Are unions anti-startup? are startups anti-union? or is it really just a PG ideology trickling down?
What can we do to bring about unionization efforts to the industry?
He told me union trucking agencies do tend to lay a lot of people off after the busy seasons, but their contracts allow them to take other loads during those times, and many of them get hired right back on in a month or two. If you really compared union and non-union shops and factor in benefits and healthcare, you come out way ahead in union shops.
He talked about FexEx and all the videos they put out showing they're a better company to work for and how you can go from truck driver to pilot. He told me UPS is a union shop and they spend less money on that bullshit advertising and more giving their workers benefits, better wages and hours. (FedEx is non-union and UPS is union right? I might have this backwards ..was a long time ago.. anyway...).
I watched him debate with a hard core, franchise owning (he owned like 8 Jimmy John's), libertarian, anti-union guy at brunch once and they had a really good rational argument about unions.
My father worked his way up into management in a union shop in the 70s and 80s. The union was completely insane and basically declared war on the company. It was hacking computers, stealing mail, working with the cleaners to rummage through wastebaskets looking for corporate info they could blackmail management with. And of course they kept interrupting service to the customers via strikes.
The solution was simple enough in the end. The company replaced the striking workers with machines. But lots of people's lives were harried and disrupted in the intervening years.
This happens when people become full-time employees of the union, rather than doing union stuff while being employees of the company. The only paid staff an honest union needs are maybe some people to do admin. Union bosses always seem to be paid as much as managers or more too, they don’t have anything in common with the Workers anymore, if they even ever did
Because 'we' all think we're way better than the average coder. There will be winners and losers in any collective bargaining scenario, and we're all convinced that we're the special one that can get a much better deal arguing out own case. 'We' don't want to be dragged down to the median by a bunch of dead weight 'losers'.
At the moment, I still appreciate the idea of unionizing to improve the voice of non-management in certain decisionmaking, and especially for salaried workers, I think a group mentality making sure people aren't getting abused on hours is great!
But is it worth the risk to talk about it? After all, I've been told you might get fired by management! Oh my, well, I'd have to elect members, and sign papers... let's just keep working.
• Require employees to strike even if they don't want to / can't afford to.
• Prevent employees being fired, for any reason or under any circumstances.
• Harass or even force non-members to join.
• Get involved with extreme-left politics and use union fees to fund the union leader's own political views / ambitions, regardless of the views of the workers themselves.
• Segregate workers into types, and attack the workers themselves if they do the "wrong kind" of work. The attendant removal of any flexibility cripples working speed and causes great frustration. For instance imagine being ticked off or even fined because you wrote a Docker config or created a monitoring dashboard, and that's the job of devops only, not developers.
• Block any kind of labour saving automation. Imagine being told you weren't allowed to deploy a script that checked your dependencies for CVEs because that was Joe's job and he's been doing it by hand for the last six months, so he's going to keep doing it by hand for the next 10 years. Now imagine that any task that anyone ever mentions is immediately given to a human to do instead of waiting for it to be scripted, so effectively nothing can ever be automated.
• Losing interest in advocating for workers rights.
These examples may sound absurd but unions of all types across all industries have engaged in this kind of behaviour in the past. It's a power thing. Because unions use their power to fight the government they can often get laws passed in their favour, granting them even more power, giving them even less incentive to work for the workers instead of themselves, etc.
Imagine the same craziness applied to which kinds of code you would be able to work on. I don't see the need for crippling the actions that enable our employers from innovating quickly for what amounts to more beaurecracy.
This whole thread is made from 93.4% paper tigers and straw men.
It has no bearing on the validity of labor collectively bargaining for better conditions.
I'm personally quite opposed to unions since they all seem to abuse their power in the long run, but I am curious what you would want a union to do for you.