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Comment by natpalmer1776 | Hacker News Reader

The main issue here is that AT&T employs a large workforce that is not relevant to the current (Fiber) and upcoming (5G Cellular/WISP) service technologies being rolled out en masse.

Which means as their legacy business units are retired or pulled back, they are letting go numerous employees while simultaneously hiring a slightly smaller number of more educated (up-to-date) workers to staff up their new business units.

What we are seeing here is the decline of a historically booming industry (linemen) as the overhead required to maintain these networks becomes more specialized in nature and involves fewer people than before.

Now, the ethical strategy to mitigate impacting their historically loyal workforce would be to re-train the copper linemen to work with the new technologies.

The problem with this is that its' expensive. Insanely expensive. The training is made available to many of their current workers, in as many areas as possible (where the skills will be relevant) however at the end of the day an individual 'first-line' manager will not advocate for 64 year old Joe Schmoe with average performance stats to get this expensive training if 24 year old Billy Bob with a 'young man's' performance record is also asking to get trained.

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That’s a scenario they created. There’s no reason the man in the van can’t hang up a WISP device or whatever. I used to run a field tech services org — it’s not that expensive to train new tasks, the hardest thing is hiring reliable people. Your old school HP and IBM CEs would service everything for 95% of service calls.

They are busting the CWA, period.

The same thing happened with National Grid in upstate NY. They’ll use 5 subcontractors and 10 guys to do a job that was handled by a 2-3 man crew 20 years ago. The hilarious thing is that that union didn’t have the stupid separation of duty stuff the contractors do. I saw one instance where they had a subcontractor on site specifically to spray bee spray.

In other words, union labor is so burdensome, it can't even compete with 5x the manpower?

More likely they are aging out the workforce.

Is there a rational reason why companies would prefer to hire 3-5x the workers to do the same job, just to avoid having to deal with a union? Or is it all just union-related FUD?

If you don't have work you don't pay the contractor. You still pay employees.

Depending on the work this can be good or bad.

When you have employees you also get flexibility in scheduling them. A contractor is expected to have other jobs and sometimes cannot get to your critical need right now.

A contractor can sometimes give you a better deal because of those other customers who are willing to pay extra for last minute service.

> If you don't have work you don't pay the contractor. You still pay employees.

It's funny, though; a week or so ago I saw an article posted here by someone who was paid over $20k for a static web page that took him less than a day to build. After he showed up for his first day of work, he went on a 7-week odyssey doing basically nothing because the people who owed him designs and assets weren't ready yet.

Push out accountability and compliance issues to the contractor.

In a state like NY, workers compensation costs for jobs with ladders are really high, for example. Contracting it out contains the cost.

They also turn capex into opex. If you pay the contractor to dig telephone poles as a service, you don’t spend capex on digging equipment.

Presumably the cost is still passed along since the subcontractor needs insurance for their workers.

If there is a liability that not covered by the insurance the subcontractor can just go bankrupt. AT&T wants to protect their assets.

NY state doesn't let anyone go without paying for worker's comp. I run a company with remote developers who sit at a desk and I am still forced to pay it. Also, contractee will require contractor to have insurance so they can sue them if needed.

Don’t forget empire building. Why be some loser with only six employees when you could run a division with forty five people?

And be paid accordingly.

Ain't that the truth.

but capitalism is efficient

What does capitalism has to do with unions? It is actually goes against basic capitalism to have a 2 party system where the employee and the employer negotiates the circumstances of work.

> What does capitalism has to do with unions?

Capitalism is the problem for the working class that motivates unions as a mitigation.

Capitalism != Monopsony

What? Where would workers work? Capitalism is not the problem at all.

In cooperatives and publically-owned workplaces, of course.

Like gulags?

On the off-chance that you aren't trolling: A (worker's) cooperative is a company that is owned and democratically controlled by its workers. Gulags were prisons[1].

Since prisoners do often work, you could technically call a prison a publically-owned workplace provided it is actually owned by the public. It would be highly misleading, but technically not entirely wrong. But gulags weren't owned by the public but by an unambiguously dictatorial state, so no, they aren't.

I hope this helped clear things up.

[1] Calling gulags prisons is quite an understatement, but very bad prisons aren't worker's cooperatives either.

unions are an expression of capitalism. Businesses will often form partnerships/merge to better their market position/profitability/etc.. Laborers (when viewed as a business-person selling a product: their labor) should do the same to promote their own position/profitability/etc.

Capitalism IS efficient, when considering the environment upon which its juxtaposed, and when compared with alternative economic systems/social orders that humanity has experimented with. Its miraculously efficient, in fact!

Its terribly inefficient when compared against idyllic, abstract notions of societies, where resources are distributed and used with perfect efficiency. But so is every other practical alternative.

the hardest thing is hiring reliable people...They are busting the CWA, period.

My father in law was a linesman for AT&T, then the various Bell companies then Verizon for 30 years. He started when he was 21 and retired when he was 51 about 15 years ago.

He regularly brags how the union would set hour allotments for each job and how he could complete work in 30 minutes that the union required scheduling for 5 hours. Most of the time he spent on the clock involved him hiding his work truck in the woods behind his house and sneaking into his house to work on home improvements while he was being paid.

Every once in a while he would get caught doing something wrong and would be suspended. The union would then represent him and provide him groceries and other items during the suspension. Eventually Verizon paid him a lump sum of a quarter million dollars to go away which along with saving money from decades of generous overtime rules including double time and a half on holidays let him retire at the age of 51.

How’s that any different than tech workers inflating story points 2x and indulging a work from home day or kicking off early. I mean other than no job security, pension, gold watch and forced obsolescence at 51.

Nobody knows wtf tech workers do.

There was a candy bar commercial where a bunch of suits were eating candy snickering at the lazy construction crew hanging out below. Pretty much captures it.

There will always be people who abuse the support the union offered, like your dad, who gives unions a bad rep - most members work with pride and want to do the best job they can.

Time allotted work is intended to ensure jobs are done safely; not everyone will take that long, but it ensures slower workers aren't going to cut corners just to keep schedule. Without a union, your dad would have been expected to take 30min every single time, and lose your job if you don't.

IMHO, in this kind of a case it's not the employee who gives union a bad rep - it's the union. Why do they actually support this kind of behaviour?

(FWIW, it sounds this is actually worse in the US, where the unions are supposedly "weak", than in my country which has social democrats in government and "strong unions".)

Unions usually have an obligation to defend everyone as part of their contract.

Like anything, the douchiest people are usually best at working the system, and it takes strong and competent management to get rid of the bad eggs.

And how did that "obligation" get into their contract? You can bet the company didn't ask for it.

This sounds like a problem of their (union officials) own making.

If you don’t do that, how can you claim to represent the workers?

Unions are fundamentally democratic organizations, and without an obligation to represent, you can easily find yourself in a position where your politics within the organization matter more than your circumstances.

All of this stuff is mostly a distraction. AT&T wireless is a union shop, and is very competitive in the marketplace. When you have companies that are fat and poorly managed, with the ability to dump costs on the customer, like Boeing or GM in the old days and you get shitty, poorly negotiated contracts,

In a case like this, AT&T has unlimited leverage. Much of their area are in labor-unfriendly states, and they have a pliant FCC who would take action if AT&T decided to start killing kittens. So they’re acting while the Fox is still in the hen house.

Unions are (supposedly) fundamentally democratic organisations also here (Nordics), but they are not obligated by their contracts to defend frivolous cases.

(They still do, sometimes, and then they take the flak in the eyes of the public, deservedly).

That "obligation" is the core tenet of union representation, has nothing to do with contract, and it's also spelled out in a union's constitution. We are a collective of workers, and we defend each other.

And who cares what the company asks for? If it were up to them you'd still be making $3 an hour on 14 hour days, 7 days a week, with no benefits, while they reap $10 billion in profit

No it isn't. There is no core tenant of unions that say they have to protect you from consequences when you commit reprehensible actions.

A union that did literally nothing but negotiate salary would be a perfectly valid form of union. The appropriate balance is somewhere in between.

And who said anything about the company asking for stuff. I've worked union jobs where we were overly protected. I wished we were less protected because it would have meant not having to clean up after the (rare, but especially noticeable) coworkers who don't give a fuck.

"You can bet the company didn't ask for it." is your quote, thus my, "who cares what they ask for".

And core tenet is that they defend and represent you, not that they protect you from the consequences of reprehensible actions; representation is the whole point of unions! As I said in another post, you absolutely can be fired from a union job; union just makes sure you got a fair shake and got fired for a real reason, other wise you could get fired for sneezing too loud and you'd be shit out of luck.

> "You can bet the company didn't ask for it." is your quote, thus my, "who cares what they ask for".

Wow, that's a complete misunderstanding of what I'm saying.

This was in reply to someone trying to shift the blame of a unions bad actions onto a "contract", the contract here is an agreement between the union and the company, so if it wasn't the unions fault it was in the contract it had to be the companies. I don't care about what companies do ask for (in this context), I do care about what companies didn't ask for so you can't blame them for it.

Unions should just make sure you get a fair shake, in reality my experience with them has been they make it virtually impossible to fire you no matter what you do.

In reverse order to your post, I will concede that some unions have become too entrenched, but employers have rights too, and if they have an actual documented case against an employee, they can fire them.

Jumping back; They weren't trying to shift blame onto a contract, they were nearly stating a fact: Unions usually have an obligation to defend everyone as part of their contract. although were mistaken in saying that it was in a contract, when it is actually part of founding principals of unions -- As the NLRA defines a labor organization as a group "[...]in which employees participate and which exists for the purpose, in whole or in part, of dealing with employers concerning grievances, labor disputes, wages, rates of pay, hours of employment, or conditions of work."

dealing with employers concerning grievances, labor disputes -- it is the entire purpose unions were formed. You replied with a remark to the effect that companies had no say.

Maybe I read your tone wrong, but I read negative, and decided to go with a snotty reply, "who cares what they ask for", which could have been thought out better -- but is the whole point of this in the first place: Unions don't support bad behavior, or reprehensible actions as you say, unions protect you through the process of being accused or actioned upon, despite the reason. They exist to handle disputes. Simply that.

I am curious which union you belonged to

> Unions usually have an obligation to defend everyone as part of their [founding princples/constitution]

This too is not the case, there is a difference between hearing grievances and defending legitimate ones, and defending people with illegitimate grievances. If their constitution requires the second it is again the unions fault for putting that in their constitution, and the comment that started this chain is still a illegitimate shifting of blame.

> Maybe I read your tone wrong, but I read negative

I am negative on this aspect of unions, I'm very positive on others, my original comment was mainly being negative about attempting to shift blame to a document of their own creation and not about addressing the pros or cons of unions.

CUPE 3902 is the only one I've been in that affected me in any noticeable way.

Then it's the founding principles which earn the bad reputation for unions.

(I presume you mean principles, not principals.)

There's a collective bargaining agreement between the union and the company that governs the relationship. The union has a constitution and bylaws that govern the services that it provides to employees. As an employee in a union shop, you're not an at-will employee, your employment is subject to a contract.

Issues of employee performance aren't inherent because you have a contract. If you work for a public company, your VP probably has an employment contract that protects him from many types of arbitrary actions. A baseball player is a unionized employee with a collective bargaining agreement -- and teams obviously have tools to incentivize performance.

Managed well, a union is a tool for compliance as well. Companies and governments have done things like push healthcare administration to the union or pool sick leave to let employees police leave abuse. I've worked and managed in union shops, and have hired and fired people. The issues you talk about usually reflect immature process on the employer side. If you follow your rules, you can fire employees for misconduct.

No, its absolutely giving the union a bad rep by abusing its support. Keep in mind union officials rarely are physically present for the complaint at hand, so it is nearly always he-said, she-said. Likely the employee put up a fight, claimed a different take on the thing they got caught for, or it simply wasn't provable -- you absolutely can be fired for not doing your job, even if you are a union member!

The protection the union gives is that you aren't fired on the spot without good reason or a fair shake. It forces the company to actually back up their reasons; not just Joe the manager didn't like you, or someone saw you take a 30 second break once.

The fact that the guy was paid by AT&T to go away tells me he was good at playing the game, and good at not getting caught.

Union is bad.

Just put into perspective.

In the Garden State Parkway in NJ, the Union Toll Plaza has 4 lanes that accept exact change. No people involved. Then few months ago, they "upgraded" the exact change lanes and put people to collect tolls, 24/7. Not to mention, it takes longer to pass the lane now if you need to pay cash.

That means, at 40hr/week per person, 168hr per week, they need 16 people to run this 4 lanes. Then another 2 to 3 people to cover for time off. Assume a low $50k per person/year, that's almost $1m per year.

What values do these toll collectors provide to society? The only reason why these jobs were created in the first place is because of the union. Don't you think money and manpower can spend on something better to serve the customers? Like repairing the road.

The fact we have toll roads at all is concerning, considering this is a common argument against privatization. Toll stops are also pretty dangerous, especially the ones on the West Virginia Turnpike, which recently doubled in price. What can we really do, though?

The fact that you're using toll booths to collect tolls is the concerning part to me. Here in Toronto we have a toll highway where everything is automated. Via cameras/license plate if you only drive on it occasionally, or via a transponder if you drive on it often enough it's worth the discount (I assume the discount exists because the cameras are unreliable, sometimes miss people, and they want to minimize errors).

Plate recognition has a fallthrough rate, and mailing out toll bills followed by processing incoming checks is a costly PITA that a transponder enabled vehicle mostly eliminates.

So what makes you think the union was responsible for this change?

The exact change lanes were removed because the change collection hardware is old and parts are becoming scarce:

https://www.nj.com/traffic/2018/10/a_tisket_a_tasket_you_can...

Another reason for replacing exact change lanes on the busy Parkway mainline is the machines that actually count the change, coin by coin, are old, cranky and hard to get parts for, Feeney said.

“Most are from the 1990’s. The manufacturers have not made parts for them for some time,” Feeney said. “Even the secondary market is difficult.”

It doesn’t help when drivers throw other stuff in the basket like slugs, foreign coins, garbage, a fish and used kitty litter

There are still plenty of companies making exact change machines, they just put brand new ones in on my local toll road ~3 years ago.

Maybe installing new machines from new vendors wasn't considered worthwhile given that most people use the electronic passes and they want to encourage more of that.

>Assume a low $50k per person/year,

That's a very low number to assume!

The last time I checked, base compensation for toll takers in New York was well over $120K/year.

In unionized NJ, I am sure compensation is about the same.

Where are you getting those numbers from? Here is data that suggest NY toll collectors make less than $20/hour, https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Toll-Collector-Salaries,-New...

https://nypost.com/2011/12/11/pa-workers-raking-in-big-bucks...

On top of $60K year in base pay, you have to consider maybe $50K a year in pension benefits, then maybe $20K a year for health insurance.

And those numbers were from 8 years ago.

Those are bridge/tunnel tolls, which are a lot higher than Garden State Parkway tolls, which might mean higher pay. (No, it isn't very logical, but I can certainly see toll collectors at a $1 toll booth making less than toll collectors at a $15 toll booth if only because the higher price toll can more easily support a higher wage.)

They do that because of the incompetence of New Jersey. Pretty sure those parkway tolls are run by counties, so it’s probably a patronage mill.

Massachusetts implemented E-ZPass/LPR billing in a couple of months. It’s hard to even tell that tollbooths existed.

> The only reason why these jobs were created in the first place is because of the union.

Citation please?

And sure, I'll admit there are some unions well entrenched, who also abuse their situation, although you can likely blame the Mafia for that in NJ

Most jobs don't actually provide value to society.

And frankly, I'm fine with that.

> There will always be people who abuse the support the union offered, like your dad, who gives unions a bad rep

That's a bit harsh and I think it misjudges human nature.

> Without a union, your dad would have been expected to take 30min every single time, and lose your job if you don't.

I had a summer job in a paper mill when I was 18. One of my earliest tasks was to "sweep the mill." The entire mill, which was HUGE.

I started sweeping at 7AM and by about 9AM I had completed the first floor. I was on my way to floor # 2 when an old-timer pulled me aside and said, "Hey. Don't work yourself out of a job." Then he and various other old-timers showed me places where they hid and took naps throughout the day. I decided I did not want to be the goody-goody college interloper, so I took a few naps myself that summer.

The kicker? This was a NON-union mill.

My point is that many of those jobs are shitty and unpleasant, and people do what they can to alleviate the unpleasantness of it all--with or without the union.

To your first point, the guy says his dad bragged about hiding and doing work on his own house, he is clearly abusing the situation, and proud of it too. He even took groceries offered by the union (a lot of times its your fellow members actually helping you out) despite knowing he was suspended for actually doing something wrong. At minimum, its an affront to your union brothers & sisters.

As far as not working your self out of a job, its true, there will always be a balance between working your ass off, and spreading out the work, but its also heavily dependent on whats expected of you: if you're only expected to complete one specific task in a period of time, there is no gain in getting it done as fast as physically possible.

Believe me, your bosses knew the oldtimers were taking naps, and it clearly wasn't a big deal for that employer.

Sounds like a stand up guy.

What is "the CWA"?

Communication Workers of America union

This is an area that I'm really interested in watching as there is more discussion around tech unions - the industry moves so fast, an emphasis on retraining seems essential when you'd be setting one up. Legacy unions haven't had to deal with making retraining as important a part of their value proposition in the past, but "we'll keep you safe, compensated, and relevant as the industry changes" is a pretty compelling platform.

The IATSE (union for technical/artisan roles related to film/tv/audio/events/etc) created a training trust for their members in 2011 and, from what I've heard, it seems to be working pretty well. https://www.iatsetrainingtrust.org/ I'd love to see other unions take notes when their industries start to modernize. They do all of the standard OSHA training, etc, but also keep Lynda.com subscriptions for their members, reimburse group craft training organized by local chapters, and have developed some specific certificate programs for retraining into A/V roles from less technical ones.

I am an IATSE member, and can testify that the training trust is great for our membership. Most classes are free, if not significantly reduced.

One of the best things out of it though, is the free CPR/AED class, which many members have taken and has saved more than a few lives, that I know of personally.

I also regularly take advantage of Lynda.com, and we also have specialized classification training depending on what kind of work you are doing, be it special effects, welding, or aerial work. Out west, some of these classes are requirements for employment; the east is catching up

An important note that I forgot, that needs to be emphasized here is that IATSE is not like many other unions in the sense that we are not a hiring hall, and do not have seniority as a policy.

Each worker is hired based on skill -- that said, if you're a horrible person, you're not likely to get work, unless your skill is really above and beyond. The end result is a group of awesome people who do outstanding work.

This would be great for tech startups. Especially globally. They'll be able to out-compete the big unionized tech companies so much easier!

The real scandal is not even close to being covered:

The 23k jobs that have been cut are predominantly aging boomers who were offered packages to retire.

There is plenty of new hiring, almost exclusively targeting millennial dev-ops people as AT&T tries to mimic Silicon Valley. The union people will not be going anywhere. This is a muckraker of an article.

That depends when BT did that a lot of people took redundancy and jumped over to competitors - there is a joke that BT's reduandancy scheme built the UK's mobile network.

What I've heard anecdotally is that the union contracts for the linemen are written in terms of copper wire. Since fiber optic is not copper, AT&T is doing everything they can to get rid of the union guys and their expensive paychecks.

Didn't they lay off all the landline people and dial-up internet people years ago?

I remember the massive layoffs in our town in the early 2000's, the old AT&T HQ was vacant for years

> 64 year old Joe Schmoe with average performance stats to get this expensive training if 24 year old Billy Bob with a 'young man's' performance record is also asking to get trained.

Even if Joe Schmoe has much better performance, it may still make sense to train Billy Bob. If training is truly expensive, and takes 5 years to pay off, odds are Joe is going to be retired at that point and it will be a waste of money.

An additional factor is that fibre-optic generally requires less maintenance, so even given the same scale of network there'd be a smaller workforce required.

I think you hit the nail on the head - and I suspect you'd find out that most of these 'job losses' are mostly attrition thru retirement, not actual layoffs

No, they are actual layoffs. You could have learned this with 5 seconds of googling or RTFA.

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