Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing
theverge.com
theverge.com
I suspect like some folks here, my personal (negative) interactions with unions have turned me off of unions in general. I worked at an unionized shop when I first graduated and while I recognize some of the positives the union brought, there were also many downsides.
Some examples:
- Nepotism. We had an open position we couldn't fill for over a year because one of the union leader's son was graduating soon and that position was reserved for him.
- General complacency. Raises and promotions for the most part weren't based on performance, but rather tenure. Many people start off ambitious but end up just doing the minimum over time because there is no reward in trying too much.
- Strange (from my perspective) rules. I couldn't have more than one CAD going at one time, and because CAD is backlogged the turn around time was super long. This meant for long stretches of time I couldn't do any work. But I also couldn't leave. I read a lot of wikipedia pages during this time.
Eventually I got super bored, didn't see any growth potential and wasn't learning much so I left.
I assume not all unions are like this, but I do hear things similar to this from others (many on this thread) quite often as well.
I don't know of any industry where this doesn't happen. Certainly in tech there's plenty of anecdata about nepotism in hiring, no unions required.
> General complacency. Raises and promotions for the most part weren't based on performance, but rather tenure. Many people start off ambitious but end up just doing the minimum over time because there is no reward in trying too much.
Again, this doesn't differ much from non-union industry. Anecdotally (I know) almost every silicon valley tech company seems to have poor ratings in their internal polls for "we fire/retrain low performers". This isn't a problem that is unique to unions, nor can I see any evidence that it's worse in unionized workplaces.
Here's a fact about unions: Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages. [1]
According to the paper you referenced, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in private industries and under the category "Management, professional, and related occupations" employees earned more actually – $35.70/h – compared to workers represented by unions, who earned an average of $32.95/h.
I would assume the majority of software engineers work in private industries, thus would fall under the aforementioned category, and as a result would actually earn more by not joining a union. Am I missing something here?
Furthermore, it's unclear whether those wages include other types of compensation, such as stock grants and bonuses for example, in which case the difference would be even greater.
> In private industry, there is a different pattern among workers in this occupational group: those represented by unions earned an average of $32.95 per hour, while those not represented by unions earned $35.70 per hour. The wage advantage for nonunion workers in this occupational group reflects the concentration of union workers in certain relatively low-paying occupations in business and financial operations, such as claims adjusters, accountants, and training specialists.
Unless it adopts a more rigorous methodology, the paper paints a limited picture. [1]
For example, according to PayScale, Google pays on average $15,030 in annual employee bonuses (anywhere from $1,000 to $80,000), and for comparison, Facebook pays $12,860. These numbers will have a significant effect on hourly compensation.
Unfortunately, statistical analysis is tricky to get right, and plenty of papers contain errors and omissions, and I'm not necessarily saying that's the case here, but one ought to be aware. More on this topic, in case anyone is interested – Statistics Done Wrong [2]
Of course this is anecdotal and I don't have data to prove one way or the other. All I can say is, given the choice I'd rather not be in an union for my next job.
I think if we want unions to be more common place and more embraced, a good place to improve are some of the ones we currently have.
Couldn't this be because you raise the wages of all the underperformers and lower the wages of the top performers?
If you have a team where a few rockstars make $100K and the average and underperformers make $60K, the average pay could be said to increase if you simply make everyone's wage $72K. But that sucks for the top performers and really is only a good deal if you are at or below average.
> a few rockstars make $100k
My problem with this narrative is that I have never worked somewhere where the "10x rockstar" was actually that, or wasn't also toxic in some other way. All we have here are competing versions of anecdata about high-vs-low performers.
I also take issue with the reverse causation you seem to imply - that somebody making 60k is a low performer. That seems to assume that companies are good at actually identifying performance and compensating fairly for it.
I never implied that. The only information I gave you were the respective salaries of the high and low performers. I as a developer know who the average and low performers are but I can only guess at their salaries. I don't want a union boosting their pay while reducing mine in order to raise the "average" pay.
You do need a union if you want to have a voice in those issues though
Dutch unions, as far as I know, negotiate employment contracts, employment standards and general working conditions with employers and the government. A lot of Dutch economic decisions are made in a committee with representatives of the government, employer organisations, and the unions. In many industries there are standards about what someone in a certain position should get paid, but hiring, promotions and bonuses are based on performance.
Union membership is also not mandatory, but some employers encourage it, and unions provide services for their members.
This seems to me like the right way to do unions, but stories about unions in other countries (the US in particular) often come across as completely nuts.
Thus the powers unions obtain not only in the US but also for instance the UK, is entirely predictable - nothing stops them taking over the firm and unions are very frequently run by open communists who see it as a moral imperative to do so.
A good example is Unite in the UK, run by Len McCluskey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_McCluskey
In a speech at the 2010 Durham Miners' Gala he said political developments in Cuba and Venezuela should be better known, and suggested the reason they were not was because of "the fear of the good example".
Not surprisingly when major unions are led by people who think Venezuela is a "good example", people learn that unions are bad news!
How this works out in practice is that many industries, including the government, have very well-defined rules about compensation, which jobs go with which salary, how healthy working conditions need to be, and under what circumstances you can be fired. People can absolutely be fired, just not arbitrarily on a whim.
So yeah, compared to the way some American unions and companies seem to work according to people in this discussion, the difference is very big.
I recently came across an interesting talk by Richard Wolff at Google [1] which suggests that a great solution would be the democratization of the work place in the form of worker coops. It’s actually a tried and true model that works well in a variety of contexts. It would probably solve the problem you outline as well as make labor mistreatment a lot less common.
You're now in the business of providing workers for companies that produce stuff. If they want access to your workers, they sign a contract with your company. If some workers don't like working for some particular company, transfer them to places where they like to work.
You've now created a private union that operates on a consensual basis rather than a coercive / adversarial basis.
Unions exist to counter an existing adversarial and coercive economic relationship with counter-coercion.
It's kind of like saying that instead of using tanks to fight a war you should use really persuasive arguments because then you don't have to use "coercion".
An interesting idea could be to use a union or similar vehicle to start a co-op. Or start to strive for more democratic practices in companies. I actually like the comparisons to consulting companies in the sibling comments which seem to be an attempt at doing something like the outlined, however, with more of a traditional paint on top and probably more vulnerable to coercion in the long run.
If you just mean that coops just cannot really compete, I would say that’s a myth. Look at Mondragon for example [1] or some large German coops. They also run successful competitors to walmart at leasr in europe. I think that one reason that they are just not as common is a general need to raise capital quickly, general availability of capital and a lack of education. But you are right that none of that is likely to counter an existing monopoly with access to huge capital baring some kind of legislative changes. There is certainly a place for unions.
Source: fmr pivotal labs
Firm theory has studied this subject in the field of economics. There's a reason there are employees in the world, and not everyone is a contractor.
The comment above described contracting a company with employees. These employees would than drop be bound by the labor laws.
Heck this is what is done in India and other countries as well, to get around worker protection rules.
Keep several rota of workers, employ them at firm X. When the 9.999 years of work are up, “switch” the workers to a new firm.
Thus dodging the legal test which states that any worker who has worked at a role for more than 10 years at a single company, is a de facto employee and should be given pension and other recognitions.
Your design degenerates to this situation. The same way Uber degenerated from ride sharing and using surplus resources to people barely squeezing by.
i don't think there have been times in tech when employees were paid and overall treated better than today (maybe the boom 20 years ago comes somewhat close). Even more, I think tech employees situation today beats any other mass employment situation in the history of humankind.
See, for example https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-apple-contract-wor...
For workers in general a UBI that decreases the supply of workers thus increasing their bargaining power.
For example, to finance a UBI large companies like would maybe be taxed more but that money would be evenly distributed across the company, thus, only marginally affecting Sergeys and Larrys position relative to their workers or society. They still remain in control, even though the population at large may have a little more wiggle room. Thus, UBI seems like a great way to make the status quo more tolerable but it wouldn’t really threaten accumulated power. That’s why basically everone in silicon valley is for it. Something like co-ops on the other hand bake in a lot more accountability and checks and balances into companies. This would also affect the distribution of power. But I wouldn’t say that this would be the obvious thing to push for or any kind of silver bullet. As I wrote in another comment, there are multiple sides to these problems (e.g., company and society level).
Thank you for engaging with this question, hope you find some value in my response!
The biggest problem is that I and many others see unions as short-sightedly protecting workers while their companies and industries die around them. The last real bastion of union workers in the US is the government and no one is calling their employment model effective.
It’s important to look at both of these sides when considering solutions, I guess I didn’t really do this in my comment. So thank you for this important insight!
To offer some additional thoughts on this, I can recommend the thought provink book Radical Markets by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. They present quadratic voting (next to some other ideas) as one means of arriving at better regulatory outcomes. To me it’s not a complete or perfect solution but certainly interesting and maybe one piece of the puzzle :)
In general, I would argue for more diversity in company structures and better education about alternative organizational models (i.e., talk more openly about the pros and cons of all forms of organization - not only from a profit making but a societal perspective). It seems to me that there is a strong dogma of how things need to be done in start ups. But maybe I am wrong, I am still working at a German University so maybe I am misrepresenting the situation in your country.
However, observe that their goal is not to tackle abusive working practices but apparently to take over the firm and impose a "social justice" agenda on it:
enrich Kickstarter’s charter commitments to creativity, equity, and a positive impact on society
promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table,”
"equity" means equal outcomes e.g. 50% of all jobs being reserved for certain genders, races, etc. "Inclusion" is a codeword for the same thing.
Obviously the goal of forcibly converting Kickstarter into using identity politics based management isn't something they can achieve by just going to work elsewhere, as would be the case if they were being mistreated, because Kickstarter would just hire replacement employees.
I personally found this as a first step toward a perception shift about tech from which we can all benefit.
Unions for instance can help fight this constant non extra paid "after-hours" working culture that force you to do all-nighters and all this kind of crazy shits just because the industry is seen as a bunch of nerds that are that passionate about programming that stay long hours just for the sake of love/passion for the job itself.
My sister thought this was ridiculous, how was she supposed to setup her classroom and answer questions afterwards? Unfortunately her boss warned her that coming early and staying late was not allowed.
Once unions start adding work rules like this you'll see a push to disable after-hours emails, banning weekend work, etc. So while the trope of the lazy union worker is deeply flawed, there are some problems for workers who want to go above and beyond (and while most non-tech workers don't get extra compensation for unpaid overtime, tech workers who go above and beyond actually are rewarded with equity)
So the school was expecting teachers to come in early to setup, not paying them for those hours and punishing those that didn't. This isn't a problem created by labor unions, it is a problem created by exploitative companies. And when the company decided how they would address the issue they decided that pre-class preparation wasn't worth paying for.
But they get overtime. From the IATSE contract with Disney:
"... all time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Except as otherwise herein provided: Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 ½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification."
"Crunch time" gets very expensive for employers.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/22/17149822/gdc-2018-igda-rou... [2] https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ [3] https://animationguild.org/
[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2017-06-07/nhk-pro...
[2] https://kotaku.com/an-insider-s-look-at-working-in-the-anime...
There's nothing particularly unusual about game dev jobs or companies compared to other areas of tech (especially including startups); it's just that there are a lot of people who want to work on games. It's been that way for at least a couple of decades now.
Yet they have the SAG-AFTRA union which had a strike to force better working conditions from games companies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016–17_video_game_voice_act...
Further acting is older than gaming, and those unions were given space to form during a period of time that was very different from today.
In the 1930s back when union organizing was likely to get you beaten by goons or assassinated by hitmen/the mob? Or in the 1940s and '50s, when active membership in the union put you at risk of getting brought up in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee and blacklisted from ever working again?
IATSE Local 728 has an article about their own history that doesn't gloss over the bad stuff.[1]
[1] https://www.iatse728.org/about-us/history/the-war-for-warner...
The concept is similar, the volume of people is vastly different, however.
Judging by the gamer-centric media, it seems like most of them hate the industry and most of the major companies in it. They love small developers, they love making games, they love their Twitch streamers, but they hate the companies with a burning passion.
Unfortunately, that passion often gets channeled into harassing women and minorities instead of going anywhere productive.
The all too common path seems to be enter the industry for a few years, endure crap that none of your friends that do similar jobs outside of the industry endure for a lot less money, actually want to plan for the future at some point, then get a job outside of the industry, and even though you love games, you just can't go back to getting mistreated.
That was what I did, and lots of other coworkers I had, and is why the industry seems to have a huge dearth of senior talent.
So the people who would be most willing to unionize are no longer in the industry to do so.
A worker owned business is either a partnership or a co-op. The forms have been around for centuries. They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.
That logic doesn't actually follow; even if they performed equally, capital owners get more return in conventional firms (because they get all the returns, not just partial returns from lending capital), so they will favor conventional firms. So, all other things being equal, employee-owned firms have a disadvantage in access to capital and so can be expected to be less common than traditional firm unless they outperform enough to negate the return disadvantage for capital providers.
I don’t see any disagreement between what you wrote and I did outside of companies with explosive growth trying to dominate an industry, i.e. VC.
If your aim is to build a cooperative supermarket chain like the Coop in the U.K. banks will happily lend once you have a proven business plan. So someone does need to put up the initial capital but once you have a proven business model you’ll be able to borrow from banks and capital markets in the same way as conventional firms.
Your argument fails to address the sectors where partnerships and cooperatives dominate, law, accounting and management consulting. I’m sure there are others but the fact that every twenty years or so the Big 4 all spit out a giant services company but they don’t change their own corporate structure is suggestive that a partnership model works. And McKinsey, Bain or BCG would have no trouble accessing capital if they wanted to stop being a partnership.
I've heard European trade unions are more flexible and are as far as technical aspects allow for more more individual progress outside of say a union / employer agreement.
To be clear, this is just what I've heard about European unions. I've had no personal experience with them.
For example the IBEW, which organizes electrical workers, decided to come out against the Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power, in developing distributed smart grids, and generally overhauling all sorts of infrastructure to come in line with new energy efficiency regulations. But most of the IBEW members are from the incument energy companies rather than part of the new energy companies that would come to life if we kicked off a Green industrial policy. They have no interest in growing the field of electrical workers as a profession, they're focused specifically on protecting the interests of the people currently employed as electrical workers.
This feeds into a lot of criticisms people have about unions preferentially focusing on creating benefits for seniority and incumbency over actually protecting the rights and status of workers more broadly.
I've seen a lot of "Feel free to learn new skills" / "But no way are we going to let them be a requirement / judged for advancment because that would be bad for those with seniority who don't want to learn it...." type policies.
And if you're in a related field outside the union... you're just hosed, and unions are surprisingly not interested in growing in to closely related areas at times even if their PR says otherwise. I suspect those areas are dealt away with in the negotiations.
The unions that have actually been successful at growing their membership during this era of reaction, such as the SEIU, tend to be a lot more progressive and forward looking.
There is also an aesthetic thing at play here and the older dudes just don't like the idea of tech workers, professional workers, and "pink collar" jobs unionizing because they're not "real" workers. If we made hard-hats and tool-belts part of the standard nurse's uniform we could probably make some real strides. . .
Very possibly at the destruction of as many jobs in established industries. That's not really a clear win for electrical workers. This is especially true if new employers living off of the GND subsidies decides not to use the senior union members or the union at all.
The big difference, which nobody seems to have mentioned here, is that unions in the US are guaranteed exclusivity by law over representing people within a bargaining unit, as well as unilateral and retroactive control over defining the bargaining unit. In practice, this means that all employees at a given company are required to be represented by the same union; they have no choice in the matter. Once the union is established, it is almost impossible to decertify it, so the union corporate structure will never feel any real pressure from the employees.
In almost every other country, employees can choose alternative representation, which means the unions are forced to compete with each other for membership, and they are not guaranteed to represent employees at that company in perpetuity. This creates a healthier and less exploitative dynamic.
The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.
I agree that some competition could help in this matter since so many unions at this point no longer need to fairly represent their members as a whole due to their ubiquity in the industry. Also I feel that many of them are so large that they would have too many conflicting interests within the union and could be harming as many people as they help with a choice.
Exactly - it's a stable equilibrium, where unions and employers are actually content with the status quo and don't want to cede power, but ultimately it produces a clearly suboptimal result for workers.
Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to fix this, as you said, for political reasons.
that doesn't mean you can't try to mitigate the worst aspects of it. here are some suggestions to start:
* saner hours
* better pay, so that you can live on 40 hours a week or less of this work.
* comprehensive medical insurance including good mental health care
* free on-site confidential psychological counseling
programmers and other usually direct employees of software companies can have it bad, but they usually don't have it nearly as bad as the content screeners.
> I'm not sure what could be done.
me either, really, but there are some reasonable things we can try. i don't think we should just abdicate responsibility on this because it's hard and those people don't have much power.
People who want to make games (or discover dinosaur bones, or paint, or do other professions that are correlated with a deep, almost-aesthetic, passion) are competing with other people just like them. Since they tend to be so passionate about these things, they bid each other down. They work just a few more hours a week without pay then the next guy, just because they would so much rather build video games than standard dev work.
And before you know it, the field is treated worse. But it's an equilibrium worse, brought about by rational agents trading off work-life balance for work-passion.
What I have heard a couple times now from relatives of union members is that senior people who know union leadership sometimes end up on “disability”, meaning there is nothing wrong with them but they don’t work and get paid. They have doctors in the loop to certify the disability. I have no idea if this is actually widespread.
My own personal reluctance with joining a union is that I feel like I do pretty well negotiating for myself.
Having said that, perhaps a tech worker’s union could result in 30-hour four-day workweeks with reasonable minimum vacation, and that would be worthwhile if it became the industry norm.
As an attendee, nobody minds if you move the non-union chair, but if you so much as move a union chair a few feet to join an adjacent table, expect to be reprimanded.
These things are harder to negotiate for than salary and would be healthy for the industry.
A voluntary organization that less than 25% of people in the industry are members of, and which doesn't seek recognition by the NLRB?
That's very different from a union.
Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
If more money is paid to individual employees just because they demanded the added cost to the employer makes them inherently less competitive and therefore able to earn less and therefore pay said employees lower wages over time or go out of business.
The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work. Any money not going to the workers ought to be justified, rather than the negation. So to turn the question around: why are management & shareholders entitled to such a large share of what the workers produce? The answer is because management & shareholders are more powerful than any single worker, and this is abused to take more than their share. No moral justification is given or even considered. To unionize is to relatively equalize this power relation.
I mean is it rational.
> The workers are responsible for creating almost all the value, since they do the work.
Completely disagree. I believe most of the value of a company is created by the vision of its founding team and the execution of its leadership not the numerous workers along the hierarchy. I also think the 80-20 rule maybe a good way to identify how much value creation should be attributed to a group of workers ie on average most likely 80% of the value is created by 20% of workers.
It's as if we're rediscovering the stated purpose of unions, right here in this thread! The union can negotiate with everyone's labor, not just that of an individual worker.
It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that.
2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism?
The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request.
But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes.
> But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices
Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.
How many people in this thread honestly DON'T see themselves as a "top" contributor? Tech is like Lake Woebegone... all the kids are above average.
You're absolutely right though, it can be very difficult to have enough self knowledge and awareness to even place one's self sometimes.
In fact, due to the extremely low salaries in either private or public schools many people who would consider teaching end up in different fields... _that_ is what is driving down the quality.
Is there additional information about how unions lower the quality of public education inside the United States?
> Although teachers are now being charged more quickly, it still takes several years to complete the hearing process and for the arbitrator to render a decision.
So they get stood down until they've had a misconduct hearing, that seems fair, we don't want to ruin careers on allegations alone.
> In June 2012 it was revealed that the New York State Education Department had not paid its arbitrators for several years, and collectively owed them millions of dollars for cases they had completed, or were in the process of hearing. In frustration, ten of the 24 arbitrators on the New York City panel have quit, while the remaining 14 refuse to hear any testimony or issue any decisions until their back wages have been paid in full.
This is a massive administrative failure, I don't know why your blaming unions.
That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.
EDIT: I should also note that NYC public schools are an incredibly challenging teaching environment, a lot of false accusations fly around, and I don't mean that all the teachers in the rubber rooms should be let go. I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but is there any evidence that it is a huge problem and not isolated cases?
> That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.
The problem is not having a way to quantify what a good teacher is. Is it the one that imparts a love of learning on there students or the one that gets better test results? Is it the one in the wealthy area or the one in the poor area where kids aren't even being fed? If the students do poorly is it the teachers fault or did a teacher in a previous year skip crucial topics?
Paying good teachers more isn't possible until you can identify good teachers.
> I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.
Well there I agree, it should at least be very rare. It does sound strange to me, I don't think it's a thing in my country and even in academia tenure isn't as strong.
You're right that it's hard to quantify whether someone is a good teacher or not, but I don't think it's impossible to judge. It's probably impossible to make it a simple succinct rubric, though. Maybe it's a challenge for a universal function approximator like a neural net :-)
You sure it's the unions and not the fact that private schools get to cream-skim children from families with means who want to prioritize their education rather than being forced to take all comers?
Mandated by government and paid for with taxes seems to be part of the equation too. I'm not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing.
However, if a regular business ended up being forced into a situation where they had to overpay underperformers, they'd go out of business, probably for the better(?).
1. I do my best work when my colleagues are also doing their best work. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job if I can't use the leverage of having teammates. I will be happier if the company can compensate all of my coworkers well and make them happy and hire good coworkers - both in terms of intrinsic motivation / happiness and in terms of whether the company is profitable enough to compensate me as my performance deserves.
2. I'm a lot better at doing the work than negotiating for the salary I deserve. There are plenty of people in this industry who are the other way around.
Regarding disruptive employees: Why would a union restrict a company's ability to fire disruptive employees? (excepting the corrupted union that has irrational favorites)
Regarding under-performing employees: Are you talking about the person who is just a bit slower than others or the person who's lack of aptitude causes other employees to lose unreasonable amounts of time to assisting that employee? I'd count the second type in the same class as being disruptive.
Also, at your current workplace is everyone equal in terms salary when when normalized by performance? Is it a problem if you're a bit more efficient than a co-worker and earning the same salary as them?
And union is by the employees, for the employees. If the person is truly disruptive and slipped through the 1 year mark, unions don't just back you up regardless.
For example, a national union of software engineers would not be a great idea. (Even with local branches) Too many factors to consider to come to agreement. I guess a lot more sacrifice on the employees part nationally when mou negotiations are happening.
But if you have a California union for software engineers who are in a media industry, you have really focused the goals to a set of people. They can negotiate by looking at a union formed by google employees. Same thing with google. Vice versa, Just a union for google employees. They negotiate on their own or look at the benefits of a union provided by, say, Facebook.
- Just like I evaluate management when finding a new job (in my most recent job hunt I quite explicitly asked my interviewers what they thought about their management and how they thought it differed from other places they've worked, and hearing poor answers from one famous company was a reason I turned them down), I can evaluate the union when finding a new job. If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
- I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
- Management often prioritizes their own needs as individual employees, and is willing to overlook failures or mistakes if it's in the interest of their own career paths. It's hard to crack down on people failing up into management if you yourself are a manager because you failed up.
In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities. I prefer that system over a straight democracy for changing management priorities.
But in the end, the "best" ideas in the sense of the most profitable ones will still win, because companies with truly bad ideas from populism (e.g., "empty the company's cash reserves into end-of-year bonuses") will just not survive. Unions don't change the fact that companies themselves participate in a market.
And if you prefer that system, you and others who agree with you can absolutely participate in the market too and compete as part of your own business. You can choose not to join unionized companies. But I don't prefer that system. That's all.
I don't want to deny you your experiences, but this has not been mine. Not by a long-shot. Tons of time and effort get spent at my company trying to work around the idiosyncrasies of our capricious and out of touch management. And we're in a fast growing industry and our management seems to become more out-of-touch about the state of the technology and the market every year.
Their cognitive biases, pickled in their experiences from 8-10 years ago when they were last in touch with the real work, have a much bigger role in their priorities than any rational or dispassionate evaluation of what the "best ideas" are. The one saving grace they have is hiring subordinates who are good at manipulating them for their own benefit. Very VERY few tech companies can find that many people with the necessary soft skills to do it.
One downside of this is it sounds like we get to roll the "good bureaucracy / bad bureaucracy" dice twice instead of once, if either roll comes up "bad" we're in trouble.
Also, you usually have more influence in what your union does than what your management does. If I have to pick one of two dice to roll, I'll pick the one that's weighted in my favor, even if it sometimes comes up 1.
The issue is not that the management will defends the bad employee, it's that the union will.
How can you know if the union will?
I got a friend that right now have to deal (ask re-do the work of someone else constantly) because they can't fire her because the union don't want to do anything about it. How could she have known that the union would be ready to not protect one of their member?
Then go work elsewhere. I'm sure your co-workers won't miss the "what about mine???" attitude.
I think this statement is used as an anti-union argument here a lot, and it speaks to the ego that many engineers/developers have. "Top performers" are single-digits in a lot of even medium sized organizations, and chances are that an individual employee falls outside of this "top performer" category even if they think they are one. The unions work for the majority. This means that the unions probably work for you.
Everyone wants to say they hire the top 1% of top 1% but in reality that's not possible, and most of them are sucked up in some pretty strange places or by big companies with lots and lots of incentives to throw at them.
The majority of information I see online about software unions tends to be either anecdotal, or generalized across every industry rather than focused on a specific one (ie, on average, unions across all industries get X% higher pay).
This is being applied to a single company, so people who think it's terrible have no shortage of other places to go. It's high profile enough that Kickstarter trying to shut it down will get public blowback, so there's a better than average chance that they end up taking its demands seriously. It'll give at least one very tangible data point of, "here's what a software union in a software company looks like." And even if it does crash and burn, maybe we'll get some Kickstarter competitors out of it from prior employees.
I see very little downside. Let's have at least one trial somewhere, even if it's not perfect, that gives us at least some preview about what a US-based software union will look like.
There are some differences as you said. If you're an auto factory that goes on strike, the management is likely still making money—they have all the cars made yesterday and the day before to sell. Of course, the pressure would rise much quicker in a factory vs a tech company; where the latter could presumably float itself for a few weeks, the former would start losing money within days.
I'm sure whenever I get a new job and resign they're going to be like 'oh shit', because there's just not anyone left to replace what I do, really (I'm the last person in the department with a good amount of knowledge on their proprietary and stupid complicated phone systems, and they've kept me too swamped to be able to do any knowledge transfer worth a damn).
And in phone systems, there's always something going wrong or down, it seems like, often network related.
You're mistaken in thinking that a walkout is the only, or even primary, method of direct action organized collectives can employ.
Here are 197 others: https://www.aeinstein.org/nonviolentaction/198-methods-of-no...
Certain types of work-to-rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) would bring most tech companies to their knees in a matter of minutes. It wouldn't just gum up the works as it would in industry, it could literally put systems into failure states.
I'm one of the software engineers who was fired for organizing a union at a SF/DC based startup last year. The National Labor Relations Board found in our favor and we won a large cash settlement. But what we wanted was a union. Seeing others pick up the torch is extremely gratifying. Below are some links to news coverage of our case.
https://gist.github.com/bwestergard/a77744dc6f3095fd3fb769dd...
If anyone has questions about the process, I'm happy to answer what I can.
Software employers are not yet collaborating to avoid unions, as employers associations in other sectors have historically. There is not yet an organized blacklist for outspoken activists.
Unions are certified by card check or secret ballot. In either case, no future employer will ever know whether you supported unionization in a former job. You will always have plausible deniability, and its illegal to ask outright.
I hope you're right, but it's probably hard to know for sure.
My skepticism stems from the no-poach cartel discovered a few years ago.
$775k for 15 people especially SF based I wouldn't exactly call that a large cash settlement considering what happened, rep damage, time to find new work, etc.
Just had expectations of at least a year salary per person.
But your point stands: this is a weak remedy, and completely out of line with international norms.
Doesn't this kill a company?
Management has the right at a workplace to make any decisions, whether someone in non-management sees fit. Can't people who are frustrated with the company just go pursue a position elsewhere?
Historically, management (factory owners) was dragged into the streets and beaten to death (yikes) when excessive inequality was reached. This is an improvement (and hopefully management would see the benefit of treating labor as a partner, not a resource to be consumed).
The relationship between a company's stockholders and a company's employees is part competitive and part collaborative. Ignore either at your own peril.
I see your point but at the same time this can create an adversarial dynamic between managers and junior employees, which is toxic even if junior employees get what they want.
>Management certainly exercises every bit of power that they are able to.
I'm a manager and my proudest moments have been those of restraint, not force. Regardless of whether or not unions can and should be formed, organizations with employees feeling compelled to unionize should be hiring better managers.
This is a fantastic observation - and I believe it holds true. I've been in some very demanding technology roles, long hours, with competitive peers. A great leader is worth much more than some Union would have been (anecdotally).
This isn't true. Management only exercises every bit of power once the relationship becomes hostile. There are tons of things management could do to me to make their jobs easier (e.g. standups twice a day at 8am and 4:45pm with mandatory, in-person attendance) that they don't leverage.
Unionizing when there isn't already a hostile relationship is sure a way to bring hostility into it.
It would be better to solidify these things before the industry takes a nose dive.
Well, why shouldn't they? It's not like the company magically has more money available when they hire a non-remote employee, is it?
Pay has nothing to do with cost of living. That's a lie told by companies as a negotiating tactic. You don't magically make the company more money by being in the bay area.
And this is why unions exist. Even if managers try to be nice, even if the company gives out buckets of benefits and pays a living wage, this is the adversarial thought that exists in business currently. Management wants to pay the lowest they can, because that helps the business the most. They want to spend the least amount possible because that's the correct business choice.
Management/Ownership and Employees are frequently at odds when it comes to their goals, and changing the math from "me vs the company" to "the union vs the company" is a huge boon for employees.
"People didn’t even want that much more time off, or that much more time not on call. They just wanted to know where they stood. They didn’t want to have to engage in highly personalized bargaining all the time. It wasn’t that there were rules that favored management — there were simply no rules, and this ambiguity worked in management’s favor."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unio...
In the uk its relatively well paid but much less than say a train driver is the average dev in London earns less than a train driver gets for a four day week an they have over time and a DB pension.
What?
There is no constitutional right for management to make decisions. Management are people with certain forms of influence over the company; workers are other people with other forms of influence over the company.
The only way in which there's a "right" is "might makes right" - that management, when they want to make a decision, can force that decision to happen, and workers can't. The point of a union is to change this calculus. If the workers say, do what we want or we'll leave, there's no question of whether they have the "right" to say that. They have the power. The question is whether it's socially acceptable for workers to say they have that power.
Some are. You're probably imagining some Python engineer who is making $140k and can work normal hours, drink craft beer and take advantage of "unlimited time off" policies and such.
Think about operations staff who are doing mission critical work, like discovering and removing spam clusters. People like that often make an hourly wage, often are expected to pick up extra volume as a company grows, and are often the target of layoffs and wage controls because they are considered "variable cost" not "overhead".
Also think about people doing traditionally woman's jobs, like customer support or office support. These people make or break customer relationships, make or break team dynamics, or set the bar for content quality. But senior people on those teams often make less than junior engineers right out of school, because companies can exploit the popular idea that these kinds of workers are just less important.
Even coders, especially in production-based industries like video games or special effects, can work under semi-abusive conditions. Many of these firms dramatically staff up and down cyclically which gives employees little bargaining power.
So it comes off as just the usual lefty political signalling, not the start of a real movement.
Furthermore, articles published on this topic indicate that their motivations included well-established and reasonable on-call hours, slightly more vacation days, and more collaborative decision making with management. All of those are real, tangible benefits that most of us would value and enjoy.
I’m a little annoyed that using the word courage made me twitch for a second because of how much “bravery” and “courage” everyone is getting commended for these days, but I think you’re an example of what every day courage can look like.
You knew what the repercussions could be, I doubt you were so independently wealthy that losing your salary meant little, and you publicly stood for what you believe in for the greater good of those around you.
Even after all the crap you’ve probably had to deal with, I hope you feel positively about your efforts.
Time and perspective are a funny thing... Coming up as young adult and professional engineer I saw unions as a relic that definitely served for positive change (way back in dinosaur times), grew fat and complacent (if not even complicit), and did more harm to the market in general than they did to benefit their members today.
Now I site here (still relatively young, thank you) at 37 with young family, having co-founded a company that employs dozens, losing sleep over how much things like health insurance cost for my employees, and my stance on unions has softened up quite a bit.
Markets and investors have perverted corporate incentives to a degree that moral leadership can be considered downright mismanagement. I’ve heard managers and other founders complain that “if I pay to train them, they’re just going to walk out the door”, etc. My little sister is in year 3 of her software development career and I can’t believe some of the crap I have had to tell her to watch out for, or worse, how to handle as it’s happening to her.
I read about things like the IBM layoffs of “old” workers, then see people I used to work with struggle to get hired (totally not because of their age, of course!) when I know how capable they are and my blood boils.
I still don’t know if unions are the answer. Maybe they’re part of it, but I believe we’ve got a generation (or two) of spineless and/or immoral corporate leadership to survive before things get back on the right track.
People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.
Tell that to anyone whose workplace unionizes against their wishes and lives in a "closed shop" state. (Yes, closed shops are illegal, but agency fees lead to essentially the same thing).
Being forced to pay a fee to a union that does not represent you and that you did not vote to join is absolute bullshit.
Of course they do. The difference is that they are tricked into thinking they won't be worse off by the union organizers pretending that it's unlikely everyone will completely lose their job.
How does that not sound coercive? A company saying "If you collectively bargain against us, we will punish you" sounds ok to you? You've been tricked out of collective bargaining by decades of anti-union propaganda, and now you're carrying water for capital.
Perhaps the causation is reversed, and industries with terrible working conditions and low raises tend to attract unions to empower the workers to change those conditions?
It always seems to degenerate into an "us vs them" sort of thing whenever I talk to them about where they work. Why would I ever work some place where things are so adversarial?
You also end up with this 3rd party involved in everything, creating all kinds of "rules" to make things "fair". Want to go on vacation? To make things "fair", the most senior people get to pick their times first, and the new guys get the not-so-good times. Don't care about the union's bullshit "industrial action" and just want to work and earn some money? Get used to being called a "scab". You get the point - it becomes more about knuckling under to what the union wants than getting work done or having a career.
Every workplace is adversarial, it's you versus the C-suite who profit from the surplus value created by your labor. A union just evens out the bargaining power between you and them.
What if you're better than the majority of "us". I can negotiate a better deal for myself than they can get or justify; now I subsidize the group for "the greater good".
This is not why unions where created. They were to address the monopoly of power when all employees could offer was their labour. This is definitely not the case in the western white-collar labour market.
Programmer unions could copy the Hollywood model--salary floors, with no caps on salary negotiated by so-called "superstar" programmers.
Yes. This is also how insurance works. Also, statistically speaking, most people aren't better than the majority. The union then yolks the top half to make things better for the majority. People see this as unfair because they think they somehow got to be better than the majority solely by themselves and with no gains provided by others in their field. This is a way to help your sector directly. Also, a rising tide lifts all ships, so it's also possible that you earn more in the union model than when employees were pitted against each other. Less money goes to share prices, sucks for them.
There is absolutely an imbalance between the rates being paid to western white-collar workers and the value they create for their companies. If there wasn't, we wouldn't continue to see stockholder shares increase and growth in income inequity. I would argue that unions aren't as common in the white collar sector because most office workers don't fully understand the unions because they're 2+ generations removed from someone who may have been involved in one.
What do you mean by "stockholders shares increase"? You're saying shares increasing in value is a sign that there's an imbalance between wages paid to workers and value created by them?
As for the growth in income inequality, there are many other possible explanations besides a free market in labor being inherently unfair to workers.
Even if capital's share of income is increasing (I believe it has increased slightly), it doesn't follow that a cookie cutter intervention that treats labor as one homogenous mass, and gives it a greater share of income, will do anything but increase distortions being imposed on the economy.
Interventions need to be more intelligently formulated and targeted than what the simplistic ideological narratives promoted by rent-seeking labor unions advocate.
Such as?
>>What do you mean by "stockholders shares increase"? You're saying shares increasing in value is a sign that there's an imbalance between wages paid to workers and value created by them?
Quick answer: Yes. If I create $200 worth of value for my company, and I'm paid $100 dollars and the other $100 is given to the company coffers, I'm underpaid relative to the value I create. Capitalism is based on the idea that this has to happen in order for a business to function. I don't believe this to be the only way.
>>it doesn't follow that a cookie cutter intervention that treats labor as one homogeneous mass
That does't tend to be how unions work. Some go with specific rates based on seniority, some simply require wage floors or ranges based on title. Some simply bargain for benefits that help the masses (grievance resolution, healthcare options, etc). Unions are only a blunt tool if you let them be. Collective bargaining is only bad if you feel you're the specialist exceptional boy, which Western culture encourages but statistics point out are rare.
* Property values appreciating due to zoning restrictions constraining supply growth. This is the finding of a recent analysis that got significant attention: https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...
* Increasing regulations resulting in suppression of competition and rent-extraction by an elite: http://cepr.net/publications/reports/working-paper-the-upwar...
* An increase in occupational licensing. 5% of occupations in 1950 required an occupational license. Today it's 29%. A higher prevalence of occupational licensing also contributes to inequality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_licensing#Evidenc...
>A study from the Mercatus Center showed that occupational licensing can lead to greater income inequality, with each step needed to open a business leading to an additional 1.4% of national income going to the top 10% of earners.
>>Quick answer: Yes. If I create $200 worth of value for my company, and I'm paid $100 dollars and the other $100 is given to the company coffers, I'm underpaid relative to the value I create.
That is a deeply flawed Marxist understanding of economics. The $200 increase in company revenue is not solely due to the workers. If it were, the investors wouldn't be needed. The investment made by the investors is contributing enormous value, which is why investors are valued.
>>That does't tend to be how unions work.
Any rule that is broadly applied to the economy and regiments how labor is to interact with employers is going to be making simplifying assumptions about groups of workers/employers that treat them as homogeneous masses which would benefit from some set of cookie-cutter rules relating to some matter, be it collective bargaining, or union membership, or union dues.
An economy is far to complex to regiment with labor laws.
>>Some simply bargain for benefits that help the masses (grievance resolution, healthcare options, etc).
Regimentation does not help the masses. Mandatory minimum employment benefits like health options seem beneficial superficially, but in actuality they prevent individuals from negotiating the optimal trade off in benefits that maximize their well-being.
You don't increase the net pool of wealth in society when you make benefits mandatory. I might prefer a higher wage over guaranteed paternal leave. It's a trade off. One benefit has to come at the expense of another. Employers have a finite amount of wealth they can expend on labour.
Mandatory benefits are a case of treating individuals in society as cookie-cutter cut-outs, and applying a set formula to all of them. It's central economic planning, and it's destructive.
I guess it depends on the equity split. Very early engineers with, say 0.1% vested of a unicorn still feel like owners to me, in addition to being workers.
Have you considered that the adversarial workplace is the reason for unionizing in the first place?
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
Even if the workplace is not adversarial, any union will try to preserve the conditions that necessitate its continued existence.
No union ever said "Wow, this new CEO and management are super fair and reasonable. We are no longer necessary, let's dissolve and let them take the reigns."
Name a company with a CEO and management who are super fair and reasonable (e.g. paying employees the full value of their labor instead of profiting from the surplus value created by the employee)
Why wouldn't the employee work for themselves if they expect the full surplus of their value to go to them? I mean, it's not like the company is a charity, right? It's designed to be profitable for it's owners.
Most of pro-union comments incorrectly assume that unions create some worker utopia.
Name unionized company that offers salary and perks comparable to Google.
Not to mention that pretty much all unions have very strong pro-seniority rules. Work harder than others? Produce more value than others? Doesn't matter, the guy that has been 5 years longer gets paid more, gets more vacation time etc. How is that fair?
In context of programming jobs, this is a case of "be careful what you wish for"
I've not heard that about the UK's second largest union, Unite. I know people who work are part of that union (the people I'm thinking of work for BAE) and when they've talked about promotions and so on, they've never mentioned any kind of union-driven pro-seniority rule, and there is certainly no different vacation allowance for union members.
As a tech worker in a union, about the only union negotiated pro-seniority rules apply to layoffs; my employer does have tenure-based rules that apply to vacation, etc., but those apply equally to non-union employees, and tenure-based vacation formulas are common in non-union shops, too.
Socialism is not the definition of "fair". One could argue that it's not "fair" for e.g. workers manufacturing BMW's to make more than those manufacturing Kias simply because BMW's demand a higher price or have better margins.
What an odd point of view. Homicides are down; should we loosen the laws? If management are "fair and reasonable", what do they care if there's a union on premises? Everyone just goes about their business.
Sure, why not? Why does additional overhead added to systems always need to be permanent? It's like installing Norton Anti Virus and then never being able to uninstall it ever again. Sometimes I think it would be okay to say:
"Wow, aviation has been safe for 20 years since 9/11, maybe locked cockpits and increased public awareness are good enough, let's cut out the most onerous parts of the TSA and make our airports more lean and efficient"
You should compare "dissolving the union" to "abolishing all air regs" or "easing up on union activism" to "loosening the more onerous regs".
A more similar scenario would be "let's disband the IRS, as nobody does tax evasion anymore"
Do you realize that you have to pay monthly dues to a union? If I were paying union dues and the union didn't serve a purpose (due to fair and reasonable management practices), then I wouldn't want to pay those dues anymore. Everyone just going about their business still involves me paying union dues.
There is absolutely pressure to loosen the (enforcement of) laws when crime is down
If we can assume you're talking about USA, absolutely we should. We have more people in prison, in both absolute and percentage terms, than any society anywhere in the history of the human race. There is nothing about our situation that makes this a reasonable state of affairs. Reversion to the mean would contribute to justice.
It should be "homicides are down, should we reduce the number of cops and investigators?"
And the answer is probably yes. But of course we know that in practicality no municipality would say they are letting a bunch of cops go because crime is down. Even though they arguably should. Or at the very least, don't replace them as they retire and let the number naturally decrease. Because the number of people who will go out murdering people solely because there are less cops is near zero. That's not really a driving factor.
No, the guard is a check that deters burglars form taking advantage of you. After a burglary is too late to bring guards on board, and after dramatic unmerited changes in the terms of employment is too late to start a union -- or, at least, later than you'd like.
(Not commenting on whether the union will actually work as I've described, just trying to spec out what a reasonable union would look like here, and refute the idea that it's "doing nothing" when the union has a good deal that lasts.)
It's actually pretty invariably when unions are formed other than at firms in industries that are otherwise pervasively unionized.
Which is actually pretty analogous to physical security: outside of measures taken by everyone in similar circumstances, most heightened measures are taken after a dramatic experience shatters the sense of safety.
Also, there's no such thing as a non-adversarial company that would require a union and vice versa. If you're building an employee-owned structure (or similar structure in which all stake holders are able to help sculpt company decisions), you don't need a union. And if you don't have employee ownership, you're not giving your employees a real seat at the table and thus don't represent their best interests.
First job I ever had was in the financial industry but was part of a larger conglomerate in the media business. As such, we were forced into the union that the writers for the media company were all a part of. Its unusual to have a union is a "professional services" type role. Speaking first hand, I can tell you the union did absolutely nothing for us except collect a portion of our wages. They didn't care about us. Perhaps it was because we were the smaller/niche part of the larger business and their focus was on the writers that far outnumbered us. Or maybe they were just shitbags. But when it came time to discuss keeping the reps we had, I asked why we should keep them since there was no clear benefit. They basically admitted they did nothing for us by promising to make our unit a focus going forward. Uh huh. Well, an opportunity showed up where we got bought out by a competitor (purely in financial services) and we took that opportunity, as per the labor laws, to determine whether or not we wanted representation at the new entity. We voted them out by a wide margin with 80% in favor of getting rid of them. My salary increased after that, and substantially so in the years since (although I did leave soon after).
The NLRB really, really didn't want us to get rid of the union and tried hard to convince us to keep them, which is weird because that's not their role. The NLRB is just supposed to oversee the process to make sure the rules are being followed. Also, we were given a mere one day to file the petition - the day the new entity was legal. If we didn't do it that day, we'd have to wait an entire year to revisit the issue! One of the many reasons it's hard to get rid of parasitic organizations one they get their hooks in.
There really isn't a need in most cases to be unionized. The primary focus of unions was always working conditions and fair wages. Working conditions are light years beyond what they once were so unions have focused basically myopically on always fighting for higher wages and benefits. But the only time I think this is appropriate is in cases of similar, easily comparable work - meaning things that are usually "blue collar". It's hard to compare a lot of professional and "creative" jobs or the people filling those positions. I think people should be forced to negotiate for their own wages in most cases. Only simpler, lower-wage type work where people may not have the personality, skillset, and ability to negotiate for themselves as to avoid taking advantage of people makes sense to me.
I encounter this a lot in IT.
"YOU IT TYPES NEVER DO ANYTHING! YOU JUST SIT AT YOUR DESKS!"
"And your files, when you deleted them last week, what happened?"
"Well I put in my request and 20 minutes later.... Nevermind."
When we in IT do your jobs, we aren't noticed because we make technology work and smooth it out. When labor unions do the same thing, and make sure benefits and salaries and disputes are smooth and work on a pre-agreed upon process.
That may have been the case for you ; you didn't need union services because they already did the hard work before you showed up.
> We voted them out by a wide margin with 80% in favor of getting rid of them.
As was your right. Now tell me, on a union charter documents and federal procedures, there are ways to initiate an election to do this at non-standard times. If they are not adequately representing you, did you look into this?
> There really isn't a need in most cases to be unionized.
Basic economic theory shows why a force as powerful as a company is needed in dealing with them. And that counteracting force is a union. I, as an individual, have very little collective power. A company has a tremendous force.
> The primary focus of unions was always working conditions and fair wages.
And with the Labor Theory of Value so low for workers, we need unions now more than ever. And yes, that include for technical, intellectual, AND labor. One needs only look at how profits keep climbing per unit of labor, yet wages are stagnated for most workers.
> Working conditions are light years beyond what they once were so unions have focused basically myopically on always fighting for higher wages and benefits.
Please tell that to the current "Walmart"-equivalent employees working at Amazon peeing into milk jugs, because they can't get enough of a break to even go to the bathroom without the threat of firing.... But they don't need a union?!??
We technical staff have it loads better. We get free drinks/food in the breakroom, gameroom, and plenty more benefits. But I've also worked at the low paying jobs. You get: no insurance, no 401k, no benefits, no breaks, and work at $8/hr.
> I think people should be forced to negotiate for their own wages in most cases.
Seriously? "Forced"?
How about I get together with my colleagues and volitionally come to an agreement? NOPE Can't do that, we must be 'Forced' to negotiate individually...
> Only simpler, lower-wage type work where people may not have the personality, skillset, and ability to negotiate for themselves as to avoid taking advantage of people makes sense to me.
Arrogant much? "Oh those poor dumb people, they just don't know how good they have it!"
When an individual negotiates and works for a company, they make the company X$/yr. And they only pay the person YX$/yr where Y is a value from 0-.99 . That's because the company relies on this imbalance across its workforce to extract money from employees' labor. Your value may be X$/yr, but you are compensated for .2X$/yr . The .8X/yr goes to the company as their profit.
In unions, the workers align themselves together in order to exert more fair (read YX$/yr where Y is closer to 1) wages. They do this because, as a group, they can effectively strike and threaten to cut the life-blood (extracted labor value) from the company for a time. In the end, the company still retains a significant amount of percentage from laborers and maintains the bulk of the money. And since there is still a monied interests vs workers condition going on, propaganda and laws can be affected by the owner class to disenfranchise the laborers. Example: look where the US is now, with anti-union, anti-worker, and "right to work" laws.
In a worker owned cooperative, the labor value is closer even than that of a union/company. There still exists a need to keep the organization going on (maintenance, upkeep, hiring), however the aforementioned strife is combined into the same group of people. And when profit is paid out, it is paid to the very people who worked for it. In other words, the labor theory of value approaches 1 under worker owned cooperatives. We have organizations like Mondragon to look at how they implemented this.
I certainly see criticisms of LTV (like any economic theory), but there is no discrediting from what I've seen.
Care to share links about this discrediting?
Unions don't try to organize happy work places because they know how hard it is to do even when people are treated poorly. It's not worth the effort as people are not motivated to organize. Suggesting that people are going through the long hard process of unionizing for no real reason suggests a lack of understanding of the process and the pushback from management that happens.
People don't unionize for the fun of it. It's a long hard slog that often fails.
The point is that forming a union is a bumpy ride, even when the majority of employees see a need. Management will work hard to stop it and employees have to do a lot of work to make it happen. Unions won't organize at places where people are generally happy because the chances of success are low.
It's just anecdotal but my SO was involved at her union because she wanted to make a difference. It was at our provincial government, thus it represent 43 000 members in that case, which to me make it pretty much needed to have a union.
Once at a reunion for the representative, they still had a bit of time left scheduled, so some of them suggested to go do an impromptu manifestation in front of a bank. In case it wasn't clear, the bank isn't government owned. From what she told me, a big majority of them went.
Have you considered that union representative may be an interesting place for adversarial people to go, thus pushing an adversarial relation?
That's the point, "us vs them" is pretty good upgrade from "me vs them"
No matter how great your workplace is, it's already us vs them whether you want to admit it or not. That's the nature of the beast.
Suboptimize what? By what metrics? And why are those the primary metrics I should be using to make extremely important life choices?
I support your right to use other metrics as you prefer to make your choices, of course.
I'm sure there are companies where the portion of value I get to take home is directly related to the value I and my colleagues created, but I've never worked at such a company. Perhaps that is the sort of thing unions could help with?
edit: That being said, I've worked at companies where the primary 'enemy' was either "the bosses at HQ" or rival departments and I agree that it is toxic and a terrible way to run a company. However when the company ends up in that state it is a failure of management and not of the workers.
And regardless of that, if my employer is willing to pay our CEO over 20x what they pay their average employee, they are not in a position to niggle over the kinds of systemic inefficiencies they would suffer under a union.
Do you not believe that a CEO could have at least 20 times the impact on the value of a company than the average employee, and if so, should they not be compensated accordingly?
But a huge step down from "Us"
Exactly.
This sounds like an argument for full worker control/employee ownership, not an argument against a union.
The only way to solve the inherent adversity in the employer/employee relationship is to eliminate the employer/employee distinction.
Expecting owners to be fair by default is to be at the whim of their charity. "Friendly work environment" and other anti-union canards are merely an attempt to paper over exploitative behavior with flowery words. Unions are a stopgap at best.
The only business that can reliably be expected to run ethically is one that is owned by the workers.
It has little to do with that. As long as there are managers, there will always been a tension between what the employee wants to do and what the manager is expected to deliver to the rest of the company.
Yeah, authority structures have to exist, but the authorities make different decisions when they're appointed from above vs elected from below.
Democratic ownership and operation of the state has been the global norm for almost a century. It's not that radical to apply the same principle to business. What is business but government in microcosm? Why should we be content to spend 40 hours a week larping feudalism?
Ok...
I currently wish I had a union because I think I was unfairly evaluated in my current perf cycle, but there is no one to appeal my argument to which includes significant positive peer and managerial feedback. What I currently make has no impact on that.
He's almost certainly not getting a fair market wage.
Bingo! Complaints like that sound like people getting mad at professional athletes for getting paid and asking for more. If they get less money it's not as if you, the fan, are going to see that in lower ticket prices or anything. That's just money that goes to management instead. Why are YOU mad about it?
Of course you can, so why doesn't everyone do it? Why is there so much written about work/life balance and burnout targeted at programmers (much of it featured on this very website)? Why is google lampooned for on-premises chefs and nap rooms? Why does every programmer in a 10 mile radius sneer when the phrase "unlimited vacation" is posted on the internet?
you won't be paid or professionally respected quite as much as those that put in the hours
Well that's certainly true, but putting in the extra hours doesn't necessarily equate to more pay or more respect, very often it equates to much more work and responsibility without much more pay.
A good union would ideally be creating better working conditions for its members.
So, yeah, what you said. :)
How's your open plan office? Do you like it? Can you do anything about it? Unions can help.
*Edit: I don't understand the downvotes. If you're in tech at the moment and somewhat competent, you can basically name your price and benefits.
If a union is in the best interest of the employees, then it's in the best interest of any company that respects their employees. Companies which employ union-busting practices don't treat their employees well by definition. And promises of good will from management hardly compare to having a dedicated infrastructure in place to support employees' needs and rights, which is exactly what a union is. Management can change and promises can be broken. Unions on the other hand are intentionally structured to place employees' needs above all else.
You just made my point for me. That's a great arrangement; how it's supposed to function. How exactly is this "extraction" if under voluntary arrangement without coercion?
In some regions of some countries.
I’d agree it is a privilege to be able to hold a job that works you harder and pays you harder, because I feel most people are not satisfied doing jobs that have them frequently idle, and would choose something with a work-level similar to programming
I have to vehemently disagree with this. I have observed that most programmers work something like 3-6 hours a day and the rest of that time is spent browsing reddit/hn or playing ping-pong or some other distraction. Also, every single place I've worked that pays engineers well also has a culture where engineers take 1-2 hour lunches regularly, not to mention full time or part time work-from-home schedules and unlimited bathroom breaks. Of course, at every organization there are those workhorse developers who drink Soylent and coffee instead of breaking for lunch and leave after the whole office is empty, but they are relatively rare.
> Many entry level jobs have workers spending significant time doing nothing.
Do you have any examples? I'd argue that your average waiter works harder than your average programmer. Programming jobs require much more specialized expertise but the work itself is about as easy as it gets; and it's also much more forgiving compared to just about every other profession. Certainly, if you're "spending significant time doing nothing" while working at a restaurant, you will be fired very quickly.
One out of the four software companies I have worked at definitely falls into what you have mentioned, so I suspect my view is colored by the others I have worked at, one of which is renowned for “overworking” their programmers.
Yes, programmers have very good jobs compared to nonprogrammers. Part of that is smart career choice, part of it is interest/skill set. I would allow discussion of privilege to go without comment in that context.
When you say "This is senior engineer privilege speaking" I am much less sympathetic to thinking it is privilege. There are tons and tons of way to improve and command a premium of pay. Almost all of those have nothing to do attributes typically defined as privilege. So it bothers me when you try and attribute to privilege something that is mostly a result of hard work.
I liken this to undeveloped understandings of interpersonal relationships. One is given the impression early in life that all disagreements are bad and must be avoided. This can manifest in pathological conflict avoidance, ending in a blowup. Healthy relationships require explicit communication and prompt discussion of problems, which we can safely assume will inevitably occur.
The relationship between you and your employer is not one of family, and if you think of it that way you're setting yourself up for a rude awakening when the layoffs flow.
Both terms are just other ways of saying "groupthink."
Because it literally is after companies become a certain size. You have a small start up of 3-10 people, you might all be friends and working together for the betterment of the whole. You get past that size, and hierarchy happens. And then it is labor vs management. This doesn't mean that the goals can't align, but there are key points where they don't.
You think you're special and better than someone else, so you should get to pick whatever time off you want. The union doesn't care and has to create some version of fair because it represents several other people. If you work in a union company without being a part of the union, you're actively undermining the union's ability to assist it's members, and being called a scab is the price you have to pay.
You don't seem to understand what the value is that a union provides. They're not perfect. There will again be places where the needs/goals of a single individual will be at odds with the needs/goals of the union. This doesn't make them a net negative.
You keep believing in your exceptional nature, that you're better than average and therefor would be dragged down by the (hypothetical) union. Statistically speaking, you're probably wrong.
If you're like the vast majority of people working here you get paid a shitload of money and other benefits and have your pick of where to work.
Unionized employees often work in fields that aren't quite so rosy.
Would you have preferred it if that money was never in your paycheck in the first place?
Who can say what workers' conditions were like before the union existed? Without knowing the industry, it's hard to say that they did nothing for you, but knowing capitalists and owners in general, it's really hard to say they did nothing for you.
It always seems to degenerate into an "us vs them" sort of thing whenever I talk to them about where they work.
Even before this news, half a year ago, I pegged Kickstarter as a company ridden with "ideological possession." The clock is ticking, as far as I can tell.
It is "us vs them". They just apparently understand that a lot better than you.
> Don't care about the union's bullshit "industrial action" and just want to work and earn some money? Get used to being called a "scab".
If all that's happening is you get called a scab then count yourself lucky. That's a sign that things aren't that bad yet.
(And the Award for Thread's Most Inflammatory Analogy goes to...)
Maybe because the employer... made things "adversarial" by creating unhealthy / untenable / inadequately compensated working conditions in the first place?
You also end up with this 3rd party involved in everything, creating all kinds of "rules" to make things "fair".
If that's your concern, then the solution -- the only solution -- is to provide attractive (or at least reasonable) enough working conditions so that your employees don't even think of unionizing. As if they're just doing it because they're bored and have some unconscious desire for more complication in their lives or something.
The implicit message behind your critique is that employees who seek to unionize must be basically kind of stupid for not seeing the downsides to going the unionization route. When in reality... it's just a tradeoff. And a tradeoff they see little resource but to take, in view of the unreasonable working conditions (and essentially, if-you-don't-like-it-then-go-fuck-yourselves) negotiating stances taken by their employers.
All I know from friends/family is all a union does is put another group of people over you to tell you what to do. Only, these guys don't really have anything to do with the business. Their interests are not aligned with the business or even with yours. As time goes by, they just use their position to further their own other interests and power.
These are the lessons we already learned about unions, and why they're so unpopular these days.
Your employer is already a group of people over you who tell you what to do, whose interests are definitely not aligned with yours.
At least your union is ostensibly on your side; your employer is incentivized to wring as much out of you as they can, for as little as they can.
This is an unfair characterization of what unions are. They're not a second set of bosses; they're democratic organizations, no more, no less. What you get out of them is largely up to you and your interest in being involved.
Saying they're "over you" and "tell you what to do" reminds me of people who complain about politics but don't vote (let alone be politically active). For people unwilling even to show up to the discussion and use what little power is literally given to them, it's unsurprising that they'll get more than the minimum from such organizations.
What on earth does the 2016 election have to do with wealth inequality (or unions for that matter)? Inequality has been on the rise for decades and Clinton was also a member of the 1%. This seems like a non-sequitur.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/2/16720952/s...
I don't really understand the purpose of the unionization effort, beyond the facade of just wanting to in some way "fit in" with a social movement.
It's pretty naive to think unionization is just a social fad. It's a path towards job security, safety, good pay, and control over the direction of your own labor. Trendiness is pretty low on the totem pole.
The alternative is complete control by the employer. Sure, a union, as an institution with power, can likely limit some of your independence, but an employer can limit all of it.
Sanders is in the 1% as well.
Just because someone belongs to a group, doesn't make their criticism of the unjust advantages of that group invalid. Similarly, a white person arguing for civil rights is not a hypocrite either.
The Great Recession and subsequently Occupy Wall Street were early reactions to the symptoms that started heavily in the 2000s but really has been in play since the 70s. Share of GDP is a steady downtrend [1]. Velocity of money fell of a cliff in 2000s [2]. US GINI coefficient has increased steadily [3]. Inequality definitely became more of an issue in 2016 election but not much has been done to help it, it will continue to be an issue until UBI or GDP share changes.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
What is a structural force that defines class in America?
There is also a lot of structure around consumerism, debt, and the like, though this is split between societal/cultural structures and government/business structures.
Wealth inequality has been increasing for 40 years despite worker productivity rising. Nearly every metric shows the rungs to wealth being pulled away, and I'm the non logical one here?
> doesn't necessitate a downvote
You were already downvoted before I commented.
> should be inspiring, bc it shows that literally anyone middle class or above can be incredibly wealthy if principles are followed for 3-4 generations.
You didn't 'show' anything; you simply stated economic religion.
Wealth has nothing at all to do with worker productivity. It has only to do with saving a lot more than one spends by spending less, or generating large value to society with a monetary reward.
The pathway for any middle class family is through inherited wealth and NOT some fantasty of wealth equality achieved in 1 lifetime. We need to stop thinking in small terms of 'years'.
Wealth can be achieved generally in a family over the course of 1.5 centuries. If a family applies good saving practices, and saves over 5-6 generational lifetimes - it is very hard NOT to be wealthy. My parents were a fireman and teacher. My grandfather paid for my college, my parents are paying for my kids college, and I'm paying for my grand kids and great grand kids college - SOLELY bc of saving over extended periods of time. That was our family deal - take care of those after you 2 generations down. Thinking multi-generational is the easiest path to success.
Yes, inequality increasing because the richest aggregate in the US says absolutely nothing about how the quality of life has changed for regular people. It's a red herring.
If a rich person moves into my tiny town, I don't suddenly become worse off, despite inequality increasing drastically.
Racism is structural in a number of ways:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/08/26/not-just-in...
* Carpenters & Joiners Union gave $38,366,262 with $37,822,215 to democrats and $529,000 to republicans.
* Service Employees International Union gave $28,224,658 with $28,219,509 to democrats and $132 to republicans.
* Laborers Union gave $27,538,080 with $26,810,870 to democrats and $708,100 to republicans.
Source: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?id=
As you can see, there's a massive amount of political spending by unions, and it's almost completely on one side. The "right to work" laws which are so demonized do at least provide one huge advantage: people are no longer forced to contribute to a political campaign which they do not wish to support. There has been court ruling around this area in the past few years, but it was a problem for a long time and, to an extent, remains one.
In both cases the answer to "how do I stop supporting this political action I don't like?" is "Quit. Hope your skills are marketable."
What do I do when there is an industry-wide closed-shop union, as some people seem to want?
It seems that some unions have shifted from representing employees in negotiations to representing a profession in all respects. I believe that's contrary to their original purpose and dilutes both their support and their credibility as simply advocating for the worker.
As for closed shop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_shop#United_States
It's illegal, so's the similar "union shop", and you can opt out such that you still pay dues but they may only go toward collective bargaining activities and services to members, which appears to solve this "I'm being forced to support the only viable political party that wants to make anything whatsoever better" problem. Maybe leaving others, sure, but this issue's... not an issue. Unlike employers. I can't sign a piece of paper banning them from using profit derived from my labor for political activity.
But the thousands of companies I could work for have healthy competition and diversity of approach to issues. An industry-wide union has no competition and no diversity.
> Maybe leaving others, sure, but this issue's... not an issue.
Say you were a Green supporter, and had a strong conviction against military intervention. How would you feel funding a union leadership that campaigns for Labour, following Iraq?
Wow, I can tell you evaluate statements in an unbiased manner. What happens when you realize the idea of "better" turns out to depend on some pretty big assumptions that you no longer believe are true? Additionally, if the only two "viable" political parties are abhorrent like the ones in the US, giving any money to either of them is still morally fucked up if you truly disagree with them and vote 3rd party.
At any rate, the two-party thing's how our (the US's) system's structured. It stabilizes there. A third party replacing one of the big two, as has happened occasionally in the past, would assuredly acquire a good bit of distasteful cruft along the way. Effective political action revolves around trying to help a 3rd party replace one of them despite that likely outcome (and accepting an even smaller voice in policy than most voters have, in the meantime); participation in one of the big two parties themselves (much, much large effect than just voting in elections, though still usually tiny); or working to reform our system to break the two-party stability point. Or some combination of those things.
Well, in one scenario it's their money being spent. In the other, it's yours. You don't draw a pretty clear distinction there?
It really isn't. I think we can all make arguments as to why we're justified in taking from others, but that doesn't change the reality of what is happening.
> may not be relevant anyway:
AFAIK this means only public sector non-union employees cannot be forced to pay for unions' political activities. Private sector employees are still on the hook. Unless there's something else you're trying to draw attention to.
I'll pick out the part I think's most relevant, since yeah, that's a big ol' wall of text.
"Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), as amended by the Taft-Hartley Act, and held by the Supreme Court in Communications Workers of America v. Beck that in a union security agreement, unions are authorized by statute to collect from non-members only those fees and dues necessary to perform its duties as a collective bargaining representative known as agency fees.[12]"
Collect fees? Yes. Spend those fees on political activities, if you're a non-member? No. Unless I'm misreading this. The public unions bit comes next and says that public sector unions can't even collect the agency fees from non-union members, which is a step farther and into union-busting territory. The original point was that union fees amount to compelled political speech, though (again, so does your company spending on politics, assuming they're making money off you even in an abstract way, but whatever) and this seems to make that moot, best I can tell. If that's wrong I'd like to know—I don't get off on going around spreading incorrect info.
Switching jobs is harder: could you be working for a different company tomorrow, or would it take a few weeks to figure out. Switching unions is often impossible: the same union often covers everyone with the same skills.
> If recognized, Kickstarter would be the first major tech company with union representation in the United States.
But that's not correct. Engineers at Hughes Aircraft, including programmers, were unionized and represented by Local 1553 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. I think Hughes counts as a major tech company. Local 1553 also represents electronics and space engineers at other aerospace companies.
How did a carpenter's union end up representing engineers whose work had nothing to do with wood? Briefly, in the 1940s when Hughes built the Spruce Goose, a huge plane built almost entirely out of wood, they hired a lot of union carpenters. After the Spruce Goose was cancelled, many of those carpenters stayed on doing other work at Hughes, and kept their union. More history of 1553 here [1].
I think it's more like you join a company, and there is a set RoE for both the company and the union to talk to you about the union, and joining the union as an individual is usually, politics aside, a strong option because of all the extra benefits and protections union workers receive.
They _could_ require that _after_ joining Kickstarter either join the union or pay equivalent dues.
That sounds like exactly the same thing as a closed shop. How is that practically any different?
And to put another way: would it be reasonable for you to benefit from the work the union does for all employees without also contributing to that union?
All this is besides the point that requiring employees to join the union is a decision the _employer_ would have to make (although probably through union pressure).
If I never asked for the union or their collective bargaining, then yes. It's like cleaning my windows when I never asked you to and then demanding cash for it.
In the case of single-developer projects as single contractors, in the case of multi-developer projects as worker cooperatives or collectives.
If you're in a right to work state neither fees or membership is required.
Kickstarter is in NY, which is not a right-to-work state. So you may as well join the union, because you have to pay dues.
- You don't have to be a union member to get nearly all the benefits of the union -- including the pay scale from its collective bargaining, access to legal representation, health insurance benefits, and being able to attend regular union meetings. Basically, the only thing a non-member can't do is vote. (I see on our worker list today that fewer than half of our workforce today are actually union members.)
- Legally, they can't even require members to pay dues, though I imagine everyone here does, because it's inexpensive, and benefits all workers, including yourself. That's why one would vote to unionize in the first place!
These rules can and almost certainly do differ according to your union, local, contract, and state and federal law.
Unless someone responding here has specific knowledge of OPEIU, Local 153, their Kickstarter contract, or New York labor law, I would not place any trust in it. Many of these answers sound more like anti-union FUD than facts from the Kickstarter United contract.
That can vary wildly. And just like other industries, there can be management abuses - like demanding regular, unpaid overtime, substandard wages, sexism, unreasonable behavior, etc. Think about all the basically permanent contractors working for tech companies that might not have healthcare or other benefits, etc.
Allowing company management to organize and act as a collective while not doing so as an employee puts you at a disadvantage in every negotiation and conflict.
Moderate hour expectations don't always hold during "crunch time"; Facebook and Google have large swaths of their employee base who are subject to the schedules of the large annual developer conferences (F8, Google Cloud Next, Google I/O). There have been internal mandates where employees were forced to work weekends for entire quarters.
Yes, this is true, but I wonder if anyone is going to someday connect the dots between "crazy high average salary" and "high housing prices". Simply raising wages doesn't in and of itself make housing more affordable... it kicks off a feedback loop. When it's not unheard of for tech workers to make $250K-$500K per year (ostensibly to make it easier to buy those million dollar homes!), don't be surprised when housing prices spiral out of control.
Local government mostly represents native San Franciscans who, understandably, do not want to give up their home so that "other people" can live there (even if, by utilitarian standards, more of those other people can live there).
Folks who moved to the Bay Area in search of employment in tech (both immigrants and Americans who are not "native San Franciscans") who desire more housing are not always represented in local government. (In some local meetings, folks shoot down your opinion if you aren't born in SF.)
For CEOs/management, telecommuting and remote sites can make your company less nimble / competitive. Remote workers get left out of "serendipitous microkitchen discussions", and coordinating across sites/time zones is more work than just having one big all-hands in one big campus. (Can be mitigated by starting with a remote-first culture, but this is very hard to bolt on to an existing company.)
Finally, companies can't exactly reduce their hiring (number of roles) or salaries in collaboration with their neighbours to reduce housing prices.
Also it'd be nice if some of the more powerful workers here could organize and help lobby for things like parental leave and minimum vacation for all workers, including those without so much clout.
EDIT: and there's still the "if you write a novel in your free time on your own hardware we can try to claim it if we feel like it" clauses that are so common.
I don't think that is even remotely an accurate statement, unless EVERY company with a website is now a "tech company".
I took a peek at the data object in https://www.kickstarter.com/team
And to me it looks like an art company, with very little focus on tech.
"favorite category" counts by # team members Art: 32 Film & Video: 29 Design: 27 Publishing: 15 Games: 14 Technology: 8 Music: 5 Comics: 3 Food: 3 Photography: 2 Theater: 2 null: 2 Journalism: 1
# of backed projects by "favorite category" Film & Video: 6264 Design: 2372 Games: 2325 Art: 2238 Technology: 1228 Publishing: 777 Theater: 310 Music: 181 Food: 119 Comics: 44 Photography: 28 Journalism: 5 null: 0
I would add that I find it incredibly ironic for a "creative" company to have such rigid categories for what it deems "creative".
It's only at big factories that they show up when more than X number of people are fired and do a big show out of that. Meanwhile, all the employees not working for big factories paid their union fees and saw nothing back. It's often a platform to launch their political careers.
Luckily, they are not mandatory anymore and now employees have to opt-in which was a great change. They have to work to earn respect and those fees back... but I'm not seeing much movement in that direction. So far they have been going the legal route, trying to cancel the changes to the law (and have lost).
In theory, the concept of unions is great but in practice, at least here, it was a terrible thing, from my IT bubble perspective.
If tech unions are new organizations by, for, and of tech workers, they might result in positive change for tech workers. If they fall in line with AFL-CIO et al., stand by for trouble.
Some of our states go a step further and have introduced measures that seek to directly attack the ability of employees to collectively bargain, to remove the power organized labor has against management. These are called "right to work states".
Generally speaking, RTW states have lower pay on average, they are less educated on average, and their workers have less benefits from their businesses (parental leave, vacation time, healthcare benefits, etc), they have less recourses against employer bad behavior (both as a function of RTW attacking collective bargaining, and from the reality that the same politics that are against unions also are very anti-labor, anti-minimum wage, anti-regulation of labor marketplace all together, so there are far less public resources and regulators to assist with claims). If you're an employer, this probably sounds great. Labor is cheaper and you can fire them whenever you want for no reason at all on the drop of a dime AND there is no pesky government regulator to come waste your time and money investigating. "Easy come easy go" is one of the most common management philosophies from small and medium business owners in my RTW state, from my experience.
From the perspective of an American: you choose a liberal/blue/union state when you want good infrastructure, highly educated and competent staff, and little turnover. You choose a conservative/red/anti-union state when you're planning to take advantage of your staff, you don't care about higher turnover, you want to pay below-national-market rates as a rule, and you don't care as much about the individual quality of each employee. There's a reason why tech companies don't pick the South and when they do they require billions in literal free cash to do so.
It is what it is, but the slow death of the union in the United States correlates quite perfectly with the slow death of the American middle class in terms of wealth and income gains per year.
I have mixed experience with unions in Brazil, the fact that they are mandated makes it almost like a scam, a part of your wages go towards union contributions but rarely do you get anything out of that. Most directors at unions are in it for political powers as the bigger unions are major players in politics(as seen that our ex-president is a former unionist).
On one hand, unions can provide negotiation power, specially in class action suits, including unfair dismissal. But most of the time I've seen unions collude with companies and associations to provide underwhelming benefits and wages that are below inflation.
In some cases such as medicine and dentistry they are solid credentials of many professionals and I take it as mostly positive.
In the case of engineering it should follow the same as the engineer's union is a very strong powerhouse that requires quite high minimum wages for engineers(IIRC 8.5x the national minimum wage). However this has led many companies to use a loophole where engineers are hired with a different job title, performing the same job, just so that they don't have to pay that minimum, while sometimes even requiring that said engineer is registered with the union. As computer science is not engineering, even though some computer engineers are qualified as such, I've never met a programmer that has a proper engineer contract.
Maybe I'm being presumptuous but being a tech company and all aren't the employees are already relatively pampered?
The problem in both cases is simply due to a misalignment of personal goals/compensation within the company.
When it's "working right" The CEO can defend their "not randomly firing employees" as being too expensive due to their unionized status. Converse is that the union can accept that some employees need to go to be replaced with other employees in another field to reflect the world changing (and help relocate/pay off/re-train as needed).
In summary - plans rarely work out and ideally there's an internal buffer/slush-fund to cover this. When you're publicly traded, there's always going to be somebody demanding you cash in this buffer to the shareholders in the short term. Unionization provides a nice external buffer.
Unions were designed for a market where employers were taking advantage of job scarcity and insecurity, and where changing jobs often meant difficult re-training for new equipment and methodologies, which was often provided by unions. That does not exist today, at least in the software industry; a solid GutHub account is a much better certification than any training or even a university diploma.
My point is that, for the majority of software people, traditional unions can barely give any benefits over the power they can have themselves. And for the best people it can even provide disadvantages by lowering the standards.
Specifically, the issue of defection.
The company can make it very easy for users to defect or FORCE them to defect.
They can give bonuses to people not in the union (with plausible reasons for the bonuses so it's not illegal) or do what Walmart does and simply shut down the entire store in that location to prevent the union forming.
We need some way to solve this problem ...
It's called solidarity, and respect for your co-workers.
Better pay and benefits - my maximum out of pocket was lower than most deductibles. Democratizes the workplace - really helps keep management in check. You get real job security - firing is much less arbitrary with a steward fighting for you.
However, if people aren't active in union elections, bargaining etc. it can get really stale really fast
People could start a union so _they_ make more money, but _you_ could make less money.
For example pay by seniority. Great for the senior people in the union, not so great for you.
Hollywood unions, for example, do not use a seniority-based pay scale.
Closed-shop unions are illegal in the US, for starters, so you can't have a closed-shop industry-wide union.
The only industry-wide unions that exist set workplace protections and salary floors but no salary caps...and no indutry-wide union has ever embraced seniority-based pay because, being an industry-wide union, that regime wouldn't work across the very different economic environments of 50 states and their thousands of cities.
1. You are required to pay a certain amount (either percentage or flat fee, I'm not sure) of your paycheque into a new political organization, the union
2. You are entitled to periodically vote on the who to elect to leadership of the union
3. The leadership of the union represents the entirety of the staff at the company in any and all negotiations and disputes with management. The leadership of the union will engage in collective bargaining with management, establishing a single working contract that encompasses every employee<->employer relationship in the company.
So, right now, in a non-unionized company, if you go to work there, you and the company negotiate a contract which is the terms of your working relationship. Frequently, the company will dictate the terms of the contract and then you will exercise some marginal negotiation power regarding, say, pay or vacation time or whatever, although (especially for specialists and highly paid staff) these are far more open to negotiation, generally, than people think.
When you do this, this is a private relationship between you and your employer. Your coworkers are not involved. They have their own private individual relationships with the employer that have nothing to do with yours. Their contracts could be radically different from yours. That's between them and the company.
What a union does is get in between you and the employer, and collectivizes all of those individual negotiations into one larger, general negotiation. So now, instead of you negotiating a private contract with the employer, the union will negotiate a general contract that applies to _all_ staff, and then you will sign that contract.
The main argument in favour of unions like this is that by collectivizing the bargaining, it gives them negotiation power. So imagine, for instance, that you are getting a job at Google. As an individual, if you don't like the contract Google is giving you, you can demand dramatic changes to it. And then Google will laugh at you, spit in your face, and kick your ass out the door, because they're one of the richest corporations on the planet and you dare to think that _you_ can dictate terms to _them_? But, if the staff at Google were unionized, suddenly it's different. Suddenly, when the union pushes back on Google and demands drastic changes, Google has to negotiate in good faith. This is because the union represents _all_ of the employees; if the union threatens to walk away from the negotiation, then _all_ of Googles employees stop working. Google might be able to kick any individual out the door, but if the entirety of Google's staff stops working suddenly there are massive problems.
So why might you not want a union? Well, there's a few reasons. One might be obvious from the previous paragraph. Say you are quite happy with your current job at Google, but some of the unions _other_ members are unhappy and are demanding change. Eventually, negotiations come to an impasse. The union threatens to walk away. If they do that, you _must_ stop working. The fact that you are quite happy with your job doesn't matter. You are bound by their collective agreement, and they just suspended their collective agreement.
More generally, unions take a distributed, private, individual process and turn it into a politicized, public, collective process. This can reduce the company's flexibility to make different arrangements with different groups of people, and if you are someone who benefits from such a different arrangement you might rationally be opposed to this. Additionally, if you are someone who is heavily skeptical of the ability of political processes to make effective decisions, you might not want a board of elected union activists making decisions on your behalf.
Unions also cost money. I admit I don't know how much they cost; for all I know it's $5 per paycheque. But fees can be substantial; a long time ago, back when I was a clerk at Safeway, my salary was $7.50/hr and my union dues were $1.25/hr. This was almost 20% of my (pre-tax!) pay. If you feel that the benefits you get from collective bargaining do not outweigh your unions dues, you might start to wish you were not a member of the union
(Note that, generally, when your workplace votes to unionize, you are _required_ to pay those dues, regardless of whether or not you wish to become a member of the union. In some states, Republicans have succeeded in passing what are known as "Right-to-work laws", which prohibit unions from collecting fees involuntarily from non-members. However, California has no such laws).
Another reason why you might be opposed to unions, which might sound absurd at first glance, is that by fighting for the best interests of all of their members, they may sacrifice the best interests of some of their members. Because most unions are national-scale, with various chapters for different companies, your local union chapter may occasionally require you to do things that sacrifice your own best interest in order to support a remote chapter (striking in solidarity is one example: The union calls a nationwide strike even though there's nothing wrong with your particular office). A union might decide to make strategic sacrifices. Perhaps a union is in dispute with an employer that has multiple offices. A union might negotiate very aggressively in one office, overplaying their hands and ultimately losing substantially for the workers in that office, in order to credibly signal their resolve for when they are negotiating in the second office. Even though this is better overall, you probably don't think so if you're laid off because you were unlucky enough to work in office #1.
Finally, unions can cripple an industry with excessive demands. Unions may gain concessions from employers that are economically unsustainable. Eventually, this can cause the company to go out of business as more nimble competitors are able to perform better in the market than the unionized company is. In some dramatic cases, the company may decide that dealing with the union is too much trouble, and shut down operations in a given area entirely, putting all of the members out of a job.
A very real fear that I have is that I observe that a lot of the success of Silicon Valley is driven by a culture of work. Some might say _over_-work. Maybe this is not healthy for the people doing it, but it certainly seems that a key component of many tech companies' success is people working weekends and evenings when the situation demands it. One likely outcome of tech unionization, if I was to guess, is unions collectively enforcing a strict 40-hour work week, no exceptions. This sounds great, overworking is a scourge on all of us. It sounds great, right up to the point where a bunch of un-unionized starts who are burning the midnight oil start offering dramatically better products than the unionized established company, who can't compete because they can't leverage as much manpower towards their projects due to contractual limits on working hours.
The one thing you didn't touch on too much is the efficiency of decision making by hierarchical management vs the efficiency of decision making by committee. This is already sometimes painful with processes like Scrum and unions would probably make it worse. The process of negotiating, suing and setting binding legal precedent is so tedious - it can seriously damage companies' ability to move quickly.
Plus unions are pretty dated. I have very little confidence that legal precedent around unions would work well in the modern global world.
Pros (mostly the employees perspective):
- Greatly increased negotiating power (We all got paid way more than I expect we would have if we weren't unionized)
- Pooling of resources to acquire shared resources (e.g. labor lawyers)
- Generally the ability to appeal decisions like "you're fired"
- Selling point when hiring (since unionized tech companies are rather rare, and everyone claims it's hard to attract talent, I'd expect this to be valuable to the company)
Cons:
- That increased negotiating power is wielded by people you often don't quite agree with.
- It's more bureaucracy, which means more inefficiency
- Generally less ability to negotiate for yourself
- While job security for yourself is obviously a feature, job security for under-performing colleagues can actually really suck. Working with, and fixing the messes made by people who just don't care is not fun.
Unions increase the importance of political skills over performance. If you do work but are bad at politics you’ll do worse in a union shop. Plus the nepotism and collusion between management individuals and union leadership to the detriment of shareholders, customers, and young workers is disgusting.
The only people who benefit are old underperformers in management and union leadership. They form coalitions of mutual support and screw the rest of us.
Screw unions. They are for useless people that don’t trust their own abilities.
They are only useful if the oligarchs block market competition for labor. But we aren’t there yet ... and we can be vigilant by supporting action taken against instances of collusion. Unions are no cure. They are like caking dung on the wound.
I run a 17 person company and I've heard employees mention that they think all companies should be unionized even if there aren't currently any problems that the union would seek to address. I strongly support the big tech companies unionizing and so it would be hypocritical of me to be opposed to it for my own company, but at the same time it seems like the overhead for such a small company would be really significant and I'm not sure what it would accomplish given that I'm not aware of current employees having any demands that we haven't satisfied already.
Even if nothing comes of it, I think it's an interesting thought experiment.
All of those things seem like relatively minor costs when spread out across a large employee base, but I could see it being prohibitive for a smaller company. Or maybe this is a solved problem and you can just find some boilerplate stuff online that takes care of the whole process.
That is, so long as the employees are content, it will be very low; try to do things that they don't like and the cost will go up.
The "overhead" you speak of is to pay someone to negotiate on the workers behalf, save up for a strike stipend, and provide worker training (usually Unions will run or subsidize courses to help workers skill up, get licensed, etc).
The term for this "class consciousness." It's not that the value isn't there, it's that you don't see it.
Add federal minimum vacation time too, 20 days at least.
"but but my margins!!!"
e-Mail, instant messaging, etc. Any form of communication makes unionizing easier.
What has happened with Microsoft's union?
Join the union at your job, ask why there isn't a union at your job if there isn't one, find a freelancer's union if you're not working for The Man, give some of your time/money/skills to people fighting for unions...
The American union tradition / behavior seems quite different than what I hear about elsewhere.
I'm interested in the European systems, but very very wary of the US systems. Too many US unions are really just bureaucracies on their own, emphasize seniority for pay, advancement, and etc, and seem to limit options for workers in terms of flexibility. And to some extent american unions become their own bureaucracy serving the folks embedded in that bureaucracy. Granted for some jobs that probabbly is ok, but for technical things, I'm very wary about flexibility and etc.
My experience with American unions has been highly disappointing and I'm skeptical about their ability to handle a more technical / fast changing world.
I think the negative type stuff makes the news, but I don't think that reflects the system over all.
US unions in my experience don't so much give people say in my experience, they just make for a sort of formalize a system into an adversarial type one with union and company.
For the most part I've enjoyed working for my employers and would rather manage that relationship on my own and not have someone else run it for me.
There are situations where folks might not feel that way too I'm sure.
I can understand why this would seem hostile to someone who isn't acculturated to it, but I don't find it hostile at all. I find it _honest_. The other side isn't pretending to care about me, and they aren't making hamfisted attempts to look out for my interests in ways that I don't like but they think I do (or should).
A company can't fire all their union employees, so if the union decides they'll only accept a deal that includes a 50% raise, what do you do?
I'm being serious here, from what I can tell it's not legal to fire your union employees. So what do you do?
Even public sector unions can't prevent terminations for financial reasons, though they negotiated no-fire clauses into their union contracts decades ago.
Montana isn't at-will after 6-months of full-time employment and follows the French system.
The other 49 states are at-will employment, with generally the same rules with limited restrictions.
I stand by my original comment. Even Montana has at-will employment for the first 6 months.
But also, that's what negotiation is. If the company didn't want to be occasionally held hostage, it should have included a "you can't hold us hostage" clause in its employees' work contracts, and also given them enough compensation to get them to agree with it.
But, super serious: If the union decides they will only accept a 50% raise, and the company _can't_ give it to them, what has happened several times before is that the company will cease operations of the facility that is unionized entirely, and move to a new geography where that union has no power.
Just as the union has the ability to hold the company hostage, management also has this ability. Theoretically, mass layoffs are not good for union members, and so they would not make such an obviously ridiculous demand.
However, you run in to major problems when for whatever reason the union does not think something is a ridiculous demand, when it is. Or, like I mentioned in my big comment somewhere else, if a union is representing multiple factories for one organization this can happen.
Say, hypothetically, the union for ABCTech represents ABCTech employees at two facilities, one in San Francisco and one in Seattle. Perhaps the union demands that, because the cost of living has risen so dramatically in SF, they require a 50% raise for all SF employees effective immediately. The company cannot afford this, and so they say no. The union says I don't care, fuck you, if you won't do this we won't work.
So ABCTech says well if we can't afford your contracts, we have to close up shop. They close the SF office. Every single employee there loses their job.
However, the union also represents ABCTech employees in Seattle. And now, ABCTech knows that the union is serious. They will make severe demands and not back down. This improves the unions bargaining power in the Seattle office, by sacrificing the SF office.
If you're the union, you're probably quite pleased with this state of affairs. If you're an employee of ABCTech in Seattle, doubly so. But maybe not so much if you were a (former) employee in SF
I feel like this is just your experience. As a counter-anecdote I spent a bit of time in the Teamsters in the 90's and it got very hostile and extremely unprofessional. There was zero material communication with management and any influence on the part of the union as a $9/hr entry level employee was equally zero. The scab situation was super dicey as well, and while there was clearly no official support for 'extracurricular' enforcement, there was enough of a question about what would happen that you didn't really want to test it.
It doesn't seem like a lot of folks commenting here have direct experience with working in unions in the US. They have done great things in the past and I feel like they are a necessity in industries where individual employees regularly face decisions that affect the physical safety of others or themselves. However, in my experience and in the experience of family members (CWA/NEA), unions in practice fall far short of the promise they hold in theory. User naravara has some pretty insightful comments elsewhere in this thread that i feel get to the meat of the matter and why there might be a disconnect on opinions between those in the US and those elsewhere.
All that said I do applaud the folks working at Kickstarter for trying this out. Maybe they will figure out a way to make a functional apparatus that ensures a positive work environment while minimizing the coddling of parasites and negative impact on Kickstarter's ability to execute, but it's going to be a struggle.
If that’s the route people think things should go it’d be a big cultural shift from the status quo.
The unions in other countries have done great things for workers. In Germany, most employed individuals get 6 weeks of vacation and 35 to 40 hour a week contracts.
People are scared they're salary is going to go down the hole for some reason. A tech union can exist with pay scales that match current peoples compensation.
Articles like this really put into perspective how strong the American perspective is here.
Anyone with an insider knowledge want to elaborate?
Unions in the US are democratic institutions, so if there is a problem with your union you can change things.
However, because the private firm is not legally, or practically democratic at all, it makes sense for those who love democracy (and themselves) to unionize, yes.
Companies are extremely motivated to undermine unions. Unions tend to get stale as they age and lose their militancy. That's why wildcat action is so common. It sucks but even a workplace with a stale union is better off than one without collective bargaining.
The hardest part of organizing, like so many things, is going from 0 to 1. Once you've got a union you have a lot more power. Thinking you don't is what the company wants you to think.
Democracy is great, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't magically mean that representation for your specific subgroup will exist. If you're part of a demographic with 10-15% representation in your union, is it really a crazy idea that your demographic might want to pool its votes together to ensure that you have more collective influence in a process that might otherwise ignore you?
Collective, coordinated negotiation being more effective than individual negotiation is the entire point of unions. It's just not clear to me why those principles would stop applying within a union itself.
My concern with the anti-union rhetoric in the USA is that we then turn to the government to protect workers. I think it's a lot better to have a union vs government as long as that union isn't protected from competition like they are today.
If we can introduce competition into unions then they might better serve the workers and the company.
Only some areas like teachers seem to have near-homogeneous membership and unions taking an active role. And this seems mostly to be because 90% have the same employeer - the state (public education). Because of standardized working terms (incl salary), they have to be negotiated centrally.
It should also be noted that the players union represents a tiny portion of the actual employees involved and they actively negotiate money away from other employees.
My father is a trades person and when one union treated him badly he left for another one cause he had options. His union has also saved him from a lot of BS that companies he's worked for have tried to pull.
Alternatively when I was a student I worked a part time job where I was forced to be a part of a union with no options. Ever week they took money from my paycheck and the one time I had a grievance they pretty much ignored me. Making sure the girl that showed up hung over and vomiting every 2nd shift was not fired was more important because seniority.
You can't get good results through bad means. Unions are fundamentally a destructive endeavor. Their use is practical but limited: the best thing unions ever fought was the state, not employers.
Like a 5 day work week from 6 days? Like 8 hour work days? Like safe conditions for workers. All things unions helped deliver.
Those gains so-called 'worker rights' were achieved in countries without unions as well. It's also unmentioned how much unemployment and misery unions also caused in this narrative.
Beware of correlation/causation. Unions that represent the highest earning workers are the strongest, because the strongest workers already have the highest bargaining power and the highest salaries.
A modern example of what productivity does to working conditions is in SV, where the unionized workers have less perks than the un-unionized ones.
Historically unions are always tied with: import restrictions, protection from competition, minimum wage laws (that dont apply to themselves), unemployment (the best way to increase wages for a union is to cut supply short).
As a nice example, Argentina has unions with constitutional level protections since the 50's, and unemployment is up, working conditions are down, poverty is up, import restrictions are up and minimum wage laws are up: result, 40% of the population works under the table, and union workers have some of the highest wages in the country.
You will seldom find improving working conditions without notable increase in GDP per capita.
Charter school teachers are non-unionized, so this demand harms the pay of non-unionized "outsiders". If they succeed, they can parade the statistic that "Unionized teachers have gained income over non-unionized teachers thanks to the wonderful work of unions", when in fact what they have really done is transfer wealth from outsiders to insiders.
Here's another link that I think has balanced coverage: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep...
Ford even wrote an article on the subject (which I can't seem to find at the moment). In it he discusses hiring private detectives to follow his workers to ensure that they spent the extra money he was paying him. He was worried that by paying his workers too much and giving them too much time off, he'd create another class of wealthy people. Instead his great experiment was to get them to spend their money, drive the economy and create a market for his cars.
So while I don't consider Ford to be a philanthropist for his moves, and while I recognise the achievements of unions in this area, it would be foolish to ignore the fact that 40 hour work weeks, minimum wage and safe working conditions have always been a win-win situation for industry. There have been companies who realised this win-win much earlier than they were forced to. I think one might even be able to argue effectively that these moves may have occurred even without the participation of the unions. Indeed, it is possible that despite all the good work from the unions, that laws of this nature were only passed because this was rapidly becoming the concensus opinion in industry anyway.
Just an aside while I'm here... I once was asked to sign a new contract with my employer with really draconian terms. I was already under contract and none of the termination clauses had come into effect, so I politely declined. They threatened to fire me at which point I asked them if understood the legal consequences of getting people to sign contracts under duress. Their lawyer, who was present, promptly apologised and wrapped things up.
As I was leaving, I mentioned that it would be a good idea to have an ombudsman to review these kinds of contract changes. I was now going to go talk with the rest of my colleagues and there was no way that anyone would sign the new contract from that point on. However, if they had an intermediary, there was a good chance that whatever problem they were having with the old contract could be solved. The HR person replied, "We'll never allow a union here and don't even think about threatening it". The lawyer laughed nervously (I really didn't envy him that day).
And this is the thing that drives me crazy about both sides of the equation. It really is a win-win situation. There is no need to have a "both sides". The company wants a good contract that protects them from crappy stuff. The employee wants a good contract that protects them from crappy stuff. But as soon as one side or the other gets the upper hand, they just try to crush the other side. It's really frustrating. Even the mentioning the idea of working together seems to be crazy talk. While I only mention this anecdote, I am one of the few people who have worked in a union shop as a programmer before. Exactly same thing, other way around. The union would happily drive the company into the ground if it meant getting some pointless concession for its members....
One thing your comment made me think about was a story I heard about a company who had a fairly draconian contract. One of the employees brought this up with the CEO and the CEO said it was what their lawyer suggested and so they did it.
Lawyers are there to protect the company. Sometimes they make recommendations that will help with the law but not necessarily with company culture and hiring people.
Kudos for knowing enough not to get suckered into a contract that wasn't good for you.
A few things that a modern union could do:
1. Place limits on expected working hours. Let the management know that working above 40 hours a week, or needing to be on-call 24/7 should not be the norm. Let management know that using all your vacation time should be the norm. Set minimum amounts of vacation time for people to take, when a company advertises "Unlimited PTO". 2. Fight for minimum cost-of-living increases, presumably tied to a fair metric such as the CPI in an area. Every company that I have worked for has had a hard limit on the raises that you can earn each year--usually around 3%. This is typically close to or just above inflation. 3. Collectively hold the company leadership accountable for their actions. When management doesn't act in a professional way, they should be held accountable in the same way that someone lower on the corporate ladder would be. 'Unprofessional' behavior could be anything like sexual harassment, being physically aggressive, etc. We've all seen this first-hand or heard about it; typically HR won't get involved because it's easier to make the rank-and-file worker change divisions or leave, than to have the upper management change. 4. Place limits on executive pay relative to worker pay. Today a CEO makes hundreds of times more than your average rank-and-file worker. This multiple is only increasing. A union could fight executive pay increases without commensurate increases to worker pay.
A few things that modern unions don't have to do:
1. Push for equal pay among everyone. I think we can all acknowledge that knowledge-workers don't all contribute to projects with the same level of effectiveness. I know some of my coworkers are better at their jobs than I am--and I'm okay with them getting paid more than me. Because we aren't just a cog in a machine, it doesn't make sense to treat each other as directly replaceable parts. 2. Encourage workers to limit their productivity, for fear of eliminating jobs. The union should win when the company wins. The union should do its part to help the company create more value for the world, and make sure that the employees get a fair share of that value.
I think it comes down to being fair versus being equal. Workers used to be equal labor substitutes, so the unions treated everyone as equal. Workers are no longer equal, but unions haven't evolved to the new business realities.
For what it's worth, I'm not a software engineer and I don't work in the Bay area. My city doesn't have many job opportunities, so I don't have the luxury of just leaving a company without also packing up and moving to a new area. For my coworkers who own houses or have a family, this is particularly hard. A union could help us create a better working environment, but many people have this idea of what a unions are based on a system of unions that was based in 19th and 20th century manufacturing.
To be very clear, this is not a goal commonly associated with unions, to my knowledge.
EDIT: removed an ill-thought claim.
What is this?
EDIT: I don't mean to snark, it just seems like an inherently utopian ideal. Material concerns should dictate workspace conflict resolution. I certainly agree with your overall statement.
My notion of a fair workplace is one where people's pay and rewards are entirely determined by their skill and merit, as judged by the management.
But lots of other people and especially unions define it totally differently: one where people's pay is determined by tenure, their union contract or their gender/race. That seems to be what these Kickstarter employees want.
Without a clear definition the word 'fair' can be interpreted as having polar opposite meanings.
It is important to remember that economic coerciveness is a result of overwhelming scale and bargaining power of one party over another. Kickstarter is a 100-ish headcount company located in Brooklyn, NY. This is hardly a captive employee pool compared to say, factory workers in a small town whose entire economy is centered around that one factory.
If Kickstarter workers unionize, I don't not believe it will results in two sides with equal bargaining power, Kickstarter will be in a substantially weaker position. If Kickstarter refuses the offer, all function ceases. If the workers refuses the offer, they have the robust job market of Brooklyn NY to fall back on.
That's not competition, that's just giving away public money.
I've worked with several unions in different industries, and I can say pretty categorically that unions are brazenly unethical.
Unions may sometimes improve working conditions and pay, but only in the sense that the mafia reduces crime. You have to start out from a truly horrifying place for their bargain to be any better, and in taking that deal you're giving up on ever having a healthy environment.
This happened years ago in Netherland: many railway employees weren't happy with something their union (part of the largest union federation) negotiated for them, so they left and started a competing union to negotiate for them instead. Messy, embarrassing for the big union, but it solved the problem.
Not sure if the alternative union still exists or if it merged back into the large union again.
I've worked for several unions and, at least in my experience, most union staff actually are unionized.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-unions-exploiting-their-emp...
Seems fair to do the opposite.
That's obviously bad for employers, but it's also bad for other employees who aren't in the union, and for anyone who wants success to be based on talent and hard work instead of politics.
Work less? Or work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week? There are plenty of examples out there of people who think that is the bare minimum.
> They directed the members to engage in behavior that was best for the union while bad for the workers and the company.
Of course, that is what a strike is, but a necessary evil.
Work less. There is no point in trying to put out anymore output than the bare minimum required if that's both the agreement between the union and the employee (promotions based on tenure) and between the union and the company (agreements on what minimum deliverables employees will deliver).
>Of course, that is what a strike is, but a necessary evil.
It's more than a strike. Continuing what I wrote above, unions will introduce obvious inefficiencies in order to support red tape processes rather than focusing on what the company is trying to accomplish. (e.g. no code can be committed without a review by two other clocked in union members while being backed by a ticket groomed by a clocked in agilist and released by two clocked-in SRE folks).
I've worked at plenty of companies which had huge inefficiencies (meetings 6hrs a day, forty approvals to get anything done etc etc), which held back individual success and were generally not meritocracies.
I think you find that all organisations with many humans involved all have inefficiencies but the media seems to love painting unions as the inefficient ones.
I'm a member of union (Australia) as a web developer, it doesn't interfere with my day to day working, negotiations or my work ethic but it's like having a backup lawyer in case there are problems with the workplace and I need some advice.
Of course, like any kind of organisation, whether it's a company, a business, a charity, a religion, or a political party, people will attempt to score themselves the best position and also improve the position of the organisation. This isn't a unique problem with unions, but with any kind of organisation, it's all money and power at the end of the day.
The US has such a workaholic culture, with lack of sleep and lack of life outside of work being endemic. Less work is a good thing!
"We support the right of private employers and employees to choose whether or not to bargain with each other through a labor union. Bargaining should be free of government interference, such as compulsory arbitration or imposing an obligation to bargain." https://www.lp.org/platform/
The idea that unions are inherently, universally good is just as silly as the idea that unions are inherently, universally bad.
You are arguing against a strawman. No one is saying unions are "universally good". However, it is an irrefutable quality of capitalism that collective bargaining is superior to bargaining as an individual. If you truly understand how capitalism works, and the way it puts the interests of employers in conflict with those of employees (i.e. employers want to maximize profits, whereas employees want to maximize their pay and benefits, and this game is zero-sum), you will realize that, on average, having a union represent you will yield better results for you (and your fellow coworkers) than you representing just yourself.
Kroger union members have health care benefits, dental and vision benefits, and other benefits that they wouldn't normally get with a minimum wage job. Protections against forced and unpaid overtime (while allowing for voluntary, paid overtime).
Hell, the fact he got paid minimum wage in the first place--since unions were, and still are, the big drivers behind minimum wage (and raises to minimum wage) in the US.
Previously my friend and I had both worked at various Walmart stores in our home state and not only were we paid above minimum wage starting salary, but there were no hidden mandatory fees of any kind. I know Walmart's famously anti-union to the point of absurdity (the propaganda in the training materials is outright laughable), but from the point of view of a couple of young guys looking to work part-time at a grocery store, Walmart treated us both far better than Kroger treated him, and without unions.
We both worked for Walmart as cashiers on and off between about 2008 and 2013, in Rapid City, Pierre, and Aberdeen, South Dakota, and the starting wages were consistently above minimum wage. I've never heard of this policy before, especially since different positions always had different starting wages and all were minimum wage or slightly higher.
Again though, even if our Walmart employments were minimum wage jobs:
min_wage * hrs_worked > -union_init_fee + (min_wage * hrs_worked) - (union_due * weeks_worked)Union membership is optional for Kroger employees in Mid-South. All employees get the union-negotiated benefits but dues are optional. They won't work hard to defend non-union members, though.
What location was this Kroger where union membership was mandatory? I didnt even know that was legal.
It's gonna be real interesting when the working class finally has enough of this shit.
I'm not saying the deal was reasonable for your friend, I don't know the details or his life situation. But like security guards or insurers, unions aren't always in "active" mode.
You're right, it is a bit like that. And similarly, many people don't want to be forced to buy health insurance. Especially if they don't think they'll get sick.
EDIT: to be clear, my argument isn’t “we shouldn’t have to pay for healthcare for others”, it’s “if people refuse to pay into the healthcare system when they are able to but still demand treatment when they need it, that’s a broken system”.
What about vaccination?
I'm just curious how far you can take your logic before you realize that it is erroneous.
But since you mentioned car insurance, did you know that two US states don't require car insurance? Have you ever wondered why that is? Are those entire states insane? How can anyone consider driving there ever? Surely the system can't work, can it? (Note: Once again I'm not arguing for or against it.)
Ive read their contract. The union negotiated great health/dental, paid vacations, time to sleep between shifts, no sit shifts for food workers, and most important: due process. At union companies like Kroger, they have to either prove you weren't doing what they said to fire you or laying you off cost something. The unions also act as private lawyer representing you during wrongful termination. Those two are all I need to hear to be pro-union in a capitalist system.
Now, lets consider Kroger. I boycotted the ones down here since their shelves stayed empty. Workers said they had no staff on purpose, cutting it aiming for bonuses. They also micro-manage a lot adding distractions further reducing profit. Did more cuts. Instead of increasing staff, they just blame workers threatening their jobs with some fired. Union and local workers told me all kinds of examples.
Currently, Kroger is trying to roll back some or all of health/dental and pension despite being more profitable than they were in tougher years. Union reps said they were fighting hard to keep them. On top of that, they intervened for a few management sacked as punishment for staffing-induced, performance problems. They still work there with some doing a lot better with newer set of managers they had no bad history with.
So, that's how unions help your friend at Kroger or other places if the union is good. If management did cuts and targeted them, the union would ensure they remained employed so long as they were doing whatever the company wanted them to do. They would also have benefits in a sector where many don't.
I posted a link elsewhere in the thread but apparently the SCOTUS has ruled that mandatory union membership and/or fee paying is not constitutional, so perhaps the situation has improved for temporary, part-time employees of WA state QFCs, but at the time it was pretty shocking to see my friend lose hundreds of dollars to a union that did nothing for him at all.
Unions are why your friend isn't worked to death while he waits for his teacher's certification.
/s
Without Unions.
Are you of the opinion that more than a century of labor fighting for reasonable working hours and conditions meant nothing, or are you just wanting to give Ford all the credit, despite him drawing on decades of increased movement toward an 8-hour workday before he ever decided to try it as a company policy?
Sometimes harder workers are harder to find, so they get paid more. Sometimes they're not. If working harder simply led to more money, salary negotiation would not be a teachable skill.
People have literally fought and died for the right to unions, for unions to be taken seriously. A bunch privileged silicon valley tech workers (not me, I'm a privileged seattle based tech worker, totally different ;) ) write off unions as inefficient and useless.
I ask this 100% seriously.
This is something I think a lot of idealistically pro-union people don't understand, at least in the college/grad school circles I've discussed it with. The concept of a union is good, sure. But unions themselves are businesses, and it's their business to be needed and to convince people to join and pay dues.
Ban unions!
Thanks to unions.
wow.
In other words, he understood that a consumer-based economy needs consumers, and consumers need sufficient leisure time to be able to go shopping and buy things.
More than a decade past before another company adopted the 5-day work week. Unions took Ford's example and made it the standard.
Can someone explain what the Kickstarter employee's hope to gain? “promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table,” sounds very left wing in an already left wing company in a left wing area.
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18273318/kickstarter-ceo-...
With Patreon raising prices and now this, maybe someone will crowdfund an alternative.
EDIT: Instead of replying to everyone individually. Over the last ~15 years I've held jobs from tech support to network engineer to full stack developer. In each of them I have noticed that recent college grads are almost always clueless, and basically have to start from scratch. These are kids with massive student loan debt that could have started working earlier and learned through an apprenticeship.
Have you talked to anyone who does professional entertainment/movie work about their thoughts on unions?
Unions are expensive, corrupt, and don't actually do much to help most of the workers. The unionized workers hire contractors to do the real work for many features, and are parasitic organizations that mostly just drive up the cost of making movies.
There was recently an article in the Times about a local NYC union president who's office is decorated with such high-end fixtures & furniture that he has a second office on another floor just to appear more humble. I can't find it at the moment...