The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personned" due to pressure from unions). Or, imagine if we had them in research (drugs discovery) --the added bureaucracy researchers would have to manage and devote valuable time to.
I am not saying unionization is absolutely bad --they have brought good things about to workplace improvement, but they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.
We are a long way off from being able to say high technology has truly caused progress. Right now, it seems to do more harm than good. People in the tech industry are slowly coming to terms with their impact on the world outside their sphere of awareness, but that newfound conscientiousness hasn't translated into much change.
Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
We need to start asking "For what purpose?" and "Who could this hurt?" more often. Packing more transistors into a CPU and working magic with algorithms to squeeze more out of them is not so good if it goes into a machine intended for surveillance and violating privacy, or to wipe out a million jobs because it can all be done by a few people now.
We can keep packing the transistors and working the magic, but it's going to keep doing a lot of damage if the people responsible don't think about the human impact.
I'd argue that it literally the entire point of technology.
"Destroying jobs" means that those people are freed up to do some else that is valuable and aren't wasting their time doing stuff that isn't worth anything to anybody.
Creating "jobs" is easy. Just implement a tax, and pay a bunch of people to dig holes and fill them up again.
Or do the modern equivalent of that and pay people to mess around with spreadsheets in an office and then throw away the spreadsheet.
At least that method of "job creation" is being honest.
Where tech directly touches my life, I wouldn't say today's tech makes me any happier or substantially improves my wellbeing over what 1999-level tech did. Worse in some ways. I do different stuff with 2017 tech than I would without it, but I doubt it's actually improving my life more than 1999 tech. I do have to remain up-to-date and immersed in it because it's an expectation of modern life and you'll drop out of what remains of shared culture and expectations of availability, et c if you don't (especially being a developer) but it's not per se especially appealing.
Self-driving cars (though I expect their benefit to largely be eaten up by race-to-the-bottom behavior or some form of rents capture, same as wide availability of personal automobiles mostly destroyed their time-saving benefits) and (even better) affordable, highly capable general-purpose housework robots would be a big deal for my quality of life, but we don't have those yet.
I'm sure industry and R&D applications of post-1999 tech improvements have been important, of course.
Instead of unions substitute the phrase "sane worker protections, pay, and rights". The U.S. is badly in need of better labor laws and much greater enforcement of those laws.
And I think many of the researchers are the oft exploited grad students and the like who are not typically bound by union agreements --some staff and contractors may be unionized, but not most of the people doing the drudgery work that goes into research, at least in the US.
I'm not sure this is really a compelling point. Tech companies have made some cool stuff, but technology is also heavily driven by FOSS, which is not really driven by the same factors business are. Union or no union isn't really a question with FOSS, as these projects, many of which drive modern technology, were developed without traditional business incentives. Yes they're are businesses built around supporting open technology, but techs huge advances aren't driven only by companies. I think unionization would have less of an impact on tech advances than is being suggested.
It’s when they’re small and parochial that they get really zealous about incumbency protection at the expense of everything else because they don’t have to balance competing interests the way you do when you have a bigger picture to worry about.
The idea that FOSS would be quashed under a mandatory unionized economy is not what was being discussed, and I'm not sure of the relevance of such a theoretical world in the context of what was said. It's tangential at best.
What was being discussed, the advancement of technology as we've seen it, has happened independent of how employees are organized and employed. As long as there are inventive persons looking to try something new, there will be technological advancements.
Private prisons are not labs of innovation. "Innovation" in this context means maximining prison labor and cutting healthcare costs. Schools are similar - we don't know how to make them work better, but bullshit standardized testing and cutting wages isn't it.
I absolutely agree - not every work force should be unionized. I just wish folks would acknowledge that the titan-CEO/interchangeable wage-slave model is also leads to terrible outcomes in a number of industries.
The following would likely happen:
* Wages would be higher, tech behemoth profits would be lower.
* Vastly more attention would be drawn to some of the worse outsourcing disasters (some of which are currently covered up).
* Those egregious IP agreements would be less common.
* Employee share options agreements would probably be fairer. Not like this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-...
* Wage fixing cartels like this would be busted quicker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
>they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.
So acknowledge them?
Your pay would be pegged to seniority, not ability to contribute. Better pay your dues, newbie. You don't deserve as much money as I do, solely because of your age.
You wouldn't be allowed to do anything outside your extremely limited job description. That's someone else's job, don't take it away from them! No more wearing many hats.
Unless you literally kill someone, you are immune from being fired. Irregardless if you suck and are holding the team back.
Find a good way to make your job more efficient? Sorry, you can't use that. It is not in your contract. And for that matter, doing things more efficiently means that there is less work to go around! Got to save jobs, by creating useless work!
Don't work too hard. You are making everyone else look bad! The contract says that we are only supposed to solve 1 bug a day.
You'd have to get some sort of union sponsored certification/significant barriers to entry, Because the union does not care about NEW workers. They want to keep them out so that they don't compete on wages with them. No more being a self taught engineer! No more switching to a different part of tech. You need a certification for that.
Collective bargaining means that you won't be able to negotiate on an individual basis. No matter how good at negotiating you are or if you could get 2-3X the pay, or if you think the union contract sucks.
Don't like the union? Too bad! You are forced to join it. Fuck you, you free rider! It doesn't matter if you believe that the union provides significant negatives, is corrupt, is destroying your industry and you shouldn't exist. Free rider! Free rider! Free rider!
That's pretty much how it works now. I've never had a boss who was able to accurately (or even non-accurately) gauge my productivity and I'll bet that unless your job is mind-numbing, you haven't either.
I've had bosses who have counted SLOC though and stupidly tried to use that to gauge my productivity.
Unions usually agree to formalize the existing peg to seniority so that the company doesn't use pay/promotion structure as a means to punish active union members.
>You wouldn't be allowed to do anything outside your extremely limited job description. That's someone else's job, don't take it away from them!
I'm strangely ok with my bosses not firing my coworker and then dumping all his work on me, which has happened to me.
>Find a good way to make your job more efficient? Sorry, you can't use that. It is not in your contract
This idea makes no sense to me. Furthermore, at a lot of the companies I've worked at, middle managers haven't given a damn about efficiency and they often purposefully reduced it so that they could increase their headcount (read: their power).
>Don't work too hard.
Am I supposed to be terrified of a company that makes me go home at a reasonable hour rather than implicitly pressuring me to stay at work until 10pm every night?
>The contract says that we are only supposed to solve 1 bug a day.
No it doesn't.
>You'd have to get some sort of union sponsored certification/significant barriers to entry, Because the union does not care about NEW workers.
Which may help separate some of the wheat from the chaff as it does with doctors. Are you in favor of this type of thing or would you prefer it was prevented?
http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...
>Collective bargaining means that you won't be able to negotiate on an individual basis.
Yes, and that means higher pay overall. Divide and conquer isn't good for you as an individual.
>No matter how good at negotiating you are
Didn't you just say that you thought pay should be linked to your ability to contribute? Why now are you so keen on "ability to negotiate"? Are you morally opposed to seeing my equally skilled friends earn as much as me because they don't drive a bargain quite as hard as I do?
>Don't like the union? Too bad! You are forced to join it. Fuck you, you free rider!
So are you pro-free rider?
You seem to be saying that individual agreements with the company are "good" but collective agreements with the company (which are used to eliminate said free riders) are "bad". Why are collective agreements intrinsically bad?
>It doesn't matter if you believe that the union provides significant negatives
It does, which is why unions are run on a democratic basis. On the other hand, did you vote for your boss? Thought not.
Unions serve as the only really reliable check on corrupt corporate power running roughshod over workers. Sometimes they are corrupt. That does not mean that eliminating them will improve your situation.
And, of course, if you really don't want to work for a unionized workplace you can go and work at a non-unionized workplace.
Because I should be able to do what I want, instead of being forced to go along with whatever stupid ideas the union chooses to do. It is called freedom of choice.
What if I want to negotiate for myself?
What if I want to wear multiple hats?
What if I want to work without getting a BS certification?
If I negotiate, and convince someone to hire me, then I can get all of these things.
We can agree and disagree about what makes a work environment good or bad. And thats fine. Just you do your thing, and I will do mine. If you don't like these things, then you can try to get a job that doesn't make you do them.
My relationship should be between me and my employer. I will negotiate all the things that I mentioned, and if the situation doesn't work out then I will vote with my feet and go somewhere else. Do not take away my right to free association.
Sure, fine, if you don't like doing those things, then you are free to join your own private organization and decide for yourself on how to do collective bargaining, and all that.
The problem with pro-union people is that they assume that their needs are the same as everyone else's needs. Different people want different things, and this whole "fight for the people" BS gets thrown out the window the moment you try and force me to join your org and force me to go along with stuff I don't agree with.
"And, of course, if you really don't want to work for a unionized workplace you can go and work at a non-unionized workplace."
Well, instead of doing this thing, I could just use the law to protect me. Forcing people to join unions is, thankfully, illegal in many states.
And, thankfully, unions are very unpopular among techies. So I am doing precisely that, and I will continue to fight against them in tech, precisely because I do not want our industry to be turned into one that does not value freedom of choice among employees, and forces different people into associations that they don't agree with.
I'm struggling to see what your problem is. If you don't like the idea of democratic control over your workplace and the commensurately higher pay that goes with it you've always been free to go and work somewhere else where they let you "wear many hats".
It seems more like that you want to prevent others from doing it:
>Forcing people to join unions is, thankfully, illegal in many states.
i.e. you're thankful groups of people who negotiate with other groups of people and form voluntary agreements are prevented from doing so.
They can get together with their groups of friends and bargain collectively. They just shouldn't be able to force me to bargain collectively along with them.
They can get together and form voluntary agreements. They just can't make me join their voluntary agreements or stop me from making my own agreements with anyone.
And we can see who gets the better deal.
I imagine less bullshit businesses selling air castles built on top of an exploitative operation. I imagine better democratic processes inside companies. I imagine using collective power to protect underrepresented groups instead of fighting against each other. A net benefit to society.
Unions would've collectively bargained and agreed not to work for companies that abuse H1-B visa farms. And this whole issue would've been resolved ages ago.
I will say that Government is bureaucratic, but no more than any comparably sized corporation. Our only problem is that our shareholders are fucking morons.
Of course, that's just the high level theory... using just common sense those same workers are going to be automated away entirely, if the wage is 20 cents or 20 dollars it doesn't matter. So we might as well force companies to compensate them in the short term for their impending unemployment.
And here appears the Broken Window Fallacy!
In the Broken Window Fallacy story, the total wealth in the system is decreased when the window is destroyed. In this example, no wealth is destroyed, it is just distributed differently. If you believe that wealth has a decreasing marginal utility as you become more wealthy, the more even distribution where the worker is paid more has a higher overall utility even though the total wealth is exactly the same.
I know I'm bastardizing the meaning but it got me thinking about Elon Musk versus "prototypical lotto winner that loses everything" you could certainly argue that he is using his wealth(as well as others) to benefit society, ie. mars, electrification of transportation, etc.