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?
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.
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.
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(?).
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.
Then go work elsewhere. I'm sure your co-workers won't miss the "what about mine???" attitude.