I find this interesting because I don't fully understand how tech became so opposed to unions. Many in our industry are quite jaded about the poor behavior of large corporations. Perhaps there are also reasons to be distrustful of unions. But mostly we accept working with or doing business with the former, and entirely eschewing the latter.
Why have we decided that untrustworthy, sometimes poorly managed organizations are acceptable when operating in the interests of shareholders, but not when operating in the interests of workers? (Note: I have never been part of a union, so this question is asked from position of ignorance.)
Unions are just another idea that sounds great on paper, only if you don't consider second and third order effects. They don't serve the workers, they serve themselves (like pretty much any organization).
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.
Given all that I personally think the downsides of unions in tech would be much higher than the upsides. I would rather see more laws universally protecting intellectual workers like e.g. non-enforcability of non-compete clauses and alikes.
> Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power
Nonsense. Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded with each other to keep tech worker compensation below its market rate[1].
Good luck negotiating a group health plan that an employer buys as a single employee.
> Given all that I personally think the downsides of unions in tech would be much higher than the upsides.
I would rather go with the facts, and not how you in particular feel about the issue.
The facts are that white collar employees that are union members have higher pay[2], better benefits, more time off, and report higher life satisfaction[3] compared to their non-union peers.
They don't serve the workers, they serve themselves (like pretty much any organization).
Unions are owned/compromised of workers. Workers vote on issues that affect them.
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
Absolutely true, but if demand wasn't so high and supply wasn't so short, what happens to worker leverage and treatment?
Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
Equity compensation is a result of the pressures of a competitive labour market. If companies could get away with not handing out equity, they would. But since the other guys are paying so well, they are forced to up the ante.
Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.
An exaggeration. You're not getting hired at the big players without a degree and/or significant experience. Software engineering != entrepreneurship. The majority of software devs would not be able to pay their own bills after 6 months of working on their own projects. Most projects fail.
There is a reason all the big sports leagues are unionized with player associations (also highly skill specialized, limited labour supply pool). They are able to negotiate for 50% of league revenue and establish protections. There are downsides; the highest earners are giving up their ability to earn true market wage (ex: a salary cap creates a wage maximum on an individual). But in general I've never heard a pro athlete say that the union has not given them measurable benefit and otherwise higher long term gain.
> Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power
> I would rather see more laws universally protecting intellectual workers like e.g. non-enforcability of non-compete clauses and alikes
One of this must be incorrect. If tech workers have good negotiating power, they should be able to get rid of non-compete clauses. If they can't, see, that's what union can do (at least try to negotiate) for you.
> Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
I am skeptical about this. At public companies, it seems like in general shareholders do an ineffective job at reigning in management. See e.g. all the discussions around executive pay, as well as the proportion of shares that are held through passive funds.
Within tech in some cases (e.g. FB) extra means were taken so that shareholders have even less control than is typical.
Within private companies, employees with vested options typically have far less visibility into company finances than do the VCs, and certainly don't have a board seat or the ability to vote. I.e. being an employee shareholder at a startup often gives you no ability to see whether management is actually working in your interest, and certainly no special input into corporate governance.
> Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
> Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
> Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.
Points 1 and 3 apply, perhaps, to Silicon Valley, but not as much in the rest of the world. I currently work in the Netherlands - there are plenty of jobs and the pay can be good, but at the end of the day you're just another worker. The disparity in negotiating power is still enormous.
Point 2 is mostly not that relevant (outside of SV). Even if you get some equity, it will be peanuts. I worked at a company that had a very successful IPO. We all got a few stock options, enough to make a few tens of thousands of euros if you sold them at the right time. The actual shareholders (the ones with decision power) made from tens of millions to billions. The disparity is enormous.
The thing that you seem to be missing is that you need labor organization to achieve those things en masse. The current 40 hour workweek we enjoy and the weekends we have off are because of the organized labor movement in the US.
If your choices are between working for one of several capital-owned tech conglomerates, or accepting their money for the runway to compete in the current business climate, can you really call that an even playing field?
The second and third order effects of labor unions are class consciousness, something that the people on this forum seem to constantly miss.
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
How do we test this hypothesis? Do we know that tech companies couldn't afford to double the wages of all their staff, or is that an assumption we've made based on high wages relative to other industries?
I imagine the likes of Apple could certainly pay their devs a lot more.
> I would rather see more laws universally protecting intellectual workers like e.g. non-enforcability of non-compete clauses and alikes.
How exactly do you see something like this coming to fruition without labor organization? There’s no way federal law like this happens without some sort of coordinated effort to compel congress to pass such a law.
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
Yet doctors and lawyers and pilots have strong unions in all but name. What do you suppose they know that we don’t?
Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
I’m sorry but this is just naive. Preferred stock and dilution make shares owned by rank-and-file employees nothing more than a rounding error these days. It was different back in the 90s when all the myths around stock options were formed but those days are long gone.
> Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0
One of these statements has to be false. I think it's the second one.
It's true that software has few regulatory or credential barriers. However not everyone is cut out for a career in tech. In fact very few are. This natural moat keeps the supply of workers lower than other industries, making unions less necessary.
My experience with unions. Monitor breaks at CES. Go get another, try to carry to booth. Get stopped because "only union people are allowed to carry equipment inside the convention center". Try to plug in some equipment. Get stopped because "only union electricians are allowed to plug in equipment in the convention center"
I know others who have add similar experiences in the aerospace industry where responsibilities were divided up and person A is not allowed do any work outside of their designated job.
For example, your job is to write UX features, some else's job is to unit tests. You're not allowed to write unit tests.
Sure there are some horror stories about unions, but you are just generalizing. And you are talking about "old" institutions ; new unions, for "new" kind of companies would not look the same.
Having an organization that can help a worker that is abused, or giving more bargaining power to workers seems clearly positive for the worker.
That could be a bit more irritating for the top management ... But the German example (strong unions, 50% of employee representation on the supervisory boards of large corporations) shows it tend to be, overall, positive for the companies.
- (Movie) set breaks. The guys from the appropriate union are working on a different part of the set and can't get away to fix it, so the camera guys (in a different union) fixes the break. They all have a beer afterwards, and the movie made $200M+ at the box office.
- Unionized grocery store. Jar spills onto the floor. The janitor is doing the COVID19 sanitation rounds, so the first employee to see the mess grabs a mop and cleans it up, even though it's not part of her job description.
Moral of the story: unions are what their members make of them. Some of them are deliberately and highly restrictive about scope of duties, but most of them are not.
Unions can also offer goods things like group bargaining, healthcare and moral support such as SAG/AFTRA and other Hollywood-style guilds. The only downside is you can't do cheap work on the side, but that benefits those who choose not to or cannot join these guilds.
Marriot jammed wifi in their conference centers to make you pay for theirs. Therefore hotel chains are a bad idea. /s
Yes, that kind of thing is a scam to make you pay more than you need to, a.k.a. "profit maximising" for the individual. But we seem to just accept that as natural for companies while shunning individuals that do it.
You seem to completely misunderstand what the union formed at Kickstarter is about. Nothing like what you describe, but rather giving employees more control over the company's decisions.
I have however been in unions my whole working life, and know of none who is a saleried employee who is not in a union, and what you describe is not how my experience of unions in Europe has ever been (nor have I ever heard such stories).
There are not, nor have there ever been any restrictions placed on how, where and when I can work due to unions. Any modifications triggered by how, when and where I was working are beneficial to me and soley the burden of my employeers.
The way unions have been warped in the US, either in reality or in the minds of people, truly horrifies me.
Aviation isn't about unions though, it's a safety feature. There were a bunch of different roles at the company I worked for:
- High-level requirements author
- Low-level requirements author
- Coder
- Test author
- Test runner
and then each of those had a reviewer, for high-level requirements, low-level requirements, code review, test case review, test process and results review.
The FAA technically only requires that the author and reviewer for each step in the process are different, but the company tried to avoid having the same person write the requirements, code, and tests as well.
You can implement anything crap. I feel like you're just taking the worst possible example of a union and using that to state that unionization is awful.
I think a lot of it is that in-demand, well paid workers don't have patience for the BS work rules that unions are notorious for. It might be unfair characterization, but "you can't change/test that code, that's role X", and other such bureaucracy can be really draining.
Are unions in the US really like that, or is it a one-off being used to spread fud? Or could it be like a judge in sports, you only notice it when the judge makes the wrong call, but all the correct ones are ignored?
My union in Europe doesn't really do that much in my day-to-day work. As a skilled worker in demand we're generally treated very well.
But for the broader questions they are nice to have. For instance they recently spear-headed the abolishing of anti-competitive contracts. That's something a lone worker probably cannot achieve.
When I graduated they said what I should expect to be paid. Which was useful as I really didn't have that much information (compared to the companies), and it also helped to anchor the pay as no graduates would settle for lower. And the union could reveiew the contracts and see what we should push back on before signing. That in itself probably helps keeping everything straight, as the companies know they cannot get away with abusive contracts so they won't even bother trying.
A union is just an organization which represents the interests of workers. If we don't want BS work rules, we don't have to have them. Instead, we could have things like:
1. abolition of non-compete agreements
2. ownership of code we write when we're not at work
3. standards for privacy and security enforced by working engineers and not by management
Maybe your list is different than mine, but if you can think of anything we might want that goes against the profit motive of corporations, a union (or a guild, or whatever you want to call it) is a proven way to get these things. The Writer's Guild of America guarantees the screenwriters of a movie are credited, for example -- imagine all software had a list of the people who made it!
> I think a lot of it is that in-demand, well paid workers don't have patience for the BS work rules that unions are notorious for. It might be unfair characterization, but "you can't change/test that code, that's role X", and other such bureaucracy can be really draining.
Some existing blue-collar unions have work rules like that, but I think it's a fallacy that a tech worker union would necessarily work exactly the same. To say so would be like condemning (say) Apple (as a business) by using examples from Radio Shack.
I think the main reasons for tech workers historical opposition to unions was:
1. Tech workers had rare, in-demand skills which gave them market power not enjoyed by most workers who have unionized. This is by far the biggest reason.
2. The influence of narratives different genres of free market propaganda. I think the concept of a impersonal self-regulating free market has a special intellectual appeal to the kind of people who like to design technical systems, and a lot of the mass-market works that espouse it are written for the benefit of the capitalists that benefit most acutely from that system. This is a secondary reason, but makes the first reason far more effective.
3. The influence of startup culture, which (temporarily!) creates jobs that blend worker and capitalist. Relatively few people find themselves in these kinds of roles, but they've gotten enormous amounts of publicity relative to other tech jobs.
Unions are the antithesis of a meritocracy. Try promoting based on seniority over merit in a tech. business, and I doubt you'll stay competitive for very long.
I don't know if kickstarter counts as a pure "tech company". They use technology, but they don't create it. Their customers are activists, so it's not surprising that their employees are, too.
Why would tech workers who vote on union rules, vote for a seniority advancement system? Makes no sense. Either the assumptions or the conclusion are wrong.
Unions are not perfect and unionized workers often have a complicated relationship with their union, but fundamentally a Union is just a democratic organization representing workers. The policies are set by the union on behalf of the interests of workers, however imperfectly. Without a union, the policies are set by management and there is no institutional power that workers have collectively against policies they don’t like.
Are the "BS work rules" that unions might introduce really that much worse than what gets imposed on the average software shop these days? Scrum ceremony, planning by committee, etc, at times is the kind of bureaucracy that brings productivity down.
- The typical 'pains' felt in the lopsided power relation between employer and employee were and often still are cushioned by the adequate compensation in a market where the sought after skills were in short supply
- Tech attracts an atypical more autism spectrum biased employee pool. This correlates with meritocratic believes.
- Tech culture is one that has always idolized 'passion', so objecting to bad working conditions and habits was not just seen as rocking the boat, but a character flaw of those that lacked passion.
- Tech workers very often see their employee status as temporary, just putting some bread on the table while they will create their own SaaS business 'real soon now' and be on the other side of the relation
- Tech has a habit of inducing very young workers, and churning through them. This is no just HR strategy but group enforced by incorporating youth (and single/ non-family) oriented spaces symbolically in the workplace (Foosball tables, slides ...)
Note that on the Employer side of the spectrum tech companies have no qualms about joining their collective bargaining and lobbying associations
> Tech attracts an atypical more autism spectrum biased employee pool. This correlates with meritocratic believes.
This made me wince; while it's not straight up wrong it's a collection of generalisations about humans jammed together that deserves a slightly more delicate unpacking. Like opening an Amazon box and finding your electronics just fall out with no foam peanuts or other protection.
That's quite a strawman. You're saying that those who disagree with tech unions are:
- Autistic
- Uneducated and naive ("real soon now," presumably said with a folksy twang)
- "Very young"
- Too cowardly or ethically naive to object to bad working conditions
Here's a more charitable possibility: Opponents may just not see the need at this point. Or they may dislike union culture.
Unionizing isn't all positive. There are costs that go beyond union dues. You're establishing what in many ways is a more exclusive culture. And you may end up stifling innovation. That shouldn't be a tool to be used indiscriminately.
Maybe I'm just super autistic (Or as you say, atypical and more autism spectrum biased), but what are arguments against a meritocracy in the workplace?
I've always done well by being judged and rewarded as an individual. I've been on teams with people who were lazy or entitled or just bad at their job and didn't care enough to change. I don't want negotiate as a block with those people because if get less of I did. And frankly, I'd rather not work with them at all, because they're just a pain in the arse to deal with.
I think unions make sense when every worker is basically the same (on a production line for instance). That's because you don't have any leverage otherwise.
Right now, my leverage is "give me my bonus or I'll go elsewhere and the only other guy on this team can't code or troubleshoot for shit and takes every nfl game day off sick". At best, a union would make me share my bonus with him. At worst it would insist he got a bigger one as he's been in this role for years (hint, that's a BAD thing) and I'm newer.
>I've always done well by being judged and rewarded as an individual
It doesn't surprise me too much that this union talk is coming from places like Kickstarter, I mean as an individual engineer at Kickstarter what could you really do to elevate yourself, the site is a solved problem.
Unless they have an interest in branching out into a new product you have very little opportunity to rise above the rest of the team just maintaining the site. The only people who are going to be causing that company to make more money are outside the engineering team and the engineering team are going to be being looked at constantly as a cost they need to reduce.
Most ambitious people would realize this and that they need to move on to somewhere with more opportunity where there is a chance for their individual contribution to shine.
> Right now, my leverage is "give me my bonus or I'll go elsewhere and the only other guy on this team can't code or troubleshoot for shit and takes every nfl game day off sick"
This attitude to me seems terribly short-sighted. Currently tech workers are privileged and can live with the illusion that they are not replaceable. The nature of capitalism however is to instrumentalize human beings and reduce them to what they can produce/consume. Nobody in particular cares about how special you are. If at some point in the future your job becomes less valuable your individual leverage will evaporate. At that point it would be good to have a union to fall back on.
Especially the video game industry should take a good long look at how Hollywood uses guilds to create saner work conditions for its various production crew. It's a very different thing to work at a 'stable' company with sustained engineering and maintenance, and then getting hired for part of a project at a one-big-project-ever-two-years production company, that might not exist a couple years from now. The sooner the games industry realizes they are actually in the latter category and organize accordingly, the better. Then maybe we can stop having these horror stories of mass layoffs when production ends, that comes from thinking you are in the former category.
If you include IT workers and programmers in certain non-technology companies, I think their position could be improved by unionization.
If you include engineers working for technology companies, unionization is less needed. This group has good working conditions on the whole. Personally when I have been frustrated with corporate work-life, it is usually for reasons that unionization would make worse (office politics, byzantine procedures, unproductive coworkers).
Using the second, narrower definition above, tech workers are paid well and we get to sit in comfortable chairs in air-conditioned offices all day long. I mean, if you work for a startup company it will probably lose money and yet you are paid, sometimes handsomely. It's not as if management is exploiting you if you keep getting paid while the startup is steadily going bankrupt.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I have felt fairly treated by management. If management is not trying to fleece workers, why add the process of a union?
> tech workers are paid well and we get to sit in comfortable chairs in air-conditioned offices all day long
One should definitely be thankful for the blessings and privileges one gets, but painting it in those terms overlooks that tech workers still have a lot of grievances. Maybe they're not as important as ones experienced by workers in other industries, but they're still valid. After all, we see articles on burnout and psychological stresses on HN every week.
> If management is not trying to fleece workers, why add the process of a union?
In addition to the general improving labor conditions issues that get brought up, I think unions could be interesting experiment in tech. The tech industry portrays itself as cutting-edge, progressive (not necessarily politically, but as a cultural outlook), empowering. Yet I've definitely seen situations where there was just constant alienation between employees and management over the latter's business decisions and product prioritizations. In those cases, what leverage can workers hold over management, besides just leave?
Unions seem to be great for generally interchangeable workers. Where there's room for personal achievement (or non-achievement), I cannot imagine any good use for them.
E.g. I'd like to do more work and be paid more and rewarded more, with none of the union pay grades BS. I'd like people to be fired based on incompetence, not seniority.
The only situations when I can imagine my outlook changing is if I become incompetent at my job, or lazy and useless (e.g. I've coasted at a job that I disliked for 6 months or so once, and then left; I imagine for some people it might be cool to coast for 6 years instead under union protections)
It doesn't replace one untrustworthy, poorly managed organization with another. It just means involving a second untrustworthy, poorly managed organization with its own goals in my contract negotiations.
Some might say that unions are better, but that has not been true historically in the US - they have a long history of corruption, power-grabbing, leadership with incentives that aren't aligned with the best interests of their union members, extreme resistance to change that would fix problems, centralizing so that your workplace's specific concerns are irrelevant to the union (since your workplace makes up such a small percentage of the union), protecting crappy employees based solely on seniority, and generally stagnating the company (sometimes making it less competitive).
When I think of strong unions in the US, I think of police, teachers, federal employees, and professional sports. Not exactly examples of unions as positive forces.
Europe has a totally different union model that is interesting and seems to work better, but it isn't really an option in the US.
> I don't fully understand how tech became so opposed to unions
I suspect it's due to the fact that while unions help the whole, they can remove the individual leverage during negotiations for salary and working conditions that many, especially seniors, want to preserve. Unions are often seen as a step towards developer commoditization which, like hour tracking, puzzle-based interviews, and other practices that de-individualize devs, is frowned upon by many. Some people just don't want to have to bargain collectively.
Granted, while some unions allow all sorts of single-employee exceptions, one can bet a company would choose to treat the goose and the gander the same when given guidelines on what the lowest common denominator is.
> Many in our industry are quite jaded about the poor behavior of large corporations
Yeah, but not _their_ organization, or they'd go elsewhere (jobs are not currently very constrained).
Do you know any union worker making $350k? or $500k? With unions, you ain't gonna get that. As much as I like unions for somethings, I'm not a fan. I'm in Detroit area. I have heard horror stories of many people who work in the car industry and do crazy things and can't easily get fired because of unions. Once I was downtown a few years ago, and they were shooting a movie and they needed to reshoot a scene, but a semi truck was parked on the street, they had to hold off the scene till the next day because they couldn't just move the truck. There was a specific job role that could drive the truck according to the union rules and the drivers were done working for the day.
Imagine union pegging a developer to only working on backend code, or middleware or frontend or only on a specific language.
For me it's that it's forced. I don't like anything being forced upon me. If I could both keep my job and not be in the union, I'm fine with you unionizing.
I just don't want to be forced to be a member or forced to give a chunk of my paycheck.
Highly-paid professionals tend to assume that if they don't like their current job, their skills would be in demand enough that they can easily find another job. This assumes that current tech industry labor conditions will continue indefinitely, which seems unsustainable.
There's also a strong libertarian or at least individualist strain of thought in both Silicon Valley culture and in engineering which presumes that those high salaries are because of one's inherent 10x rockstar ninja abilities, and not because of market conditions. Also often a trend towards apoliticism, wanting to just be left alone to code and not engage in the dirty tribalist business of politicking.
Finally, there's a widespread conception that "unions have failed, unions just can't work." This despite that labor unions did work in the past, do continue to work outside of the U.S., and somehow an industry focused on disruption and innovation is unable to improve on unions.
I've been working with a tech union for 15 years, and it's been horrible. I could sit here for hours listing out all the ridiculousness...but a small taste, grievance for being woken up from slumber too abruptly. Whats that? I'm playing star ocean and I cant talk right now middle of boss fightz. How do public companies deal with unions when the workforce gets to where it no longer really needs to accomplish things? Maybe I've just been involved with bad union experiences..
We dont need a union, we need a stronger professional organization with appropriate licensing/apprenticeship, akin to other engineers, doctors, accountants, lawyers ect.
Personally, I don't want unions because my job is awesome as it is - absurd salary, great benefits, interesting problems, etc. I don't really see what a union could give me, I don't need more money and I work reasonable hours. Also I've seen how unions can completely paralyze the hiring and firing process (ex. Ontario teachers union and their horrible standardized job interviews).
I'm in a mandatory union in my country. But I'm a software engineer and it's an "office worker" union, so needless to say they take on a lot of stuff that's totally irrelevant to me. But because I'm required to be in the union, I get "represented" anyway and "get" to go on strike and take a substantial pay cut to "support my peers", none of whom I'll work with or have similar life situations to mine.
To be clear, though, I have no issue if some people think they can improve their bargaining position by being in a union. That should be what a union is, after all. Where I do object to unions is when they come to dominate their field and turn actively hostile to outsiders who don't play their game or, as in my case, arrange things so that people who don't care to be represented by them have to be regardless in order to work in their area.
I am jaded by large/exploitative corporations, but my way of dealing with that is to not work for large/exploitative corporations.
I would argue that most people don't have an aversion to the idea of unions, but more to their practical application (at least in the US). Just like any large organization, things can go off the rails and move far away from the original intended purpose.
But at the same time, you only really hear about the bad unions. The ones that fairly represent their members and partner with management to find common ground (obviously this is dependent on good management as well)? Those don't get talked about much.
Several have mentioned that contemporary tech workers (mostly?) are privileged and have leverage in negotiations that allows them to individually gain what others in other industry can only get through unions. Part of that leverage comes from having lots of options. And why is there lots of options? Because "anyone" can start a tech company. The main mean of production of a tech outfit is the tech workers themselves.
Companies don't own the workers.
A steelworker can only do what they are skillfully specialized to do by using capital goods own by the company. Hence they can't negotiate with their feet (leaving) while a tech worker can.
Tech workers can work (remotely) for virtually any company in the world.
A farm worker can't.
All this may change in the future, but with some privileged tech workers (I'm not one of them) being able to retire in their 30s and 40s now I don't see why as a whole the industry is incentivized to unionize.
If you are super handsome, rich, smart and young, it is easier for you than most people to find another girlfriend / boyfriend... but you still want to have influence of the big decision inside your couple, you don't want to be abused...
Unions are particularly effective when labor is commoditized and fungible. Less so when labor is not exchangeable (suppose it hinges on the question of if a guild more like a union or a cartel?). Programmers like to think they are unique and irreplaceable. Some of them are. Others, probably not so much.
I just don't see the value of unions in tech right now. I make decent money. My hours are consistent at 40 per week. If the employer employee relationship sours, there are 100s of other companies, and it's easy to switch jobs compared to other industries.
Mainly from bad experiences with unions not in tech. It’s funny when people say, no no no the old unions are bad but the new ones will be better. Are you sure?
At the end of the day, if you need to go against the decision of a union vote you are completely screwed and out of your own agency.
Because in tech its easy to just move jobs or negotiate on your own. Unions would just have government in you businesses, and make it harder for workers. Not to mention programmers are cheap and wont pay the union fees. I know I wouldn't I'd just avoid unionized companies.
The ethos of SV and the original libertarian thought that pervaded early firms also opposed unions. The early success of the firms, especially in days when growing fast in unchartered waters was all that mattered, it was a great refutation of the idea that you needed unions to take care of workers, and appeared to support the ideals of early founders.
The ideal has not weathered well - it works if you are on the cutting edge, where the degree of constraints are much lower.
But for the rest of the bell curve, some form of collective bargaining seems to be useful.
Maybe part of the reason is that, at the bleeding edge frontier, people who can work there are few and far between. This gives them market power and so can command/negotiate price.
Anyway, as long as everyone thinks of tech as the bleeding edge, its hard to make the case for unions.
Plus: America has a history of unions being a politicized topic, so it tends to result in strong views.
> Why have we decided that untrustworthy, sometimes poorly managed organizations are acceptable when operating in the interests of shareholders, but not when operating in the interests of workers?
The thing is, acting in the interests of shareholders is often acting in the interests of workers as well. Many workers are compensated using stock (RSUs/options/etc) which makes them shareholders. Even if that weren't true, for publicly-traded companies, employees are free to invest their compensation into company stock if they so choose and can then both vote on shareholder resolutions and share in the company's success (or failure). And even if that weren't the case, acting in the interest of shareholders helps sustain jobs and create space for raises by attracting investment.
With unions, there are a few major issues I see, at least in the US implementation of unions:
- First, they often institute parallel management systems and sets of rules that govern the business. It can make work more complex/rigid. These rules also often tend to favor employee traits like tenure. Over time they turn into something of a pyramid scheme, with the newer employees indirectly subsidizing more senior employees.
- They can create unnecessarily inefficient labor. For instance, I've heard stories from friends in manufacturing about how only certain employees are allowed to perform certain mundane tasks under the guise of 'safety', even though anyone could do it. It can be infuriating to hold work or delay customers due to rules like this.
- Unions erode individualism and localized control in favor of institutional control. Unions can become a conduit for implementing political stances as a result. For example, the NEA (largest teachers union in America) has taken a public stance on supporting critical race theory, including introducing factually incorrect/biased material like the NYT's "1619 project" into classrooms (https://neaedjustice.org/the-1619-project-resource-page/). [Note I am not looking to debate this point here, but am just offering it as an example of activism using a union as a way to route political stances broadly, instead of allowing independent localized control]
- Unions erode competition in the market. This is especially problematic for public sector unions, where taxpayers have no choice but to fund a particular public organization. In general, I do not favor unions having exclusive rights to labor at a company. If there were multiple unions competing alongside non-union workers, that would be a more balanced/healthier situation.
Ultimately I am not sure why unions have special provisions under the law. Workers seeking unionization are all free to form their own company renting out their labor services to customers. They get to act as a group, and negotiate as a group, but are still subject to choice and competition. Under this model, for those who don't agree with a union for whatever reason, they have the freedom to sell their labor as individuals or as a company. This seems like a much better situation than having large number of workers subject to tyranny of the majority within the bounds of an exclusive union contract.
The real explanation is decades of widely prevalent anti-union propaganda. People hear something enough times and they tend to believe it. Walmart workers don't have unions either, for the same reasons, but I'm sure people here are cringing at being compared to Walmart workers.
Easy. I'm not anti-immigrant and I know large groups of disgruntled software engineers (precisely the union-fans) are. So I need to reduce their power. So I'm anti-union.
I know your big fear is that SWE unions would push for anti-immigrant protectionism, but a cursory glance at HN reveals that the industry workers are disgruntled about everything from ageism to unpaid crunchtime to lack of compensation transparency to technical interviews to open offices (now a moot point) to HR inability to prevent sexism or racism. All issues that could potentially be more compelling to an actual SWE union than lobbying against H-1Bs and other nativist policies.
Do you have any evidence that the Kickstarter Union has done anything in the direction you're talking about?
A lot of the pro-union push is coming from largely the same set of people that are big activists on social issues/politics, and the union push feels in part like a power grab to gain leverage on those issues. I simply don't agree with the activists on some of the issues they are activists about. On the issues I do agree, I still don't feel that union pressure is the right way to go about it.
Anything that infringes upon personal freedom in any way is seen as a negative.
This is not a tech ideal so much as a capable person's ideal, because capable people are by definition surrounded by people less capable than they are and often dream of nothing more than to rise above them, through merit and hard work.
Merit and hard work gets you places in tech, hence anyone remotely capable is mostly satisfied with the status quo.
I always find it hilarious that tech people think that a tech union would be like the teamsters or autoworkers union rather than the entertainment industry unions given that the latter already have provision for people with widely varying skills and compensation.
I don't see why they wouldn't have more exposure to the existence of the Writers Guild of America than they would to the Brotherhood of Teamsters. Certainly in recent years there have been a few prominent WGA strikes that would have been hard to miss.
It doesn’t help that tech salaries outside the US are so low. I don’t know if that’s union related but relatively high salaries lead to higher contentment.
> more than 145,000 members who work as scientists, engineers, tech experts and in other specialist roles.
I see it simply as something of an "insurance policy" in case bad stuff happens - I feel this is especially useful to have this as backup as Brexit and the fall-out from COVID are on the horizon...
Yes, I'm a member of Prospect and I'm quite happy. I've never been involved with a dispute, but I know the union and my employer are in regular contact from the very top of the org down to my department's head.
I was thinking more if the economic conditions after brexit/COVID are bad and one's employer starts doing some dodgy things, you have some element of protection.
So I was thinking unfair dismissal, poorly executed/rushed/unfair "redundancy", and general other unfavourable things from a company that is struggling. Or maybe your employer suddenly thinks it doesn't need to care about equality or employment law and the like etc now we're out of the EU, or are taking a liberal interpretation of any new legislation that is screwing over the workers etc.
If the company is going bust after brexit there probably isn't much here that can be done, but if it is just downsizing/cost-cutting etc or instigates some questionable & unfavourable new policies you at least have some element of help, even if it is just giving you some advice or sending your employer a letter from their legal people etc.
Might buy you some time or a better exit-package if nothing else. Having looked down the barrel of two potential-redundancies (that were avoided eventually) in the last few years without anyone to talk to about "is this fair? am I getting screwed? what can I do?" etc, it is well worth it for the peace of mind and the feeling that you have someone who can go out to bat on your behalf if you think you've been screwed IMO. Everyone talks about how the employee-employer relationship is totally skewed towards the employer, this at least feels like you stand a chance if anything bad happens.
"One of the few" or "the only". Using "one of the only" just fudges the point you're trying to make. Is it the only one, or is it one of only a few (and then list the other ones, too).
So long as the software industry is expanding, the salaries are growing and software engineers have freedom to jump ships, I don't see unions coming. The recipe to make a union is to lock thousands of grumpy software engineers in a bureaucratic company with stagnant wages.
What’s the benefit of unions? Because from the outside looking at Teachers unions in America I see that only hurts education and benefits Teachers. It doesn’t help make education better. So it seems like unions protect the employee but damage everything else.
(Serious question I’m super curious why tech unions are a good thing cos I have 0 idea)
> It doesn't, that's a myth. What hurts education is lack of funding for education.
The pay being the same between a good teacher and a bad teacher, doesn't hurt education? Or teachers unions pushing to get tenure preventing bad teachers from being fired, and being able to collect a pay slip for doing no work while waiting a year for disciplinary hearing?
Others have pointed out that tech workers are much more unionized elsewhere (other than US).
There are probably multiple factors as to why there are few unions in US (ie. Comp in US is insanely high, tons of competition for workers, etc).
But I'd argued that the main reason is: insane growth of US tech sector in past decades as compared to elsewhere in the world. This enables both higher comparative wages and competition for labour.
Also consider that almost anyone can start a tech business (workers are the capital resources of a tech outfit - not machinery) leading to more dynamic labour market.
But, I'm not sure this will continue to be true after backlash we are seeing against USA tech sector. Maybe that's why the conversation around unions is starting now.
Readit News
Why have we decided that untrustworthy, sometimes poorly managed organizations are acceptable when operating in the interests of shareholders, but not when operating in the interests of workers? (Note: I have never been part of a union, so this question is asked from position of ignorance.)
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.
Given all that I personally think the downsides of unions in tech would be much higher than the upsides. I would rather see more laws universally protecting intellectual workers like e.g. non-enforcability of non-compete clauses and alikes.
Nonsense. Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded with each other to keep tech worker compensation below its market rate[1].
Good luck negotiating a group health plan that an employer buys as a single employee.
> Given all that I personally think the downsides of unions in tech would be much higher than the upsides.
I would rather go with the facts, and not how you in particular feel about the issue.
The facts are that white collar employees that are union members have higher pay[2], better benefits, more time off, and report higher life satisfaction[3] compared to their non-union peers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[2] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf
[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0160449X16643321
Unions are owned/compromised of workers. Workers vote on issues that affect them.
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
Absolutely true, but if demand wasn't so high and supply wasn't so short, what happens to worker leverage and treatment?
Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
Equity compensation is a result of the pressures of a competitive labour market. If companies could get away with not handing out equity, they would. But since the other guys are paying so well, they are forced to up the ante.
Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.
An exaggeration. You're not getting hired at the big players without a degree and/or significant experience. Software engineering != entrepreneurship. The majority of software devs would not be able to pay their own bills after 6 months of working on their own projects. Most projects fail.
There is a reason all the big sports leagues are unionized with player associations (also highly skill specialized, limited labour supply pool). They are able to negotiate for 50% of league revenue and establish protections. There are downsides; the highest earners are giving up their ability to earn true market wage (ex: a salary cap creates a wage maximum on an individual). But in general I've never heard a pro athlete say that the union has not given them measurable benefit and otherwise higher long term gain.
> I would rather see more laws universally protecting intellectual workers like e.g. non-enforcability of non-compete clauses and alikes
One of this must be incorrect. If tech workers have good negotiating power, they should be able to get rid of non-compete clauses. If they can't, see, that's what union can do (at least try to negotiate) for you.
I am skeptical about this. At public companies, it seems like in general shareholders do an ineffective job at reigning in management. See e.g. all the discussions around executive pay, as well as the proportion of shares that are held through passive funds.
Within tech in some cases (e.g. FB) extra means were taken so that shareholders have even less control than is typical.
Within private companies, employees with vested options typically have far less visibility into company finances than do the VCs, and certainly don't have a board seat or the ability to vote. I.e. being an employee shareholder at a startup often gives you no ability to see whether management is actually working in your interest, and certainly no special input into corporate governance.
> Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
> Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.
Points 1 and 3 apply, perhaps, to Silicon Valley, but not as much in the rest of the world. I currently work in the Netherlands - there are plenty of jobs and the pay can be good, but at the end of the day you're just another worker. The disparity in negotiating power is still enormous.
Point 2 is mostly not that relevant (outside of SV). Even if you get some equity, it will be peanuts. I worked at a company that had a very successful IPO. We all got a few stock options, enough to make a few tens of thousands of euros if you sold them at the right time. The actual shareholders (the ones with decision power) made from tens of millions to billions. The disparity is enormous.
If your choices are between working for one of several capital-owned tech conglomerates, or accepting their money for the runway to compete in the current business climate, can you really call that an even playing field?
The second and third order effects of labor unions are class consciousness, something that the people on this forum seem to constantly miss.
What?
If that actually describes you, then yeah a union membership isn't for you. For the rest of us, this doesn't really apply though...
How do we test this hypothesis? Do we know that tech companies couldn't afford to double the wages of all their staff, or is that an assumption we've made based on high wages relative to other industries?
I imagine the likes of Apple could certainly pay their devs a lot more.
How exactly do you see something like this coming to fruition without labor organization? There’s no way federal law like this happens without some sort of coordinated effort to compel congress to pass such a law.
Yet doctors and lawyers and pilots have strong unions in all but name. What do you suppose they know that we don’t?
Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
I’m sorry but this is just naive. Preferred stock and dilution make shares owned by rank-and-file employees nothing more than a rounding error these days. It was different back in the 90s when all the myths around stock options were formed but those days are long gone.
In USA that is, things can be very different abroad.
> Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0
One of these statements has to be false. I think it's the second one.
It's true that software has few regulatory or credential barriers. However not everyone is cut out for a career in tech. In fact very few are. This natural moat keeps the supply of workers lower than other industries, making unions less necessary.
I'm sorry but that is not true at all.
Dead Comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5a_00YVVkQ&feature=youtu.be...
My experience with unions. Monitor breaks at CES. Go get another, try to carry to booth. Get stopped because "only union people are allowed to carry equipment inside the convention center". Try to plug in some equipment. Get stopped because "only union electricians are allowed to plug in equipment in the convention center"
I know others who have add similar experiences in the aerospace industry where responsibilities were divided up and person A is not allowed do any work outside of their designated job.
For example, your job is to write UX features, some else's job is to unit tests. You're not allowed to write unit tests.
Why I would I want that?
Having an organization that can help a worker that is abused, or giving more bargaining power to workers seems clearly positive for the worker.
That could be a bit more irritating for the top management ... But the German example (strong unions, 50% of employee representation on the supervisory boards of large corporations) shows it tend to be, overall, positive for the companies.
- (Movie) set breaks. The guys from the appropriate union are working on a different part of the set and can't get away to fix it, so the camera guys (in a different union) fixes the break. They all have a beer afterwards, and the movie made $200M+ at the box office.
- Unionized grocery store. Jar spills onto the floor. The janitor is doing the COVID19 sanitation rounds, so the first employee to see the mess grabs a mop and cleans it up, even though it's not part of her job description.
Moral of the story: unions are what their members make of them. Some of them are deliberately and highly restrictive about scope of duties, but most of them are not.
Yes, that kind of thing is a scam to make you pay more than you need to, a.k.a. "profit maximising" for the individual. But we seem to just accept that as natural for companies while shunning individuals that do it.
Can you imagine having a "frontend developers union" which disallowed backend work (or vice versa)? What a nightmare.
I have however been in unions my whole working life, and know of none who is a saleried employee who is not in a union, and what you describe is not how my experience of unions in Europe has ever been (nor have I ever heard such stories).
There are not, nor have there ever been any restrictions placed on how, where and when I can work due to unions. Any modifications triggered by how, when and where I was working are beneficial to me and soley the burden of my employeers.
The way unions have been warped in the US, either in reality or in the minds of people, truly horrifies me.
/edit: spelling
- High-level requirements author
- Low-level requirements author
- Coder
- Test author
- Test runner
and then each of those had a reviewer, for high-level requirements, low-level requirements, code review, test case review, test process and results review.
The FAA technically only requires that the author and reviewer for each step in the process are different, but the company tried to avoid having the same person write the requirements, code, and tests as well.
The idea that unions should run the business is silly. Unions need to negotiate a good salary and healthy working conditions.
My union in Europe doesn't really do that much in my day-to-day work. As a skilled worker in demand we're generally treated very well.
But for the broader questions they are nice to have. For instance they recently spear-headed the abolishing of anti-competitive contracts. That's something a lone worker probably cannot achieve.
When I graduated they said what I should expect to be paid. Which was useful as I really didn't have that much information (compared to the companies), and it also helped to anchor the pay as no graduates would settle for lower. And the union could reveiew the contracts and see what we should push back on before signing. That in itself probably helps keeping everything straight, as the companies know they cannot get away with abusive contracts so they won't even bother trying.
1. abolition of non-compete agreements
2. ownership of code we write when we're not at work
3. standards for privacy and security enforced by working engineers and not by management
Maybe your list is different than mine, but if you can think of anything we might want that goes against the profit motive of corporations, a union (or a guild, or whatever you want to call it) is a proven way to get these things. The Writer's Guild of America guarantees the screenwriters of a movie are credited, for example -- imagine all software had a list of the people who made it!
Some existing blue-collar unions have work rules like that, but I think it's a fallacy that a tech worker union would necessarily work exactly the same. To say so would be like condemning (say) Apple (as a business) by using examples from Radio Shack.
I think the main reasons for tech workers historical opposition to unions was:
1. Tech workers had rare, in-demand skills which gave them market power not enjoyed by most workers who have unionized. This is by far the biggest reason.
2. The influence of narratives different genres of free market propaganda. I think the concept of a impersonal self-regulating free market has a special intellectual appeal to the kind of people who like to design technical systems, and a lot of the mass-market works that espouse it are written for the benefit of the capitalists that benefit most acutely from that system. This is a secondary reason, but makes the first reason far more effective.
3. The influence of startup culture, which (temporarily!) creates jobs that blend worker and capitalist. Relatively few people find themselves in these kinds of roles, but they've gotten enormous amounts of publicity relative to other tech jobs.
I don't know if kickstarter counts as a pure "tech company". They use technology, but they don't create it. Their customers are activists, so it's not surprising that their employees are, too.
On the other hand I wonder if it might have inadvertent effects on other things, like maybe free software.
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- The typical 'pains' felt in the lopsided power relation between employer and employee were and often still are cushioned by the adequate compensation in a market where the sought after skills were in short supply
- Tech attracts an atypical more autism spectrum biased employee pool. This correlates with meritocratic believes.
- Tech culture is one that has always idolized 'passion', so objecting to bad working conditions and habits was not just seen as rocking the boat, but a character flaw of those that lacked passion.
- Tech workers very often see their employee status as temporary, just putting some bread on the table while they will create their own SaaS business 'real soon now' and be on the other side of the relation
- Tech has a habit of inducing very young workers, and churning through them. This is no just HR strategy but group enforced by incorporating youth (and single/ non-family) oriented spaces symbolically in the workplace (Foosball tables, slides ...)
Note that on the Employer side of the spectrum tech companies have no qualms about joining their collective bargaining and lobbying associations
This made me wince; while it's not straight up wrong it's a collection of generalisations about humans jammed together that deserves a slightly more delicate unpacking. Like opening an Amazon box and finding your electronics just fall out with no foam peanuts or other protection.
- Autistic
- Uneducated and naive ("real soon now," presumably said with a folksy twang)
- "Very young"
- Too cowardly or ethically naive to object to bad working conditions
Here's a more charitable possibility: Opponents may just not see the need at this point. Or they may dislike union culture.
Unionizing isn't all positive. There are costs that go beyond union dues. You're establishing what in many ways is a more exclusive culture. And you may end up stifling innovation. That shouldn't be a tool to be used indiscriminately.
I think unions make sense when every worker is basically the same (on a production line for instance). That's because you don't have any leverage otherwise.
Right now, my leverage is "give me my bonus or I'll go elsewhere and the only other guy on this team can't code or troubleshoot for shit and takes every nfl game day off sick". At best, a union would make me share my bonus with him. At worst it would insist he got a bigger one as he's been in this role for years (hint, that's a BAD thing) and I'm newer.
It doesn't surprise me too much that this union talk is coming from places like Kickstarter, I mean as an individual engineer at Kickstarter what could you really do to elevate yourself, the site is a solved problem.
Unless they have an interest in branching out into a new product you have very little opportunity to rise above the rest of the team just maintaining the site. The only people who are going to be causing that company to make more money are outside the engineering team and the engineering team are going to be being looked at constantly as a cost they need to reduce.
Most ambitious people would realize this and that they need to move on to somewhere with more opportunity where there is a chance for their individual contribution to shine.
This attitude to me seems terribly short-sighted. Currently tech workers are privileged and can live with the illusion that they are not replaceable. The nature of capitalism however is to instrumentalize human beings and reduce them to what they can produce/consume. Nobody in particular cares about how special you are. If at some point in the future your job becomes less valuable your individual leverage will evaporate. At that point it would be good to have a union to fall back on.
If you include IT workers and programmers in certain non-technology companies, I think their position could be improved by unionization.
If you include engineers working for technology companies, unionization is less needed. This group has good working conditions on the whole. Personally when I have been frustrated with corporate work-life, it is usually for reasons that unionization would make worse (office politics, byzantine procedures, unproductive coworkers).
Using the second, narrower definition above, tech workers are paid well and we get to sit in comfortable chairs in air-conditioned offices all day long. I mean, if you work for a startup company it will probably lose money and yet you are paid, sometimes handsomely. It's not as if management is exploiting you if you keep getting paid while the startup is steadily going bankrupt.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I have felt fairly treated by management. If management is not trying to fleece workers, why add the process of a union?
One should definitely be thankful for the blessings and privileges one gets, but painting it in those terms overlooks that tech workers still have a lot of grievances. Maybe they're not as important as ones experienced by workers in other industries, but they're still valid. After all, we see articles on burnout and psychological stresses on HN every week.
> If management is not trying to fleece workers, why add the process of a union?
In addition to the general improving labor conditions issues that get brought up, I think unions could be interesting experiment in tech. The tech industry portrays itself as cutting-edge, progressive (not necessarily politically, but as a cultural outlook), empowering. Yet I've definitely seen situations where there was just constant alienation between employees and management over the latter's business decisions and product prioritizations. In those cases, what leverage can workers hold over management, besides just leave?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535292
And I know for a fact that there will be discrimination on grounds of age, sex, race and disability based on experience in the uk tech industry.
There's also the issue of representation at grievance and discipline hearings.
E.g. I'd like to do more work and be paid more and rewarded more, with none of the union pay grades BS. I'd like people to be fired based on incompetence, not seniority.
The only situations when I can imagine my outlook changing is if I become incompetent at my job, or lazy and useless (e.g. I've coasted at a job that I disliked for 6 months or so once, and then left; I imagine for some people it might be cool to coast for 6 years instead under union protections)
Some might say that unions are better, but that has not been true historically in the US - they have a long history of corruption, power-grabbing, leadership with incentives that aren't aligned with the best interests of their union members, extreme resistance to change that would fix problems, centralizing so that your workplace's specific concerns are irrelevant to the union (since your workplace makes up such a small percentage of the union), protecting crappy employees based solely on seniority, and generally stagnating the company (sometimes making it less competitive).
When I think of strong unions in the US, I think of police, teachers, federal employees, and professional sports. Not exactly examples of unions as positive forces.
Europe has a totally different union model that is interesting and seems to work better, but it isn't really an option in the US.
Can you say more about what prevents a union in that model from being formed in the US?
I suspect it's due to the fact that while unions help the whole, they can remove the individual leverage during negotiations for salary and working conditions that many, especially seniors, want to preserve. Unions are often seen as a step towards developer commoditization which, like hour tracking, puzzle-based interviews, and other practices that de-individualize devs, is frowned upon by many. Some people just don't want to have to bargain collectively.
Granted, while some unions allow all sorts of single-employee exceptions, one can bet a company would choose to treat the goose and the gander the same when given guidelines on what the lowest common denominator is.
> Many in our industry are quite jaded about the poor behavior of large corporations
Yeah, but not _their_ organization, or they'd go elsewhere (jobs are not currently very constrained).
Imagine union pegging a developer to only working on backend code, or middleware or frontend or only on a specific language.
The AMA isn't technically a union, but performs similar functions.
I just don't want to be forced to be a member or forced to give a chunk of my paycheck.
There's also a strong libertarian or at least individualist strain of thought in both Silicon Valley culture and in engineering which presumes that those high salaries are because of one's inherent 10x rockstar ninja abilities, and not because of market conditions. Also often a trend towards apoliticism, wanting to just be left alone to code and not engage in the dirty tribalist business of politicking.
Finally, there's a widespread conception that "unions have failed, unions just can't work." This despite that labor unions did work in the past, do continue to work outside of the U.S., and somehow an industry focused on disruption and innovation is unable to improve on unions.
Ask the manufacturing sector
To be clear, though, I have no issue if some people think they can improve their bargaining position by being in a union. That should be what a union is, after all. Where I do object to unions is when they come to dominate their field and turn actively hostile to outsiders who don't play their game or, as in my case, arrange things so that people who don't care to be represented by them have to be regardless in order to work in their area.
I am jaded by large/exploitative corporations, but my way of dealing with that is to not work for large/exploitative corporations.
I would argue that most people don't have an aversion to the idea of unions, but more to their practical application (at least in the US). Just like any large organization, things can go off the rails and move far away from the original intended purpose.
But at the same time, you only really hear about the bad unions. The ones that fairly represent their members and partner with management to find common ground (obviously this is dependent on good management as well)? Those don't get talked about much.
Companies don't own the workers.
A steelworker can only do what they are skillfully specialized to do by using capital goods own by the company. Hence they can't negotiate with their feet (leaving) while a tech worker can.
Tech workers can work (remotely) for virtually any company in the world.
A farm worker can't.
All this may change in the future, but with some privileged tech workers (I'm not one of them) being able to retire in their 30s and 40s now I don't see why as a whole the industry is incentivized to unionize.
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At the end of the day, if you need to go against the decision of a union vote you are completely screwed and out of your own agency.
That’s not a situation I want to find myself in.
The ideal has not weathered well - it works if you are on the cutting edge, where the degree of constraints are much lower.
But for the rest of the bell curve, some form of collective bargaining seems to be useful.
Maybe part of the reason is that, at the bleeding edge frontier, people who can work there are few and far between. This gives them market power and so can command/negotiate price.
Anyway, as long as everyone thinks of tech as the bleeding edge, its hard to make the case for unions.
Plus: America has a history of unions being a politicized topic, so it tends to result in strong views.
The thing is, acting in the interests of shareholders is often acting in the interests of workers as well. Many workers are compensated using stock (RSUs/options/etc) which makes them shareholders. Even if that weren't true, for publicly-traded companies, employees are free to invest their compensation into company stock if they so choose and can then both vote on shareholder resolutions and share in the company's success (or failure). And even if that weren't the case, acting in the interest of shareholders helps sustain jobs and create space for raises by attracting investment.
With unions, there are a few major issues I see, at least in the US implementation of unions:
- First, they often institute parallel management systems and sets of rules that govern the business. It can make work more complex/rigid. These rules also often tend to favor employee traits like tenure. Over time they turn into something of a pyramid scheme, with the newer employees indirectly subsidizing more senior employees.
- They can create unnecessarily inefficient labor. For instance, I've heard stories from friends in manufacturing about how only certain employees are allowed to perform certain mundane tasks under the guise of 'safety', even though anyone could do it. It can be infuriating to hold work or delay customers due to rules like this.
- Unions erode individualism and localized control in favor of institutional control. Unions can become a conduit for implementing political stances as a result. For example, the NEA (largest teachers union in America) has taken a public stance on supporting critical race theory, including introducing factually incorrect/biased material like the NYT's "1619 project" into classrooms (https://neaedjustice.org/the-1619-project-resource-page/). [Note I am not looking to debate this point here, but am just offering it as an example of activism using a union as a way to route political stances broadly, instead of allowing independent localized control]
- Unions erode competition in the market. This is especially problematic for public sector unions, where taxpayers have no choice but to fund a particular public organization. In general, I do not favor unions having exclusive rights to labor at a company. If there were multiple unions competing alongside non-union workers, that would be a more balanced/healthier situation.
Ultimately I am not sure why unions have special provisions under the law. Workers seeking unionization are all free to form their own company renting out their labor services to customers. They get to act as a group, and negotiate as a group, but are still subject to choice and competition. Under this model, for those who don't agree with a union for whatever reason, they have the freedom to sell their labor as individuals or as a company. This seems like a much better situation than having large number of workers subject to tyranny of the majority within the bounds of an exclusive union contract.
Kickstarter and now Spotify have both been about editorial control. Not hours. Not wages. Not roles.
Do you have any evidence that the Kickstarter Union has done anything in the direction you're talking about?
Anything that infringes upon personal freedom in any way is seen as a negative.
This is not a tech ideal so much as a capable person's ideal, because capable people are by definition surrounded by people less capable than they are and often dream of nothing more than to rise above them, through merit and hard work.
Merit and hard work gets you places in tech, hence anyone remotely capable is mostly satisfied with the status quo.
https://prospect.org.uk/about/who-are-prospect/
> more than 145,000 members who work as scientists, engineers, tech experts and in other specialist roles.
I see it simply as something of an "insurance policy" in case bad stuff happens - I feel this is especially useful to have this as backup as Brexit and the fall-out from COVID are on the horizon...
So I was thinking unfair dismissal, poorly executed/rushed/unfair "redundancy", and general other unfavourable things from a company that is struggling. Or maybe your employer suddenly thinks it doesn't need to care about equality or employment law and the like etc now we're out of the EU, or are taking a liberal interpretation of any new legislation that is screwing over the workers etc.
If the company is going bust after brexit there probably isn't much here that can be done, but if it is just downsizing/cost-cutting etc or instigates some questionable & unfavourable new policies you at least have some element of help, even if it is just giving you some advice or sending your employer a letter from their legal people etc.
Might buy you some time or a better exit-package if nothing else. Having looked down the barrel of two potential-redundancies (that were avoided eventually) in the last few years without anyone to talk to about "is this fair? am I getting screwed? what can I do?" etc, it is well worth it for the peace of mind and the feeling that you have someone who can go out to bat on your behalf if you think you've been screwed IMO. Everyone talks about how the employee-employer relationship is totally skewed towards the employer, this at least feels like you stand a chance if anything bad happens.
Uncertain times.
(Serious question I’m super curious why tech unions are a good thing cos I have 0 idea)
> So it seems like unions protect the employee
Yes, that's the entire point of a union. It's about the employees, nothing else. collective bargaining. union is strength.
> that only hurts education
It doesn't, that's a myth. What hurts education is lack of funding for education.
The pay being the same between a good teacher and a bad teacher, doesn't hurt education? Or teachers unions pushing to get tenure preventing bad teachers from being fired, and being able to collect a pay slip for doing no work while waiting a year for disciplinary hearing?
There are probably multiple factors as to why there are few unions in US (ie. Comp in US is insanely high, tons of competition for workers, etc).
But I'd argued that the main reason is: insane growth of US tech sector in past decades as compared to elsewhere in the world. This enables both higher comparative wages and competition for labour.
Also consider that almost anyone can start a tech business (workers are the capital resources of a tech outfit - not machinery) leading to more dynamic labour market.
But, I'm not sure this will continue to be true after backlash we are seeing against USA tech sector. Maybe that's why the conversation around unions is starting now.