Microsoft Bug Testers Unionized, Then They Were Dismissed | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Bug Testers Unionized, Then They Were Dismissed

bloomberg.com

222 pointsfludlight168 comments

I realize that it's the article's title, but this seems misleading. The bug testers were contractors working under the temp agency Lionbridge Technologies Inc.

After they won their right to unionize, they were eventually laid off because Microsoft required fewer bug testers for their dwindling Windows Mobile app store and their agency, Lionbridge, couldn't find additional work for them.

It seems convenient and frustrating, but it did seem like Lionbridge specifically targeted them for laying off.

That is the political line from Lionbridge and Microsoft.

Do you think there's something special about QA for Windows Mobile that makes them unhireable for other QA jobs?

If Microsoft’s review process is anything like Apple’s for apps, I would assume it’s a lot different from testing internal Microsoft products.

So then you retrain your workforce in order to keep them employed.

It's not their workforce

It looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck being held off at a distance by an intermediate party whose sole purpose is to let Microsoft have all the benefits of full time employees without the protections that we award to full time employees.

Those people could easily be full time employees with benefits---only employed by Lionsbridge, rather than Microsoft.

Heck, before Microsoft, Lionsbridge primarily contracted out to Nokia.

It's an independent company, that worked in an industry that consolidated around two parties---Android and iOS---and LionsBridge didn't have a significant part in either of those.

They simply bet on the wrong players.

> Those people could easily be full time employees with benefits---only employed by Lionsbridge, rather than Microsoft.

Not good enough. The quality of benefits from Lionbridge or similar companies is much worse than the benefits offered by Microsoft. Microsoft is getting a tax break (they don't pay FICA on health insurance or certain other benefit-based employee compensation) dependent on making those benefits available to all employees; they need to hold up their end of that deal instead of scamming taxpayers by using subcontracting loopholes.

That’s not how W2 contracting works.

LionsBridge is paying FICA, the contractors are considered LionsBridge employees. LionsBridge is passing the cost on to Microsoft. Microsoft is not saving money on FICA.

Not necessarily in this case, but full time employees overindex on the value of company provided benefits. It’s just another part of your compensation. You can get health insurance on the open market, without depending on your employer. You have to set your hourly rate high enough to compensate.

I’ve done W2 contracting, I made damn sure that my hourly rate was high enough to cover the absence of benefits, the lack of paid time off, etc.

In the case of W2 contracting, you can usually buy insurance through your consulting company - full price, pretax. If you are a 1099 contractor you can buy insurance through the exchange and it’s tax deductible.

Well MS is not hiring. So you're saying that the W2 system shouldn't exist? That means many of these people simply won't have jobs in the field _at all_.

>whose sole purpose is to let Microsoft have all the benefits of full time employees without the protections

You have evidence of that?

And what “protections” do full time workers get?

Plenty. What does that have to do with my response?

What protections do full time workers have in an at will state? The only protection any worker has is protection against certain types of discrimination - they have that protection regardless.

Exactly. Microsoft and other companies get a tax break by providing some employee compensation in the form of benefits (like health insurance or retirement plans) instead of wages. In exchange for that tax break, they are required to make the benefits available to all of their employees, from the janitor to the software engineer, on the same terms, with certain exceptions (like restricting to full-time workers only). By subcontracting, they can get out of making it available to the janitors or QA testers. The quality of health insurance, for example, offered by any of these outsourcers (not only Lionbridge) is much worse, in premiums, deductibles, and copays, than that of Microsoft or the other tech company actually in charge. And that's if they are offered insurance at all -- if the outsourcer isn't giving them one hour less than the number of hours necessary to qualify for health insurance.

It's a scam. Nothing stops companies from providing different quality levels of insurance to different types of employees; they just have to pay payroll taxes on that compensation. But they've managed to have it both ways -- they're getting the tax break while failing to hold up their end of the deal. The law needs to be retroactively changed to close this loophole and retroactively assess companies FICA tax, interest, and non-payment penalties on the full value of their health insurance, retirement, and other FICA-free benefits if they didn't really make it available to all employees. The result would be a huge tax bill for Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, and everyone else.

Also, Microsoft and other companies need to be on the hook as joint employers, like the union was trying to do. The union was almost certain to win on that at the NLRB under a Democratic administration. There was no hope under a Republican NLRB. In addition to joint employment in the collective bargaining context, we need legislation to implement a very broad, unified joint employment standard (ABC test + Browning-Ferris indirect/potential control) across all federal employment laws, including tax, wage and hour, anti-discrimination, and workplace safety laws. Subcontracting should not be a "get out of jail free" card; every employer in a joint employer scenario should be jointly and severally liable for everything, regardless of their knowledge of the wrongdoing. (Otherwise, you get the "what, we're only paying the contractor $5/hour but we had no idea the contractor was paying its employees less than minimum wage!" issue.)

What about the responsibility of the worker? Everytime I have voluntarily done contracting, I’ve known up front the trade offs.

The last time I was looking for a job, I wanted to contract because everytime I do, I make more money all in. The people I know contracting as QAs were making a killing - they get paid every hour they work and made more than enough to take vacations - most of them did - pay insurance out of pocket, etc.

Full time salaried work and “the benefits” for most of corporate America is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Contracting, not subcontracting. If Microsoft was itself a contractor, I guess you could then use subcontractor here.

Microsoft used to employ janitors directly in its early days, many of them eventually became millionaires. Microsoft and most other American companies decided to outsource non-core work in the late 90s.

On-site contractors are subject to many rules in order to maintain their status, including length of employment, choice of tools, and so on. Offsite...well, that is just treated as company to company transactions right?

Full time workers get no protection in a right to work that contractors don’t.

They worked under a contract. The contract ended. They could have gotten another contract with Microsoft. But they could have gotten a contract with any other software company, too. Why didn't Lionbridge find another contract?

Not familiar with Lionbridge, but lots of contract companies pretty much serve one large, local company. It’s often hard to drum up work for a large number of contractors on demand.

It's probably similarly hard for Microsoft, though, isn't it? It's not like their ending of the Windows Phone project opened up a bunch of vacancies in their other QA projects.

I agree. I was responding to your question, "Why didn't LionBridge find them more work?". If LionBridge principally works with Microsoft (as is common among contractors) and Microsoft cut QA work, then LionBridge likely couldn't find work for those contractors.

This may be _especially_ true if those contractors were demanding a certain salary that is infeasible in LionBridge's market.

> They worked under a contract. The contract ended.

This sort of argument is disingenuous at best. Unless Lionbridge suddenly left the software development business and stopped hiring developers and testers, it is not possible to assume that these employees were fired just because the company went out of business.

Why would MS try to find them work if they didn't need them any longer? Other projects were likely already provisioned for. mS doesn't employ these people directly, it's not their problem.

from the title: "then they were dismissed" should have been: "then a few years later they were dismissed"

Since you are quoting... creatively, let me grab the part you ignored:

> In documents obtained via FOIA request, the union provided updates from management in the fall of 2016 about pending assignments that it said showed no substantial decline in workload.

"The number of apps in its Windows Store had dwindled to 13 percent of the 1.1 million offered in 2014, the company said, and it needed less bug testing from Lionbridge, according to a January 2017 memo obtained via a FOIA request."

The number of apps is 1/8th what it used to be. That's significant.

but you used 2014. parent poster mentioned 2016.

"the union provided updates from management in the fall of 2016 about pending assignments that it said showed no substantial decline in workload."

I mean seriously, testers gunna test stuff right? Have you ever had a situation where the testing work couldn’t expand? The work grows in size to fill the available time.

It says "13 percent of the 1.1 million offered in 2014".

In 2014 there was 1.1m.

In a 2017 memo there was only 13 percent of the 1.1m.

So while there was probably testing to be done, MS probably decided that there was no point in testing stuff as it was winding down the windows mobile stuff anyway.

OK, but let's just think if being a union member worked for or against them when it came to MSFT?

Microsoft abused subcontractors to deny them benefits even though they were de-facto employees. It doesn't matter what bullshit excuses Microsoft or anyone else comes up with, because they treated people like garbage.

It's not Microsoft's responsibility to provide benefits for contractors or subcontractors. It's up to those contractors' actual employer (assuming W2) or themselves (if 1099) to provide those benefits. If you're a contractor under W2, you need to take that up with your direct employer, not MS. If you're a 1099, you need to negotiate a sufficient rate to provide yourself with ability to provide yourself with the benefits. I formed my own S-Corp and hired myself as an employee when I was contracting. Better rates than going through a higher agency. Made sure my rate was high enough I could afford health insurance (~$400/month as an individual). You have to negotiate these things, not just take an offer or leave it. Group you're contracting for is always going to low ball it, if you accept it as is, you're at fault. Contracts are negotiable, not take it or leave it. If they say it's take it or leave it, you leave it - they're not going to be worth working for, anyway, and they're going to have a really hard time filling their need.

That entire post sounds an awful lot like the kind of 3-year old tantrum someone at Microsoft would have if employee's decided to negotiate for themselves, or to work together through collective bargaining.

Also, condoning grift is unbelievably short-sighted. A fraction of people are badly taken advantage of or get trapped in bad situations, and when you allow that to happen around you, you are also condoning the <I>violence that inevitably ensues those situations and the violence that becomes a part of the local community, of which you may be a target</I>.

What a coincidence.

Work for Microsoft?:)

Honestly, I think we should just unionize everyone in the tech field. A single Union that handles and accepts all software developers, IT operations folks, software testers, etc and we protect our own and lobby for the laws to benefit us and our profession. The things these companies do to get around basic worker rights is deplorable and we need to organize and fight back, and befor you say you make a ton of money and love what you do so why unionize, ask yourself how many hours you worked overtime and didn’t get paid for it. Ask yourself how many times you’ve seen a colleague let go because they had some medical troubles. Ask yourself how many times a colleague on a visa told you they felt trapped. Ask yourself how many times you’ve heard of a colleague get fucked out of their vacation due to a critical issue. Ask yourself how much power you have to effect change when it comes to just general process and how we go about our day to day. Ask yourself how many times you’ve felt you’ve been asked to do something that was unethical and didn’t want to risk the financial implications and consequences of saying “No”. We need a union. Call it whatever you want, a guild, a bar, a union. Whatever. The point is, it’s time to organize and it’s time to start fighting back.

I'm sure this is not true for everyone reading this, but for me the answer to all those questions is zero times.

Nonetheless, if such a Tech Workers Union existed, joining as an act of solidarity would benefit all fellow members and offer you a level of protection to insure you never experienced any of the aforementioned scenarios.

Not interested, personally. I can only picture being made worse off by being in a union. Fortunately, it’s insanely difficult to get well-paid ambitious people to join a union, so there is little danger I’ll come closer to experiencing a tech workers union than reading about the idea in impractical internet comments.

> well-paid ambitious people

Hollywood actors and other people in showbiz? Professional athletes? Doctors?*

*https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2014/09/03/the-doct...

It's not at all difficult to get well-paid and ambitious people to join a union. The Screen Actors' guild represents people who are as ambitious as, and far better paid than, the hottest tech superstars.

What amazes me is, for how curious tech workers tend to be about, say, new frameworks or languages or whatever, they're so amazingly incurious when it comes to talk of unions--and in fact not just incurious, but so willing to repeat stuff that just isn't true.

>The Screen Actors' guild represents people who are as ambitious as, and far better paid than, the hottest tech superstars.

Are you just making up SAG claims throughout this page? Did you look to see what SAG members actually make?

Avg SAG member makes far less than a software developer. Tech superstars make well over an order of magnitude more than an avg SAG member. Tech superstars include unicorn founders, who again make more than an order of magnitude more than even the very top stars.

Here's one place listing how low SAG members generally are paid. You can find others if you like.

https://www.backstage.com/news/actors-income-falls-far-below...

I didn't make any claims about the pay for all SAG members, but only that they are absolutely a union that highly ambitious, highly-paid people willingly join (counter to the parent poster's claim that unions don't appeal to such people).

Also, yeah, a handful of tech company owners make more than actors? So? Does that matter at all to the rank and file, who, by fault of not acting collectively, are leaving money on the table year after year? "Your boss is a billionaire, don't unionize" is the argument to make here?

>handful of tech company owners make more than actors?

From the numbers I posted, the majority of tech workers make far more than the majority of actors. Do you dispute this?

If the benefits of unions were so clear, would you have to keep using this comparison dishonestly?

No. I'm an adult. I handle my own issues.

Curious: do you also have that attitude toward starting a company? Would you do it with no loans, no investments from others?

Why would I think the two should be equivalent or conflated? They are different audiences with different requirements, different risk tolerances, and outside of the shared work, likely different major goals.

A corporation is a mechanism for individuals to pool capital and achieve greater return from that capital than any of them would using only their own personal resources.

A union is a mechanism for individuals to pool labor and achieve greater return from that labor than any of them would using only their own personal resources.

The only difference between them is the resource being pooled. As a result, I have great difficulty understanding why people are accepting of one but condemn the other.

Corporations pool resources to make things or offer services. Unions are just bargaining devices that attempt to tip the scales.

If you want to compare unions to corporations, consider this: What if all the local companies got together and agreed to only pay tech workers minimum wage? By pooling their bargaining power, they can achieve a far better result!

This is of course illegal (at least I'm pretty sure it is), but even if it weren't, it would be easy for startups to take advantage of: Suddenly, there's a surplus of tech workers looking hard for different work. Unions have the same problem: Some people might be happy to work for wages that the union considers unfair, causing the union to collapse. Unless, that is, there were some law requiring the businesses to only hire from the unions.

I'm extremely happy to be employed in a field where I have natural bargaining power that doesn't need to be augmented by legislation. The day programmers unionize is a sad day indeed: It's just a few years before the whole profession is automated or outsourced away.

Interesting question:

What if all the local companies got together and agreed to only pay tech workers minimum wage?

Rather than use a hypothetical, lets use a couple of actual things that have happened; "all the local tech companies got together and:"

   * agreed not to offer jobs to the other's workers
   * agreed to get H1B visas rather than pay hire wages
   * converted previous employee jobs into contracting

These are all things that have happened which could not be counter acted by disorganized labor pools. So when you say "I'm extremely happy to be employed in a field where I have natural bargaining power that doesn't need to be augmented by legislation." I expect you will find at some point in your career that your "natural bargaining power" will erode and you will be in a position where the lack of any bargaining power will benefit the corporation disproportionately.

I think it is great that this hasn't happened to you yet but it would be unwise to assume it will never happen.

> If you want to compare unions to corporations, consider this: What if all the local companies got together and agreed to only pay tech workers minimum wage? By pooling their bargaining power, they can achieve a far better result!

And this would be totally fine if we valued corporate rights over individual rights.

But as a society, we value individual rights over corporate rights, which is why we allow for unions but not corporate collusion. Any individual cannot stand up to a corporation, but a union of individuals certainly can, supporting the subjective values of our society.

> And this would be totally fine if we valued corporate rights over individual rights. But as a society, we value individual rights over corporate rights, which is why we allow for unions but not corporate collusion.

Unions are corporations. They are corporations which claim to represent their members' interests, but under US law, they are not obligated to. (And fittingly, there is actually plenty of evidence to suggest that many do not, which is one of the reasons for decline in both overall union membership and the decline in support for unions among union members).

This is of course illegal

I wonder how it came to be illegal. Did legislative bodies pass laws to protect workers solely out of the pure and spontaneous goodness of the legislators' hearts?

Or did they pass these laws because people organized and agitated and worked to get these laws passed?

If only there were some sort of books of history we could go look this stuff up in to find out.

And I think you'll find corporations have problems and excesses, too, but you seem perfectly willing to tolerate those.

As to the rest, see the other replies: "I have and have always had good bargaining power" does not imply "I will always have good bargaining power". In fact, the belief that how things are now is how they always must be is one of the most basic economic mistakes a person can make.

> I wonder how it came to be illegal. Did legislative bodies pass laws to protect workers solely out of the pure and spontaneous goodness of the legislators' hearts? Or did they pass these laws because people organized and agitated and worked to get these laws passed?

Wait, are you really going to try and give unions credit for antitrust laws (ie, the laws that OP is referring to)?

The first antitrust laws outlawed collusion, which also had the effect of outlawing a lot of common union activities as well. Labor unions fought to exempt themselves from antitrust laws.

I'm going to give the progressive movements of the turn of the 19th/20th century a lot of credit for antitrust and worker-protection laws. I'm also going to ignore anyone whose response is to try to nitpick and split out individual acts and try to attribute them to completely contextless utterly independent forces that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything else happening at the time in any way.

> I'm going to give the progressive movements of the turn of the 19th/20th century a lot of credit for antitrust and worker-protection laws. I'm also going to ignore anyone whose response is to try to nitpick and split out individual acts and try to attribute them to completely contextless utterly independent forces that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything else happening at the time in any way.

Nobody's saying that these were "utterly independent forces". I'm pointing out that the relationship between them was the exact opposite of what you claimed. Labor unions opposed antitrust laws which outlawed the sorts of behavior OP described; they certainly weren't responsible for it like you tried to claim.

It sounds like you're interested in ignoring the actual details of the history which disprove your point, in order to paint a certain narrative. In that case, there's probably not much point in discussing further, because that's not what a good-faith discussion looks like.

> As to the rest, see the other replies: "I have and have always had good bargaining power" does not imply "I will always have good bargaining power". In fact, the belief that how things are now is how they always must be is one of the most basic economic mistakes a person can make.

But I didn't imply that. What I said was that it makes me happy to be in that position. Requirements may change in the future, but I am capable of change as well. Rather than invest in a union to protect me as I become obsolete, I'll invest in my own development to do my best to ensure that doesn't happen.

Programmers are hired without unions for a reason, not because nobody's thought of it yet. Unions are a last-resort crutch to prop up unsustainable employee-employer relationships. Nobody should want to transition from being beholden to no-one to owing their employment to both a union and a government. I could scarcely live with myself.

Many companies start with no outside investment or debt. Like unions, it's a risk assessment: do you give up control in exchange for stability?

That kind of obstancance isn't a sign of being an adult.

Unions are by their very nature levelling mechanisms, the only real situation they can be of any use is in non-competitive and relatively low skilled labor markets. Anybody who wants to develop their skill set and advance their own careers would want to have nothing to do with unions. If a union negotiates a contract for me, they're not actually doing it for me, they're doing it for everybody, which will mean that I walk away with compensation equal to the average value of all people in the union. If I negotiate compensation for myself, then I can get employer to pay me what I'm actually worth, and none of my salary will be used to subsidise other less ambitious/competent union members.

That's a very optimistic view, and does not take into account the vast discrepancy in leverage between an employee and an employer.

That leverage only exists in non-competitive labor markets, which are almost exclusively low-skilled. That discrepancy can only arise when labor supply greatly outstrips demand. In such cases, you could make an argument that the disadvantages of the levelling mechanism are outweighed by the protection that unions provide. However, no matter where unions exist, they will always restrict individual contributors ability to advance their own careers, as well as their ability to seek remuneration appropriate for the value of their contributions.

"That leverage only exists in non-competitive labor markets, which are almost exclusively low-skilled"

That is flat out not true.

It absolutely is true. Employers cannot possibly have a disproportionate amount of leverage in competitive labor markets. what high-skilled markets do you believe are non-competitive? It’s certianly not software engineering, employers compete relentlessly for talent in this market.

That's good, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Especially not on divisive topics, where the effect will be trollish.

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

To give some examples of practices that unions might help prevent:

I was a full-time employee of an enterprise software consulting company my first job out of college. We were paid salary and didn't get overtime. We did get comp time, but only for hours worked in excess of 95 every two-week paycheck (so you'd have to work 7.5 unpaid overtime hours per week until you started getting comp time). I also had several managers who wanted us to bill the contractual maximum of 40 hours per week for clients, which in practice meant that I worked a lot more than 40 hours per week once travel and various administrative tasks were factored in.

I burned out at that job in less than four years and left to do something else that didn't involve so much time spent away from home at godforsaken little cities.

while I agree with you, I don't think this would work, as most tech workers are pretty well off and simply don't have to deal with what tech contractors have to deal with. I get a strong "f%$k you I got mine, don't change anything" vibe working in the tech industry.

In terms of benefits, SV companies, modern tech companies, are typically the cream of the crop, so I think it mitigates the need.

I don't think we need collective bargaining on salaries. But I do think workers should have a unified voice at the table, and at the very least have a political lobby for their rights.

>In terms of benefits, SV companies, modern tech companies, are typically the cream of the crop, so I think it mitigates the need.

There are a lot of lower level tech employees in modern tech companies that don't have the luxuries or benefits software engineers do and get stomped on all the time. It's really only engineers who have 'cream of the crop' jobs and benefits.

Of course - most tech workers are not in this group. They would benefit from unionization - but outsourcing has decimated that ability.

Speaking from a software engineers perspective, the need for unionization is pointless. Software engineers are at the top or near the top for most jobs in terms of compensation - so the need for unionization isn't as necessary.

Relative to cost of living, typical SV compensation is not "pretty well off" or "cream of the crop". It's not even close to the latter…

My tech coworkers live in the dingiest of apartments. Housing prices are outpacing gains in salary, and the majority of housing is out of reach of the median tech-worker salary.

There are some exceptional positions at exceptional companies, such as FAANG, but I strongly believe they're exceptional. Frankly when I look around my office I see either a bunch of young engineers working too long and too hard for a salary that won't really ever get them anywhere, or folks who already got their share of the pie. (And perhaps are quite fine on a SV salary.)

I'm also strongly considering leaving the Bay Area, as I'm tired of trying to change the minds of a generation that doesn't want me here.

>My tech coworkers live in the dingiest of apartments. Housing prices are outpacing gains in salary, and the majority of housing is out of reach of the median tech-worker salary.

I do executive tech support & linux support for corporate and live in a 1br apartment from the 60's 10 miles outside of the city. My commute is 1-1.5hr every day on the bus. I can't afford to use my health insurance even though I pay the premium every month.

It's absolutely true that costs are outpacing salaries, and a majority of them aren't "cream of the crop".

Tech support and linux support, call centres, etc, would make sense for unionization - but they're easily outsourced.

Perhaps I should've been clearer in my comment. If we're including call centers and first level support in "tech workers" then that changes things, just like including laborers in a steel mill as "steelworkers" would change things. Strictly from a software development/engineer perspective, unionization makes little sense right now.

Where is this not true? If you actually do the math for software engineers it simply doesn't add up. Most decent rust belt cities will be a severe drop in salary that it wouldn't be worth it. Some cities in Texas you'll break even.

If we're including low skill tech workers, then sure, their benefits won't compare. I was looking at it from a different PoV.

I've never been in a union but know people who have. From this small and biased sample of unions:

- Pay is based on seniority, not skill

- You have to please your boss from the company and also the union

I don't want either of these things. If there is a union where this doesn't happen then I could consider it.

Not all unions, just some blue collar unions. The american bar and american medical association are also de facto unions.

Lets call it a professional organization instead, and I think what most of us want is collaborative bargaining around IP(companies doesn't own your off hours) and non-competes.

The ABA doesn't do much if anything to benefit lawyers' working conditions. It enables and perpetuates the regulated monopoly that makes it a giant crapshoot of an industry to work in.

That is a small and biased sample, and ignores a union representing the most visible people in society: the screen actors' guild.

Think Tom Cruise is paid based on seniority and not skill?

Isn't selecting the SAG an even smaller and biased sample?

I'm showing one very easily understood counterexample to "unions pay based on seniority" to expand on the parent poster's "small and biased" sample and show that unions are what their members make of them.

Are the majority of people in unions in a union that bases pay mostly on seniority?

I dunno, and it doesn't really matter for this conversation.

After all, why would tech workers choose that pay scale when putting together the rules for their union?

(And, if they did choose that, whose place is it for anyone outside the union to tell them that's wrong?)

>I dunno, and it doesn't really matter for this conversation.

travis stated pay is based on seniority (implied most, not all). You claimed his sample was too small, then gave a small sample as counter-evidence. So now that I ask you if the majority of people in unions are paid based mostly on seniority you admit you don't even know? And thus claim it's irrelevant?

That's an odd way to demonstrate that your objection has merit.

You can look up the biggest unions in the US, and you will in fact see that a significant component of pay is seniority based for the majority of people in US unions.

If you're going to complain that someone is wrong, at least put in some legwork.

It is irrelevant. How unions structure their pay rules is entirely up to them.

If tech workers unionize, they can decide whatever pay scale they want. Why do you think that is not so?

And if they choose a pay scale based on seniority, lines of code delivered, or the weather, what difference does it make to you, someone presumably not a member of their union?

We need some more creative thinking here. If we base it off existing unions meh, but we can prob engineer something good.

A software eng that cant see this prob/solution most likely isn’t a good software eng and would benefit from said union.

https://iww.org/unions/dept500/iu560

> Ask yourself how many times you’ve seen a colleague let go because they had some medical troubles.

Never.

> Ask yourself how many times a colleague on a visa told you they felt trapped.

Never.

> Ask yourself how many times you’ve heard of a colleague get fucked out of their vacation due to a critical issue.

Never.

> Ask yourself how much power you have to effect change when it comes to just general process

Hmm, somewhat. All places I've worked have been pretty responsive. Current place moreso.

I suggest the above is USA-specific and nothing to do with unionised programmers.

I work in the USA and also answer "never" to all of the above. Regarding the last bullet point, I've helped to change general processes in almost every place that I've ever worked. I'm genuinely curious to hear from folks who have experienced these bullet points: where did you work at the time?

Another example of how Medicare for All would help business. Just remove healthcare as an employee benefit entirely.

Not sure why you're getting down voted - tying health care to employment is a burden on both companies (at least small ones) and workers.

I'm sympathetic but I'm not sure how it's related.

Probably because he didn't make it clear that the reason he brought up Medicare for All was because the whole reason contractors are so prevalent is so you don't have to pay for healthcare for them, effectively separating your workers into two classes.

Medicare for All would be beneficial in this example as it would totally remove the burden on company to provide a healthcare plan.

Without that crucial context, it sounds like he's just randomly bringing up hot-button political issues.

In countries with socialized medicine already, how many people are covered by private health insurance and is it paid for by the employer?

The answers are "lots" and "mostly"

> In countries with socialized medicine already, how many people are covered by private health insurance and is it paid for by the employer?

> The answers are "lots" and "mostly"

I would appreciate citations for this statement. As it is here, I suspect the 'lots' actually are a wealthier subset of the overall population; indeed, I imagine the subset of employer-paid insurance beneficiaries is smaller in most other countries.

If you'd like to read more about this topic, NEJM has published a series on the healthcare systems of many countries[1].

1. See 'Related Articles' here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1413937

The difference is that it's a perk, not a necessity. If you get diagnosed with cancer and then subsequently fired, you don't have to remortgage your home (if you have one) in order to pay for your treatment.

Yeh but its shit (in the UK) from experience I had a major operation and having Bupa gave me zero benefits.

All it means is you have a" benefit" that is supposedly worth "800 quid) costs you 400 in tax I would rather have had an extra £800 in my pension.

Its interesting my current employer does not do private health for this reason.

I would like to see some facts back that up.

Perhaps for the richest quartile, but surely not the poorest quartile...

The point of socialised healthcare is to provide some cover to the otherwise least fortunate in your society.

I'm in NZ, it's not too common. There is private health insurance, but it mainly is for extra beyond what the state provides and to short circuit wait lists for certain elective medical procedures. It's also pretty cheap, a few companies will pay for it, mostly employees get a discount through their work places. Most small small businesses wouldn't offer it at all. According to stats around 35% of NZ adults ( from 2015 ) have private insurace.

My private health insurance in NZ costs $1650 USD a year, including dental and optical, and nearly unlimited hospital care.

On earnings of $~100K USD, you'd pay $26.5K USD in income tax, $1.2K in compulsory accident insurance, for a total tax rate of 28.12% (https://www.paye.net.nz/calculator.html).

In Australia it's ~50% and I've never heard of anyone getting it paid by the employer, it's an alien concept.

Even that 50% is with the government abusing the tax system to force people to take out basic private insurance.

My company does actually give a subsidy to health care, so it's not a totally alien concept in Australia. But it's pretty rare.

"The answers are "lots" and "mostly"

Where would that be? Name examples. In Germany you certainly don't get it paid by the employer.

Countries with socialized medicine still have jobs with private health insurance benefits. The publicly funded health care ends up being mediocre for some reason or another. For example, about 60% of Canadians are covered by some form of private health insurance.

If it's anything like France, the private insurance hooks you up with "perks" compared to basic, or even shared room care.

Edit: Found what is covered by private insurance in Canada:

>About 27.6% of Canadians' healthcare is paid for through the private sector. This mostly goes towards services not covered or partially covered by Medicare, such as prescription drugs, dentistry and optometry. Some 75% of Canadians have some form of supplementary private health insurance; many of them receive it through their employers.

I've heard that the UK does this as well, still get insurance from work because the free one is terrible.

No, that's not how it works.

The free one is all you have. The insurance from work covers drugs, massages, eyeglasses and dentistry.

Not in my experience the UK isn't like the European ones where they are dual funded from general taxation and compulsory employer and employee contribs.

You can, I had BUPA for a while earlier in my life. IMNSHO It's basically just a waste of money unless you really care about aesthetics. I put up with it because my mother insisted, she worries.

With a public system right there, it makes no sense for private providers to waste a penny on anything that doesn't generate profit. So e.g. if you have an emergency while you're physically at a private hospital, they will almost certainly phone for an NHS ambulance, because the NHS does emergencies and they don't. Heart attack? Not their problem. Broken arm? Not them. Car accident? Nope. Those can all go to the NHS. But if you need a routine or even cosmetic minor operation, they're happy to take your money and offer you a slightly nicer experience, air-conditioned room with fresh flowers, branded products instead of whatever was cheapest for the NHS to source, that sort of thing.

Some of the private schemes are literally insurance. So you get the exact same NHS treatments as everybody else, but your insurance means e.g. you get a $50 cheque for the inconvenience of seeing a doctor to treat that nasty infection, that sort of thing. This is a bit trickier for them to implement since obviously the NHS doesn't want its doctors doing paperwork for some insurance company on tax payer time, and the insurer isn't keen to pay a doctor's hourly rate to fill out a form saying "Yup, your customer had a nasty infection, I prescribed ointment". But if you really wish you got a cheque every time you spent time in a doctor's waiting room I guess it's an option.

So you're saying the socialized insurance isn't terrible, just private insurance is supplementary to provide things you really could probably live without?

Since I don't care about these supplementary things I never made any use of my insurance at all in the years I had it, I just paid the fees because it kept my mother quiet and continued as a normal NHS patient. I know friends who've had stuff done privately, but I didn't see any meaningful benefit. I'm sure mileage may vary.

I had cancer when I was younger, the NHS fixed that. Again what would private providers do differently? Better wallpaper or whatever versus the worry of imminent death? Who cares? I used to buy myself a BK Double Whopper as a treat before chemotherapy do you think a private insurer would throw in a free burger?

> Another example of how Medicare for All would help business. Just remove healthcare as an employee benefit entirely.

The problem there is that the existing Medicare system is predicated on paying less for the same things than private insurance and then letting high private insurance premiums subsidize the Medicare system. Which obviously doesn't work when everyone is on Medicare, so the cost per Medicare patient would go up at the same time as you're adding hundreds of millions of people to it.

So the Medicare tax would have to increase dramatically, but the Medicare tax is pretty regressive. Meanwhile a lot of companies would then get away with discontinuing their private insurance coverage without increasing employee compensation by the same amount. So you're basically talking about a huge transfer of wealth from the middle class to corporations.

We should probably look into some other method of dismantling the employer-provided healthcare system. Maybe something that involves primarily catastrophic coverage as a baseline.

Presumably we would still have private insurance, just like Medicare patients have private insurance now. You'd use your private insurance to do things like skip ahead in line or not see your primary care provider first or getting drugs that aren't on medicare's schedule.

We would also presumably still have doctors who don't take Medicare and can charge whatever they want, and then you'd want private insurance to see those doctors, who presumably would be the best doctors, and the ones that could get away with such things.

You can't get the same amount of cross-subsidy out of that because nobody is going to want to pay a ~20% Medicare tax plus $5000/year for $1000 value in supplemental insurance with $4000 in cross-subsidy.

I'm not sure that's how Medicare is 'predicated' - the fundamental assumption is that you get to a) reduce administrative overhead due to a centralized system, and b) using the power of a single-payer system to negotiate lower fees - it's reducing the profit margin of private insurers, not relying on them to subsidize Medicare.

> I'm not sure that's how Medicare is 'predicated' - the fundamental assumption is that you get to a) reduce administrative overhead due to a centralized system, and b) using the power of a single-payer system to negotiate lower fees

This fundamental assumption is wrong, because Medicare doesn't negotiate. Medicare sets rates by fiat, and providers don't have the ability to negotiate rates with Medicare the way they negotiate with private payers. Medicare reimburses rates that are below COGS, which means that providers actually lose money on Medicare patients and have to cover their losses with the margins they make on privately-insured patients. (Medicare acknowledges this, and in fact will pay separate stipends to providers who don't see enough privately-insured patients to cover the losses on Medicare patients).

OP is correct - Medicare's funding model is not sustainable without private insurers to provide the difference.

> it's reducing the profit margin of private insurers, not relying on them to subsidize Medicare

Uh, where do you think that extra money goes?

Medicare for all would get rid of high private insurance premiums, but it would also raise payments by people who are currently uninsured, and would have higher payment levels than Medicaid. So the decrease in provider payments would, in total, be something like 10%, which could be compensated by lower administrative costs, since hospitals would have fewer insurance companies to deal with.

> Medicare for all would get rid of high private insurance premiums, but it would also raise payments by people who are currently uninsured, and would have higher payment levels than Medicaid. So the decrease in provider payments would, in total, be something like 10%, which could be compensated by lower administrative costs, since hospitals would have fewer insurance companies to deal with.

Your numbers are completely out of whack. First of all, Medicare pays rates that are below COGS. That means that, at the current reimbursement rates, providers wouldn't want to see more Medicare patients; the more Medicare patients they see, the faster they lose money.

I have no idea where you're pulling this 10% number from. But administrative costs due to private insurance companies are nowhere near 10% of total reimbursements - that's an absurd figure. Most administrative costs have nothing to do with the number of insurance companies you're dealing with; it's to do with the overhead of providing care and billing[0]. Reducing the number of payers doesn't reduce that fixed cost.

[0] Yes, billing is still an issue with Medicare. How do you think Medicare knows how much to pay providers in the first place?

the Medicare tax would have to increase dramatically

Would it? It already covers all the old people who suck down almost all the healthcare expenses already. Expanding it would cover younger and healthier people. I don't know the numbers...that's just my quick take.

> So the Medicare tax would have to increase dramatically, but the Medicare tax is pretty regressive.

So, if you need to change it anyway, make it less regressive at the same time.

We actually have employer sponsored health insurance because of unions, and the effect that has had on the insurance market is part of why insurance on the individual market is so dang expensive. Not entirely, as it's expensive no matter how you get it, but it is a factor.

Heck, the Affordable Care Act ruined a lot of insurance policies held by union members because they covered too much. My best friend's employer was stuck with the Faustian choice of massive increases to employee contributions, paying massive penalties to the government, or renegotiating for shittier coverage.

A good set of strong unions could make that a reality

I used to work for LionBridge. They did have quite a few full time positions when Nokia was flourishing, but when things started to go south with Nokia, they put pressure on LionBridge to cut their costs, else lose their business contract. When Microsoft took over Nokia, nothing changed for the better. People who were forced out of their full-time jobs didn't get them back, and the people who had permanent zero hour contracts kept the same deal. This is when I left (because I was only getting a couple of days work a month).

I feel bad for LB because it was Nokia and MS that turned the screws, even though I think they had the funds to support LB's employees. I also have no idea why LB couldn't then get the reason Nokia and MS lost their product support, ie. the Android vendors' business contracts.

I had to look up what a zero-hour contract is [1]. Seriously sounds like a setup ripe for worker abuse - I mean, yes, according to the standard zero hour contract, both employer and employee can decline work offered/accepted, but who do you think has power in this relationship?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-hour_contract

> according to the standard zero hour contract, both employer and employee can decline work offered/accepted, but who do you think has power in this relationship?

In my particular case, I was still eligible to unemployment subsidy, if my monthly earnings were lower than that of unemployment benefit, but it came with a condition. Even though I was allowed to decline offered work, I would forfeit my unemployment subsidy for three months each time I declined it. This of course was a condition of the unemployment office, not the company, but the company knew about it, so yes, the company indeed had power over those who needed at least the minimum living allowance.

We actually had a homeless guy working there for a while, until they found out he was homeless.

Big company A wants to pay less for a general service, Large company A outsources the service to smaller company B. Smaller company B in order to make the service cheaper than Company A could do it themselves, company B cuts on things like pay, vacation and social benefits. There is no work safety in company B and everything is by demand "contract" work. In fact employees of company B is often self employees.

This is usually how it goes around and in globalization it is there is often someone willing to the work cheaper but with no health care, pensions etc.

Just as an fyi, there are countries where companies like lionsbridge are not even allowed to exist. e.g. France.

Check on the number of companies that exist in France with 49 employees.

Thought experiment: what if the US government limited companies to a maximum number of employees, say 5000?

There would be new inefficiencies, but it might decrease the possibility or impact of monopolies and encourage competition. There would be a lot more specialized contractor companies. How much of, say, Google's search service or Microsoft Windows could be maintained or developed with just 5000 people?

There would be 5000 car manufacturers

We would end up with massive conglomerates who owned 500+ companies of 4999 people, and if that didn't work you'd just get simple collusion where everyone knows company A and B are owned by the same person so they try to cooperate even without being explicitly ordered to.

It would likely just encourage convoluted corporate structures that would function more-or-less equivalently to the ones we have today.

Canada too.

what's the relevant law here?

If these people can form a union, what's to stop them from forming their own agency and finding clients? Software testing isn't exactly a capital-intensive business.

A similar thing happened to SWEs at Lanetix. I was coworkers with several of them at my previous job. https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-tech-company...

Fortunately I've never worked anywhere that had conditions so bad that organizing was worth thinking about, but I won't rule it out as a possibility in the future.

There is a general lack of empathy for these workers and even for those who get laid off due to globalization and now under a opioid/meth epidemic.

Free market proponents always talk about 'retraining' and other up in the air initiatives but there is no follow up or details about how these will actually work in the real world with some base accountability, processes and studies about how well they worked in the past. And yet all these trade deals without exception have claw backs and multiple processes protecting their investments and profits. In this case all the details are covered carefully and it is not left 'up in the air'.

There are no easy answers here as opinions will shift depending on which side of the equation you or someone you care about finds themselves in. This is really about the kind of society and community you want to build and how you see yourself as a country.

Could we at least agree that tech workers in the video game industry should be unionized? The anti-union detractors always talk about how cushy engineers have it and that unions are unnecessary. Well how about the notoriously horrendous working conditions in games?

As a lesson for people who want to unionize, this is why larger is better when it comes to unions.

Unless you live in MN, where they push tthrough legislation so they can take medicare money from disabled people.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattpatterson/2017/10/02/in-min...

Should tech workers unionize?

Tech workers are a global force! Instead of unionizing you would do better by getting security clearance and become a fed contract worker.

That is the closest thing to building a worker moat, I know of.

The purpose of a union is to pool the power of all the workers together and use that combined power to achieve things which the individuals themselves never could alone. Really big things. Like, we have weekends, maternity leave, and OSHA thanks to unions big.

Tech workers are indeed a global force and in a world that increasingly requires global solutions - think climate change, migration crises, etc. - a union that leverages the power of all tech workers would be really useful right about now.

Yes why not? many well paid professions do even in the USA.

"... gave up on what had been, for people in the software world, an almost unheard of unionization victory" The 'software world' is not just America, thank you. Almost every other civilized country thinks this is normal.

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" -- attributed to Mao.

The union expected to be dealt with fairly and according to the law; the law failed them, because the mechanisms of the law were controlled by politics and Microsoft has political power; the union did not.

I think Cornett Joyce predates that :-) when arresting Charles I the king asked on what authority he stepped to one side and pointed to the men with guns behind him.

I'm not sure why this is being down voted, it's true.

People are not quite at the point of revolt.

If the path we are currently on continues, though, it will happen. It's only a matter of when.

Were the bug testers working in conditions where said testers were in physical or psychiatric danger from job hazards? If not, I don't really see an issue with this.

what’s the difference between a union and a bunch of small 1 person companies all deciding to price fix?

> what’s the difference between a union and a bunch of small 1 person companies all deciding to price fix?

Is this a riddle?

The answer: Both were outlawed by antitrust laws, but labor unions later lobbied to except one (but not the other).

Article can't be found now?

Huh. Article cant be found now?

I guess this would explain the low quality of Windows updates recently. Almost every patch Tuesday we patch, and then something that should have been caught by Microsoft QA breaks.

The increasingly low quality of Microsoft products makes it hard to use in the enterprise.

wow! Can't they sue Microsoft and get reinstated? Perhaps using courts?

It is important to read the article before you react to the headline.

> Can't they sue Microsoft and get reinstated?

Please stop with this. The last time temp workers sued (and won) [1] the rippling effect it has had on 100s and 1000s of contractors since then, is that companies (in Silicon Valley and Bay area atleast) no longer employ contractors for more than 18 months at a time.

And due to this a lot of contractors since 1998 have had to leave lucrative contracts at software companies, because the companies that hired them specifically put this max limit after this lawsuit to shield themselves from such a law suit.

Personally, I've had to leave 3 separate contracts since 2006 in San Francisco, solely because the clients had this policy of not hiring temp workers/ contractors for more than 18 months, so as to avoid any lawsuit from temp workers suing for employee benefits.

[1] Source: [2000] Microsoft to Pay $97 Million to End Temp Worker Suit http://articles.latimes.com/2000/dec/13/business/fi-64817

Ditto. I make much more as a contractor than any FTEs I’ve worked with. This has bitten me a few times.

The best fix for this is to eliminate the "benefits" corporations see by hiring temps/part time over just hiring for a full time job.

If a job is really a partial job require pro-rated benefits (and favor the worker slightly so that it encourages just having full-time jobs).

That might also encourage businesses/the rich to put their political pressure towards socializing those costs instead of outsourcing them to individual (temp/part time) employees.

> The best fix for this is to eliminate the "benefits" corporations see by hiring temps/part time over just hiring for a full time job.

Having worked at a big tech co, our budget for contractors and vendors was different than our budget for full time employees.

It wasn't that vendors were even cheaper, the average was close to $100 / hour, and vendors got paid for every hour they worked! But vendors were easier to let go if they turned out to not be good, or if (when) the department budget was cut.

Getting approval for head count could take forever, but if I wanted to hire 3 vendors next week, it was only an issue of "is the money there right now?", not "will the money be there for years and years to come".

(As an aside, at one point in time the 3rd or 4th highest earning person in the building was one of my vendors, he was earning over 250K per year for awhile, all cash!)

Presumably contractor pay would be adjusted to reflect this.

I wonder if getting the /position/ they were previously hired to fill classified as a job that /should/ have been full time, so they could then be eligible for relocation/layoff by the main company, is a legal tactic that could work?

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