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Comment by news_to_me | Hacker News Reader

I'm not against unionization, but I also wonder whether employee representation on the board of directors is a better approach in many cases. It seems like it may suit the culture of tech better, and avoid some of the unfortunate bureaucracy of a true union.

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I've heard this concept brought up before, but are there real world examples where this has been effective?

It seems to me like any minority form of employee representation on a board (e.g. requiring 1 seat) would just be paying lip service to employees since the majority of the board would still make decisions based on what drives future profits.

it's currently law in Germany. As an American I don't have any first hand experience with how well it works out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

Harder to hide board decision making process when the employees have a seat at the table though. Might make it easier for employees to organise against problems before they become entrenched decisions.

How do you implement this without a) government mandate a la Germany or b) some form of employee collective (unions) to balance the power the company wields?

Alternative is it’s a mascot/figurehead appointed or “voted in”.

"union bureaucracy" is mostly just anti-union propaganda, unions are no more bureaucratic than the corporations they live in, the difference is they are typically democratic organizations. You have little to no control over the bureaucracy of the company you work for as an ordinary worker. In a union you can.

This is definitely not true. Some unionized aerospace companies literally draw a line on the floor that engineers can't cross. When an engineer needs to make a change to a spacecraft they need to describe how to perform the change to a technician, wait for the technician to do it, and repeat the process if the technician doesn't do it right. Policies like those would immediately go out the door if union rules didn't mandate that only the unionized technicians can work on spacecraft.

This is a bug. Not a feature

No, this is a feature, not a bug. Union rules often create redundant roles for the purposes of making the company hire more employees. More unnecessary work for the unionized technicians in this case, at the expense of making the company as a whole less efficient. Remember, the union is incentivized to do what's best for the union which is distinct from what is best for the company or its members.

You’re stuck in the past. Instead of lamenting about the negative effects of past schemes with the idea that any future scheme will have the same problems, how about we design new solutions given all of the experience and information we now possess.

Are we not technologists and engineers?

A defeatist attitude just slows down the problem solving process.

The current situation is working perfectly fine for plenty of tech workers. We have some of the best ratio of compensation to working experience in the country. There's a reason why so many people want to get into tech. Forced arbitration or not, I highly doubt the average Google Dev would want to trade life situations with the average American.

Are we not technologists and engineers? Don't we know enough about the pitfalls of trying to fix a system that isn't broken?

> We have some of the best ratio of compensation to working experience in the country.

But is it among the best ratios of compensation to value provided to the company? That's the more interesting number.

> Are we not technologists and engineers? Don't we know enough about the pitfalls of trying to fix a system that isn't broken?

The system isn't broken for _you_. You're not in a position to speak on behalf of me.

> "union bureaucracy" is mostly just anti-union propaganda, unions are no more bureaucratic than the corporations they live in

So, extremely? "no more bureaucratic than the corporations they live in" is not a hard standard to meet while still being incredibly bureaucratic.

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