Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions
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* Vocational training: unions in our area run schools to train craftsman (e.g. carpenters). This increases productivity and screens for quality.
* Shifting workforce: Construction companies expand/contract as they get big jobs. The union is a clearinghouse that enables tradespeople to switch between companies as they expand/contract. The union also helps by running benefit programs that travel with the workers.
* Commodity-ish labor: Most carpenters have about the same productivity, so it makes sense to negotiate their compensation in bulk. Unions don't work as well when productivity/value varies greatly between workers.
I also worked as an apprentice carpenter for several summers during college. I wouldn't say that the carpenters I worked with had a glowing view of the union. They seemed suspicious that the union reps were corrupt, and talked about how they would "shut down the job" over minor union infractions. They also believed the "hall" was corrupt/political in how it matched carpenters who were out of work to jobs. Several were also contemptuous of what they saw as the union discouraging hard work (if you were working hard, you were "ruining the job.")
The main point I am trying to make is that unions are complex from both the employer and employee side.
Unions are definitely complex, it's not a silver bullet to solve issues in the workplace. But at its core it's a group of people negotiating as a unit: the rest is just the natural evolution of a group where some power has been attained. More members means more organization needed to keep everything straight, and more organization means more barriers to joining. Once there's a real structure to the power a union gets, it's subject to the same people problems as an other organization.
With remote work, computer science is much more global, so someone could easily be trained by a union and then go work for a company that doesn't support the union.
Interestingly, this is one of my Dad's main complaints about unions these days: That our city trains great carpenters, but then they are recruited away to non-union areas.
https://www.purdue.edu/dfa/types-of-aid/income-share-agreeme... (Income Share Agreements)
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/29/708152566/epis... (Episode 903: A New Way To Pay For College)
Why do they take the offers? I don't want to write anything bad about your father, but I think people wouldn't leave if they were paid well / felt good all around at their current job?
Welders or house framers take designs from engineers and (mostly) work to spec. I have to be the architect, engineer, and builder, usually only based on the approved visible UI, or rough description of a problem.
One of the economic failure modes of strong unions is excessive credentialisation and a dualised labour market. I’m most familiar with unions in Ireland and we definitely have some of that. A plastering apprenticeship is either three or four years. Learning to plaster is at most a six month job. Se situation with tiling. For a knowledge worker example more directly relevant to programmers the teachers’ unions really push credentialisation and dualistation. During the recent economic downturn the government wanted to decrease the wage bill so the teacher unions doubly shafted aspirant teachers. They negotiated a doubling in the length of teacher certification, from a one year Higher Diploma in Education to a two year M.Ed. and a lower pay scale for teachers hired after a certain date. Education in pedagogy doesn’t even have any demonstrable effect on teacher effectiveness so this was pure waste with no benefit. Even before that in Ireland a permanent job as a teacher is fantastic but it will take the average new graduate of a teacher training programme at three to five years of substitute work, with no paid holiday or other benefits to get one, if they ever do.
In the U.K. with its easier entry and lower credential requirements [1] getting a job is easy but the working conditions are comparatively dreadful.
Unions generally make things better for those on the inside by making them worse for those on the outside.
[1] Do you have a psychology degree and want to teach Math? Do a conversion course and you can.
Though it may not seem like safety is a big concern in tech right now, there are areas where it will be of concern. For example, Unions may be a good method to force safety concerns in self-driving cars and in IoT devices. Unions may help with health-care data and privacy. Unions may help with other forms of sensitive information like in judicial work and military work.
I'm not saying that unions are the only way to force safety, but they have been an effective force for safety in other areas in the past. Their effectiveness should not be discounted out of hand.
Quitting right off the bat or folding like a wet biscuit after realizing that they do have power over you are not ways of pushing back.
His company employs one full time person whose job is to improve safety. The guy runs safety competitions (days without a serious accident) with prizes, does reviews, researches equipment and practices, etc.
He will also tell you that the biggest safety improvement they ever made was drug testing. He resisted it for a long time because he feared it would be difficult to hire people, but after they did it he became a big advocate of it.
Unions are best when practitioners in a field vary a lot in quality and desirability. When anybody can be quickly trained to do work, unions have to rely on physical means to help their members. That's why Taylorism/Fordism destroyed the unions.
Tech is an ideal place for unions skillwise, the problem is how easily offshorable the work is. A tech union would have to be a world union.
Dualisation, making a labour market with insiders and outsiders certainly helps those on the inside. But that comes at the expense of those on the outside. If this is the goal how would punishment of those hiring self taught developers and those who didn’t pay union dues be coordinated?
This model has a problem in that programmers are closer to lawyers or accountants than electricians. An individual lawyer/accountant/programmer can be tens or hundreds of times more valuable or productive than another. So you can see professional services firms. You’re not going to see electricians doing that because the productivity differential isn’t that enormous. And those programmer professional service firms can either continue that way, as consultancies, or augment themselves with capital and make a product. That’s a startup. The economics of knowledge workers are radically different from production workers. Even voice actors and script writers are inputs into the final product, a film. Knowledge workers can make the entire product and capture far more of the productivity thus generated.
Those on the outside should come inside. There's no reason why self-taught developers can't be on the inside, as long as they learn and adhere to professional standards (as agreed upon by the membership.) If they refuse, I have as much sympathy for them as I do self-taught doctors. There's nothing that needs to be coordinated; if a business hires non-union labor, union members cannot work for them and remain union members.
As for the rest, if you are good enough that employers would be happy to ignore the union because you're worth 100x any of them, you shouldn't have a problem, and the people you work for shouldn't have a problem. The union doesn't affect either of you, because they're paying you a boatload, and you're giving them all the work they need. [edit: and tbh, there's also nothing to lose by being in the union except what is probably a trivial amount of dues in return for group rate insurance, refresher training classes, and discount software licenses.]
> Knowledge workers can make the entire product and capture far more of the productivity thus generated.
And should. Co-ops and the self-employed don't need a union, they are a union.
If the members have enough market power to enforce union exclusivity they have no incentive to allow self-taught developers to join and every incentive to keep them out. A union is a labour cartel and economically it works the same as a capital cartel by capturing more of the productivity than they would under free competition by reducing supply of the input they control.
> and tbh, there's also nothing to lose by being in the union except what is probably a trivial amount of dues in return for group rate insurance, refresher training classes, and discount software licenses.
Because unions try to represent the average worker, in areas with low productivity differentials they generally aim for seniority based pay and last in first out firing. This is another instance of the general pattern of helping members at the expense of non-members. In areas with large productivity differentials line the SAG they set minimum wages while punishing employers of non-members.
Unions grab a bigger piece of the pie by taking it from someone else, either the employer or potential competitors and they often redistribute the pie from higher to lower productivity workers.
There are laws that work has to be assigned to union shops, etc
The other side of the same coin is, for example, ISP local monopoly laws.
The point is that the mere existence of a union is not a sufficient condition for union-only laws; unions exist in places where such laws don't exist. As an argument against unions this is a slippery slope fallacy.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but I'm not even sure I concede that programmers have that large a differential.
I still have yet to see genuine scientific evidence that this differential exists in programming.
Or, alternatively, I don't concede that there isn't a 10x difference in master vs apprentice carpenters.
1. Tech is not a space where training can help improve worker's quality? Or is it just something that people are expected to do on their own and people who don't suffer?
2. You might be surprised to learn about the number of contractors in tech.
If there was a programmer's union that let you join as a union employee, you could take salary concessions for the union-mandated retirement plan contributions, and have both parties wind up ahead simply on tax-efficiency metrics. $110k salary and $100k salary + $10k retirement plan contribution cost the exact same to the company, but the latter has a lower overall tax burden on the employee.
It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such...
https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate...
If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well.
I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG.
I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job.
If your are making over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point...
https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c...
Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.
One advantage of software as a relatively ill defined career is that you can acquire responsibilities that look like software engineering without actually having a software job. Would my first employer have let me tinker around with the server (when my job was mostly Excel based) if it would have run afoul of union rules?
Imagine how many people have gone to Silicon Valley and worked their butts off in a startup that really went nowhere. It would be nice if they had a union that had resources to indicate if the developer should quit, go to another startup, or take another position. An intermediary that could assist with some analysis of the cap/gap tables would be helpful. A union that could indicate the daily minimum pay with a startup would be nice.
If you want to tinker with code no one would stop you. But if you got a gig and tinker with code after 3 paychecks you could join a union. Many actors don't join SGA when they start. They take on multiple gigs and then decide if the fee is worth it. Plenty of youtube videos go over the options. It seems very flexible. I don't understand why there is resistance to the idea. It's not some factory union. A Software dev guild similar to SGA seems most appropriate. Essentially most dev roles are contract roles for a short amount of time 3 months - 3 years.
Imagine if we got residuals from our code... Best incentive to document, unittest, and push some code library.
Tech workers feel pretty good here in the US because they are compensated better than most. The time to organize is now, not after worker supply has increased or during a recession when workers are more desperate. We have real issues (Ageism, Working Conditions, etc) that we'll never be able to address individually.
I'm not convinced that is the case, nor is it an either or (union or corporate powers).
Your protection by the union depends on what the union negotiates... beyond that their ability to effect change pretty much stops there. Then you are again at the mercy of your employer. I've had first had experience with "oh yeah they can do that" union situations.
Also premature organization IMO is much like premature optimization, more likely to be a bigger problem and miss any real issues.
> beyond that their ability to effect change pretty much stops there.
Is that true? You can't negotiate even further by yourself? I think you do.
I think that is a bit of a grand statement don't you think?
I've worked non union jobs and I'm pretty sure the benefits I get are not directly due to a union... I wouldn't associate ALL benefits with a union, nor would that necessitate forming one simply if you thought those benefits were related.
I've worked for some nice people, I do belive they seriously want to provide their people benefits...
>Is that true? You can't negotiate even further by yourself? I think you do.
Negotiate what exactly? The Union and corporate relationship generally lays out what the lay of the land is, the the areas that the employer gets to decide are usually pretty obvious and the union isn't likely to call a general strike because an employer made a choice.
The remuneration package offered by a business is typically dictated by the business sector (competitors) so saying "I've worked non union jobs and I'm pretty sure the benefits I get are not directly due to a union." is faulty logic. If half the shops are union shops or competition for staff is fierce then pay/benefits will reflects.
Unions gave us 40 weeks (as opposed to 60+), no child labour, work place health & safety (maybe not such a big deal in tech but in other industry it's critical), etc... yes, government legislation made them law but unions applied pressure to get it done. While many aspects of unions have, or appear to have, outlived their usefulness they are still a very important tool in the employer-employee relationship.
Look at it this way, if unions were really just about the money then employers wouldn't care so much and attempt to keep unions out of their businesses (sometimes illegally). An employer could just say to the union "this is how much I have to spend on labour, how would you like it budgeted" and call it a day cause at that point it's just deciding on how big your slice of pie is.
I guess I sound like a union fanboy, which I'm not, but we shouldn't discount the very real impact and ongoing influence unions have.
And before we have the detractors of unlimited vacation coming in. Several of my colleagues take month long vacations, some multiple times a year, withiut reproach. It is objectively superior to my mother's union job
I'll just say I don't think unions or the concept of a union needs to be perfect to generally have a positive effect. Maybe I'm naive.
I can see your point about premature unionization, but I do think we need to think about the future. I think there's a sense among tech workers that this period of high demand won't last. Maybe not unions now, maybe not unions in a traditional sense, maybe we do need to think of some kind of new paradigm better suited to tech work than say, a carpenter's union, but something.
I can understand that.
Personally I've had experiences with two unions in different industries.
Each time the unions were IMO more of a hindrance to me than anything else. They were for me just another layer of bureaucracy with no more interest in me than a poor employer.
Worse yet they laid down policies that were so general that they were serious problems. Lots of protections for long time union members who simply didn't want to learn new things, etc.
Having said that, I would be interested in some "trade union" type things that maybe do things less traditionally compared to typical unions in the US.
If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.
If, today, you work for an organization with a few dozen or couple hundred employees, but it is really run by ten or twenty "Directors", "VPs" and "Executives", they likely have full control over the majority of the capital owned by the company. They are also likely to be highly paid, and own the majority of stock or RSUs. If a moonshot expansion plan fails, they will be fine. Executing on high-risk and high-reward business ideas is 100% in their best interests.
However, if employees organize, those who instead rely on the organization to feed and shelter their families will begin to have a say in whether it's worth dumping the organization's $30M Series C into some blockchain moonshot that may never pay off.
Frankly, I don't believe they'll be as inclined to say yes. The union may instead re-negotiate to redistribute that funding to workers salaries, or to invest it in training programs. This is a good thing if you're in this industry because you're an experienced and skilled worker who wants long-term stable employment, but perhaps a bad one if you're in it to hope you hit the startup lotto and get rich after selling our your stock at 26. If you run an organization, which would you rather have working for you?
Ironically, not only do tech workers aren't worried about this, they embrace it and encourage it. An enormous amount of work is being done to lower the bar, make things more accessible, reduce the need for diplomas and certifications, downplay the value of experience, etc. Basically ensuring that they'll see significant competition in the future (those initiatives don't help "a little". They literally change the landscape of the industry).
So it's a bit hard to convince people that they should work to protect their job when they're already working so hard to do the opposite (with the well being of others in mind, of course)
20 years ago the internet was less than 0.01% of global GDP. Tech will continue eating industries that are structured unfairly.
Like how tech took driving a taxi from a job that (unfairly) paid a living wage to one that doesn't.
While I'm not a big Uber/Lyft fan, prior to them the cab companies in the non-functional cities were atrocious.
I spent 40 minutes getting a bloody taxi at my lawyer's office in Las Vegas--and then had to wonder if I could get one back from the restaurant I went to. Getting from Monroeville to the Pittsburgh airport was a disaster. I can go on and on.
With Uber/Lyft in existence, a whole bunch of things don't happen with impunity anymore. Drivers can't refuse to pick you up. Drivers can't blow you off and not show up. Drivers can't refuse to take a credit card. etc.
Uber/Lyft aren't my favorite companies, but neither were the taxis.
Yes I know there are outliers but the vast majority of entrants are BSC grads.
Look at the discussion here: lots of people arguing against unions, saying they're just plain bad, or they're good in some industries but not in tech, or we just don't need them, or whatever.
And not to say that these arguments are wrong, but....
Hands up, how many of you think that it's a good idea to run a business with employees as a sole proprietorship?
I'm pretty sure there are no hands up. The first thing you do when you're going to create a business with employees is to organize. This is so ingrained that we don't even think about it. When was the last time you saw "Ask HN: do I need to incorporate?" Of course you do. There are many questions around where to do it and what type of corporation to create and what ownership structure you want to use and so forth, but there's no question about whether it's a good idea.
When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and we come up with many reasons why this may not be a good idea.
When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "corporation" and nobody takes even a moment to wonder whether or not this is a good thing to do.
If workers are better off without organization, maybe the same is true on the management side? Instead of big companies, we should have individual managers on their own, employing a team as a sole proprietor.
This actually has some interesting incentives.
When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing.
When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing.
Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to unions and are mostly created for legal reasons, not for anything related to collective negotiation?
Inside a company, the management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees, including compensation. But employees talking together about maximizing their compensation is considered scandalous, harmful or even unethical. The practice is even given special names "organizing" and "unionizing" and is certainly considered unusual.
Corporations acting together are not analogous to a union because, legal fictions aside, corporations are not people.
But the activities of humans working together inside a cooperation to maximize some benefit, say a promotion or higher personal profit buy cutting employee costs vs a group of employees seeking a pay increases, seems a credible analogy.
Instead companies talk about how much they can afford to pay for salaries. Frequently they talk about increasing the cost of employees from the point of view of expanding. Should we hire more people? Will it improve the business? Should we increase salaries? Will it allow us to attract better employees?
When companies are talking about reducing or restricting the cost of employees, it's usually in the context of solving problems in the company. The company is losing in money in some areas. Should we lay off employees? Can we negotiate a pay freeze or a pay cut until the company can get in better shape? Will we lose too many employees if we do that? Will we lose our best employees if we do that?
The biggest problem I have with unions (being one of the few programmers who has actually worked as a programmer in a union) is that in my experience is the conversations almost never discuss the health of the company. They only discuss strategies for maximizing pay, benefits or ensuring that layoffs are impossible.
I honestly believe that the attitude of "They are doing it so we have to too!" is a thing that destroys companies. The Us vs. Them approach helps nobody. Yes, if you have no choice and the company you are working for has decided that they want "Us vs. Them" and you can't convince them to join you in making the company and it's employees successful, I can completely see the point of a union. For me, that's a last resort. I'll try everything I can to fix the problem a different way before I'll say, "We're going to organise so that we can effectively compete with you". This includes simply quitting my job and finding another one.
Or to be more clear: I greatly value working at a company where I wouldn't ever think of organising a union. I value working at a company where the company values me and sees it as a cooperative venture. I don't want to work for a company that views me as an adversary or as someone they need to manipulate. That's why I don't want a union. In my fairly long career I've worked for both kinds of companies, so I know both exist.
Those topics may dominate the discussions, but unions can be a way to leverage worker power for the good of the organization as well. How many times has a company turned out to have leadership that refuses to heed the concern of engineering, mandating development by sales bullet point and failing to allocate the necessary time to maintain product quality? How often does management order prioritize the wrong choices, leading to fiscal straits where the workforce suffers? How often are the concerns of the rank and file ignored, either dismissed at all-hands or filed away by powerless HR orgs? And how often do we hear stories of tech companies with toxic dysfunctional cultures?
There is at least some precedent for unions forcing leadership to be aware of market realities:
For example[1], empirically the presence of a union does not correlates with a bad workplace or failing business because the bulk of last half of the twentieth century saw widespread union membership yet was dominated by enormous growth in both production and quality of life along side high job satisfaction. While the last 40 years with declining union membership has seen slower GDP growth and in some cases quality of life reversal. So unions can't be causing the problem.
And the Us vs Them attitude is certainly close to catastrophic. But people aren't going to go through the effort, stress and risk of forming a union unless there are already some never addressed grievances in the first place. The antagonism would have to precede the talk of unionizing not be caused by the appearance of the union. And after the fact, there is at least some small chance of discussing, explaining and solving the problems. But I too would bail long before it got that broken. But for tight labor markets, with few and poorly run industries, this choice doesn't exists.
[1]in western countries and Japan
The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market, and in a market as competitive as tech, this is particularly true. Management can decide what tier of employee they want to target when they set hiring budgets and salary ranges, they can decide how risk averse they want to be with losing top talent with retention bonuses and benefits, but they don’t get to directly “minimize the cost of employees” in that sense.
Only a set of companies colluding together can act to minimize the cost like that, for example what we saw in the past with anti-poaching agreements, which the big tech companies were sued for successfully.
The individual corporation vs union analogy is highly tortured. Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.
Absolutely. And in a sufficiently abusive environment, none of that will happen. It is a terrible thing when executive staff destroy a company by creating a toxic environment. But employees would rather be improving the orginization since they need the company to survive and everyone would rather work with smart people than someone they have to carry.
But I know of cases where employee pressure in tech has slowed AI use in warfare and stopped physical abuse toward workers. I hear theory about it being bad but where has it made things worse?
>The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market
If that were true then negotiating would be irrelevant. And previous salary would not be the primary determiner of your next offer. And there would not be formulaic pay raise percentages that rewards those people who changes jobs frequently over those who say on and so are in fact more valuable but less savvy.
More than that, labor prices have as much to do with housing prices as anything else (from which extra expense neither employer nor employee benefits). That is not the tech market.
So skill availability is only tangentially related to compensation. The market favors a set of behaviors other than technical skill such as negotiation and job hopping. And ironically for the job hopper, who is selected _for_ by this system, would have minimum interest in the companies success.
>Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.
Being incorporated has nothing to do with analogy. Or even to being called a company. It has to do with some communication being acceptable while other similar communication is not. It's also a specific description of the friction that emerges anywhere only a subset of people decide the allocation of revenue to the whole group including themselves. In this case, in a work place.
Which becomes more suspicious when the opposition to full participation in decision making is on moral grounds or is followed by implicit threats rather than showing how the arrangement is best for everyone.
The above is sort of a lie -- in the case of the tech industry, there is a lot of competition for workers. Since everyone wants to hire SWEs, I have more negotiating power than other industries. If Google doesn't hire me, I could (presumably) get a job at Amazon, Facebook, a startup, etc.. Since I could find other offers, I wouldn't have much to lose if I don't take Google's offer, and Google will therefore have an incentive to offer me better comp. Because of the above, it's not clear to me that tech workers need a union right now.
In other industries, labor is a buyer's market. If there is only one or two employers in a region, then those employers can choose to not hire any one laborer. Not hiring one laborer might mean that an employer's capital is deployed slightly inefficiently, which is again unfortunate, but nobody will lose sleep over it. But since that one laborer has no alternatives, they must work for a lower wage or risk destitution. This is a big problem in academia, where it's very difficult for grad students to switch schools (admissions offices reduce student mobility) and there is only one employer -- the school.
So unions are not analogous to cartels for selling labor -- they are not necessary when there is a balanced labor market, like in tech. But for markets which favor employers, they may often be necessary to protect workers.
The union ended a whole list of bad practices virtually immediately. Even better, they negotiated us into the same benefits (healthcare, etc.) package that faculty received, which was a significant bump up even for students in the better departments like mine.
None of this would have been possible had the employees not been able to organize to realize their power.
You're comparing apples and oranges here, in that you're comparing Google not hiring a single employee to you not getting _any_ job. The analogue to you failing to get any job is Google failing to hire any employees, at which point it ceases to exist, which isn't the case for even the chronically unemployed. The comparison as you've constructed it proves the _opposite_ of your claimed point (though I should note that I think the whole construction is weak; I'm certainly not drawing the conclusion that workers have more power than Google)
Yes, which is why I clarify in the second paragraph that my first paragraph is a lie. As a tech worker with a few years experience, it is unlikely that I can't find any job (i.e. it is likely I can find a job).
But my first paragraph is _not_ a lie if you replace Google with MIT/Princeton/Harvard/Columbia/other universities, at which there are currently unionization efforts among graduate students. Or industries/regions where there are fewer employers or high switching costs.
You say that corporations aren’t created for collective negotiation. When was the last time you bought something from a corporation? Did you negotiate with individual members of that corporation on the price? Do you get individual cashiers to bid for your business? Of course not, because the organization they belong to insists on handling price negotiation in a consistent fashion across the company.
I suspect a lot of the negative attitude toward unions comes from an incorrect assumption that a union must be a monopoly (or perhaps monopsony is the right term). I think that’s why you immediately jumped to “cartel” for the analogous organization on the other side. There’s no reason a single union has to represent all workers in a field, any more than a single company has to be the only employer in a field.
There is a reason for it, actually: unions are exempt from antitrust regulations. Combined with closed shop unions (where legal) it can be effectively impossible to form a second union.
This seems particularly pertinent when discussing the possibility of starting a new union in a field that traditionally hasn't had any: you're not going to suddenly get all tech workers to join up. There will be plenty of space for competing unions, and plenty of space for non-union workers.
Cartels are not collective bargaining - they are collective price fixing by market suppliers. Employee unions negotiate with employers, while supplier cartels do not negotiate with market consumers. Not the same by a long shot.
Also, if you look at the history of corporations, they are originally created to give the capital contributors equal share in the control of the company. Hence the word shares.
For example, you could front your ship for a spice voyage to India, while other people front the crew and funds for supplies, and you would have a percent control of the endeavor equal to the value of your ship. Voting shares today are not much different, just scaled appropriately.
No, we call that illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
That keeps people idealistic, vocal and demanding of the behavior from their employer/bosses. This is not the norm in other business functions. Unfortunately.
All a union does is give centralized power to the employees. If employees need to be cut for survival or salaries need to be lowered temporarily than these are things that an employer can provide proof of to the union and together with employees as a union work something out.
A union prevents the laying off of employees as a profit boosting measure even when it IS'NT required for survival. That is wrong on every count.
The employees are a greater part of the company than shareholders, board members, owners and C-level executives combined. Employees are not sheep to be herded and they deserve a centralized voice.
I've observed this to be true myself, but don't really have a good understanding of _why_ that might be. Do you have any insights?
The level of responsibility and authority you have as the person responsible for a $10M system can be leveraged to move to different leadership career tracks. I think this bleeds out into the industry at large so VCs recognize that smart engineers make good financial bets.
Unions historically stem from segregation between labor and bosses along multiple dimensions such as skills, day-to-day experience and class.
This doesn't make much sense from a numbers perspective. If entrepreneurs and managers manage more than one person then at the very least there should be double the amount of engineers then there are leaders, meaning at best your statements apply to only a third of all software employees if managers all manage 2 people.
Usually this isn't the case. Managers manage up to 5 people so your statements apply to on average 1/6th of all employees.
>As such I'm likely to look at solving problems from all sides and negotiating with a union to "prove" that I need to lay people off sounds extremely troubling from an operational and efficiency standpoint.
The efficiency standpoint is equivalent to the corporate standpoint. There's an additional standpoint you failed to consider. The moral standpoint. A 47 year old father of 3 kids depends on his job as an engineer to support his kids then you come along and fire him to replace him with a kid fresh out of stanford because this kid knows reactjs and will code 12 hour days for half pay.
There is no question, the scenario above is more efficient but it is also ethically wrong. Managers need to take steps to help the employee improve and managers should have their power limited so they cannot fire a father of three just because they don't get along or the kid straight out of stanford is his cousin.
Engineers make up the majority and backbone of a company they are not sheep for you to herd, hire and slaughter based off of operational efficiency.
>As a high performing IC I'm never at risk of being laid off unless the company really is in existential danger.
Good for you. I admire managers who care about the people they employ over managers who are efficient. The best managers are the ones who take underperformers and make them great.
> The best managers are the ones who take underperformers and make them great.
In my experience (successfully managing a large amount of people) you can't really turn around underperformers in most cases and expending the energy to do so is harmful to the rest of the team. You should focus on your best employees and let the underperformers go asap. As an IC I also appreciate this strategy as I strive to be a top performer.
I think instead of looking for a past era solution we should look for a completely new solution set. Why not work on creating open systems. May be instead of getting a leverage over employers, tech people should contribute and create parallel systems. Which instead of creating monopolies help anyone challenge the status quo easily. I think it already happens to a great degree with many engineers and even companies contributing their tooling, research and solutions to open source.
May be we just need to accelerate that trend?
We totally should walk away from zero sum view. So not employer vs us. But how do we make sure that engine for innovation and opportunities keeps on running and keep on creating new companies
When employees feel represented and empowered, when we have real ownership in the company - not just a few thousand $ in stock grants while billions are spent on dividends/stock buybacks, but an actual seat at the table where decision are made - then we want the company to succeed. We will work harder and become more invested in our product than any corporate morale-raising initiative could ever hope to achieve. This grows the pie.
I think right now were in a "golden age" where the latter group still holds power and can command decent salary. I'm convinced this will start to change in 2-3 years and a lot of people who came in for that golden age are going to face a shocking reality that they aren't as privileged as they thought they were.
With the fall of the second group software companies will have much more leverage across the board and we'll see darker and darker patterns prosper.
Developers convincing themselves that they're single points of failure is arrogance, IMO. 99.9% of the time if you leave then someone can step right up and take your place. Oh sure there will be costs, lost productivity, maybe an outage, but the world keeps turning. So go ahead and take that vacation.
On the other hand its like a mediocre army doing a great job because of a great general. That general leaves/dies and the army falls apart or is reduced to a fraction of its former self.
Especially at smaller orgs with constrained resources, they may replace their technical lead but if the replacement flounders, and the replacement's replacement flounders, the whole org becomes FUBAR. In this sense that original technical lead becomes ipso-facto irreplaceable (IMO).
And both resulted in a labor shortage a few years later.
I suppose an argument could be made that unionization would increase the output of the technology sector by virtue of preserving the labor pool, along with all the expertise and domain that would normally evaporate, during down-cycles.
Also, lots of people seem to be equating unionizing to having some sort of fixed wage. In reality, it comes down to how the union decides to structure its contracts -- several unions simply dictate a minimum rate/wage, and leave room for negotiation. It's why SAG offers people minimum day and weekly rates and SAG movie star can negotiate a multi-million dollar contract.
A union is forever.
You're describing what Beverly J. Silver's "Forces of Labor" [1] refers to as "marketplace bargaining power," one of labor's "structural" (ie endemic) sources of political leverage.
> Marketplace bargaining power can take several forms including (1) the possession of scarce skills that are in demand by employers, (2) low levels of general unemployment, and (3) the ability ofworkers to pull out of the labor market entirely and survive on nonwage sources of income.
Marketplace bargaining power is valuable, but it's not perfect, safe, infallible, or free to exercise--especially if one is here on a precarious visa.
Additionally, as the tech job marketplace expands into the global economy, marketplace bargaining power approaches 0 (think: outsourcing).
> Labor's marketplace bargaining power has been undermined by the mobilization of a world-scale reserve army of labor, creating a global glut on labor markets. Moreover, to the extent that the global spread of capitalist agriculture and manufacturing is undermining nonwage sources of income and forcing more and more individuals into the proletariat, marketplace bargaining power is undermined further.
Tech workers are then left with other sources of structural bargaining power, which we had better not neglect:
At the same time, companies endlessly bemoan that they can't find enough people, so there's a big push for immigration to fill the gaps, bootcamps, etc.
Maybe those people that are anti-union because they consider themselves too skilled really are skilled, however the two issues I described above will definitely hit anyone from mid level downwards.
I look out my window and watch the birds fly by and wonder why a human like me needs a boss, or a "job creator" or some other euphemism.
It's hard for me to comprehend someone so slavishly minded to conceive of a concept like "don't like your boss, get another one". Sometimes I ponder what is going on in the minds of "men" who conceive such a notion, just like I sometimes see a homeless man in the gutter drinking a bottle of wine and wondering what is going through his mind.
That's okay until you are "old" or "average"--and that next job isn't coming.
Then you will wish that there were some unions around to help you.
I call this out because I see a steady stream of NYT articles that focus on big tech in a negative way.
Big tech has its problems and should be regulated. On the other hand, I question the NYT and their motive. This clearly isn’t honest journalism but NYT focusing on companies that are now directly competing with the NYT.
Edit: article I was referring to https://fair.org/home/sidney-embers-secret-sources/
The democratic party is a big-tent and demands consensus. When all of these connected folks eyeroll at the guy, it hints that he would have trouble governing. An "out-there outsider guy" persona works for the GOP because the GOP is a political machine party... some state senator from North Dakota would kill kittens on TV if instructed to.
Journalists get stories, they do that by talking to people and getting information. The New York Times has a pretty obvious mainstream approach. Very few credible people in that community have anything to say about Sanders.
I didn’t notice lots of biased political activism when they were reporting on the prosecution of NY legislators and a governor. When did the switch flip?
He's consistently polled in the top three for the democratic primary. He's also consistently ahead of Warren who the NYT often promotes. The New York Times is trying to manufacture credibility by selectively covering candidates.
The NYT is decidedly _not_ leftist. Slightly-liberal leaning maybe, but in no way leftist. They supported the Iraq war of all things.
I honestly can't think of a paper that leftists are more critical of... Maybe the Washington Post?
This is definitely my feeling. When I can just open up LinkedIn and browse all the unsolicited interview requests I get, I don’t end up feeling like I really need a union to protect my current job - I can always just leave and go somewhere else if I’m unhappy.
That said, if someone asked me to vote for it I might do that, but I wouldn’t put the effort into organizing myself.
You think you can, and hopefully you actually can, but your employer might have other ideas... https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...
I'll expand on that slightly - the point is that employers are not beyond illegally getting together to restrict our access to alternative jobs. While it feels like we can just get a new role with a couple of phone calls, we might not be getting the best deal for ourselves regardless.
A common refrain, and not entirely incorrect. It's true that I personally lean on marketplace bargaining power when making politically risky workplace decisions, e.g. pushing for a product or process change.
It has its limits, however, as I've lightly addressed in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384306
Right now, I’m not on a visa and the job market only seems to get hotter and hotter, so for now I feel pretty good about it. Definitely recognize that could change.
Cartels and price-fixing agreements are extremely lucrative, which is why they were commonplace until outlawed by antitrust legislation, and why cartels like OPEC still operate today. Unions and collective bargaining are no different. Unions are equivalent to a cartel of labor-suppliers, and collective bargaining is identical to price-fixing.
Just like with cartels and price-fixing agreements, unionizing would likely benefit the average tech worker. It would also have an extremely bad effect on innovation, bureaucracy, and cost-of-tech-development which would spill over to consumers in the form of higher prices.
I'm in favor of breaking up big corporations, as well as implementing a wealth tax, raising the top tax rates, and strengthening the social safety net. But I don't think encouraging the formation of cartels and price-fixing agreements is in society's best interests.
Another solution to add to the ones you mentioned can be the promotion of founding tech companies run as worker cooperatives, similar to Mondragon in Spain. If tech companies leadership will flirt with anti-hierarchial management fads like flat organizations and holocracy, why not putting their equity where their mouth is and allowing the workers themselves to own the means of production?
Like, if employers don't give enough vacations, is the solution to unionize and bargain for better vacations, or could we agree that everyone needs more vacations and just encode it as labor right?
Sure seems to work well for my colleagues in Dublin, for one.
Then you get your cake and eat it too. Everyone's better off, and we don't have to deal with the negatives of unions.
Unions were the right way in the past because employers were typically the most powerful actors in society, with the ability to sway the actions of government. Unions represented an opposing force to their employers, reigning in that power. Today, employers are still the most powerful actors in society -- arguably even moreso than before -- and some kind of worker organising or other form of bottom-up/grassroots power is needed to counter the abuses of power by the wealthy. There are already good examples of gains being won by unions or similar organisations in tech. A good example of a modern conception of worker power in tech is the tech workers coalition:
Certainly not at the major tech employer level with their tech workers? A software engineer can already work at any of these and get vacations benefit similar to what's law in those European cities, and that's not doing any movement at the government level. And my non-tech colleagues at the same companies have the same benefits for the most part (commission sales folks probably excluded, but that field is unique)
So you're suggesting we organize to even out the power with our employers to...get something we already have so that...this influence that's currently not spreading will bubble up?
And they might take a lead in setting industry best practice eg around $700 for a 1 in 4 on call minimum call out of 4 hours and TOIL at OT rates
Furthermore, a lot of software companies are filthy rich. If anything, American corporations are squeezing the last drops of profit through creative (read borderline criminal) accounting, outsourcing, faux-contracting and other creative arrangements. Said additional profit is not shared with the employees, invested in society or used in any productive way.
How is it benefiting anyone that Apple is buying back stock for example or that they have hundreds of billions parked somewhere?
That's where collective bargaining could come in handy in software. There needs to be some recourse for when shitty companies abuse its employees.
This can happen for a number of reasons:
1. In cases of specialized skills (like working at a factory where you've trained on a particular machine). 2. In cases of natural or artificial monopolies (like working for a federal government). 3. In cases where companies and workers incentives are misaligned (like that of a construction worker).
Probably more that I'm missing.
I don't see how the current software engineer market meets this condition.
There are more open software engineering jobs than there are software engineers. If my employer mistreats me, I'll leave and go to a different company, and likely I can find a job just as good very easily.
I'm not sure how a union would benefit me personally.
In my 35 years of life, it has become harder to start a union, so it isn't out of the question that it becomes harder and harder to start a union when software engineers "need to". There's no guarantee that what exists today will exist tomorrow.
Do people actually think that software engineering is going to become a job that isn't skilled, and isn't sought after?
I'm not sure why you would be so sure it wouldn't. Are the software engineers of today truly that different from the machinists of yesterday?
If you believe in the free market, then it is elementary that more people will flood into these careers which will lower the wages and diminish the bargaining power of existing software engineers.
Software is hard, humans have a hard time doing hard things, that's why we get paid more.
These are actually two perfect examples to illustrate my point. Both industries are represented by organizations that systematically make it harder for more people to enter the profession (AMA for medicine and Bar Association for legal). They have eschewed the free market in favor of regulatory capture in order to maintain their market advantage.
==Software is hard, humans have a hard time doing hard things, that's why we get paid more.==
Same could have been said of building cars and planes 50 years ago.
...and automotive and aerospace engineers are still paid quite well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Professional_Engine...
There's plenty of stuff that software engineers could want to improve today around oncall, long hours, IP restrictions, non-competes, pay transparency, parental leave, equity, promotion and career management, educational benefits, age/gender/racial/etc discrimination, health care, etc.
When we're in a position of power is a great time for us to form a union and start tackling some of the second tier of issues (like non-competes). If not now, when?
Non-competes are unenforceable in California.
Do you actually think that writing software is going to be come an unskilled job some day?
This presupposes that you'll have a list of companies to join that have all the benefits that you want.
> Non-competes are unenforceable in California.
Great. Tech work happens nationwide. You could say, "I got mine in California" or you could help pull up others. I believe that it's worthwhile, sometimes, for me to spend some of my income to help others reach a better station.
> Do you actually think that writing software is going to be come an unskilled job some day?
Do you not? Also, there are plenty of workers in tech who aren't software developers. We should be helping them get benefits as well.
Does anyone, anywhere, have a list of companies that checks literally all their boxes?
> I believe that it's worthwhile, sometimes, for me to spend some of my income to help others reach a better station.
Again, I don't think that software engineering is in a position that needs unionizing. This argument is nil to me. You're asking me to spend my income for something I don't see as a net gain.
> Do you not? Also, there are plenty of workers in tech who aren't software developers. We should be helping them get benefits as well.
You've suddenly moved the goalposts to be about something other than software engineers, which is not what we were talking about. If another profession wants to go unionize, more power to them. I don't see my profession as benefiting, hence I'm arguing against it.
Ok, that's fine. Depending on your reasoning a bit myopic/solipsistic/sociopathic, perhaps, but I recognize this is a widely held position that I happen to disagree with.
> You've suddenly moved the goalposts to be about something other than software engineers, which is not what we were talking about.
You are right, you said software engineers. But the article discusses tech workers.
There's a whole universe of sys-admins, SREs, technical writers, TPMs, QA folks, programmer analysts, devops folks, etc. who are essential to writing and shipping systems at scale who don't call themselves "software engineers".
Even if you don't think it's morally right to do so, isn't it in your self interest to ensure those people are as productive, well trained, and happy as possible so less of their work lands on your plate?
Less than $100 a month to have an organization fight open floor plans and to provide legal services on your behalf for when HR fails you seems like a small price to pay.
> I don't see my profession as benefiting
Say you're working in the game industry, and management keeps on slashing the QA org. Enjoy the additional stress of having to write all of the automation tests yourself on top of fiendish deadlines when you're already working 50 hour weeks with unpaid overtime.
Sometimes management sure loves to treat it that way:
See also: Minimum product security standards and product excellence.
This is how basically every union workplace in the US works. The pay-scale becomes very rigid. Why would tech be different?
How do you address, other than dismissal, the existence of the SAG and other unions for industries with vastly varying pay levels?
Well, in that the vast majority of union jobs are either public sector blue-collar, or both, sure.
Non-blue-collar, private-sector union jobs don't work that way, though they often have firm minimums (like SAG-AFTRA “scale” pay.)
You responded with an authoritative answer backed up with zero evidence or supporting data. That it was about unions is an embedded assumption based on that fact that the entire discussion is about unions.
I assume this is referring to the technological innovation and corporate profits of Silicon Valley. I would ask you to consider, from a broader perspective, what Silicon Valley is today. Specifically, in relation to elevated levels of depression [1], suicide [2] and inequality [3].
Isn't it worth exploring whether the same working conditions that benefit the top 10-20% are having a negative effect on the other 80-90%?
[1] https://money.cnn.com/mostly-human/silicon-valleys-secret/
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
[3] https://fortune.com/2018/10/16/silicon-valleys-income-inequa...
That workplaces are universally intolerable after 2-3--as is accepted industry common knowledge--is not a matter of individual preference, but systemic inadequacy of workplace conditions.
Burnout is not a personal problem, it is an institutional pandemic.
> One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.
-- Carol Hanisch, "The Personal Is Political", in Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation
Despite all the claims on HN on how good life is for software engineers, our field has very high burnout rates and it's very ageist.
But I also find my self largely wanting to leave out of a desire for a new challenge, learn something new. It would be way to easy to stay stagnant at a company and than find yourself forced to deal with new technology in a new role, that for everyone else is old technology (and there is a limit to how much you can realistically do that for side projects). Not that it does not happen anyways.
I don't see any way a Union could (or should) address this.
> Mosch, who sits on parent VW’s supervisory board, asked top management to provide specific information as to how the growing shift to electric cars and digital services will affect employment at Audi, which has 88,000 workers globally.
Having worked at places where management was deaf to employee concerns about the direction of the business, and seen the consequences of bad management fall upon those employees, I can clearly some sort of leverage would be good for engineers. Perhaps that could involve forcing a company to invest in new technology, thus allowing you to grow as an engineer- and perhaps making your job more secure by making the business more competitive.
Pretty easy to see how unions could address both of those issues. This might not work in favor of aggressively job-hopping careerists, but would probably work for everyone else in the International Brotherhood of Codeslingers.
Is the ideal model of employment the "job-for-life," or not. If not, how many of a "traditional" union's norms still make sense?
Personally, im not really sure where I stand on tech unions. I suspect that certain things would be better if unions were more present. Work-life balance, unpaid overtime and always-available-on-email problems would probably be better. I suspect on-the job training would be better too. This is an area where our industry is insane. How is it even possible that tech companies do less training than wharehouses?
I was trained to drive a forklift for a part time summer job. 6 days paid training out of a total<60. 13 years in tech, and at best I've been offered "do a MOOC or something in your spare time."
OTOH, I don't think most of us want unions deciding who gets hired/fired/promoted, want seniority systems or a lot of traditional union stuff like that.
Unions make sense when labor doesn't have any power. Do programmers have enough power? I'd say yes. Maybe not across the board but -- in general -- yes. We aren't coal miners, that's for sure.
Do programmers in general tech startups have enough power? I’d say yes too. Do programmers in the gaming industry have enough power? Definitely not.
In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.
and game development work is probably the most trivial software development to move to foreign jurisdictions. unless the union promoters would like video game tariffs.
That said, I'm not convinced game development would be easily outsourced. Games are some of the most highly optimized pieces of software out there, as it's in their interest to squeeze every bit of performance out of consumer hardware. You can think of their target as an intersecting line between the game being playable on consumer hardware vs. the graphics quality users expect that would lead to the game selling. Optimization has a big payoff to increase the possible market to buy a given game.
"Only?" It can itself, become a nexus of plutocratic power. The best antidote to corruption is transparency and the dispersal of power.
Neither do most employees either, what does that have to do with anything? We can't organize because there's a 5% chance that we're promoted to management?
If you want to learn more about this phenomenon, read Meditations on Moloch [1].
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I have no interest in joining a union but I absolutely take all of the salary information I can get my hands on into account when negotiating my pay.
1. Everybody's complaining about how they don't want to be promoted to management after a certain age and remain an IC.
2. Very few people, proportionally, are actually promoted to management.
3. Management vs worker is alive and well in all domains, this can be seen as the years pass in the attitudes of those promoted to management. It's the nature of the job, not the education.
Unions are (at least supposed to be) democratically run, so if tech workers don't want to sit in the same position for 45 years until they can collect a pension, their union doesn't need to negotiate for that. They can use that leverage for something else.
Putting that together, your modernized union might be an industry-wide organization that acts both for collective bargaining and as a placement agency. They could bargain for making switching companies easier - maybe employers need to support specific benefits providers so workers don't need to switch. And they could use their network to improve bargaining - a big part of strike preparation is making sure everyone is taken care of ahead of time; the union could secure job offers for workers who can't afford to go on strike.
Nobody cares much about that any more.
If you want to see a modern union, check out The Animation Guild.[1] Local 839, IATSE. They represent most of the major studio animators in Hollywood. Although they've tried, they have not been able to organize game developers.
It's about fear. Try to organize a union in the US and you will probably be fired. Even though that's illegal. WalMart has closed down stores that voted in a union. Uber workers have a strike scheduled for July 15, but it probably won't do much in the US.
The app can optionally take the next step and help employees become a legal union but before that it can function as basically anonymous Slack with polls that allow for majority opinions to be discussed openly and safely.
Even issues like "95% of employees think the coffee machine is shit we need it fixed" can be addressed more quickly.
First I need a full updated roster of employees of a company to confirm that an anonymous user is actually an employee of said company. Not sure how to do this in a fully secure and updated way.
Second user engagement. If I can figure out how to get one full company to use this as aggressively as they use slack, we'd be good to go to launch this in other companies.
Both are hard questions that I'm not sure how to answer or execute.
The second point is definitely important. The problem too with having an anonymized place where users can vent and gossip, is that it can quickly become a toxic dump of FUD, similar to how Blind is now. And the smaller the organization is, the less likely people will want to speak out, for fear their anonymous words will be traced back to them.
This is my observation too, right now there is simply a correlation that doesn't have to be.
It doesn't matter that you get paid a comfortable amount, and that another startup delivers snacks all day, and another startup delivers catered food to you: you aren't getting paid what you are worth to these companies.
The board members are just the VCs and the founders and they aren't in a position to change that. The fraction of a fraction of a percent equity that they told you "was a generous amount" after feeding your face has nothing to do with what a more equitable amount could be. Doesn't give you any information about all the scenarios in which you would get nothing because the strike is too high and the preferred shares liquidity preferences are too onerous.
Even the cash component of tech compensation could likely be 75-150% higher. This has nothing to do with the stagnating wages in other sectors, we are working with this generation's largest and fastest growing companies and could accelerate comp growth and other changes.
its okay if the average moves up, and transparency increases on stock options and the liquidity preferences of preferred shareholders. this is only currently relevant to non-public companies, and this article was about startups so thats fitting
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzJO6ELjJT9/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzJP9nlDA5c/
Thinking that unions are going to have an effect is like believing flies effect pigs.
Thats been the MO for people at Big Oil, Big Pharma and Wall Street for a long time now. People are in deep denial about the state of affairs.
These are "too big to fail" systems with too much momentum built up behind them, for a trajectory change.
The last thing I want is to let those same people formally represent me in a union. Given the current climate, those are very likely to be the people who would be running it.
Is it so, or my memory is playing tricks with me?
I am well off, have a flexible work life balance, and I enjoy my job. There is nothing that a union would bring to the table for me.
If there was a union in Silicon Valley in the early 80s, we would be no where close to where we are today. Look at the stark difference between a Silicon Valley worker vs someone working at Boeing or other unionized shops.
Sometimes HN is a caricature.