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Comment by moonka | Hacker News Reader

>We have reserve pilots to help cover flying in December, and we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate — as much as we are allowed to pay them per the contract

Interesting that there is a maximum rate.

>In a post to its website, the union warned its members that because "management unilaterally created their solution in violation of the contract, neither APA nor the contract can guarantee the promised payment of the premium being offered."

Looks like the pilots trust AA less than I do when they promise vouchers.

View on HN

"we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate "

In most tech companies they would maybe give you an extra pizza but certainly no extra pay.

That's because most tech companies pay a salary rather than an hourly rate.

Isnt't a salary just a predefined quota of hours and rate?

> Isnt't a salary just a predefined quota of hours and rate?

That depends on one's employment contract.

In most companies I've been exposed to, it's the _minimum_ expected effort for the rate.

It's also why one of the first career mentorship steps I go through with Juniors is calculating their hourly rate with the assumption of 40 hours a week (per the ostensible employee agreement), and then calculating it against the _real_ hours worked per week after taking a position.

You'd be surprised how illuminating that's been to those Juniors, and how much of an imprint it left on those folks as they progressed in their careers. A lot of people in our industry genuinely don't recognize how much they devalue themselves and diluting their hourly rate when they're putting in 60-80 hours a week.

And everytime we start new jobs we're like "ok I'm doing 9 hours days max," but that never lasts.

In other countries it is illegal to work that much without being a manager.

More accurately, for Europe it would be illegal except for the business owner. A normal manager is still convered by the limit.

(Actual limit is 48h/wk, averaged over several weeks.)

I have worked probably 20 days over 8 hours in my 10 year career. My team hardly ever works more than 8 hours these days.

Depends what you do, but if you're a "normal" software company you should be able to get away with this. Work smartly - don't waste a bunch of time, recognize how much actual work your people can do in a day - and let them go home to recharge.

>It's also why one of the first career mentorship steps I go through with Juniors is calculating their hourly rate with the assumption of 40 hours a week (per the ostensible employee agreement), and then calculating it against the _real_ hours worked per week after taking a position.

My dept. is considering moving us from hourly to salary. I've expressed that I don't mind that as long as we get a pay increase equalling expected overtime. Let's see how that plays out.

My old job started requiring frequent work on remote sites. I was originally paid a bonus hourly rate while away (in lieu of my salary for those days), and they tried to move me from that setup to a slightly higher base salary but no extra pay for remote work.

Of course, while they were quite happy with capping the amount they were paying me (at less than even my existing salary-plus-site-bonus), they always refused to accept a limit (any limit at all, not just one I felt reasonable) on the number of weeks a year I was expected to be away.

Eventually I left and a friend of mine accepted their deal, he ended up racking up 400 hours of overtime (which he never got to take or got paid out) in his first three months.

Eventually I left and a friend of mine accepted their deal, he ended up racking up 400 hours of overtime (which he never got to take or got paid out) in his first three months.

An employment lawyer and/or the Department of Labor would be very interested in this. It takes more than simply putting someone on salary to exempt them from overtime (in the US).

We're not in the U.S. and my friend has since moved on to much greener pastures. I don't know the specifics of his employment contract but I believe software development is one of the roles specifically exempted from "reasonableness" requirements for overtime where I live. It was still a crappy thing to do to him (and made me feel totally vindicated in my initial cynical attitude to the whole thing.)

Generally, no, especially for tech workers at common Silicon Valley pay scales, which are exempt under state and federal wage and hour laws.

But lower-base-pay non-exempt employees sometimes are quoted a salary but with terms that make it a predefined quota of hours and rate that is in practice more like an hourly rate; these positions usually have paid leave so that, unless the leave is exhausted, it mostly only differs from a pure salary in that overtime is paid, either at straight, time-and-half, or double pay, depending on labor law and contract terms.

No I think a salaried employee is a professional and supposed to put in the hours required to get the job done, within reason. For example if a client has come to see you and your boss wants to take everyone for a work dinner you wouldn't say 'sorry it's after hours' - you're paid full time and you're supposed to be there as required, and you don't quibble about the hours, within reason. Where as an hourly employee would say 'sorry I'm off the clock'.

"is a professional and supposed to put in the hours required to get the job done, within reason"

Funny how it only goes one way. Not many employers are OK with someone taking Friday off because they got their work done early. Lots of employers will see nothing wrong with asking people to come in on the weekend. I think people forget that the employer/employee relationship is a value for value business relationship. As a professional I'm flexible but I'm not exploitable.

Well flexibility is what I mean. Being a salaried employee means not clocking in-and-out, not quibbling about hours worked either way, and working with your employer rather than against them in some kind of by-the-hour adversarial relationship.

Taking a salary means you are being responsible for what you achieve, not just mindlessly churning out the required number of hours.

Well, flexibility is what I mean. Being an employer of a salaried employee means signing more than just one fixed paycheck per 2 weeks, not questioning when someone requests to be paid more and working with your employees rather than against them in some kind of exact-amount-of-dollars adversarial relationship.

Taking a salaried work means you are being responsible for the well-being of your employees, not just mindlessly handing out fixed amounts of money.

Not many employers are OK with someone taking Friday off

But for some reason rush hour starts just after noon on Fridays (at least in the bay area). So many employers seem to have some flexibility.

Which is what My Boss at BT said as he had worked in the Valley and in the UK he got no more work out his SV teams than he did in the UK -and in the UK this was an ex civil service unionized with 5 weeks Al plus privilege days

Lawyers would like to have a word with you.

They charge an hourly rate to clients. They aren't salaried to clients.

Outside counsel lawyers, perhaps.

Staff attorneys / in-house counsel are generally salaried and work as described above.

> For example if a client has come to see you and your boss wants to take everyone for a work dinner you wouldn't say 'sorry it's after hours' - you're paid full time and you're supposed to be there as required, and you don't quibble about the hours, within reason.

I'm paid a certain amount to do a job, with technically unspecified hours, although with the cultural expectation that it'll be 40 hours per week. If I'm going to spend a few hours with a customer (presumably part of my job, in this hypothetical situation), I'll expect some flexibility next time I've got a couple hours of errands to run during the week.

I'm not so worried about one-off occurrences, but I'll take exception if I start to see a pattern of my hours inching up. 42 hours a week? Doesn't sound like much (24 minutes a day). What do you think would happen if I asked for a 5% raise for 5% more work? Right now, my manager would tell me that we don't have the budget, and his manager would start probing around to see how to spread out my current workload to other employees.

technically in the UK a Salaried position doesn't have fixed hours of work - this is a major social status indicator

In Germany I had a salary too but overtime was paid by the hour. The math is pretty simple.

Well what's the point of paying you a salary then if you're going to be counting your hours anyway?

In Germany, compensation is usually negotiated on a monthly basis (X Euros per month, before tax). Employees sign contracts that are far more binding than American job offers - for both sides.

For example, during the first six months, my employer or I could end it with a month's notice, without having to give a reason. Now that we're past that, I have to give three months' notice, and they have to be cutting headcount in Germany, unless I'm fired for cause, which absent actual criminal activity, requires proof that they tried to work with me over a long period of time to correct whatever they were unhappy about with my performance. That part is a very mixed blessing. On the one hand, I feel braver about trying things I think will be good for my company and pushing for what I think will work best. On the other, it's very hard to get rid of people who have lost interest in their work.

Back to the hours vs. salary: many of us, especially at big, traditional companies, have contracts for a certain number of hours per week, usually 40, sometimes 35. Anything you work over that goes into your comp time account, anything below that is a debit on your comp time account. At my company, if I work outside the standard hours it a) requires agreement from the works council and b) gets paid at 2x time, with the overage paid out in my next paycheck.

Depending on your contract, your comp time account might not be allowed to go above or below certain values. When it goes above, either your manager has to make you stay away, or the overage gets paid out at what your hourly rate would have been.

Only people who are truly making manager money are outside this hours system. I used to balk at being sent home by 8pm or 10 working hours, but now I treasure it.

Most employers count hours for salaried people. Try showing up for 30 hours for a while. In most companies someone will remind you to work more. Salaried mainly means a minimum amount of hours without overtime.

Not necessarily, a company I used to work for had to lay off a significant chunk of engineering but paid out big bonuses to those who stayed on. If there's a shortage of labor to do the job, money is a pretty easy way to simplify the problem.

It's not a direct comparison, but then again, the jobs are pretty different to begin with.

Money is the easiest way, but it seems like it's always the way of last resort, after everything else has been tried, and those things have blown up in their face.

In most tech companies base salary is already 150 percent of the average salary.

Doesn’t mean it’s fair. I hope people haven’t forgotten that Apple and Google recently got busted for price-fixing salaries.

Yup. Also, Stanford abuses temp workers for years and years as standard practice to avoid paying benefits.

The tech industry is notorious in using contractors as well.

New grads need to realize $100k/yr gross (~$70k net) at 100 hr/wk is ~ $13.50/hr net. So either get a better comp. package or refuse to work like a slave.

Yeah I think I’d start with 100hr/wk being absurd. I’ve worked at startups and 50 was an unusually high number of hours for a given week.

Most new grads (or employees in general) are NOT working 100 hrs a week, even in startups.

Anecdote, but I currently work ~40 hours at a startup during holidays as an undergrad.

I'm a new grad. My comp package is a -bit- cushier than that at 40 hrs/wk

Who the hell works 100 hours a week? 14 hours a day, every day of the week?

* lowers head in shame

Actually maybe only 80. Foundin is hard.

Most of the gamedev industry for starters. Did many 80-90hr weeks for 3+ month periods.

Back when I was making 35k/yr in Seattle I did the math and could have doubled my take-home working a min-wage job at the hours I was putting in.

I've done 80 sustained for long periods multiple times (3mos - 9mos), in both film and games, over two decades. In my experience, more than 80 is quite rare in both industries, and less than half ever get above 70. There simply isn't much time left to do more for any length of time. At 80 hours/wk, you eat, sleep, and work, and that's it. More than 80 and you're cutting into sleep. One guy I know pulled over 100 for a couple months, but we was definitely sleeping inhumanly low amounts, and was taking prescription drugs to stay awake.

The last game studio I worked at measured actual work hours and noted a significant discrepancy between what people thought they worked and what they actually worked. A lot of people over-estimate their load during crunch. Maybe they factor in commutes, maybe they just over-estimate, but a lot of people that though they worked 80 were only in the building for ~60-65. Some people who thought (or at least said) they were pulling 45-50 were actually working 35. Maybe the mental stress of crunch adds phantom hours.

I consider commuting as part of my working hours. If I'm driving to a client, it is billable time, if I'm using public transit it is a reimbursed fare plus I do work on the train/bus for them or another client (so it's billable). Commuting especially in heavily congested cities should be calculated as part of your "work hours". If not to increase your pay, so you know what your hourly rate actually is.

That is great if you can bill for or otherwise count your commute hours. In film and games, that is sadly not the case for any studio I've ever seen. Work hours are usually defined as being physically in the building working on the production. In some studios, lunch is even deducted. If your commute is an hour each way on top of an 80 hour work week, it just means you're away from home 90+ hours per week. I've done this, and it really sucks, there is zero time for family life, social life, exercise or hobbies during the crunch. Even before we get to niceties like everyone counting commutes as working hours in dense cities, it would be great if we could get rid of crunch times altogether.

When I worked at Yahoo years ago many people told me about how they worked long hours. It was some sort of point of pride. In reality, most of these people worked normal days or close to it. They’d work til 7-8pm every night but they never showed up before 10-11am. With lunch thrown in, that’s just 8 hours.

People overestimate their hours when they work places that treat long hours as a sign of commitment or productivity. When the culture expects long hours, people fake long hours.

Yeah, it's easy to inflate. In this case I lived a few blocks from the studio(and was tracking my hours since I was accused for 'skimping' because I came in at 8am instead of 12-2pm).

Either way crunch has no place but that industry has so many wide-eyed people clamoring to get in that I don't see it ever changing.

Bullshit. 80 hours a week is at least plausible. Working 100, no fucking way. That's 9am - 11:15pm actually physically inside the office EVERY SINGLE DAY OF YOUR LIFE. There is no way "most" of the gamedev industry do that.

Who said you have to be inside the office? It's totally plausible to work remotely. Reading your emails is working.

Who about on call? You can be called repeatedly in the middle of the night, every night.

I've seen people being abused to work on days, nights and week end. It's doable.

Yup, that sound about right, I'd get in at 8am, go home at 5pm for ~30 minute dinner with my wife(then GF, I don't deserve her for sticking it through with me) and then back to the office till 10-12pm.

Got a ton of shit for it too because everyone else usually rolled in at 12-2pm and stayed till 2-3am so the time I worked from 8-12 wasn't noticed and I got called out for leaving "early" at 11pm.

Got into a huge fight with one of our content guys over it which was one of the catalysts for leaving that industry. That along with blowing a red light next to my place 2 times when I realized that job was literally going to kill me.

FWIW the previous gig was pretty similar.

That's not even half of the crazy war stories I have from that industry. I'm always happy to talk to engineers who are interested so I can tell them to stay the fuck away(or learn how to put proper boundaries on working hours, which will get you passed over on career progression).

Oh man, you're bringing back memories I had stuffed away. I had similar resentment stories, and everyone did. It's insane to work unpaid extra hours and have people bickering over who's putting in more or less than others.

Once I started managing, I found it extremely difficult to avoid discounting the people "only" working 55 hours rather than the guys who pulled 65. People with kids on my team putting in an extra 3 hours each and every weekday for years, and the company/environment/industry made it seem like slacking.

I more or less missed the first year of one of my kids over a long crunch. Here's to the wives we didn't deserve to keep!

For about 3 weeks of crunch time before shipping our Sony PlayStation title, I brought a cot and sleeping bag to my cube and basically lived in the office, going home about once a week for laundry reload. I'm proud that we shipped on time, but working like that is completely in the past for me, now with kids, a wife, and a non-gamedev job.

Except that's absolutely the truth. When you're getting close to launch and crunching to meet the deadlines, you basically live in the office. Game dev is a total meat grinder, there's always two eager fresh newbies that want to make games for every dev seat available. This isn't even an industry secret, it's pretty well known and people still want to be game devs, it's insane to me.

engineers at amazon do, the ones who have stockholms syndrom.

I worked at Amazon for two years doing typical 40 hour weeks.

I’ve done this in crunch periods but it’s obviously unsustainable. I recently sustained that pattern for two weeks to deliver a big chunk of work to a deadline. Then I took a holiday.

As a younger person I routinely put in 36h of continuous work. Can’t do that no more.

Some of us actually prefer to sprint then rest.

I had an interview recently where the founder asked me if I was ready to work 100 hours a week on an ongoing basis.

I laughed.

Almost nobody is working 100 or even 80 hours a week.

I'd laugh in the face of anyone who asked me to work more than 40 hours for more than 2 weeks a quarter.

I wonder what the percentage is of revenue.

I see this a lot; techies are paid well compared to a lot of other industries, and yeah, no argument there.

My question becomes: how much better paid should they be, looking up the company hierarchy, looking at owners/investors/etc?

The question of "what's fair" shouldn't be restrained just to us workers, the comparison should really map out in along a different spectrum.

Most tech companies are also located in places where living expenses are 200% of average.

That's incorrect as it pertains to the US. In fact, it's not even remotely close to being true.

The majority of tech companies and tech employment in the US exists outside of San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle.

There are 6.9 million technology jobs in the US currently. There are about 1.2 million technology jobs in all of California. Just Texas + Florida = 900,000. New York has close to 400,000.

So CA + NY = 1.6 million out of 6.9 million US technology jobs. Not all of those are located in SF, LA, NYC. Also of importance: a very large percentage of that tech workforce in California, consists of a small number of huge tech companies.

The slim minority of tech companies are located in locations with such extreme living expenses. They do represent the extreme outlier outcomes when it comes to producing iconic mega corporations (high value market capitalizations).

It turns out there is an extremely large economy outside of Silicon Valley. See:

Cyberstates 2017 Study

"The definitive state-by-state analysis of the U.S. tech industry"

http://www.cyberstates.org/pdf/CompTIA%20Cyberstates%202017....

Unions are the difference here. If it was AA's IT department, and not pilots, pizza would have been the offer.

Union's also capping it at a contractual 150%.

Free-market AA could offer better incentives, but the union doesn't think that's fair.

That cap is likely in the contract as some trade-off for something else the pilots wanted.

A free market does exist at some companies for pilots, and they are compensated and treated far less well than their unionized counterparts.

Because of the specialized training, pilots have lots of leverage. You can't quickly and easily replace them.

Pilots have leverage because you can’t replace them with other pilots. Imagine if Java developers weren’t legally allowed to write C# until they got certified… keep in mind it’s just an analogy.

Sure, and it's more complex than that even. You might be qualified to fly an A320, but not over open water. And not without being checked on airline X's specific A320 configuration.

You can also be qualified to land at some airports but not others!

Pilots have almost no leverage and the pilots association screwed up years ago. Because so many of them were the same age, the pilots voted long ago to screw over the younger pilots.

It’s pretty easy to replace pilots. Entry level pilots make less than a fast food manager.

> Because so many of them were the same age, the pilots voted long ago to screw over the younger pilots.

What did they do?

I don't know specifics in this case, but I'll never forgive the ALPA for torpedoing the removal of the third-class medical certification, thus ensuring that I'll never be able to get one without an extremely costly special issuance. In return, I'll happily do anything I can to lobby against their interests in perpetuity until they correct that mistake.

What I'm trying to say is, older pilots screwing over younger pilots and would-be pilots is pretty common.

"...how can we explain a 19:1 pay differential for workers with similar training and tasks?

The answer is to look at who controls the pilot's union: very senior pilots. The airline management is mostly interested in what percentage of its revenues are paid out to pilots; the distribution of the money among the pilots does not affect profitability. The very senior pilots on the other side of the table say 'We need the most senior pilots to get $300,000 in pay and benefits.' The airline's response is 'The only way that could work is if we pay the new pilots $16,000 per year.' The group of senior pilots responds 'We can live with that.'"[0]

[0] http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

Compare the pilots at BA to those at Ryanair. Or the cabin crew.

That's because a lot of the pilots at BA are more senior as they have been at the job for longer and don't need to retire any time. A lot of the pilots at the cheaper carriers are more junior and earlier on in their careers, mainly because the larger airlines are full and don't need to employ them. I have a friend who's a first officer at a low cost airline because he couldn't get a job flying at the majors.

The free market would be the IT department example where you get pizza if you are lucky.

6 guys one medium pizza

The early customer service rep gets the cheese pizza.

>Free-market AA could offer better incentives

Baseless/Unsubstantiated comment. Unions come in when the people who are working there feel they aren't being treated fairly. Sure Free-market AA could offer better incentives to SOME, but at the detriment to MOST.

Can't speak to the peculiarities of this situation, but in general, unions have the exact opposite effect: they benefit SOME workers at the expense of MOST workers outside the bargain.

Argentina is a model example of what happens when the pilots have a strong union: they have the highest pilot salary in south america and there are consistent service outages due to strikes on holidays.

Fear not that if union workers could collect a paycheck without showing up to work and no consequence, you would not see any working.

> Fear not that if literally anyone in the world could collect a paycheck without showing up to work and no consequence, you would not see any working.

Fixed that for you.

I agree 100%

So you're in favor of a 100% estate tax, and outlawing parents creating trust funds or other vehicles for their children to get around that tax, yes?

jackvalentine didn't propose anything, just stated a fact. You should ask politely before trying to put things in people's mouths.

It's the logical conclusion, though. If it's a fact that anyone who can "collect a check" without working will do so, and if it's considered bad that someone would do that, then a 100% estate tax would fix one big way people manage that. Since as we all know, anyone who inherits enough money that they don't need to work will never work.

Don't put words in my mouth.

It isn't. Stop insisting on that.

If you wish to talk about the 100% estate tax I'm willing to talk about it tho. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPdjuPPtnWA

I'm more interested in why:

1. People selectively choose to care about whether another person or class of people can live without needing to work, and

2. People selectively advocate for contradictory universal statements about human nature depending on which humans they're talking about (in other words, applying different "universal" rules about motivation and behavior depending on whether the hypothetical person they're talking about is already wealthy or not).

My original comment about collecting a paycheck without working is about the contrast between the alledged dignity of union workers versus their intended goal.

jackvalentine said that the intended goal is shared by everyone. And then I agreed.

There is nothing immoral in living without needing to work. ITs sometimes the opposite: should mentally deranged people or children be forced to work or live free? Those leeches. In the future its possible nobody will need to work. Thats just not the world we live in today.

> they have the highest pilot salary in south america

Sounds like a pretty good benefit for everyone involved.

> there are consistent service outages due to strikes on holidays.

Sucks for consumers, but your point was about the workers, not about consumers, etc.

> Sounds like a pretty good benefit for everyone involved.

Yes, its just a terrible one for everyone else. Thats the whole point.

> Sucks for consumers, but your point was about the workers, not about consumers, etc.

Consumers are workers. If we talk only about pilots, its also bad: the union prevents other pilots from being hired.

>Consumers are workers.

This is circular logic, isn't it? It's like saying McDonald's should only pay workers $3 an hour because I, some uninvolved person who happens to be a worker elsewhere, would like a cheaper hamburger. That's not pro-worker, that's pro-hamburger.

If the question is about a fair playing field between bosses and workers, I don't understand what a strike inconveniencing people has to do with it.

It isnt, because not all workers can unionize. In consequence, unionized get the better on non unionized.

The artificial increase of wages has the same effect that the artificual increase of profits

> It isnt, because not all workers can unionize.

Yes they can.

They cant, for multiple reasons. But even if you believe what you said, all workers dont unionize. Thats an empirical fact.

So while they dont all unionize, still some workers eat others.

For multiple reasons. Which you don’t list.

State often limits who can unionize. For example in argentina, police and firemen cant unionize. In the us maybe the military cant ( but the can in argentina!)

Second some jobs are easier to unionize than others due to geographicalities. Farmers in the us have below minimum incomes. Their effective unionization has no limit on how much wages they could get. But because its impossible to be cohesive with small numbes and large distances it doesnt happen.

Unions form successfully by their capcity to limit supply. Anything that can be imported breaks unions. Anything that cant helps them. Thats why teachers, cops, garbage and transport are unions in the us, but electronic manufacture isnt.

Hope this is enough!

Farmers unions exist. Police and fire brigade unions exist. Manufacturers unions exist.

Did you know that unions have been illegal in various countries at various points of time? People still unionised and fought to have it made legal.

It isn’t always easy, but any worker can unionise. You seem to be confusing possibility with activity.

Any worker can unionize, but not all workers can. Akin to saying everyone can be rich and have a servant.

The prohibition of unions was a terrible thing indeed, and unions themselves have also been producers of tremendous violence, murder and oppression. There are no short examples of abuse.

Nevertheless, any union that has significant effects has them by providing new limitations on labor. You don't need to ban unions to make them dissapear, you just have to let labor roam free and then they dissipate instantly.

> Any worker can unionize, but not all workers can. Akin to saying everyone can be rich and have a servant.

The barrier to entry for unionizing is a lot lower than getting rich and hiring a servant. That is not a comparable situation. Incredibly poor labourers and rich professionals alike unionize.

> you just have to let labor roam free and then they dissipate instantly.

We have completely voluntary unionism in my industry and people join the union voluntarily. You seem to have a _very_ skewed view of unions that only takes the negatives.

My union (Professionals Australia) takes a pragmatic view to labour relations. I resigned from my previous union because they didn't take that view and focussed on short-term gains for only a subset of their members.

Trade unions are the easiest example of monopolization of labor. I bet you a bitcoin they either lobby to require professional degrees to excercise labor or give out their own. Tell me if i should give you an address.

I'm torn. I really want to say 'I'm not making childish bets with you'. But then I really want you to give me a BTC.

I'm not making childish bets with you.

You have an... interesting... view of labour relations that I haven't come across before. Did you say you were Argentinean?

Yup.

Professional licenses are one of the most classic examples of limiting supply. Classic as Adam smith, wealth of nations, 1776 classic, where he talks about the artificial restriction of a certain number of years of study to be able to exercise some labor skill.

Ugh my union does no such thing - but you won't believe me so let's just stop there hey?

Even if it did, I have no moral objection to labour banding together to restrict supply. It's just the free market in action. Actors (capital, labour, consumer) are free to band together and increase their functional power.

There is no perfect state of equilibrium in a market, just a temporary pause. Same goes for capital and labour - what works now won't work tomorrow and so constant tension and negotiation will occur. Some parties will lose and some will win. Either way the situation is merely temporary.

Or is the free market just for capital to band together to increase it's power?

I just went over the website a bit. Its interesting. First, there is this RPEng, which is exactly what I thought it would have. They do certification.

It also has an interesting advocacy section:

- "At least 10% of the work carried out on Victoria’s major projects must be undertaken by apprentices, trainees or engineering cadets...we were able to make the case, and change Government policy."

On Privatisation of power - "As well, privatisation resulted in large reductions of the number of staff employed as well as significant outsourcing of important functions"

If you asked me, I'd say its unavoidable for unions to do these kind of actions the same way its unavoidable for private companies to try to monopolize a market. Its the basic incentive.

> Even if it did, I have no moral objection to labour banding together to restrict supply. It's just the free market in action. Actors (capital, labour, consumer) are free to band together and increase their functional power.

Sure, thats not really a problem at all. There are plenty of circumstances where that will provide real and palpable defenses against employers that have powers that shouldn't be. But dont mistake the debate of allowing unions to exist, and encouraging them.

Much like the biggest employer monopolies, the biggest union results come through the government. Unions lobby for the government to put rules, like the eng cadets or limit outsourcing, or require accreditations given by them, etc etc. If you had a union that didnt have the power of government to apply those rules, they wouldn't be very relevant.

> There is no perfect state of equilibrium in a market, just a temporary pause. Same goes for capital and labour - what works now won't work tomorrow and so constant tension and negotiation will occur. Some parties will lose and some will win. Either way the situation is merely temporary. Or is the free market just for capital to band together to increase it's power?

This is a common theme I find on this topic: capital monopolizes and gets profits they shouldnt, so why shouldnt workers do the same? Well, two wrongs dont make a right, and someone being a criminal and profiting from it doesn't mean we should all become criminals. Free markets are precisely a tool against forming monopolies, both on companies and on labor.

I agree with you to some extent. I want costs to go lower. To that end, unions are a barrier. However, why isn't executive pay also a barrier? Why can't we ever talk about it? I think there is no reason why our corporations should pay millions of dollars to the CEO and I think it should be illegal to be compensated for being on a board at all. Imagine the cost savings that could be translated to either the shareholders as dividends or the consumers as lower prices or both!

I think ceo compensation is another topic, but its very important to understan that CEO compensation does not come from workers, it comes from investors.

If you could effectively limit what CEO's make, the savings will go into the stock and investors, it will not raise wages, because wages are not set by CEO pay.

Think of the effects of a maximum wage in an economy. It cannot possibly help workers. It will definitely help investors/capitalists/employers.

A crock. If the CEO gets a bonus, and everybody else no raise and some layoffs, how exactly can that be called compensation from investors?

Wages and bonuses are set by CEO decree. And they, across the board, set them as low as they can get away with so they hit their quarterly numbers and get their bonus.

Im guessing that you think that all wages come directly from capital, so there is a limited pie of wages that can be given out. So when a CEO makes a lot of money, he has to be taking more from that limited fund and not allowing others to get it.

But its not really true: wages are paid by the production of the worker himself. In a farm with a landowner, an apple picker picks 10 apples and pays 20% on the landowner. That is, his wage is 8 apples.

A guy comes in picks 100 apples. By the same rate, he would earn 80 apples, or the wage of 10 common apple producers. By the same nominal rate, he would earn 98 apples. The common producer has a lot to envy on that person, and might make a case for him getting 8 apples, 80 apples or less than 98 apples. But in any case whatever he lobbies for will go to the landowner, because the landowner already has lots of people that pick 10 apples and pay 2.

CEO pay is agreed in a market, and albeit there are interesting governance issues, it is truly drawn from investors. Personally I do believe investors are getting stiffed. ITs just not the solution to increase wages.

> CEO pay is agreed in a market, and albeit there are interesting governance issues, it is truly drawn from investors. Personally I do believe investors are getting stiffed. ITs just not the solution to increase wages.

except it is not. A CEO of corp A is a member of the board in corp B. Disgraced ex-CEO of citi John Thain is on Uber's board now. I think Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board at some point? Point is the board is NOT representative of ordinary passive investors or even institutional investors like Vanguard. The passive investors have almost no leverage. How do you propose we level the playing field for the investors?

I'm not sure, but my point is that docking CEO pay is not the way to increase wages.

The easiest way to decrease CEO pay is to obviously..have more CEO's. Interestingly enough, the more the public disdains them, the less you have.

> I'm not sure, but my point is that docking CEO pay is not the way to increase wages.

I actually agree with you more than I disagree with you. Beyond a certain point, higher wages are bad. I don't want much higher wages. I am just saying we need to cut wages at the top.

> Fear not that if union workers could collect a paycheck without showing up to work and no consequence, you would not see any working.

You can look to the TSA or the NYPD for examples of this happening in the US.

There are TSA employees who have patterns of repeatedly showing up to work drunk, sleeping on the job, or stealing from passengers' bags and have managed to keep their jobs, because

And let's not forget three years ago, when the NYPD openly refused to do their job for three weeks[0], but still got paid all the same[1].

[0] I'm not complaining that the NYPD stopped enforcing low-level drug offenses that shouldn't even be crimes in the first place, but they literally collected paychecks while openly refusing to do it.

[1] https://nypost.com/2014/12/29/arrests-plummet-following-exec...

Without labor unions I would not be alive right now. I would've died young after slaving my life away in a coal mine, in permanent debt to the company that owned it.

But please. Do go on about how unions harm most workers.

I don't know where you are from, or the situation you are talking about. If you give me some context, I'm confident I can make a case.

The parent poster is probably referring to the American labor movement in the early 1900s.

I grew up in the Appalachian coal belt of the US.

If you'd like to continue making blanket statements about unions being harmful to "most" workers, I'll be happy to give you citations of what life in the mines was like before the unions.

I dont need citations of worker exploitation, i have enough done by the state, by the capitalist and by other workers.

Im from a country where almost half the employment is under the table, and the rest is unionized. Teachers, truckers and state workers enjoy plenty of perks and would defend like you are the role of unions. They should if they simply respond to their own incentives.

The result? Logistic cost is 50% the cost of food, education tripled staff and got worse results in the last decade and state spending is 50% of gdp.

The teacher can reminisce of how sad it would be for the kids if she didnt have such benefits or were fired and would ask you a name of who is being punished by her benefits. And you couldn't answer with a persons name like the teacher could. But its still very real.

Why is Argentina the model example, and not, say Sweden? And are you saying that the pilots unions in the US are weak?

The pilots in argentina is a remarkably powerful union. I single it out because im argentinian

I would argue that the behavior of unions in Argentina has more to do with Argentinian culture than the strength of the unions. In Sweden unions are also very powerful (to the point where e.g. laws about minimum wage don't even exist since that's covered by the unions, and unemployment benefits to a large portion are distributed by the unions rather than the state), but Swedish culture has a stronger emphasis on consensus so the results are different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltsjöbaden_Agreement

It could mean that unions or some forms of unions (state-backing etc) are incompatible with certain cultures though.

I know that europe has collaborative uniones and they have shown very different results. I have yet to study the german transport case.

The unions in america and Argentina are more similar to italian and spanish unions which are rent seeking and confrontational. In argentina, unions have constitutional level protection, and union leaders have pseudo diplo powers( they are harder to arrest for ex). The result is very rich union leaders and all industries where unions exist have terrible employment and costs

Australia had one of it's most dramatic Union disputes with airline pilots. The airline / government (Labor/leftwing!) won. During the dispute the Air Force supplied some pilots and some pilots were brought from overseas.

The result is much cheaper airfares and no loss in quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Australian_pilots%27_disp...

Argentina has the highest salaries in many other jobs too.

Correlation is not causation and all that fuzz.

Also, that piece of propaganda conveniently forgets that Avianca just suffered the longest ever strike in Colombia, not really the most worker or union friendly place.

> Argentina has the highest salaries in many other jobs too.

I get the point. Pilots however, are super interchangeable, like software engineers. There's no reason peruvian, brasilian, paraguayan , brazilian and chilean pilots wouldnt move to argentina to work and depress wages. Except the biggest payer and employer of pilots in argentina is the State. And it doesnt hire that many foreigners, for some reason...

> Also, that piece of propaganda conveniently forgets that Avianca just suffered the longest ever strike in Colombia, not really the most worker or union friendly place.

I dont know what colombia has to do with argentinian pilots.

No, that’s not likely to have been the outcome without a union in place. The more likely outcome would have been a policy within their contract requiring the pilot to work in the case of a holiday period crunch, if the pilot were lucky enough to have any contract at all.

The 150% maximum pay was also likely a negotiation point between the airline and the union when agreeing on a contract.

You seem to think that negotiations between an at will pilot and an airline are on equal ground, they are not. The pilot is very unlikely to get a better deal outside of collective bargaining. That is why people are willing to pay a due and give up some freedoms in order to use them as leverage in compensation negotiations.

> You seem to think that negotiations between an at will pilot and an airline are on equal ground, they are not. The pilot is very unlikely to get a better deal outside of collective bargainin

The pilots would most definitely get a better deal outside of the collective bargaining. That is, all the ones that get left out because of this contract receive no benefits at all.

For anyone reading along at home, this is one of the oldest and most standard anti-union talking points. #1 on the list, in fact. [1]

[1] http://www.bankableinsight.com/ways-unions-hurt-the-economy....

[2] http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/03/17/unions-harmful-wor...

Because its true. Unions can only increase wages by reducing the amount of workers. Unions dont get wage increases by reducing the profits of capital in the long term.

If uber drivers unionized and made uber pay them more, then less capital would go to uber and eventually have less workers. Ultimately the return on capital will end up being the same, because capital looks for returns and will move. So in effect, it would only increase wages of drivers as long as it can prevent other drivers from showing up.

For anyone at home that wants to listen to someone that knows more about economy than any of us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzYgiOC9cj4

Literally everything you said is FUD and a maliciously deliberate misrepresentation of the purpose of unions.

Unions exist to collectively bargain on behalf of workers in markets in which individual workers do not have sufficient bargaining power to achieve the same results. They remain in power in those markets precisely due to their continuing ability to achieve better-than-free-market rates for their members, as evidenced by the death/diminishment of unions in many fields where they are not able to maintain above-market compensation for their members.

> They remain in power in those markets precisely due to their continuing ability to achieve better-than-free-market rates for their members, as evidenced by the death/diminishment of unions in many fields where they are not able to maintain above-market compensation for their members.

They remain in power in those markets due to their legally-granted right to remain in power in perpetuity without periodic recertification or reauthorization elections.

That's not an opinion; that's legal fact, just like saying that the President of the United States is in power because the law grants him that right until January 2021. Unlike government, where politicans have to run for re-election every N years, once a union forms, there is no legal obligation to hold an election to keep them in power. (The process for petitioning for a decertification election is incredibly difficult, and unions are actually granted a great deal of leeway by the law in taking action to prevent these elections from happening. Furthermore, even in cases where they do happen, and the majority votes to decertify the union, the election results may be overturned by the NLRB.)

All in all, if you want to argue the case that unions successfully bargain for better results on behalf of workers, you can't really rely on the fact that they remain in power, because that's already the default - it takes an extraordinary degree of opposition to remove them.

Union's have regular democratic elections for positions CEO's don't face a mandatory share holder vote every year or two do they

The very link I posted tells that the union power comes from above free narket rates. I agree 100%. And it does so bu restricting supply. Unions have an arsenal of tools to achieve that.

I see that there is quite a bit of history and passion in what appears to be an old flame war, so excuse me if I'm asking the obvious.

Americans seems to favour "free market" at almost any cost, but you mention that Unions are not free market (for labor) yet they provide better results. So why the "free market" passion?

Would you make the same argument for companies that have monopolies? They achieve above free-market profits, so why the "free market" passion?

If you think of labor as a commodity, unions are simply a monopoly of labor. Everyone wants a monopoly of what they sell, and freedom of what they buy, this is no different.

I would be very hard pressed to find a good union case that didnt provoke some sort of restriction on other workes, either by wage fixing, protectionism or supply limiting.

I'm on neither side of the debate. Thank you for the perspective.

"Unions dont get wage increases by reducing the profits of capital in the long term."

Why not? Google could make half the profit, pay it workers more and still make a boatload of money.

Google stock would plummet because people will sell to buy apple that is not following the same policy. So as soon as google does that, the stock dip will lower wages within and hire less.

How does a reduction in stock price lower wages?

A significant fraction of compensation for Google employees is RSUs.

Lower stock means the company has less capital to invest in its own ventures, and less capital is less employment within the company. This is true even if no employee got stock whatsoever.

Why?

It's not like Google or Apple pay dividends.

Google is currently handing out giant sacks with dollar signs on them to machine learning people far exceeding the meager means of most other companies, and the stock price is rising.

By your logic, shouldn't they be in the crapper for over-compensating these folks compared to what the market value?

Apple pays dividends.

Google is paying a lot for talent because of supply and demand - competitors are also paying high rates for the same talent.

AAPL is no VZ, but it's paid dividends since 2012.

Employee salary is not a market in the same way shares are employers keep secret what they pay from potential employees.

A lot of people holding stock right now are probably doing so specifically in hope of tax law changes giving the companies more money, which will be used to buy back stock from shareholders.

(oops, I mean to make capital investments in the company and raise wages for average employees -- since a company in possession of a good fortune must be in want of workers to give raises to!)

> Unions can only increase wages by reducing the amount of workers. Unions dont get wage increases by reducing the profits of capital in the long term.

Why do you think that it's mathematically impossible for a company to find the money some other way? Any profitable company by definition makes more money than it spends, so it's clearly possible for such a company to pay its workers more without having to reduce costs (i.e. hire fewer workers) or go into debt.

If a company makes less money than others, it will stop investing investingn in itself and divert funds to more profitable ventures. The rate of profit will regulate the amount of capital. The amoubt of capital will regulate the amount of workers.

You cant reduce a compnies profits and think that will increase employment.

> If a company makes less money than others, it will stop investing investingn in itself and divert funds to more profitable ventures.+

+ In a free market without monopoly in its industry

Is your argument that unions are effective against monopolistic companies?

Maybe, but it's an approach of looking into the abyss.

I'm saying that statements like this:

> You cant reduce a compnies profits and think that will increase employment.

Have a lot of implicit assumptions about the market that company operates in, assumptions that may or may not be true in the modern global economy.

>Why do you think that it's mathematically impossible for a company to find the money some other way?

Depends on the industry. If there's a lot of foreign competition and workers aren't mindful of the health of the industry, they can easily kill it off. That's what happened to steel production in the US.

You're not wrong; if a foreign country can deliver a similar product without respecting worker's rights, it'll screw with the people working at normal income / safety standards. I guess that's one reason why import taxes are a thing, to protect the national workforce - hasn't worked I guess. I wonder if Trump and his cabinet have plans to increase import taxes.

If I were king for a day I'd institute an across-the-board import tariff of 5% or so. Enough to keep domestic suppliers from gouging consumers, but also enough to tilt the playing field a bit in the direction of domestic manufacturing. It would hurt growth a bit, in the long run, but I think it's worth the cost.

Globalization increases equality between countries, but it also increases inequality within countries. There are places where unskilled labor pays a couple dollars a day. Doesn't matter what the safety standards are - there isn't anywhere in the US you can survive on that kind of money.

>That's what happened to steel production in the US.

*Some of the steel production in the US. I am certainly not making the argument that the steel industry in the US is as large or vibrant as the 70s or 80s. However, USX still does have several plants open and is doing fairly well. In my slightly knowledgeable opinion, this is because there is such a high up front cost of building a plant (especially a continuous pour caster).

The industry also made a very large shift from producing new steel to recycling scrap to produce slabs. Virgin steel is much harder to work with and produce than its recycled counterpart. This lowers the barrier to entry, increasing competition.

After this shift, I don't think there is any way that the U.S would have been able to compete with Chinese steel regardless of unions. Even if you removed all of the union CBA stuff and just left U.S compensation laws and OSHA, I highly doubt the margins are there to compete in regards to recycled steel.

TL;DR unions: a collective that can put pressure on businesses. Treat employees better, or they go on strike, see how the business can operate then. This will work for airlines, because if only half the pilots go on strike they'll have huge problems.

Doesn't work for Uber, because if half the drivers go on strike, pay will go up for the other half and more people are likely to work for Uber because the bar for entry is so low. Also no, uber would just raise prices. I'm fairly sure it was unions that made it difficult for just anyone to become a taxi driver though - protecting their own income, limiting competition etc.

Nope they can argue for a greater share of the profits of the company or better pension rights. Back when I was a union branch secretary I helped get several thousand people get a better deal from the BT pension scheme.

If unions gave people a bad deal, then why would anyone start working at a union shop? Unions would die out because workers would abandon the workplaces that are covered by them for more lucrative non-union workplaces.

They do. That's why unions that subsist usually have some special command of power, normally enforced by the state.

For example, in argentina its impossible to hire pilots from other countries.

>That is why people are willing to pay a due and give up some freedoms in order to use them as leverage in compensation negotiations.

I am not ant-union but unless they live/work? in a "right to work" state I don't think they gave a choice but to pay dues or quit.

But where does the union come from?

> But where does the union come from?

Of all union members in the country, only 7% actually have ever cast a vote in favor of the union that represents them.

The vast majority never have the opportunity to vote one way or the other, because once a union is formed, it is legally granted authority in perpetuity. They only lose that right if a majority for decertification or deauthorization, but for a number of legal reasons, it's almost impossible for those elections to even be held, even in cases when the majority of workers oppose union representation.

So, to answer your question, "But where does the union come from?" - most likely, from the people who happened to work there years ago, when 50% (plus one) voted in favor of it. It may or may not actually represent the wishes of the current workforce, were an election to be held today.

Of all employees in the country, certainly less than 7% actually have ever cast a vote in favor of the company that employs them.

> Of all employees in the country, certainly less than 7% actually have ever cast a vote in favor of the company that employs them.

100% of people who accepted a job accepted the job...

'Are there no prisons?'

'Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

'And the Union workhouses.' demanded Scrooge. 'Are they still in operation?'

The majority of the employee pool in America is in a deeply economically precarious position. A month or two, or even a few hundred dollars make the difference between being able to house and feed their family or not. Employment in America is a gun to the head. The idea that choice is a factor in accepting (or doing anything to retain) a job is the delusion of a privileged few.

> Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a close room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employment, I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntary! Let us look a little at this remarkable form of human freedom. Do we from mere choice leave our fathers' dwellings, the firesides where all of our friends, where too our earliest and fondest recollections cluster, for the factory and the Corporations boarding house? By what charm do these great companies immure human creatures in the bloom of youth and first glow of life within their mills, away from their homes and kindred? A slave too goes voluntarily to his task, but his will is in some manner quickened by the whip of the overseer.

> The whip which brings us to Lowell is NECESSITY. We must have money; a father's debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother's ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? When a man is starving he is compelled to pay his neighbor, who happens to have bread, the most exorbitant price for it, and his neighbor may appease his conscience, if conscience he chance to have, by the reflection that it is altogether a voluntary bargain. Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his task by the whip of the overseer or the wages of the Lowell Corporation. In either case it is not free will, leading the laborer to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question.

-- Sarah Bagley, 1845

In a few cases I've had to ask for changes to the contract. I have never and will never sign a non-compete. I'll sign NDAs, and IP agreements and relinquish patent rights, but never will I sign something that dictates what I can or cannot do once no longer employed.

Once I walked away from a contract where they refused to remove the 1-year non-compete.

Another time I worked for a for a startup which had started out as an open source/volunteer project. After a big disagreement about the contract with the lawyer, the principal investor told me to 'sign the contract I wanted.' I refused to write my own contract and insisted the lawyer stop being insane and send me a contract without the non-compete section. She never did, but I started getting paid.

It worked out. The startup failed, I gutted the two commits that weren't mine and back-ported all the changes to the OSS version, keeping it all GPLv3.

TL;DR I accepted a job without accepting a job contract.

I take your point to be that you negotiated on your own behalf, which is great.

I think it's fair to say that very few people have the savvy to know that offer terms are negotiable, and further that very few people are employed in high-demand careers where they can negotiate their employment terms 1:1.

The companies have information asymmetry on their side, since these negotiations are performed sequentially and in private. Mathematically, the Nash Equilibrium looks very different for n sequential negotiations of "who will sign this non-compete?" vs a single all-or-nothing negotiation where the company ends up with <n|zero> employees.

And 100% of people who accepted jobs in union shops accepted jobs in union shops. If accepting the job counts as a "vote" "for" the company, why doesn't accepting a unionized job count as a vote for the union?

But the members vote for the elected positions of the union and on the motions at conference :-)

State "right to work" laws are irrelevant here. Airlines are subject to the Railway Labor Act. Generally states have very little power to regulate airlines.

Thanks for letting me know the airline labor regulations are covered by the Railway Labor Act and not the regular labor laws in the individual states that is interesting to know. So I guess I should have said that no matter which state they live in they don't have a choice but to pay their dues or quit/be fired since the Union contracts say that the airlines must fire anyone who does not pay union dues.

Could. Free-market AA could also say, we're canceling your vacation, if you don't show up you're fired. Why is your scenario more likely?

Really? I had a major project assigned to me last minute right before my planned vacation scheduled months in advance. Even worked Xmas day. I didn't have choice but to do it without any additional comp. This was at a fortune 500 company.

> I didn't have choice but to do it without any additional comp.

You had a choice. It just wasn't a fair one.

Ah, the usual exceptionalism of commenters on HN. All leaders in their field of work apparently..

Being more serious for a minute, can you explain why you think like that? With data, not anecdotes.

you seem to be for free markets and against unions, but that's contradictory.

free markets precisely allow participants to join together (e.g., unionize) to strike better deals in the marketplace (in fact, that was one of the original advantages of forming a company, to band people together to gain market power).

A lot of people like to pretend that government invented unions, when what the government did was step in and set things up so companies would stop hiring mercenaries to shoot unionized workers and unionized workers would stop burning down factories. Making it harder for government to effectively mediate labor disputes won't eliminate labor disputes, in the long run, it will just bring back the thuggery of the late 19th/early 20th century.

The government does far more than stop companies from hiring thugs to shoot union members (which it should do). The government does things like obligate non union members to pay union dues even when they choose not to participate.

The government forces people to pay union dues even when they choose to not support the political groups unions give money to.

Unions don’t fight overtime rates. That’s almost certainly a concession management demanded to avoid stacked overtime.

Case in point: several years ago when I was an SA we were having some sort of big piece of Verizon equipment in our office due to our bandwidth and phone demands. The guy was coming from Philly (to upstate ny) and was on his 10th consecutive day, on a Sunday, on a holiday weekend at like 3 AM and a forced double shift. I think he said he was on something like 10x overtime.

Even paying that kind of ridiculous OT was preferred by them vs hiring more CWA guys. CWA is/was a stronger union that would strike over that kind of cap.

well it makes sense for the rare occasion you need extra resource to pay OT it also helps to make sure mangers properly schedule work if the costs are high working on say thanksgiving at dark o clock

You're correct, in a free market the union could offer better incentives. They could also just say, "Whoops, we messed up the leave schedule. You now have to work the holidays or you're fired." I suspect a combination of the two, some carrot and some stick, would happen without the union contract.

If there were no union, AA would just send around an email stating that there was an error in the scheduling software, and that everyone now needs to go in and re-do their schedule for December. Sorry to those folks who already booked vacation for Christmas week, counting on having the time off. Companies do this all the time, with zero repercussions.

Of course, that would never work if they had made an error in their purchase of jet fuel futures -- the futures market does not have a do-over function.

The union is forcing the company to be professional in its dealings with employees, in the same way that it is professional in its dealings with vendors, regulators, bankers, customers -- pretty much every other stakeholder.

LOL. I remember a previous gig some 15 years ago when someone complained about the long hours on a rather stressful project. The response was "What are you complaining about? We're feedin' ya. Plus you're here most of the time anyway"...

To be frank with all the enterprise "cost cutting" and "Remote Work" - I doubt there would be even pizza.

In US.

Here in Europe, depending on the country it would be extra pay or vacation days.

Or you could keep the mouth shut, get the pizza and not report the issue to the authorities.

Yeah the latter is always an option, if you're not being collectively worked into the ground and you don't mind.

With the more unionized lines of work, usually pay is lower and the stakes and dangers are much higher. I mean for airline pilots, fatigue puts lives at risk.

The big difference is that in Europe, everyone gets the right to belong to an union, there is no such thing as only having part of the building belonging to an union.

Anyone that gets explored on the workplace, without reporting the case to the government authorities, does so because they fear to loose their job after reporting it, or are completely in sync with the current situation.

In countries like Germany, unions also have a seat on the company board.

A FedEx jet pilot will make $400k a year. Senior major airline captains will make a quarter million or more and fly 8-10 days a month. Please explain how that would be higher without ALPA.

When I was a teenager, I worked in a larger store. During busy times we would get the offer to work on Sundays stocking up and trimming the stockroom so it was ready for next week, usually a very busy one. We received double pay and food, and we always accepted because, who doesn't want to get double pay at the age of 16?

This store had a gardening section was was open on weekends, and people working there got jealous and complained to the warehouse boss. This resulted in our double pay being no more, and we only got what amounted to pay for an extra 45m of pay, for a 4 hour shift according to the union agreement. Needless to say, none of us wanted to skip out on our weekend for essentially no benefit, and my boss had to hire extra people full time to cover what we could do uninterrupted during sundays, ultimately meaning greater cost overall.

Now what pissed us off, is that the people in the gardening section was hired to work on Sundays. They knew this was the job.

From the union's perspective, success. The goal of a union is to increase the number and quality of union jobs.

As a member of that union, I certainly didn't feel like it was good. In fact, the union was fine with this, it was the people hired to work on Sundays for union pay that was not, ruining it for us in the process. And they gained nothing.

No, at AA. I work in the US and if I ever have to work on the weekend we get flex time (extra vacation days) at least 1:1 for hours worked, if not a little better. Come in for 6 hours over the weekend? Take an extra day off, not unusual at all. And we still don't have this ridiculous red tape of being "allowed" to work on the weekends.

It varies more company to company than it does from US to European. Many of the companies I've worked for have nearly European-level vacation/PTO policies.

What industry is this?

Starting compensation at competitive tech companies is already higher than 150% of airline pilot compensation. Looks like a pilot with 10 years experience at AA makes 120k. An engineer with 10 years experience at Google makes around 300k. There are also far more engineers at competitive tech companies than there are airline pilots.

I'd gladly trade an occasional 1.5x hourly bonus for a 2.5x salary.

Just a reminder that most software engineers don't work for one of the big five, and don't get compensated in the region of 300k.

Most pilots don't work at a major airline, and don't make 120k.

Source? I'm pretty sure this isn't true. I worked in aviation for a while and you either work commercial, military, or private and there aren't a lot of private jobs.

Edit: BLS says average pilot salary is 126k[2] and majority are employed by airlines. [1] You're wrong.

1: http://work.chron.com/average-commercial-airline-pilots-sala... 2: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a...

I don't think you read the BLS page correctly. The 126k figure is for a subset of pilots. Read the next sentence to see what the rest make. The page also doesn't give a figure for the proportion of airline pilots, only "pilots, copilot'slls, and flight engineers". I also said "major airline" to specifically make the apology with "big 5 software companies".

126 is for airline pilots. Barely any modern aircraft flies with an actual flight engineer. There are probably less than 100 flight engineers in service at the airlines. The BLS page clearly state the difference b/t the two. BLS also has 105 for 'airline and commercial pilots', but a big gotcha here is that the commercial jobs they included are typically the low paying jobs that pilots take to build hours in order to get an airline job (i.e. crop dusting, sightseeing, air tours, oil and gas flights). Think of them as internships. So, you're going to see a disproportionate number of <1-2 year pilots in the commercial group who are still trying to get their first actual pilot job. Regardless, the numbers clearly indicate that more pilots are airline pilots than not and that the average salary of an airline pilot was 126k in 2016. The BLS numbers also note that they don't include pilots' per diem. For every day away from home, a pilot receives a stipend to cover their expenses. Considering that all of their work is away from home, this is a not insignificant amount of untaxed additional income. A final big hidden value is the low end of the airline pilot spectrum. New airline pilots need what is called a type rating in order to pilot a specific aircraft. These are expensive and a source of income for pilots. So, new pilots at airlines are again taking low salaries for other forms of value. I don't know if all airlines do, but some definitely offer new pilots type ratings as part of their salary. This, again, would lead to a $20,000 salary but closer to $40-50,000 in benefit received.

The hours are a bit different too. I don't think many people working at Google making 300k per year are working only 900 hours per year.

http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2016/03/09/airline-pi...

"Pilots at US carriers can work up to 100 hours per month and up to 1,000 hours per year, though in practice most pilots are going to fly closer to 900 hours per year.

For example, a 12th year captain on the 777, 787, or A330, is making $293 per hour. At 900 hours per year, that’s ~$264,000 per year. That doesn’t include things like their flight benefits and per diem pay (~$2.80 for every hour they’re gone on an international trip)."

I can see this devolving though. They're really apples and oranges industries; there are too many differences for a straight comparison.

Aircrew are only technically "working" once the cabin doors are locked and the plane is taxiing to the runway, until the doors unlock at the other end. That's why the hours look low. But obviously there is a lot to be done outside of those times.

900 "block hours" are far more than 900 working hours.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/block_hour

Not sure where you got your numbers from. An AA pilot with 10 years experience makes a minimum of $159,000. That’s the absolute bare minimum. I do not have the data of what aircraft many 10 year pilots fly or which seat they’re in but I would imagine the mean of all 10 year pilots at AA is closer to $200,000.

Plus pension probably which is a lot of money.

Fortunately pensions are gone. Defined 401k contributions are the new norm.

The big variable is profit sharing which I know to have been 17% of annual gross in 2016 at one airline.

Here are AA’s current pay rates - https://www.airlinepilotcentral.com/airlines/legacy/american...

Multiply the rate by 1,100 for a ballpark annual salary. This doesn’t include per diem or benefits, which can be quite good. Delta, for example, puts a 16 percent match, based on total salary, into the pilot’s retirement account with no contribution from them.

>people in their mid 30s actually getting hired in SV

lol good one

Would you mind posting substantively?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Feeding your devs free pizza will make your software buggy and do things like... i don't know... bad stuff.

It literally says in my contract that overtime can be considered a necessary part of the job so there's no extra pay. Mind you, doing overtime is rarely necessary over here, and you can compensate in the same month. There's also been an instance where we had to show up at night to do a release, those were compensated x2 (so 4 hours up at night = full day off)

American tech companies
Having worked in Germany and Switzerland, I can tell you how many hoops my employer had to jump through to make their software engineers eligible (!) to work on the weekend.
By law, only "essential" personnel can be required to work weekends. All exceptions have to be white-listed on a case-by-case basis.

In one case, I had to be present at a 8am meeting on a Monday, in a town 5 hours away. Since trains didn't run until 5am, my employer shelled out for 150% travel time on sunday. And they didn't grumble about it.

If fewer companies could get away with paying "an extra pizza", I have the feeling that a lot of "essential work over the holidays" suddenly becomes non-essential really quickly.

I wonder if the fact that they have a union has anything to do with it....

For good general background on airline union issues written from a "hacker" perspective see Philip Greenspun's article. He's an engineer who switched careers and worked as a regional airline pilot.

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

> Looks like the pilots trust AA less than I do when they promise vouchers.

I know several people who work in union shops, including airlines. They all have adversarial relationships with management. There's a lot of gamesmanship and working to rule even if that prevents actual work from getting done.

It's funny to hear them complaining sometimes about trying to get good vacation slots, etc, because the guys who've been there the longest get all the priority due to union rules and they get what's left over.

Yup. I heard on the radio (also NPR) that the union expects flights to be cancelled.

And the union seems to be laughing ("Santa Claus giving everyone the day off") about the problem.

And the union contract prevents paying more than 150% to fill the slots.

Yeah, this will go well.

So the company approves vacation time for its employees, then wants to take it away because they don't know how to use a calendar, and you're blaming the union for the entire thing?

Mistakes were made, and it's not unreasonable to expect both sides to work together to serve the "greater good" (getting people where they need to go during the holidays) instead of just saying "you made a mistake, screw everyone who has their plans ruined".

The airline made an honest mistake (clearly they didn't want this to happen), and the union laughs in their faces and the contract they pushed prevents the airline from doing more to remedy the situation.

I'm obviously blaming the airline first. But the obvious remedy is to pay the pilots even more than 150%. I wonder what the ultimate solution will be. Maybe it'll be easier to weasel out of it by yanking vacation from employees than simply paying 300% (or something).

> And the union contract prevents paying more than 150% to fill the slots.

Without having seen that contract, this is almost guaranteed to be false. Most probably the contracts prevents the union to demand more than 150%, but of course the airline is still free to voluntarily pay more than that. This is just a (successful, it seems) PR spin of the situation.

Seniority sucks... if you aren't senior.

> Interesting that there is a maximum rate.

My research indicates that this is because in unions pay increases are based purely on seniority. Therefore, it is undesirable (from a union's perspective) to tie wages to anything other than seniority.

> we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate — as much as we are allowed to pay them per the contract

Pretty sure this is not correct. The contract most probably prevents the union from demanding more for overwork, but doesn't prevent the employer to voluntarily pay more.

The 150% cap in the contract is most probably a concession the unionized pilots granted in exchange for some benefit, e.g. "we want a better 401k employer match! Ok, but only if you agree to cap maximum overpay at 150%."

Yes, and additionally it seems the AA rep is using some pretty sneaky weasel words, making it seem like the contract is to blame for the limitation on overtime, when we can pretty much guarantee it's not. Capped overtime pay is something the airline demanded, for sure.

Capped overtime pay is something the airline demanded, for sure.

Probably, yes, but I could also imagine the union wanting a cap as well, to limit the airline's power to resolve situations like this without having to negotiate with the union. The union is clearly pissed off that the airline hasn't needed to involve them yet. If the airline can't unilaterally offer higher pay to the pilots to fix this problem, that gives the union a chance at benefiting from it.

> Interesting that there is a maximum rate.

Besides the other excellent reasons given, these sorts of clauses sometimes exist to protect the company. If the union has control over who works, as is often the case, they could choose to allow excessive overtime and make the airlines pay out for it regardless of whether circumstances really demanded it.

They don't usually do this because it's not in the favor of the union to keep people out of work. But there are always extraneous circumstances that could result in such outcomes, for example a national emergency that causes a shortage of pilots and those who stick around are contractually able to pull in ridiculous overtime while at the same time AA is restricted from changin flight schedules based on labor costs alone, etc.

The union contracts + federal regulations lead to some surprising rules including max rates, mandatory time on and off, etc.

There is a federal regulation for max number of hours flown per year, so the airlines and unions had to put rate-limits in place to prevent pilots from flying too much in the summer leading to free time off around the holidays.

Nothing about that domain surprises me anymore.

There are federal law limits of 30 flight hours in 7 days, 100 flight hours in a month, in addition to the 1000 hours in a year limit.

Funny anecdote I heard from a friend who's a United pilot- he wouldn't take a job with AA because they have such a bad reputation among pilots:

The AA pilots had a big dispute with AA corporate once, and nearly went on strike over it. Instead of striking they took advantage of the fact that they are paid hourly and taxied at a near crawl at the airport, causing delays for every AA flight and costing the airlines money in terms of pay as well as lost revenue. AA pilots are the slowest taxiers to this day, and my friend curses every time he gets behind one.

As a contrast, Southwest pays pilots by the trip, so it's in the pilot's best interest to move quickly. Southwest pilots allegedly send presents to the controllers and in return they get bumped up in line for takeoff and landing.

Or the union is flexing it's muscle to both sides, the sides the union hedges against each other for the union's own now-built-in profit share. Capture that value baby.

> Interesting that there is a maximum rate.

I always thought this was to limit the incentive to cram extra working hours in (so as to avoid fatigue), interesting that it's probably more of a negotiation point.

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