Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

The relative ease of finding employment shouldn't factor into your desire to unionize. In fact, quite the contrary: It's less difficult to organize when you're the strongest.

But more importantly, these are the "halcyon" days of finding tech work, and they are fleeting. There is absolutely no guarantee the job market will look this promising in a few years. Things seemed to be on an endless upward trajectory in the 90s and then it all came crashing down.

If you're gambling on the fact that tech work will always be in extremely high demand, then you have a combination of risk appetite and optimism that makes for a founder.

As someone who worked through the period of the tech industry during the dotcom fallout, lots of stuff people take for granted today was non-existent: You had much less autonomy over the technical aspects of the objectives you were trying to achieve. Mandated tools, crappy underpowered computers, bureaucracy, over project dependencies, process-heavy SDLCs weren't just the norm, but widely viewed as the proper way to build software. It was all a reaction to what was seen as the "inmates running the asylum" during the dotcom boom. It basically took a bunch of promising startups in the mid-aughts to start cleaning people's clocks and become juggernauts to get the broader industry to reverse course. It also became a lot cheaper to do a tech startup.

Basically, understand that a lot of what is enjoyable today about working in tech is a side-effect of supply-and-demand; they HAVE to avoid developer-hostile actions because we're difficult to hire and expensive to employ. Once that's no longer the case, the screws are going to tighten. Just look at China's 9-9-6 work policies and companies using chat tools to spy on their employees to keep them working as a point of reference.

> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them.

I'd like to think we have enough integrity as a profession to fall back on an Eichmann-adjacent justification.

Once you discover later on in your career that seniority and respect of your peers is not transferable between companies, that hopping to the next job from the job board is vicious circle of working on dull dead end projects under authocratic and dumb at times people (with long length of service at the company), you might change your mind. Also you’ll discover that life is more complicated than „just walk away or start your own business”, at times neither of these is possible or even both of these are straight suicidal.

Yes, you are popular now but in 10-20 years after you’ve been through the wringer a couple times the concept of a tech union might make more sense.

EDIT: changed "ringer" to "wringer".

> What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize?

These things are not diametrically opposed.

A union doesn't imply anything other than collective bargaining. Maybe having a union would prevent things like Disney firing a bunch of full time employees after they retrain contractor replacements. This type of nonsense is driving down wages for the entire middle class of workers.

>> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them

I feel that is a very myopic attitude. Engineers and tech workers generally are in the best position to present options that can inform business decisions. In order to identify a good option it helps to have a lot of options. Disregarding the positive input that any employee can have on how a company operates is incredibly stupid.

I think that increasing efforts to unionize or blackball projects will just increase off-shoring. This isn't like a coal mine where physicality is important and can be leveraged. It is easy to open an office in random company and also pay people less. I'm not making a judgment that it isn't important to stand up to companies being evil but I just don't see unions being successful. Most big companies could cut 50% staff on the engineering side and simply make more money. A lot of this is hoarding of resources and using it to create new products to enable more consolidation.

The main reasons I would like to see a tech unions and things I would want out of it:

1. assessment training and rank. my sister is in a union and has been train and qualified for specific kinds of work. she does this work for many clients and the chance that they are getting the skills they need and she has those skills are very high. she can also call in others from the union if needed and the union handles negotiations of changed whatever.

2. unions handles her seniority. she can work for several different companies a year, but time off and other benefits come from time in union not those companies.

There is a lot of other things about her union I do not like, but my biggest problems in tech are finding or developing the right talent (including my own) and constant loss of seniority (pto, retirement, and other benefits). I lost a lot of both early in my career because I didn't negotiate well.

If a union existed that helped protect my interests, develop my talents, and match my skills with work I would join it. If they were good at training/vetting their members (apprentice, journeyman, whatever) in whatever skill set they learned that would benefit both employee and employer. Might help with imposter syndrome. Might help both sides with many issues if done right.

>> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them. Don't like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more/total control over decision making? Start your own company.

Don't you want more out of the roles in your career? I want to work at a place that wants my best self, ideas, opinions and all. I don't want my only career options to be a paid typist or an entrepreneur.

How would unions reduce your ability to choose between jobs? How are these two things even related?

It seems obvious to me that there is a burning need for tech unionization and the reason has little to do with individual compensation or job security (although those are very important ancillary issues that deserve to be addressed and discussed as well). The real purpose that unionization could potentially serve is as a check against what people like Stallman and Bruce Schneier would perhaps call the mass exploitation associated with extreme surveillance capitalism. There are risks associated with unionization, of course, but collective bargaining offers one of the only proven mechanisms for average workers to impact the behavior of their employers. In the past, collective action was taken primarily as a means to improve the work conditions and compensation of average employees; as you point out, work conditions are generally very good for tech workers already, and so the improvement of working conditions isn't such an issue (although there is a good argument for organization as a means to preserve good conditions). I argue that in the case of tech employees, many of whom are involved in the development of systems that carry the potential for horrific misuse against vulnerable populations in the name of corporate profits, unionization is actually a moral imperative. Such unionization would represent a form of evolution in the history of collective action and employee organization, since it would be (at least in part) about challenging large-scale trends that run counter to the ideals of privacy, human rights, and equal society - things that can't be meaningfully impacted by individuals switching jobs. For instance, consider the case of challenging the pervasive use of privacy-violating adtech in products, or partnerships between corporations and authoritarian governments.

As tech workers, we are uniquely positioned within society: we have privileged knowledge of how the most powerful systems and products of the age function and we are incredibly close to the control surfaces of the major pillars of the economy. We are in demand, paid well, and generally well-educated. We have the ability to make a difference in the world in ways that very few people do. This is why organization is important.

Hirschman wrote a book called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that you may find interesting. What I see in your response is this: 'Exit and Loyalty are enough, so why have Voice?' In your mind it's good enough to just go to another job that has better conditions, but why is it wrong to want to change your current job? I don't see a good argument in your post against the usage of voice or democracy in the workplace, just your perspective that you don't need it. But maybe others do think they need it, so let's give it to them.

Professional actors and actresses can also be in-demand and are often 'recruited' constantly for different projects. They get paid sometimes millions of dollars.

They're in a union

Exactly. Why unionize in the industry which highly competes for talent?

I've started businesses. When I start a business, it's mine (and my partner's). Like a car or a house or a website. I'm trying to do something specific with it, with plans that I've drawn up. It's not just to make money. If all I wanted to do was make money, I'd just get a normal job.

When I hire people, I'm not giving away my business, in the same way that if I give a friend a ride, I'm not giving away my car. If they don't like where I'm driving, their only option is to find another ride.

That's the key difference between starting a business vs getting a job: all the decision making is yours.

And this applies at any scale, even Amazon scale. If you have plans and you start a business to execute them, you can execute them even better at a large scale. Getting Amazon big and maintaining control is the reason you start a business.

It'd be insulting if my hires started wanting to take away control. When you hire someone, it's with the implicit understanding that they respect that the business is not theirs. They don't own any of it. (Unless they want to buy in.)

Violating that understanding is disrespectful. Like your neighbor letting their dog shit on your lawn and not picking it up, because they think "well, he's just going to walk his dog in twenty minutes, he can do them both at the same time."

I don't like working (whether for my business or for someone else's business) with disrespectful people. There's a lack of trust.

Same reason we dont live in shared houses, i suppose

> I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone's capacity

I agree strongly. My generation (millennials) often look with disdain at how easy the baby boomers had it, often paying off their college tuition by taking on just a summer job.

I think my future children (or maybe their children) will look with disdain at how easy software engineers had it. Imagine that you get a degree and train for a job, without a particular position of power, and just like that you have leverage and a growing salary that you can increase 30% every time you switch jobs! Just from the scarcity of your skills!

> I find the people who are clamoring for unions in tech are among the least talented and skilled of employees, and they should probably find a new industry entirely instead of trying to change the one they’re in to be more hospitable to the lowest common denominators.

That's one perspective, sure. Here's another perspective: There's nothing stopping a company from firing it's junior and 'least talented and skilled' employees in favor of contractors or outsourcing.

Union organizers are fighting power to improve the material conditions of all tech workers. It sounds like you need some class analysis.

Your employer is able to bargain with you as one massive, collective organization with all its resources to bear. Why should you have to negotiate with them as a one atomic individual person, when you and your coworkers can instead get together and negotiate from a much stronger position?

> what right have you to the fruits of my labor?

Edit: Nobody.

If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service (I'm thinking healthcare), then you're saying you have a right to the people who produce the product or service, which is slavery. The government can't guarantee your "right" if there's no people to produce it, unless the government forces it (slavery), or just throws random workers into the position (low quality).

Who is doing the fruit labor in this example?

Employees share responsibility for the success of a company so they should also have stake in the company.

This whole idea that a company exists exclusively for the owners doesn’t make sense to me. There is a bigger picture to make a society work for all citizens.

Warning about “ socialism “ also doesn’t make sense. We don’t have to choose between the way the US is at the moment and the Soviet Union or Venezuela. There is a lot of room between these extremes.

Conversely, companies that oppose employee unions should hire and employ only shareholders, with a number of shares commensurate with the importance of their work roles. That door swings both ways.

Unions are not an exclusively socialist construct.

I support unions as an anarchist, because I recognize that it is both useful for corporations with concentrated capital to exist and necessary to counterbalance their power with opposing institutions to keep their perverse incentives from directing their behavior unchecked. If all social institutions are set up such that they check and balance one another, no single one of them can safely dominate. Each has a time to be supported, and a time to be undermined.

For now, government institutions and religious institutions have refused to counter commercial/mercantile institutions, so the lowest-energy path to doing so is reviving the unions. Growing a neo-socialist voting bloc now is a longer play, but that one will be beneficial between 6 and 12 years from now, and probably won't become threatening for 20 years. One can never know in advance; democracy is messy.

Socialism is an awful idea in isolation. It's a great idea if your goal is to temporarily undermine those whose power is based on accumulations of wealth and pre-existing social contacts. If you feel that those in power are keeping you from breaking into their ranks, you can promote socialism to clear them out, and then move into their vacated places of power to quash the socialism before it gets out of hand.

As I am not one of the elite, and do not currently have any plausible way to become one, I fully support a socialist political movement. For now.

My personal morality does not compete well against those whose ethics revolve around "might makes right", "them that has the gold, makes the rules", and "F U, I got mine". So I have a newer rule: to suppress my other ethical rules in all situations where those who do not share them are exploiting my respect for them, and any information asymmetries, in order to influence my behavior to my own detriment.

I have no right to the fruits of your labor, but rights are a political construct. They have to be protected by a chain of support, like chess pieces. And right now, someone has sacrificed all of the pawns. The right to keep one's own property weakens in the face of a growing class of people who are somehow completely unable to accumulate significant wealth, even after a lifetime of toil and diligence.

Middle class purchasing power has been stagnant since the 70s. That's more than enough time for all those getting screwed by the system to forget why they ever believed in it, and to raise children who never believed in it, who then decide to replace it with literally anything else. The seeds for the democratic socialist resurgence of 2019 were planted in the 1980s and 1990s. Sow sighs; reap gales.

I can live with socialism for a few political cycles, if it can clear out some cruft at the top. It's dangerous, and difficult to know when to hit the brakes, but I feel ill used by the current system, and I'm not going to go down with it.

Socialism is when the government owns production.

capitalist are allowed to aggregate in the form of corporations why shouldn't workers be allowed to aggregate.

> what right have you to the fruits of my labor?

Socialists ask the same thing of capitalists.

There's no reason to elevate one particular (and historically rare) version of property rights over all others. And there's no particular reason economic organizations should or must be authoritarian dictatorships ruled by "shareholders" instead of workplace democracies.

I'm 46 years old. I can't think of one example where I was exploited as a tech worker. I'm from a union town, grew up in a union family. I support unions. The UAW was very important to the country and the middle class. I'm just not sure where the need is in tech. I think it might hurt us, if anything. Tech workers are not fungible. We do have quite a bit of leverage. Your average factory floor worker is fungible and has almost zero leverage.

This exploitation seems to take many forms. Being paid a multiple of the median income, working indoors under climate-controlled conditions, and (at least in my case) being paid to do that which I’d do for free anyway.

My grandfathers mined coal and milled steel. They needed unions. I don’t see any benefit to unions for me.

Look at airlines and auto companies for the danger of extreme unionization. You can kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Unions generally only work in monopolies (think old school telecom) where there is a surplus that is protected from competition. In this case it’s just about dividing a fixed pie.

The best thing for workers is to have many companies competing for their talents. That’s why counterintuitive things like lower corporate taxes can sometimes benefit workers. Same with reducing barriers to market entry.

Unionization is also extremely important to protect the non-tech workers at tech companies who do not have the same leverage as the salaried engineers.

Their undoing contract will mean less if it doesn’t have ability to veto any attempt to farm out work to cheaper or less regulated labor markets.

There are numerous notable caes of changed views. Kara Swisher, Roger McNamee, BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie, Tim Wu, Tristan Harris, the entire Wired editorial slant.

Wind's done shifted.

I think there was a sort of techno-utopianism in the aughts that the hip new startups will solve all the world's problems. People will be educated and not fall for disinformation with wikipedia and google at their fingertips. People will discover the wonders of democracy and free speech with facebook and rise against oppressive governments. These were obviously overly optimistic projections.

Also, the rise of outrage porn makes it much easier for people to come to the conclusion that "the system" is horribly broken and needs to be changed (for almost any "system" that we speak of, government or capitalism, or youtube, literally anything)

Regulating the internet is completely different than regulating Uber and AirBnB's business practices