It feels like a lot of astro-turfing going on here. Why would any sane person be against unions?
Comments having divided opinions on a divisive topic is the most common thing on the internet. There's no need to torture Occam.
To the extent that unions would make the company able to make profit less efficiently, for example by making it harder to fire poor employees, it would have been against my own interests.
I also totally never felt that there was a power imbalance between me and my employer. I got to work whenever I wanted, worked on whatever I wanted, left whenever I wanted, and when I got burned out and started disliking the job, I quite easily found a job somewhere else. Again, probably different for non-software-engineers, but it's not hard to understand why many of us feel no draw to unions.
It's hard for me to understand when you look at other similar industries. We're not talking about blue collar unions here: we're talking about white collar unions. They're very different.
Take Hollywood as an example. You have incredibly wealthy individuals who are all members of unions. Kevin Feige makes Disney billions of dollars, but he still pays his PGA dues.
The purpose of unions like the WGA, PGA, DGA, SAG, and Equity aren't to "make it harder to fire poor employees" - they're to provide equal protection to all members regardless of whether they're making millions upon millions of dollars or just getting started in the industry.
Sometimes I feel people in tech forget there is a highly skilled, highly unionized industry just a few hundred miles south of Silicon Valley that seems to be doing OK. Is it perfect? No, definitely not. Is the film industry better to work in with the unions than without? Almost certainly yes.
Yet demand for software engineers are higher than ever. It seems like market forces should counteract these issues, however SV is impervious to these issues.
If you want to start an industry wide programmer union, by all means, start one and then try and get people to join it. I'd love to hear what benefits you think I would get by joining an industry wide programmer union.
The WGA was grandfathered in with the law, but you’re not allowed in the US to create sector wide programmers union. It is cool to imagine what you could accomplish with sector-wide software strikes though.
Have you considered using the AMA or similar in your examples instead?
And so if someone wants to convince people how effective unions are at worker protection, Hollywood's unions aren't the most convincing example.
Another personal view - as somebody from Europe, I really don't feel any need for any unions. I am not trembling from fear that I will get fired. If I will, there will be good reasons (my poor performance or employer getting into financial troubles). For me, that's a good trade-off for extra pay and interesting work. When I was consulting, I had nano-fraction of current job security, but again it was offset by salary. Again, fair deal for me and for employer too.
Another reason - anytime I even remotely interfered with Union people in my previous jobs, they literally reeked of internal politic games, keeping their comfy jobs as safe as possible. You get this kind of folks in any company, even in my current one, although we don't have unions. They try different ways (ie managing pension fund or other 'political' positions that require little work but add friction to firing process). Needless to say they are never stellar performance workers.
This all obviously doesn't say anything about Google or generally SV culture, my experience is local to 3 European states only, and cca 6 companies.
We in IT are vastly overpaid compared to any other engineering degree holders. Not complaining, but its a fact. Just talk to other engineering folks. High salaries and positions can be achieved quickly, not over 30 years of gradual rise of staying within same company.
If/once market saturates and salaries go down significantly, there might be more need for unions. But most folks are not there I think.
It's hard to concevive of a more asymmetrical partnership, and a partnership in which one party uses all their power, legally and socially, to increase the intensity and duration of work, and dictates the method in which it is done.
Your employer doesn’t feel that way.
Understand: I make no claim that malevolently exploitative companies don't exist; of course they do.
But your position seems to be that any company that makes any profit is malevolently exploitative.
Going to work without a union is like going to court without a lawyer. Are there incompetent lawyers? Does it cost money to hire a lawyer? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't a stupid idea to try to represent yourself pro se.
Unfortunately, workers in the US have been the subject to the equivalent of a fifty year propaganda campaign bankrolled by prosecutors (business owners) to convince people they're really better off if they represent themselves in court pro se (without a union). The sad thing is the campaign has worked surprisingly well.
Dropping the analogy, I think many tech workers are treated relatively well for now by employers. Sort of like a well-treated personal assistant to the boss, who is comfortable and has their small privileges compared to those in the factory floor, and therefore feels like they're more like a boss than a worker, even though that's not at all the case.
The startup ecosystem has also encouraged tech workers to think of themselves as future bosses rather than present-day workers, so they favor the policies they imagine their hypothetical future selves benefiting from, even though it hurts themselves and their friends today.
That's stretching the analogy too far, and adding biasing details to force the impression that unions are bad.
Here's another analogy:
Going to work without a union is like going to war without any military organization. If your enemy is well-organized, how smart is it for you and your fellow soldiers to attack individually in an uncoordinated way without any overall strategy?
That is perhaps a better analogy indeed, but still lacks a bit since each 'soldier' has different goals and capabilities, which may be curtained by if they organise. And the 'enemy' still requires you to cooperate with them at the end, to come to their side and help them achieve their goals, which again, would probably mean you would be fucked if you were fighting alongside, and midway decided that the 'enemy' was actually right and you wanted to work with them.
The other thing is that I see a lot of criticism of some practice or other of some particular union inflated into a critique of unionization in general. I object to that because 1) it often echos management's anti-union propaganda talking points, and 2) it denies the possibly to innovate in the area of worker organization. I think there's a lot of value for workers in worker organization, even for high performers, and I think that needs to be the focus.
I have no horse in this race. But as a counterpoint, pretty much everything in New York is more expensive due to heavy unionisation, particularly around construction and public services.
Europe doesn't have this problem because they have good unions. We can't have those in America. I really don't know why, but that's just how it is.
https://financesonline.com/10-wealthiest-cities-in-the-world...
Construction in NYC is far more expensive than anywhere else in the world, largely because of union contracts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
It's not just unions, but here is a taste:
There are “nippers” to watch material being moved around and “hog house tenders” to supervise the break room. Each crane must have an “oiler,” a relic of a time when they needed frequent lubrication. Standby electricians and plumbers are to be on hand at all times, as is at least one “master mechanic.” Generators and elevators must have their own operators, even though they are automatic. An extra person is required to be present for all concrete pumping, steam fitting, sheet metal work and other tasks.
In New York, “underground construction employs approximately four times the number of personnel as in similar jobs in Asia, Australia, or Europe,” according to an internal report by Arup, a consulting firm that worked on the Second Avenue subway and many similar projects around the world.
I don't know the answers. Some of them legitimately may be useless sinecures, but it's worth keeping in mind that what looks like redundant waste is sometimes an important guard against some kind of failure. Just because it isn't always used doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile.
In the public sector, unions and engineering firms/management contractors are not at odds as they are in the private sector, they collaborate to rip off the public.
Even more likely is that the redundancy exists because of something bad that happened in the past. That is how most regulation comes into existence.
Companies will want to save money and you don't need to force them to save money.
It's clearly a "job saving" argument and not a "money saving" one.
Unions at least in my country are all about political power, and little about workers' rights. The major ones are composed of mostly retirees from an era and a work modus operandi that is no longer the case there.
They argue for a model that is equal for everyone - yes, everyone equal at the bottom. They insist that every contract should be handled mostly at the national level (for political bargaining power) and discourage local agreements between unions and employers.
Also the public transportation seems to enjoy the "special" privilege of having a strike (not necessarily for workers' rights) at least once every month, "by chance" almost always on a Monday or a Friday.
Oh, and when an acquaintance of mine tried to get a union to help her file her retirement papers, they basically left her to her own devices (she was a retiree, no longer a worker, so "tough luck") and she had to fix the many problems that emerged by herself.
If we need unions, they need to be nothing like the one I hear about every day in the news.
EDIT: And for this reason I also refuse to take part in any union (last time someone wanted to do so, all I heard were "marches" and "strikes": people, it's not the 1970s anymore).
Unions are good for private companies, as there is a balance of powers - if the owners pay employees too little, employees quit, whereas if the employees protest too much, the company doesn't sell anything - both scenarios lead to collapse / bankrupcy, so both sides are motivated to cooperate and find a compromise.
In public services, there is no such balance - the state isn't constrained by market forces, and it won't collapse no matter how much employees protest. In addition, state employment usually comes with other benefits (e.g. job & pension security), so really the employees shouldn't be complaining and holding the whole country hostage.
-FDR Letter on the Resolution of Federation of Federal Employees Against Strikes in Federal Service
I think we've seen this play out in how public unions now dominate policy discussions putting the public good as an often secondary consideration.
Because they, like any other organization, tend to become corrupt and exercise their power to the benefit of the "party insiders", at the expense of the everyday member. And I, for one, don't feel any need to have my pay rate negotiated based on some group average or least common denominator. And union dues.
I personally fully support the right of people to bargain collectively, but being a member of a union is not something I'm particularly interested in.
> Because they, like any other organization, tend to become corrupt and exercise their power to the benefit of the "party insiders", at the expense of the everyday member. And I, for one, don't feel any need to have my pay rate negotiated based on some group average or least common denominator. And union dues.
Going to work without a union is like going to court without a lawyer. Are there incompetent lawyers? Does it cost money to hire a lawyer? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't a stupid idea to try to represent yourself pro se.
I'd join a union if one were available to me, then I'd work in it to make sure it was well-run and effective.
And while the company may not be "on your side", companies are still bound by market forces, on both sides of the equation. You can't compete (for now!) without people, and if you constantly run your best people off by mistreating them, you aren't going to be very successful in the long run.
Its not true.
Real life isn't that simple. These things aren't binary, "it's true" or "it's false". There is a continuum along which things vary. The extent to which companies are compelled by market forces to treat their employees well is obviously something that varies by sector / geography / profession / etc.
I'm not saying that nobody is justified in joining a union, or that unions have no reason to exist. I'm just saying that relative to my combination of the above factors, I do not find any appeal in the idea of joining a union, when you balance it against the associated negatives.
EDIT: Let's read the second paragraph of the article again:
"each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company"
You see that phrase 'labor activism'? This is the exact cognitive dissonance I am describing here. You want to pretend activism isn't political, that an employee planting a message on the website of a company affiliated with their employer related to this political subject is totally innocent and not a politically charged message. Just 'totally telling you your rights' and nothing more than that. That's intellectually dishonest.
As others have said, if she'd abused her access to insert, say, a pithy pop-up about recycling on Earth Day, she would have received a slap on the wrist at the very worst. This isn't about changing the code without authorization. This is about a message Google doesn't want employees to hear.
I believe that you should be able to join whatever professional organization that you want.
But the moment that you try and force me to join that professional organization, with legal provisions that would cause me to lose my job if I refuse, is the moment that I go to war against you.
I will retaliate. I will fight back. Because I no longer have any sympathy for you, if you are going to cause me to lose my job because I refused to join your special club.
To me this sounds like someone snuck a PR that does questionable things into the code base.
Sure you can say that's a failing of the PR process, but it doesn't mean putting up the PR in the first place shouldn't be punishable.
"Following the process" doesn't absolve you from the fact you initiated the process with questionable intents.
Honestly, I would not want to work with someone who'd do that, and would be surprised if that wasn't a fireable offense.
I value the fact I don't have to scour PRs for covert (or honestly, even overt) attempts to stick political messages into our codebase.