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Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

Workers need unions, plain and simple. The addition of an impartial arbitrator at any step along this process could’ve helped so much.

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I used to believe that. But I saw very close how an IT union was taken over by old school, corrupt fat union guys. And they just pander to the lowest common denominator. They go against meritocracy.

I'd rather pay attention and vote with my feet.

"divided we fall" is a cliche but may have some merit here, especially if this will be filled by another starry eyed immigrant visa holder who can be treated as such. the information asymmetry gap is just too high imo.

there's other opportunities for organizing labor that don't include old-school unions. screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.

read up on some of michael o church's old blog about his ideas about organized labor in tech, but be careful espousing the same views as it very well might get you into irredeemable trouble.

Getting to be a new member of SAG is almost impossible. I don't think we want that model for developers.

Agreed. But the fight to keep management in check shouldn't devolve into a fight to keep the union leaders in check. What's the guarantee that won't happen?

i don't know, my first reaction is introduce democratic elements to the system as opposed to seniority but perhaps that's been done.

"worst system but best we've had" and all that - at least labor would have a fighting chance

> i don't know, my first reaction is introduce democratic elements to the system as opposed to seniority

Unions are almost invariably democratic; where seniority rules are adopted by a union (and this is far from universal), they tend to be adopted democratically,and not to replace democratic control of the union, so these are not opposed concepts.

> screen actors' guild is one example that, e.g., mandates various "newer" members get roles on films and seems to be really well regarded. a guild could serve techies as well.

But does the profession of acting strive to be meritocratic as much as software development? It appears that fame (which is probably correlated with how good of an actor someone is, but probably only weakly) has a much bigger effect in acting.

They both seem to pay a lot of lip service while the reality greatly undermines the verbiage. I’d argue that in acting the representation of women is far better than in software development. The degree to which software development is an asocial boy’s club is hard to understate, and the pet theories about intelligence and genetics don’t help, but rather reinforce the farcical nature of the self-serving “meritocracy” narrative.

> They go against meritocracy.

Not necessarily. You can have union representation and maintain a meritocracy at the same time.

But I also observe that the industry is not nearly as much of a meritocracy as we like to pretend anyway.

Unions are supposed to fight for each of their members equally. As such it is in their interest to eliminate performance based pay as much as possible. Increases in pay should be based on time in job (positively) and likelihood of losing job on time in job (negatively). If you have performance based pay someone who’s three times as good might get paid more, or long serving staff might be let go before the newly hired. That is not what the average union member wants, they want security and stability and they work to get it.

Nowhere is a perfect meritocracy but a union that did not actively work against meritocracy would not be working in the interest of its average member.

Unions operate according to the rules the union members agree to. There is no "one way" that unions function. A "programmer's union" would be structured according to whatever makes sense to the programmers.

agreed, unions have had issues akin to this across the board in the last decade or so, and it's extremely sad (to say the least). active worker participation and leadership of the union is the antidote to that.

> They go against meritocracy.

So does management. The difference is, you can vote shitty union reps off the island.

"impartial arbitrator"

No such thing. They are being paid by someone.

> No such thing. They are being paid by someone.

Having a union represent you at work is like having a lawyer represent you at court. Sure some rugged individualists choose to represent themselves pro se, but we all know how smart that is.

Right. So it's good to have someone on your side.

Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000. [1]

[1] https://laborpains.org/2018/06/04/union-president-pay-watch-...

For reference-- that's $318,160 more than Jeff Bezos' salary. That's insane.

How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?

If journalists focused on developer unions for even a fraction of the time they spend criticizing Amazon, I'd bet we'd have some blogs that sound just as damning as the one the author has written.

The bulk of Bezos's compensation is all in his equity.

Sure, but that's because the company is doing better. If it stagnated then he would only make base salary. If the union does their job poorly the Union leader still gets paid.

> How is a union able to pay that much to their leader on the one hand, yet completely unable to help defend this Amazon employee against an abusive manager?

Are you saying the Amazon has a developer union that could have helped defend this employee? Citation needed. AFAIK, developer unions have been advocated for, but don't actually exist (in a functional form, in the US at least).

...which is pennies compared to tech CEO salaries.

You're right, but please consider this: unions leaders are paper shufflers, bureaucrats, whereas tech CEOs are doers, risk takers and innovators; big difference.

Depends on the tech CEO. A lot of them seem to be mainly concerned with 'innovating' the stock price higher.

Also, union leaders aren't bureaucrats.

Also, bureaucrats serve a useful function.

> You're right, but please consider this: unions leaders are paper shufflers, bureaucrats, whereas tech CEOs are doers, risk takers and innovators; big difference.

There's actually not a big difference, after one factors out the remarkable level of spin you've worked into your characterizations.

> Speaking of payments: I was actually amazed to find out how much certain union leaders make. Some of them are in the top 1%, with yearly salaries of over $400,000.

If you object that people in large-organization senior management roles can make that much, you won't believe what many corporate CEOs make. It'll blow your mind!

https://laborpains.org/:

> LaborPains is a joint blog of the Center for Union Facts and the Enterprise Freedom Action Committee.

> We expose the truth about labor unions and the pain they impose upon free enterprise.

So, basically garbage anti-union propaganda. You might as well have just linked this video https://youtu.be/ONKkoiszVSs?t=17.

Wouldn't this situation and others like it simply devolve into an accusation and a denial? What can a truly impartial arbiter do in such a scenario?

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