Employees at Google, Yahoo, and Amazon lose nothing if they unionize

If you exit the union but still work at the company you're free riding on the higher benefits and wages negotiated by the union your coworkers paid for.

If you really don't like unions that much you can leave and go work for a company that isn't unionized. It isn't like there's a shortage of them.

That's because HR literally exists to protect the company from you. You don't report serious issues to HR. You hire a lawyer.

HR is paid by management to manage -- that is, assure that the company can get the most out of for the least cost -- the "human resources" of the company.

Unions are paid by their members to assure that those members can get the most out of their employers for the least cost.

From the employees point of view, it is quite literally true that HR is not there for you whereas unions are (or, more accurately, the union you are a member of, if any, is) there for you.

> We also had an option to take out of our paycheck a monthly fee for legal advice and retainers. I got that option just cause I thought it was a nice security I really don't know why I would need it. It turns out these retainers cannot help you legally against your boss or company btw.

Yeah, employer-arranged group legal services plans never cover any scenario where you are against your employer; they are something the company arranges so that employers can be less distracted from serving the company's interest by outside legal matters.

Did Ronald Reagan fit your description? He was a union president.

I mean, I guess, if you think you'll always be able to get lawyers to take cases like this on spec you have a point. I don't really think that is the case. We need a legal defense to deal with bullshit like this and a union is an effective way to get it.

I'm not sure that's accurate. I think in the US it was mostly skilled industrial workers who were unionized.

Not really. It's not just writers and actors, examples mentioned in the post. Baseball players (stars made middle-class salaries before the union). Engineers at Boeing and other aerospace companies.

Machinists, who were the software developers of the early 20th century (high-skill workers who spent their time automating things away), were not just unionized but often union pioneers and at the leading edge of militancy. Radical machinists were at the forefront of some of the most dramatic moments in labor history, like the strikes that knocked Russia and Germany out of the First World War.

This idea that unions are for peons is a mythology that software engineers tell each other in order to separate themselves conceptually from other workers. I think in part it's motivated by a sincere recognition of relative privilege, but sometimes I'm afraid it may also be motivated by a certain concealed snobbery.

Easily move between jobs:

Only true currently, and only if you're in certain metro areas. Are we forgetting 2007-2010? or 2001-2004? There are likely more down years than up, but I've only been in the workplace since the mid nineties.

Command decent salaries and benefits:

Decent compared to the median nationwide salary, sure, but decent compared the value brought to the companies? Hypothetical example: Who's more "decently" paid? The $15/hr fast food employee who delivers $30/hr in value to their company, or the $150K software engineer who delivers $2MM in value to their company?

More able to negotiate better conditions individually with their employers:

On what planet? Go ask your employer for time-and-a-half overtime pay and let me know if they only laugh for a few seconds or a whole minute. See if Legal is willing to make an exception to their mandatory IP assignment or binding arbitration clauses just for you.

Engineer mobility is mostly a myth. You have a short shelf life, as generations of engineers can point out. Engineers get laid off en masse when the economy tanks, and as the most cursory google search would tell you, get gamed extensively by the companies they work for. Demand curves are bent by importing labor; salaries are capped by illegal agreements; seniority is avoided by purging.

What about the illegally low wages (although still very livable) that were created by these companies colluding. That's one way for employees to fight back.

Perhaps a modern alternative would be something like the AMA[1] or ABA[2] (for doctors and lawyers respectively).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association

I'm not sure I understand everything you said but I assume you're trying to say that employees who are not even members pay dues to the union from their salary. I don't understand this at all and this is not how we operate in sweden.

So that's one major issue with policy in your country.

I don't understand what you mean by 10% difference.

The union does have a lot of power but in my experience most of it is used to negotiate salary raises every year and to advise members who need help with negotiating or general queries.

So I've never felt that the union is another power I have to answer to in any way. The only way I can imagine them giving the impression of being "in the way" would be that the reason salary raises are delayed most years are due to the union negotiations. That hardly matters though as everyone still gets their salary raise retroactively, regardless of when the negotiations end.

With most companies being connected to some sort of collective bargaining deal here, there's really not much reason to join a union. I am a member partly due to ideological reasons and partly due to the fact that managers still fear the unions here and I think that's how it should be.

Without tuting my own horn, I've been a model employee for my It-career so far so I haven't had any need for the union. But should I ever lose my job, or need to enter into any difficult negotiating with my manager, I know they will help me. Because they've helped co-workers and other people around the country in good ways before.

If you had worked there long enough, eventually they would have had your best interests at heart.

It's legal, and in fact normal, under the US labor law regime, because because the union is legally obligated to represent all employees equally, members and non-members, in both collective bargaining and individual grievances. Without something like this the temptation to free-ride those benefits would be pretty enormous.

Sure you could. Join a company which wasn't a union shop.

Or did you like this particular one because of the salary and benefits negotiated by the, uh, union?

Then that's not a real union. A real union also has competition; if the conditions are great at an employer the union will slowly lose members. If the union acts badly, the employees will just create a new union. But if there's only one union and it's cozy with the employer then you have a "company union" which will not always work on the benefits for the employees. You see this with teachers unions that hardly protect the teachers (salary/wage freezes and shrinking of benefits have been happening for years now).

>They were an entity with lots of institutional power, but they all had their own agenda. It's not like they really had my best interests at heart. It just became one more level of power to answer to. It was really frustrating, and I was happy when I was able to leave.

Yep and that's precisely the goal of a "company union". They want to make it so that the word "union" is a curse word. Even unions need competition.

How certain are you that the best developer you know is also the best paid? Is "being good at interviews/charming management" an ability that you consider important? How about "being well-connected"?

Unions would not fix this. Badly run, they would swap charm for seniority. Well run, however, they would tackle the objective economic fact that in a negotiation between one human and an institution, there are information and resource asymmetries, which the larger entity will exploit to their advantage, and it would even the playing field a whole lot. Avoid fixating on silver bullets and try to think of the many ways in which the dynamics would change.

I think unions would be a net positive for most developers, including tons of excellent performers without much mind for business who get taken advantage of by both management and slick-talking peers.

You'll learn soon enough that that isn't true at all, and when you learn the reasons why, you'll probably be wanting a union.

That's a common misconception; not all unions are like that. Some unions do value seniority such as teachers' unions which seem to think that even the shittiest teacher still deserves to keep their job and lately, at least in Canada, they haven't been fighting properly for benefits.

Valuing seniority despite incompetence is something we typically see in the corporate world. Where do you think the inspiration for the Pointy-Haired Boss in Dilbert comics comes from?

A programmers union would only need to establish a lower limit; if you're a bad programmer you'll eventually be found out and your salary will never go above X but we at least need to establish what X is. I've seen decent junior programmers start at 45k salary or even 40k (gender discrimination was at play there) and no benefits or 401k/group RRSP or anything else. They were basically treated like crap. That's something we can prevent by unionizing. The programmers making 100k can join the union too and won't be capped in their salary or anything else; they'll just get the satisfaction of making sure other programmers aren't exploited.

>and nothing will be done about it so long as most software engineers remain apolitical cowards who refuse to fight for themselves.. Thanks...?

You will have to admit that it is accurate. I've seen lots of programmers who think that keeping their head down and just coding will magically result in promotions and pay raises and a bigger training or conference budget. It won't. It won't and you'll get screwed. There's a coder at work who didn't even take vacation! And the company doesn't pay out vacation so you're forced to take it. He was screwing himself by not asking for $$$ in exchange for not taking vacation time, and every year he never uses the $500 training budget. Working for 3 years that's $1500, enough for a few good conferences, enough for travel expenses and hotel to be paid for a 2 day conference at least. But will he attempt to go for that? No way; Why? Because it requires politics. It requires actually interacting with people.

I've seen other programmers come into the office on weekends and they didn't band together to avoid that unpaid overtime just to avoid politics.

> I feel like unions are first a way for the less competent to kind of hang in there and not have to try harder.

Perhaps that is true with some of the more entrenched unions. I don't think unions are all perfect by any means. But that is a far cry from many unions, and certainly never (or at least rarely) the reason the unions started. Unions are not about letting you rest on your laurels, though leadership can turn them into that, they are about ensuring fair treatment and due process.

I'm not saying unions are right for West Coast tech sector, but I don't think they should be dismissed out of hand. And while I appreciate where your view of unions comes from, I don't think it appreciates the whole picture.

And finally, it must be noted that some unions are just very small in scope, but still effective. My wife is in a union, and their main sources of negotiation are 1) parking and 2) the incredibly inequitable distribution of work for those not on a particular "pathway" (this is a healthcare field). That's effectively it, and it has made a huge difference. There is no protectionism for bad performance, or tenure, or scheduling preferences, etc.

Given the demand for top talent we are largely underpaid, at least look at the multipliers that top engineers can generate.

So, imagine what you could achieve with collective negotiations. You want a death march to achieve a deadline, great then pay in overtime or stock at 1.5x my salary. You've given me new responsibilities, great I love the new challenge but now contractually we are obliged to open salary discussions to bring my salary inline with those new responsibilities (usually this happens 6 months later). Just a few ideas off the top of my head.

The author lists several current problems directly in the article: Stack ranking, binding mandatory arbitration clauses, non-competes, inclusion of performance reviews in a candidate’s transfer packet for internal mobility, mandatory IP assignment, severance, overtime pay.

Basically anything where the information gap and power disparity between the employee and the employer leads to employees having no option besides "accept it or quit".

No, the opposite is true.

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5813/fatalities_higher...

Unions can fight this alot more effectively than engineers can.

The simple fact is the large companies willingly and with full knowledge of the illegality, abuse their position, even when it comes to software engineers. Pretending you are protected when you can't afford a 6 figure lawsuit, isn't really true.

All they get in return is a salary that is above industry average.

>High performers lose high compensation

Sure, because unions in Hollywood totally ruined it for A listers.

(All that said, I'm not fired up about unionization as a software professional)

Not sure if being located in the bay area is a straight-up loss for everyone—it's necessary for some businesses—but I would argue ratio of salary to median annual rent should be included. You should not have to move to the earth's anus to find employment.

Finally, those stupid fucking engineers who are "high performers", whatever that means, unfairly weight compensation packages, lowering average salary, and draining the market of competition, and encouraging "investing" in acquihires and getting nothing in return. I'm looking at you, Sparrow. You were supposed to fix gmail and it ended up getting worse to the tune of millions of dollars.

So you have two points, but you haven't addressed whether it's a net loss. Very few things in the world are truly free.

EDIT: Didn't see dang's comment. So I'm not sure.

In the US, union leaders were forced to make a sworn statement regarding their political inclinations.

Unions in the US are viewed very negatively, but as a political institution, it does solve some issues. I don't think a world without unions is a better world, though I wish they behaved more transparently than they do.