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Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

Universities and Hospitals are infected with them. Like full blown infestation.

Yep! But his is not like an autoimmune disorder (e.g. type 1 diabetes). It's more like an acquire disease (i.e. type 2 diabetes), for which we fully understand how to prevent and alleviate, but somehow do not implement the necessary measures.

Guess whose job it is to implement the necessary measures.

Let's sort that at the preliminary scoping meeting before assigning it a team at the next quarterly.

It's more like a host/parasite relationship.

The cure, in any case (unionization of the value producers), isn't particularly obvious to most.

How do you unionize just the value producers, without also unionizing (and entrenching) layers of middle management?

Why would middle management need unionization?

Would a senior programmer be ejected from the union when they are promoted to say a project manager? I'm just not sure you can isolate value producers.

The key question isn't "do they produce value?", it's "can they hire and fire?"

Once people acquire power over resources/people the shift from value creation to value extraction is pretty natural.

> The key question isn't "do they produce value?", it's "can they hire and fire?"

This is traditionally the line that people draw, yes, but I think the reasons for that come from the other end.

That's the thing; the manager who manages the cashiers at the grocery store doesn't have more power than the individual contributor software engineer who writes the software for the registers, not in any reasonable sense. That's not why the the line is traditionally drawn where it is.

The line is traditionally drawn where it is because it is management's job to act as a proxy for the will and interests of the owners, and pretending to do that while being in the same union as the workers would be very difficult, or at the very least, quite awkward.

The power relationship a cashier has with his hiring/firing manager at a grocery store is not materially different to the relationship a software developer has with his hiring/firing manager.

In both cases the managers' job is to keep the workers in line.

>The power relationship a cashier has with his hiring/firing manager at a grocery store is not materially different to the relationship a software developer has with his hiring/firing manager.

I disagree.

>In both cases the managers' job is to keep the workers in line.

While I agree with this part, I think the differences in the pay of the worker makes for a hugely different power dynamic. a period of unemployment is a lot easier to take if you can live on 1/4th of what you get paid.

Right, they are forming professional societies.

(Like SHRM: https://www.shrm.org/ , which just showed a TV advertisement, for some reason)

As long as companies maintain a pyramid structure management layers will be outnumbered by workers. It balances things automatically.

It is my belief that after the creation of the NLRB this is no longer possible, though people did it before that.

Except the unions will also grow a management structure or a political class, and eventually the two hierarchies get stuck in an uncomfortable stalemate.

Now you know why healthcare and education costs so much in America.

It is spreading to the rest of the world under the "new public management" moniker.

Effectively it is a scheme of metrics, and attached incentives and punishments, cooked up by MBAs to emulate market mechanics within public services.

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