility for their talent. The software industry hiring practices need this very bad.
With the film industry, it is hard to get into the unions. It takes a lot of work and networking, and proving one’s self worthy, but considering the hiring hell that the software industry is experiencing, the film industry union structure would be a blessing.
Dead Comment
Nathan: "Would not voluntarily recognize a union even if the vast majority of workers signed in support of one."
The CEO's statement he referenced: " If a majority of the staff in an appropriate bargaining unit votes in favor of a union in an NLRB election, we will fully respect that choice and negotiate in good faith toward a collective bargaining agreement."
Those statements seem to be opposite of each other?
NRLB elections are legally binding, so the CEO statement there is basically "we will follow the law".
The process Nathan is referring to is something a lot less formal where they pass around a petition to form a union and it gets a bunch of signatures. Not recognizing such a petition is consistent with Kickstarter's stance of not supporting unions.
Apparently there's also a 50% rule where if 50% sign authorization cards for the union then they can ask to be recognized directly (https://definitions.uslegal.com/a/authorization-card/), but nobody seems to be discussing that, probably because actual support for the union is low and getting even the 30% for an election will be difficult. In May there were 28 public supporters (https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/evjb47/workers-accuse-kic...), but KS has 152 employees so they'd need 18 more employees just for an election.