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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about unions, but I'm OK with this move.

Cafeteria workers need unions. The maids who muck out hotel room toilets need unions. Coal miners who work in horrific conditions for little pay need unions.

You know who doesn't need unions? Millionaire TV anchors. Millionaire movie studio execs and actors. Anyone who makes six figures, which includes a hell of a lot of union members. In those cases the unions need the members, not the other way 'round, and it leads to greed and corruption because all both sides can see is dollar signs.

So, again. I think it's good that the caf workers got some protection. I'm still on the fence about computer programmers, though.

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All workers can be abused regardless of their salary.

Examples for programmers that come to mind:

- Companies that require workers to enter arbitration and give up their right to sue.

- Companies that force workers to give up IP generated in their free time (not using company resources)

- Companies that require programmers to work 12 hour days, "crunch times", minimal paid leave (game dev industry, VFX industry comes to mind.)

Unions collectively negotiate with employers to reduce or eliminate these abuses. Some unions have poor leadership, which is to be expected. Some companies have poor leadership. Not everyone is good at negotiating, which can create power imbalances on either end of the table. But on the whole, unions are a Good Thing, even for IT folk.

A lot of people on HN are interested in a 30-hour work week. A strong union movement could get that done, as they have been working on in Germany: https://www.businessinsider.com/german-workers-can-now-work-...

We need a stronger law: any employee should be able to choose how many hours or days per week to work AND work for any other company at the same time (NDA applies, but non compete bs doesn't). Execs do this all the time: they can be on boards in multiple companies, run other companies, while possessing material information about them all.

The way I see it's working is the total comp negotiation goes as usual, but the employer isn't allowed to ask how much time the employee indends to work and whether one works for other companies. The salary and other comp is paid bi weekly as usual, but is pro rated to the number of hours or days worked. All the machinery is already in place: big corps have very detailed per minutes compensation for vacations, various on call duties and so on.

This will be strictly better for the IRS, because more competition means more taxes, but much worse for the dividend seeking investors.

Obviously, this will be a decade long legal battle with tens of millions in expenses, and it can't be done without a full time team of motivated and very expensive lawyers. However if 100k engineers spend 1k/year as membership fees, this organization will have a 100m/year budget and can keep courts busy forever.

Another example of abuse:

- Unions that forces its members to only work specific contracts giving up their right to work.

Entertainment unions handle such things like health insurance and retirement funds. Most actors aren't millionaires. Having the few millionaires in the same union is good for the non-millionaires. Because it means that studios only get the in-demand millionaires if they provide okay conditions for everybody else as well.

And in the UK "tech" and "Entertainment" are in the same union.

There is a lot of similarity and crossover between teh workers in that area.

Most actors aren't millionaires

Which is why I specified millionaires. Let the actors who are working paycheck to paycheck or earning a middle-class wage, or working second jobs as waiters or whatever join a union. But when an actor is making $10 million for a movie, they don't need a union. They have an accountant and an agent who take care of them.

Are you saying after a certain earning threshold actors would have to drop from the union / guild? And if they hit a dry spell, they can come back? Maybe is it better to base it on wealth?

Don’t you think the paycheck to paycheck actors like to know even the super successful are part of their group? Maybe the strength that emanates from the group and what binds them is the profession and the craft, not the earnings? Is a highly paid actor, a better actor than someone who makes 1 cents less then the threshold?

Seems very arbitrary and not something that creates group cohesion.

Problem with actors union is that they strike if the highly paid actors doesn't join the union, because they refuse contracts where non-union actors are present. Actors union also has progressive fees, so the rich actors pays a lot more than the poor ones. So I don't think the rich actors really want to be in a union, they are just forced to be and pay the cost if they want to work.

Yeah let's create fake talking points about unions using the million-dollar salaried talking heads of media owners.

> Cafeteria workers need unions. The maids who muck out hotel room toilets need unions. Coal miners who work in horrific conditions for little pay need unions.

aren't all those jobs ripe for automating? unions feel like an intermediary measure to the end goal: no more humans in shitty jobs.

In tech we talk about automation like it’s an inevitable thing but for as long as the cost of developing robots to do all of these jobs is much more than hiring humans it’s not happening. Even that stupid pizza oven Zune is all about won’t replace workers anytime soon.

for sure. but once the cost is lower than hiring and training a human, it's almost inevitable getting that robot instead of the human.

Everyone needs unions - not just the little people.

why thou?

We are all workers in the end

i think very few are the kind of workers that need unions. and the numbers are falling constantly. more workers than ever before are independent human beings, fully able to take care of their own interests. even more so in our field of software development, where the pay is monstrous, the hours very low, and everyone's a contractor. i'd rather have my freedom both from a worker's pov and from an employer's.

Would you like to cite any studies on why the 99.99% of tech employees /workers don't need unions.

An most tech workers pay is not "monstrous" compared to our peers in other professions - even more so out side of SV

The CTO of a telco was in my branch before he retired a few years back.

> Millionaire movie studio execs and actors

The story about these is interesting. Because for every millionaire actor there are hundreds/thousands of wannabe actors. Who may or may not one day become a millionaire actor.

Not to mention all the rest of the TV/movie production chain: writers, directors, cinematographers, gaffers, production assistants, stunts professionals, etc, etc, etc

The "over-unionization" of that sector ensures fair pay and conditions (which sometimes are already grueling) for the professionals involved in this area of business. What happens without unions? Check the VFX companies for an example.

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