What's the benefit of being in a union for highly specialized tech workers that are very in demand?
Unions as only a working class institution is mostly a US historic artifact. Other countries have unions in highly specialized and in-demand industries too.
Were they firing people arbitrarily making it a positive thing that the company will now have to jump through hoops to reprimand or get rid of the worst non-productive workers? Or the countless other limitations now imposed on the company from making decisions which benefit the existence of the company itself (and the fact they can even hire/pay for these workers)?
Will it make Kickstarter super cautious about hiring new people with their new extensive protections lowering the amount of people who would benefit from the success of various companies who have unions (and the taxation of these which benefits the wider community)? Turning them into mini-exclusive clubs of workers, while everyone else works p/t or on contract to avoid f/t hires?
Additionally if the union expands beyond highly compensated tech' workers (e.g. Customer Service, QA, janitorial, etc) it could help them negotiate better pay and benefits.
As a concrete example, when Google analyzed their wages they actually noticed that they were underpaying men.
Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point.
Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less.
Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.
> Whether you actually utilize your benefits should also have no bearing on whether you get promotions or raises, given that those are supposed to be tied to job performance, so I don't understand how that's related to my point.
You are misinterpreting my comment. It had been well documented that in job searches women prioritize benefits at a higher rate than men. So women might on average be getting $10,000 less in salary but also ~$10,000 less in benefits. This is not about utilitzation of the same benefits. This is about differences in men's and women's job preferences that result in unequal salary but equal overall compensation.
> Similarly, for being on the rotation less. If Google wants to include on-call hours worked in your salary, it has the option to pay explicitly for overtime. The reality, of course, is that Google does not want to do this, because this way they can pay both women and men less
Equal pay for equal work can also be violated by giving workers equal pay while allocating unequal work.
> Finally, I'm not sure why you trust Google's analysis of its own payment structure. Besides the fact that this is literally an instance of "we investigated ourselves, and didn't find anything wrong!", they've been repeatedly found to pay women and men different salaries for the same role when employees release their salaries (something the company officially denies doing). They also have a long history of executives blocking women's career advancement to punish them for reporting sexual harassment.
Google's analysis is conducted over all of their employees, for one. By comparison people typing their salaries into spreadsheets is 1) subject to people falsifying or misremembering their compensation, and 2) has a selection bias towards people who feel they are not compensated fairly. Furthermore, Google has the data to know the stock prices at the time equity packages are awarded, which affects compensation results (e.g. someone who started right before a rise in stock gets more money than someone after even though their original equity packages had the same dollar value).
I'm afraid that paying employees less for a role with the same stated responsibilities, then allocating them less work, and using that as an excuse for why you're not paying them as much, is still a violation of equal pay for equal work. If the roles have different responsibilities, they should have different titles.
Is there any evidence that would convince you that Google is not being honest in its evaluation of its workers' compensation? Because if there isn't, this is kind of a pointless conversation to have.
Anyway. You still haven't addressed my original point, which I can back up with lots of research: that women are passed over for promotions and raises much more than men:
https://www.nber.org/digest/feb07/w12321.html
https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2018/05/new-research-pr...
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/19/health/women-work-harder-...
Also, talk to literally any woman who is trying to advance in her career. This is an incredibly universal phenomenon. It's really strange to me to see people trying to cast doubt on it in this thread when it's actually a really uncontroversial fact.
Yet again, you continue to misinterpret the role of benefits that I explained in my comments. Women's prioritization of benefits over compensation does not mean they are receiving different benefits than men at the same company. It means they apply to different companies than men. Pointing out that Google does not negotiate benefits is not a valid line of criticism.
> I'm afraid that paying employees less for a role with the same stated responsibilities, then allocating them less work, and using that as an excuse for why you're not paying them as much, is still a violation of equal pay for equal work. If the roles have different responsibilities, they should have different titles.
You assume that this is the company refusing to allocate more work to women. Typically, this is the opposite: the company is more than happy to give women 24 hour oncalls but a lower rate of women are willing to do so than men.
> Is there any evidence that would convince you that Google is not being honest in its evaluation of its workers' compensation? Because if there isn't, this is kind of a pointless conversation to have.
The onus is on you to provide proof of your allegations that Google is not being honest in its pay analysis. What proof do you have that they are lying? Like I said, employee compiled spreadsheets are rife with selection bias, and there's no guarantee that employees are even telling the truth. Why would we believe the latter over studies compiled by people who actually have the real salary data?
> Anyway. You still haven't addressed my original point, which I can back up with lots of research: that women are passed over for promotions and raises much more than men:
This is not what the research you linked claims. There is a promotion gap, in the same way that there is a wage gap: the average woman is less likely to be promoted than the average man. The existence of a gap is not the same as the existence of discrimination. Much like the wage gap, when normalizing for role and experience the disparity mostly disappears:
> The additional controls slightly reduce the gender difference in promotion rates but, controlling for all variables, including worker performance ratings, men's promotion rates were still 2.2 percentage points higher than women's.
And furthermore, your own study says that there is no wage gap once these factors are accounted for:
> However, in marked contrast, the authors find that after controlling for measured characteristics, promotions and expected promotions continued to yield comparable wage increases for both men and women. And, there were essentially no gender differences in overall wage growth at the establishment, with or without promotion
So this difference in promotion drops to 2% when accounting for differences in role and experience, and there is no wage difference with or without promotion between men and women. I'm not sure how you think this study supports your point.
Not to mention, there's plenty of evidence of discrimination against men: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/
> Also, talk to literally any woman who is trying to advance in her career. This is an incredibly universal phenomenon. It's really strange to me to see people trying to cast doubt on it in this thread when it's actually a really uncontroversial fact.
I have. Many do note instances where they believed there were discriminated against on the basis of their sex. Most of them also detailed explicitly discriminatory policies aimed at allocating more opportunity to men. I'm more than happy to give you the details if you so desire. They want to be treated equal to men, not have the red carpet rolled out for them because they're "diverse". Since you're seeing many people disagreeing with your claims around these supposedly uncontroversial facts, it would be prudent to rethink whether your assertions really are as universal and uncontroversial as you claim.
Notably, directors, actors, and writers in American film and television are unionised. That does not mean that everyone is paid the same, nor that there is any concept as "seniority" (very rare in unions that represent highly skilled workers), nor that it is assumed that everyone has the same level of skill.
While the AMA and ABA are not conventionally considered unions, they do effectively control entry into and regulation of their respective professions. (Medicine and Law).
If brain surgeons benefit from being in a union, javascript developers probably do as well.
In my experience, tech unionists fall into one of two camps:
* The progressive camp, which is largely what you describe. Likes open border, diversity hiring and the like.
* The protectionist camp. Wants to limit immigration, require CS degrees, and clamp down on H1B hires.
The former seems to care more about influencing the politics of the company. The latter is more the traditional union stance, which is to increase the price of labor by restricting the supply.
Focused on global markets rather than focused on capturing as much as possible from the lucrative American market.
1) Better IP restrictions. Working on open source, side projects, etc.
2) Better treatment around oncall.
3) Limiting hours (no expectations of 60+ hour weeks)
4) Transparency in hiring, promotion, and review processes
5) Transparency in company performance and benefits decisions
6) Better benefits, particularly things like parental leave, vacation, and health care
7) A greater slice of the value that workers provide
8) Representation at the board level, or at least a democratically elected representative to the C-level
9) A representative during disagreements with the company (e.g. making it harder to be singled out/fired just because)
There are probably a bunch more, this is just what comes to mind off the top of my head.
For example, the vast majority of employers reserve the right to change benefits at any time, and they liberally do in a minor downturn. I've worked at places where an email was sent saying "as of tomorrow we will no longer match your 401(k)." That's it, one executive decided something, you just have to deal with it or quit. Another example is an email saying "this is the new PTO acquiral schedule." I lost a whole week of PTO that day, no apologies, just a "this is how it's going to be." If you're working under a union contract where the benefits are spelled out in the contract, they have to wait until the contract term runs out and then renegotiate another contract to change the benefits.
Some tech companies are known to demand unpaid overtime without prior warning. A union contract may have a provision where you must be paid for overtime or overtime can't be mandatory, etc.
Another example might be that allegations of misconduct must have a transparent investigation before adverse action is taken and the employee is entitled to be represented by the union during the investigation.
If you've only worked in a bull market environment with a massive amount of free flowing VC money you might not appreciate those sorts of things. I've worked outside SV during the Great Recession, during that time jobs dried up and benefits were dropped like a bad date. I was laid off and had to relocate to get a new job. I'm not saying that a union would have prevented that, I'm just illustrating that jobs might not be so plentiful at some point in the future.
Another thing is when a significant portion of a workforce is unionized then there is a tendency to improve the working conditions of non-union shops because they have to compete with unioned shops for employees.
Professional athletes are some of the the most highly specialized, highly paid, and highly demanded employees and the vast majority of them at the highest level are unionized.
Who, exactly, is highly in demand? There was a post on here last week from somebody who had gone on, I think, 40+ in-person interviews and hadn’t gotten a single offer. It’s well established that experience actually works against you in this profession; you can end up being too old long before you hit retirement age. Influential hiring authority Aline Lerner argues that people with Master’s degrees should be rejected in favor of those with just Bachelor’s degrees; education can work against you, too. There’s an unprecedented market for 30-year-old developers with specific education and experience; if you’re anybody else, you would have been better off getting a business degree. To paraphrase Bane, “Do you feel in demand”?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Footballers'_Asso...
Well, at the risk of getting all tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, I can’t help but wonder if the people posting these “you guys are too well paid to have any other concerns” types are really practicing software developers and not “startup founders”.
Or, for that matter, doctors, who are frequently members of professional organizations that are unions in all but name.
There's a lot of hubris in the tech field that high salaries and a plethora of available jobs is the norm and will forever be that way.
I anticipate a lot of "Why Tech Needs A Union" posts on HN during the next recession or when the current crop of 25-35 year olds reach their late 40's and all of a sudden have trouble finding stable work.