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Comment by _sbrk | Hacker News Reader

I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern.

Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45pm, everyone was back in there, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm.

One day, I needed to connect two PCs together, which was approved by boss as they would be isolated from the network. So, being the diligent type, I went off and found some network cards and a cable to do this.

About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.

Not "you're not qualified", not "you're not taking the proper ESD protection steps" (was wearing a grounding tape strap), etc. This boiled down to the union job classification, which said that I couldn't open up a PC to put in a network card.

Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

I got my degree, went to work for a start-up where ambition and taking on responsibility are appreciated and rewarded. I never looked back...

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My experience with US unions was similar.

They're just another layer of bureaucracy that is NOT required to respond to you as an individual in any way. I've had lots of poor experience with US unions protecting the lowest denominator at the expense of everyone else. They seem to focus on very specific rules that came up in specific situations applied to everything possible and end up just creating a web that is no different than an employer's web of bureaucracy ... albeit much slower / resistant to change.

I've seen a lot of strange posts about how a union will help with X, Y, Z. They can only help with what they've negotiated, and those rules are restrictions on you as well as the employer. In the US if you've got a fairly simple job that's probabbly OK and a net positive. A nuanced job / people with lots of different skill sets / moving quickly ... those rules can be a nightmare.

Those rules apply to what you can or can't do as much as they apply to what your employer wants to do.

I've heard European unions are notably different, I'm highly skeptical of anyone's ability to emulate that as the help most tech union drives in the US seem to be getting is from traditional US unions.

The experience I have had with UK unions is very different from this, and the other descriptions of unions in the US.

I only had a few interactions with them (in a union capacity, the rep was a normal worker as well). These were things like: Getting some new equipment for the break room (kettle and mugs), pushing some new health and safety process (developed alongside the company), and then the yearly meeting, which was along the lines of: "We tried to get X% pay increase, but we ended up only getting X-y% increase. We're organising events for this charity this year. If you want to get involved please get in touch".

I get the feeling that, in general, in Europe unions and companies work together with a co-operative relationship. Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.

It's certainly a more antagonistic relationship from what I've heard from folks in Europe. The worst part is IMO that least with my experience Union leadership is often pretty poor and despite being people who actually work those jobs, they're not very knowledgeable or capable about even the job.

It's unfortunate.

>Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.

It likely stems from the fact that the birth of the unions in the US was a super violent affair (grotesque murders of both union organizers and union busters). All of the old unions born around that time were founded in an environment where the company was a hostile enemy you negotiated every minute thing with.

This 100%. I'm generally against unions in tech, but the right to have a union was earned in blood here in the US. I hope it stays around at least as a remembrance to those that died for it. We all benefited in some ways.

Not just those. One of the more powerful unions famously bombed the Los Angeles Times building and killed a bunch of journalists because it was opposed to unionization.

That sounds like a much better relationship. But in that case isn’t the role of the Union almost redundant? I mean what’s stopping the workers and management from just having a dialog without a union?

Another thing is I don’t want the same X% increase as everyone else. What if I’m better or worse employee? Why should I get the same output for variable input?

Same reason that when you and your friends reserve dinner at Hakkasan you don't all go and call Hakkasan - it's better for everyone if the group manifests as one. Your rep is your designated guy in charge of following up on your requests.

I'm not pro-union but the use case is meaningful.

Just to take Sweden as an example. For public companies with more than 25 employees the workers have the right to two members and two substitutes on the companies board. Usually these come from the union working with the company.

The goal of this is to create a dialog of how the company is run and similar on every level of the company.

Regarding your question about the salaries, that is mostly blue-collar work here. For white-collar workers the unions mostly exist to enforce regulations and allow the workers to have the legal clout and information necessary when disputes arise, creating more of a do it right the first time rather than try to bend the rules to see how far you can go environment. Salaries are individually negotiated.

Maybe the differences between how unions are implemented. I've worked at a white collar union shop (electrical engineering) where salaries are collectively negotiated. i.e. x% increase per year. The net result at this particular place has been that outside of promotions, salary increases are tied to tenure.

I mean in theory nothing. But then that dialogue would have to be called something, and it would basically be the union at that point.

I mean that's all the union is, a group of employees having a unified relationship with the company.

I was working in a factory at the time, and the nature of that work didn't lend itself to individual bargaining, like say software engineering. That said I don't see why you couldn't ask for more if you're a better employee, I never got told I couldn't ask. It might be down a different path, like a promotion. And not every union would necessarily do any salary negotiation.

> Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

There is nothing inherent in unions that make them operate like that.

It's something inherent in human nature, unfortunately.

There are ALL SORTS of inefficiencies and insanity and laziness and treating people like garbage most of us have experienced at non-union workplaces, of course.

That union shops may seem to be subject to extra risks of of certain types of nonsense doesn't mean they aren't a win overall.

But yeah, to be honest, some people with unions find they need to struggle with union leadership over some things. It's generally a lot better overall than struggling with your boss.

A union is simply an agreement between workers and management. Agreements can be modified to prevent such faults when both parties enter in good faith.

I had a uncle that was a bricklayer and moved somewhere that bricklayers were in demand so that he could get paid more. He was not a union member. When the union found out he was doing the same work for slightly less, they sent some people over to threaten his life if he didn't join union or leave. He left.

What's with the anecdotes on this thread? The OP was trying to make substantive statements about unions in general and why anecdotes are ineffective in describing them, and your counter was to provide yet another anecdote?

I had a father that worked as a fisherman for a small company which was not union. He ended up dying because the owners didn't properly inspect the boat and it capsized because of a fatal flaw in the design, killing everyone on board.

Using your same argument, we should abolish all corporations, correct? Since a poorly ran corporation can quite literally kill people due to negligence.

I find it honestly absurd that people attribute all of these negative qualities to unions and yet are not willing to do the exact same thing to the same corporate behavior which has zero checks or balances.

Because your issue is better solved by regulations.

Corporations don't pretend to be on the workers' side; unions do.

Corporations absolutely do pretend to be on the workers' side.

I had a relative that many suspected was murdered way back in the day when my city was having one of its bridges built. Basically there was a strike going on and he was a scab.

I guess I should have mentioned the entire process in my previous comment instead of pointing out the conclusion.

Businesses use lobbyist to get laws to entrench themselves in their own monopolies. If I attempt to disrupt this business by avoiding their regulatory capture, police are sent to punish me. Depending upon which laws I violate, I can be sent to jail and end up with years in prison. Prison, where you are kept in stylized cages and your ever waking moment is controlled by others. That is a treatment that I do not see any significant difference from treatment that would be labeled as slavery.

I know people this has happened to, and I don't see why people treat it as being somehow justified just because the business went through the process of lobbying (and political donations which only seem different than bribery in name only).

And this is ignoring the history of business outright murdering people for protesting for workers' rights.

There is nothing inherent that makes dictatorships violent. Yet they are. But maybe there is something inherent that makes them violent after all? It's simply not obvious at a glance that they're going to be violent.

I'm not sure that there's nothing inherent in unions that makes them promote mediocrity. There could be - the fact that unions add more layers to the bureaucracy and slow things down could very well have the effect of promoting mediocrity.

Generally, if you want people to do the best work, then the people need to be motivated and they need to have as little friction as possible. Unions add friction. In a company where things work, unions would probably add friction and cause more mediocrity.

Note that I'm not saying that unions necessarily cause this, but I am saying that they might be a cause for it. Claiming otherwise with no supporting arguments isn't convincing.

> There is nothing inherent that makes dictatorships violent. Yet they are.

They are violent in the same way Democracies are violent. If you break some arbitrary rule, we put you in a cage. If you resist, you die.

Violence is inherent in statehood, it’s not specific to dictatorships.

Unions operate financially like churches. They depend on the dues (tithes) paid by their membership. The more members you have, the more influence and power you have.

This incentivizes unions to never voluntarily reduce their numbers. The more mediocre the employees, the more protection they need from the union, and thus the more power the union has over the employee population.

The ideal union employee to a union boss, based on how unions are funded and run in the US, is a minimally competent drone that regularly pays dues.

Unions also consistently advocate credentialism over performance. If an employer wants to improve performance the union will fight any outcome based benchmarks, and will instead push for everyone to be educated and certified. In truth it would be best for the business to do both, educate and measure outcomes. What is more important, that every teacher in the US have a masters degree, or that every teacher be good at teaching. The union will always advocate for the former.

I like unions, particularly in the private sector. I wish they operated differently and were more pro-active in cultivating skill (like old school guilds) and less about body count.

We should advocate union reform rather than ditching them entirely then.

A friend of mine worked as a developer at defense contractor with mostly union employees. One time they moved him to a different cubicle. Due to union work rules he literally had to wait two days for a union electrician to come by and plug his desktop computer into the wall socket. Just ridiculous.

Personally I had to wait a week to move desks until an electrician carried my desktop two desks over. He didn't move my monitor ... that wasn't included in the rules.

I ran into this sometimes when I worked conferences. We weren’t allowed to plug in our equipment, though we had paid for a power drop and it was sitting there. Of course, nobody was there to do it, so I would just plug it in. If they want to come by later and unplug it and plug it back in, they can feel free.

I had same issue at a large investment bank. I don’t blame the union so much as the negotiated rules. De minimis items shouldn’t need union unless there’s a safety or liability issue.

I've personally seen this exact same thing. I was raised pro-union. I'm still very pro-union. Stuff like this is just batty, though.

Was that "union rules" or "the way the company had agreed to comply with their agreement with the union"? Because 'work to rule' can be a double-edged sword, and in my experience companies just love to blame their own chosen behavior on the union. "We have to fire you if you're late five times this quarter, because the union" really means "after we frequently and arbitrarily abused employees under the excuse of 'attendance' the union insisted we have a uniform attendance standards and this is what we came up with".

That's still "union rules". If the union chose to be pedantic and insisted upon these rules in negotiation, then it's really the union's fault.

No, it's "union and company rules". The nature of a negotiation is that both sides have agreed on the result. Getting people to accept calling this sort of bullshit "union rules" is propaganda.

This is really a problem of unintended consequences. And it's not "union rules", it's a collective agreement that both the union and management sign off on. Union shop or not, we can all point at absurdities in work life - just as many come from management in my experience (which doesn't include much work with unions).

It's a bit like the tax code or some complicated piece of bureaucracy. Some of the stuff in there sure seems stupid but you can bet it was put in for a reason that, at the time at least, looked sensible. In the case of things like "only an electrician is allowed to do that", it's a pretty safe bet that at some point in the past management tried to do an end run around the agreement and have cheaper labor do something they weren't trained or compensated for. In the US at least the system is so adversarial you end up with hard lines being drawn on both sides.

The alternative to enforcing rules pedantically is enforcing them arbitrarily, which is what happens in non-union environments. One set of rules for Billy, another set of rules for Sally.

Why is the result of a negotiation only the fault of one party if both sides had equivalent bargaining power?

Think about where the company's interest lies. Without the union, of course they would want their employee to just plug the thing in. They wouldn't agree to such a silly stricture if it wasn't forced upon them by the union.

But if as a low-level manager I can gain sympathy and build relationships with my superiors by blaming my inefficiency on the union-devils, why not cause a petty delay with passive aggressive rules.

The union might be a corrupt and self serving enterprise. They may just be reacting to abuses by management.

Perhaps the company kept getting fines from the fire marshal for unsafe use of extension cords. Management tries to use that as an excuse to harass or fire their electrical workers. The union responds by saying that their electricians never saw nor approved the use of the cords and that they had no way of knowing they were in use. After enough hostile interaction, you wind up with a rule that nobody can plug their own computer into an existing outlet.

The places where I hear about the worst red tape, are places where the relationship between the unions and management are really antagonistic. Both sides need to remember that everyone wants the employer to be successful, because then there are more profits for everyone to share.

This is a very simplistic assumption that there’s one company interest which everyone understands and supports. I’ve seen many places where it would be as simple as department A owns that function and they care about making their lives easier, not your productivity. That’s basically the norm for large company IT departments, with nary a union in sight.

Remember, there’s been a well-funded campaign pushing back against the New Deal for longer than most of us have been alive. Unions are not perfect but there are a lot of misrepresentation and urban legends circulating and most of the stories you hear are likely either wrong or leaving out key details (e.g. the union got adamant about certain tasks after management tried to avoid honoring their contract). Unless you have first-hand experience or lots of documentation, be skeptical.

Expecting that companies want their employees to be able to do their jobs without being blocked by picayune rules is simple, but it's not simplistic.

Again, you could be surprised by some IT departments.

There's this perspective that the best way to keep a system working is to make it unusable, so that nobody uses it, and thus nobody breaks it, and so you don't have to keep fixing it. It's something I've seen parts of organizations navigate into without any union-related involvement.

Again, “company” is not the same as “each distinct political group within the company”. Anyone with experience at a large company will probably have examples of groups behaving against the perceive global because that was better within their group’s incentive structure.

As a simple example, how often is purchasing inordinately expensive because something was abused in the past and that group was told to make sure it never happens again? Or a sales group setting engineering up for failure because they personally had a huge financial incentive to do so?

And without a union, employees might tell people who report sexual harassment to get bent.

Yes, unions can make things less efficient. Yes, unions can cause unnecessarily stupid systems that harm people. But so do employers! I'd rather have one I can at least vote in.

That exact same scenario happened to me but it wasn't at a union shop. Seems weird to blame this on unions in general. Dumb rules are dumb rules...

Since we're all trotting out anecdotes...

I knew a guy who came to work at Google and didn't get a laptop for two weeks. No unions were involved.

That is not the norm though, typically everyone gets their laptop together in a big room the first hours of orientation. You can even request a new laptop and get it within a couple of hours, so if the person didn't get a laptop their first day something must have gone very wrong somewhere...

Yeah, you're right. It was unusual.

Thinking about it, this anecdote isn't a great counter-example to systemic foolishness after all, d'oh!

> had to wait two days for a union electrician

Ok, fair enough. I once had a job where there was no union, but if I needed to get something deployed to production (or even test), I had to fill out a form, submit it to devops, have them tell me that I filled it out wrong, fill it out again, wait for them to prioritize it, stay on a call with them while they did it, have them tell me again that my form wasn’t specific enough, resubmit it again, wait again, and hopefully be permitted to let them complete the job that I was being held responsible for. I could have ssh’ed into the server, uploaded the binary and restarted the server at any point, but bureaucracy prevented me. This is, in fact, pretty standard. This has nothing to do with unionization, it has to do with liability and risk management.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this reads like poorly disguised anti-union propaganda, but it does. In my experience with startups--which is a bit more extensive than yours is with union workplaces--"ambition and taking on responsibility" are rewarded only when it's convenient, and those rewards are often removed or withheld for arbitrary or personal reasons that have nothing to do with your quality of work. The fact that your bosses can (and do) fire startup employees at a moment's notice without any real consequences to themselves would probably concern you more than whether the employees... worked regular eight hour days (wait, why is this being spun as a negative?), were you in an industry where jobs were tighter.

The only thing missing is the comment starting with "I'm not anti-union, but..."

Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training.

Don't forget HR covering up harassment and discrimination until stories are leaked to the media!

But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well?

I get that it would be frustrating to not do your own hardware setup as a techie.

Just like it must be frustrating sometimes to not do your own lighting as a camera operator in Hollywood. But in Hollywood they've collectively decided they want an industry that supports actual lighting experts, and that there should be a career path from "junior lighting person" to "sought-after lighting expert" that isn't constantly at risk from self-appointed jacks of all trades and also bean counters.

Sure there are other negative aspects: it's hard to get started, a lot of production gets moved to other places (countries) where they don't have unions, etc.

But in principle it looks to me like unionized Hollywood does a pretty good job, considering the challenges, of enabling careers for a lot of the people who are necessary for good filmmaking but by themselves wouldn't have, say, the power of Brad Pitt (a member of the Screen Actor's Guild of course like almost all famous actors).

> But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well?

I'm not concerned about any specific job, including my own.

I will learn, adapt, and excel at whatever I need to do to survive.

That is the reasoning, and it's exactly why it concerns me. I'm imagining a world where the national SRE union comes by, and tells me I should never write any monitoring code or change any configuration flags because that's an SRE's job I'm taking.

It’s all pros and cons. This is very much one of the big negatives of unions. That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time. In an era of massive income inequality, it’s a loss. I wish there was a way to get best of both worlds.

—-

I’ve always felt ESD stuff is way overhyped. I’ve handled a ton of electronics over decades without any ESD protection, and never had an issue. I just touch metal once before starting in while seated.

> That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time.

Not in the tech industry. Salaries in software have outpaced any union environment just through competition for labor and a booming economy rewarding technology.

It’s a relatively nascent industry, and this wealth is not equally distributed. We don’t know what it’ll look like in ten, twenty years. You cannot assume the world will continue to be as is.

River boat pilots once could say the same thing.

As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers".

Conditions change.

Yeah, and look what happened to the auto unions. They made a deal to protect the income of the senior members and hung the junior members/new hires out to dry.

> River boat pilots once could say the same thing.

> As could steam engine operators, the original "engineers".

and to the extent that unions protected those jobs any longer than they were necessary, society as a whole was harmed.

> About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.

I say this as a non-union IT Tech who works at convention centers and trade-shows regularly and really wishes at times I could just grab a hole saw to make the mouse-hole to run my cables through:

It's not your job. If there was a need for more NICs to be installed the company needs to pay for the necessary labor to make that happen.

Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?

> Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

Great! Not everyone has to be motivated to work or excel! I come to my job, do the job, and go home. It's a business transaction.

> Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?

They are not being forced to sweep the floors, sometimes people are choosing to step slightly outside of their role to do something when it is more efficient for them to do it rather than inefficiently finding and having someone else do it.

If I make a small mess, I can:

1. stop working, contact the janitor, and ask them to clean it up, or

2. grab a broom, take 2 minutes and clean it up, and continue working

In most cases 2 is the better option, and most good workers would prefer to just do 2.

I think you missed the point of adding additional responsibilities.

In my example the electricians did not make the mess, but they, however, walk around the facility a lot so why not give them a broom so they can clean up messes on their way.

Unchecked is how you lead to companies squeezing 3 jobs out of one person.

A union is run rather democratically. It will tend to reflect the attitudes of its membership, i. e. your coworkers. In some old industry on a downward slope, employees will tend to be older and risk-averse, and so will the union. Tech Unions will tend to be rather different.

Don't get hung up on this concept of "union". Look around the office and imagine what you and the ten people you see might want to ask from management.

It could be "no open-plan offices", or maybe it's better options for working remotely, budget for conferences, free choice of OS, whatever...

Those were my initial feelings as well. I guess the issue comes down to focusing on software development as a skill and having that skill rewarded in manner you can count on. Our industry is really similar to actors. They have SAG and their guild negotiates with the MPAA. So every studio needs to belong to MPAA. Every year they negotiate the daily/weekly minimum rates for actors with SAG. They are pretty flexible with different rates for indy films vs big budget films. 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.

> 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.

Unless you want to spend most of your life waiting tables and bartending while looking for another part time gig at some software house, this is the last thing that you want.

Also, several of these companies like Apple, Netflix, and Amazon already deal with those unions as content producers.

Any union in the tech industry is going to resemble professional unions such as Hollywood unions or sports unions much more than the punch-clock unions seen in manufacturing and government.

This goes against the anti-union propaganda, though. I'm sure if we unionize, some mafioso from "corporate" will come down to my home office 8 US states away to plug in my monitor before I'm allowed to work.

/sarcasm

What an absolute joke of a discussion. Rather than discussion how actual professional unions operate in our fields, instead we're talking about punch-clocks and strict schedules (which I had plenty of in non-union shops) and over-bureaucratic corporates.

No, it will look nothing like those. The industries have virtually nothing in common.

Sounds more like the union added contract terms preventing the business from hiring somebody for position X and "asking" or even "allowing" them to do the tadks if position Y (which might pay more than X).

A lot of times, rules are cryptic and complex because they were adapted to prevent a workaround.

Tech companies in NYC (the likes any one would recognize) who have DCs in NYC area are affected.

If you’ve worked with them in infra you’ll have come across issues like so and so left for the day. They’ll be back tomorrow and so on. It could be as simple as flicking a switch.

This is a very strangely specific comment.

I am not saying if I agree or disagree, it just seems that you had a rather specific instance.

Unions don't mean anything you said above, all a union does is have a strong-arm against the "company". And gives the company a way of communicating with everyone.

Unions don't make rules like what you experienced, a large amount of unneeded employees with nothing to do convince unions to do that.

This is an extremely common pattern with union practices in the US.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22that%27s+not+your+job%22+...

The search results I'm seeing for that don't seem relevant to the discussion. Did you actually have any evidence to the "This is an extremely common pattern with union practices in the US." or were you just taking a shot in the dark here to support your own bias?

No evidence that you would (or should) be satisfied with, just direct personal experience as a member of the Teamsters (Local 284), years of indirect personal experience working in HVAC and building two homes (IBEW and Carpenters union) and many personal anecdotes from my brother (CWA) and wife (NEA).

My point is this. There are some common pathologies in the way unions tend to operate (or at least old unions that have ossified over time) in the US that have nothing to do with the underlying objectives of collective bargaining. This step for Kickstarter is a huge victory for organized labor in the USA and they are likely to receive aggressive input from other American labor unions as to how they should operate. In my opinion the employees at Kickstarter accept this input at their own peril. This shouldn't just be a new union, this should be a new type of union and one indicator of success would be strong objection to their charter from one or more existing unions in the US.

For the record I have no philosophical objection to unions or collective bargaining at all. I do have material concerns around how they tend to operate in the US.

"Unions don't make rules like what you experienced,"

They negotiate them with the employer. What comes out of those negotiations like all compromises sometimes gets really wonky.

Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed.

What's wrong with "mediocre" employees staying employed?

Everything is a trade-off between priorities. You can optimize for anything, but not everything.

There's nothing "wrong" with stable employment for unproductive people, but when you optimize for that as a goal, then you're paying for it with things like decreased productivity and immense frustration for the creative people who actually want to solve problems. Detaching employment from productivity reduces it to ritual, which is incredibly demotivating for the good workers who see through the farce. They can't even go off on their own to volunteer their skills for the common good, because they still rely on employment--but their hands are tied within that sphere due to a fundamental distortion of its meaning.

The current system was designed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution for factory labor. Instead of pretending that we can force it to be relevant into the future, we need to accept that productivity is moving into the realm of cognitive work. Part of this means educating people from the ground up to use information tools and reason abstractly, but we also have to admit that not everybody is going to have the innate ability to contribute in the future, and handle that in a way that doesn't hamstring the people who can.

Because now other employees have no motivation to put in anything more than mediocre work. The reality is people are motivated primarily by self interest. If advancement and retention is based on seniority rather than merit, people have no incentive to put in more than the minimum work.

This is assuming they were already based on merit and not on nepotism and favoritism. In comparison to those, seniority might be a reasonable alternative.

Competition will bring success to the company that fosters an engaged and motivated workforce. Even in national unions, they are still subject to foreign competition.

Sure, the free market isn't immune to nepotism or favoritism. But unions more often than not institute practices that give the same rewards to mediocrity as excellence - to the effect that the latter either put in less work or change jobs.

In either case the company risks losing to a more focused company valuing meritocracy and contribution over either nepotism or seniority. And we see this happen when starts rise up to the top. But our current system gives a lot of protection to existing players, be it through regulatory capture or be it through more natural phenomena like brand recognition taking time to decay even in the face of numerous bad products (in the world of games, look at how many people are still looking forwards to TES6 despite the issues with FO76).

There is also some cases where valuing meritocracy is only the best option when employees are willing to leave, but many employees are very stuck to their existing jobs. This is why pay raises do not keep up with the price of new hires. Consider the case where the cost to hire a new employee goes up 6% year over year while the company raises go up 1% year over year, potentially losing out to even inflation. The reasoning is that the extra costs to hire the few people who leave to another company to capture the 5% difference is smaller than the 5% savings for each person who does not leave.

To some extent, unions help to balance out the issue where most people are not perfectly rational actors.

It takes time, but you'll find that most of the ambitious and motivated people you'll meet are also mediocre. The successful ones tend to also have had luck on their side.

Sounds like a crummy union.

Anyway, what's wrong with keeping mediocre, unmotivated employees employed? What's so great about ambition? This is tongue in cheek, but I feel like plenty of people, with good justification, would think of their jobs in exactly the terms you describe, with words like "serve" as in a prison sentence.

That's a cool anecdote. Meanwhile, unions across Europe won massive increases in standards of living for all workers, from better leave, healthcare, safety protections, to even blocking the wealthy from having control over their democracies through militant, labor-backed political parties.

I'm not sure that last part is really a recommendation. What if I don't agree with the political positions of my union's leadership?

Then you vote to change the positions, and if necessary the leadership.

When you work for a contractor working for a corporation, you work for the contractor. When you work for a union working for a corporation, you work for the union. The difference is that the contractor isn't even notionally on your side, and the union is, at least in theory.

I wouldn't work for a corporation that organized "militant, corporate-backed political parties" either.

Then your probably going to have to work for yourself, if you’re in the US anyway. Even small companies do this through the US Chamber of Commerce.

Millions of people across the U.S. benefit from collective bargaining, such as increased wages, health benefits and retirement security, yet one anecdotal off-topic post gets upvoted.

Probably because it resonates as a real problem despite the upsides.

An easily solved problem.

Please solve it then. Start with AT&T's union. I await your results.

The employees can request it be fixed in the next contract. Of all things though, I'm not sure that it's worth the effort relative to other things.

> Of all things though, I'm not sure that it's worth the effort relative to other things.

So its not easily solved...

Or perhaps it reinforces preconceived notions?

It matches my own experience and anecdotes that others have told me from their experiences. I don’t think it’ll be hard to find similar stories out there...

It's good to have those stories, because then it will provide case studies for future unions to learn from and to avoid.

That’s not the correct comparison. Unions are a hedge against abusive employers when employees lack other options. They are a blunt instrument with many downsides. They make sense when the downsides are not worse than the abusive employer. This does not describe the situation with kickstarter employees, and any real union job would find this entitlement laughable.

Tech industry is full of entitled prima donnas living in an alternative reality valid only in their heads. US median wage according to data for 2016 was about $32k [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...]. According to Payscale Kickstarter pays its employees an average of $96,897 a year. Salaries at Kickstarter range from an average of $62,662 to $142,634 a year.

Deciding to treat tech management in an adversarial fashion or being more woke than the management while making 3x is going towards the mean, not away from it.

"Software engineers aren't a privileged set. They're just less fucked than the rest of the U.S. Former Middle Class."

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...

Not recognizing that making over 100k/year sitting in $800 chairs, eating company provided organic snacks, having subsidized meals ( or fully free ) in lovely offices and complaining that the management is not woke enough that it dared to pull the "It is always a good time to punch a nazi" project before reinstating it not to offend the woke employees is the definition of privileged set.

In lovely open offices?

> In lovely open offices?

Yes. Compare it with an average office in Manhattan:

Windows 10 on computers with 4Gb RAM slinging Acrobat Pro, where you are in NYC and your files are on a network drive in France, company does not do Dropbox or Google drive, there's one printer on the other side of the 25k sq feet office full of cubicles, you pay for your own coffee, there are no snacks, the chairs are $50 ones you typically see in the office supply stores and you are paid cool $49k/year.

As discussed recently, cubicles would probably be preferred by most engineers to open offices. However, they are virtually an industry standard at this point and it's not exactly something that a tech worker can escape by changing companies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22256872

As far as snacks and coffee go, this subthread goes into a good discussion about how most of the perks are relatively cheap for management to shell out for, and elides that the money could instead go into providing individual offices as was the case in the industry in the '90s- or just paying employee salaries:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359927

Tech workers are relatively compensated well, no doubt- but as mentioned in the Quora link, they are not exactly paid commensurate to the value they bring. Perks such as snacks or fancy furniture are simply window dressing, not to mention provided meals are also seen as a way for the company to maximize time spent in the office. The tech industry is very good at providing double-edged benefits- unlimited PTO is another example, as it nearly always comes with some strings attached and often leads to less vacation time taken than if allotted vacation time is given. It's an industry that's very good at selling products that are only free at first glance- is it any wonder that many employee perks/benefits are no different in principle?

This is absolutely bog-standard anti-union propaganda. This could have been written in the 1960s.

This seems like a cartoonishly simple respresentation of what a union can do.

Why would one have no incentive to excel? Our union creates entire promotion matrixes for excelling employees.

Comparing it to a prison... Are you a worker or a shill for corporate?

Please don't cross into personal attack, and please don't insinuate shillage or astroturfing on HN. I know you probably didn't mean it literally, but it's still against the guidelines.

Your comment would be fine without the last sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I worked (years ago) for the UFCW as a worker at a grocery store. All of the union that was exposed to me as a part timer was:

- hours go out by seniority

- raises happen at set intervals regardless of quality of work

- that guy selling pot out of the backroom will be protected until they catch him stealing a rotisserie chicken

- 0.x% of my paycheck goes to the union.

- I got paid less, and received raises less often than I did when I worked at Walmart.

Now there's lots more to them then that, but they certainly failed to sell me on the concept as a teenager, despite having me as quite the captive audience.

Yep. I had this same experience when I was working at a grocery store.

I didn't want to join a union, because the idea of my 16 year old ass having to pay $20 dollars a paycheck to somebody for a job I was gonna have for 4 months during the summer sounded asinine.

Well, the "union-boss" at my store informed me that if I didn't join then I wouldn't be put on the schedule or get any hours.

So I joined just to get hours, and lost a few hundred bucks that summer so the old women who had been cashiers for 30 years could get their raises.

Remarkably similar experience. I worked as a bag boy at a grocery store many years ago. The guy who hired me told me he strongly encourages everyone to join the union and I didn't realize at the time it was an implicit threat. After four months I kept wondering why there were five bag boys on duty and I was the only one working and where they went. One of the store managers came over to me during one of my shifts to thank me for my hard work. I was literally just doing my job while the other kids weren't. Less than two weeks later I had no hours on the schedule. Assuming it was a mistake I asked the guy who scheduled the hours (Mr. "Strongly Encourage") and he said he'd look into it. It was the end of my week so I needed to know what time to show up on Monday and so I persisted and said I needed to know when my next shift was so I wouldn't be late. He kept feigning ignorance. After my third inquiry he turned and said "Look, someone else transferred in so they got the hours, okay?"

I might still be on the payroll with no hours scheduled at that company for all I know.

This was definitely a case where a union wasn't good for workers -- it was good for the lazy bums who didn't want to work.

Okay so my comment was a bit rude, but it from reading this thread it seems many US citizens are so entrenched in an anti Union stance they can't even think of what could be.

In my country the unions negotiate a framework for pay rise based on performance management. They make sure people working (night) shifts have enough time off, can't be rotated at will by management and get compensation.

People who are forced to leave due to downsizing get a proper retraining budget first and are transitioned to other jobs in or outside the company.

It just seems every time Unions are brought up here on HN someone says "my train was late once so all trains are bad form of transportation". But this is too simple, and it doesn't account for the fact that highly skilled IT people can easily negotiate good wages but that low skilled people can't, and they need unions the most.

You Do know that there's more than 1 way to set up a union, right?

There are such things as professional unions (think old European guilds) that also enforce competency and much more.

somehow I seriously doubt the people from that article will add any competency laws or requirements to the workers to their union at all.

If you don't think there is waste and ridiculous rules without unions, you need to work for any medium to large company.

Large/medium sized companies are run with tiny fiefdoms where the more people working under you means more power.

You don't need unions to have people do bullshit and useless wasteful work.

Agreed. All people protect their realm regardless of unions.

> One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served"

I really dislike any kind of system that more tightly couples people's well-being to their employer. Government regulations on industries like safe working conditions can be great and really help to protect people. No matter what company you work at, they'll protect you. But a company union, where I am only protected as long as I work in this one place, just isn't appealing to me. If I get transfered to a bad manager, or any number of other things happens that makes the job a little worse, now I have to worry about leaving the union, maybe throwing away the number of years I've been working towards my next promotion, etc. Similarly, I really dislike employee healthcare plans for being a huge hurdle to anyone who wants to leave a job and work for themselves, or work part-time to spend more time with their kids, or take on any number of other flexible work options.

I don't buy that the only possible choices are either to have no protections and continue to erode the middle-class standard of living, or force everyone to work 40-hours a week full-time at a big corporation the rest of their lives to have decent conditions. I really hope other alternatives like UBI start to catch on more.

I've worked once in a non-union shop, where I wasn't allowed to move my computer from my old desk to another. I was expected to unplug all my stuff, label it, put all my personal effects and peripherals into a crate, label it, and sign out. Then, I was supposed to come back the next day, and set everything up.

In one of these moves, my new desk was twelve feet away from my old desk. (In seven years of working at this non-union shop, I have had my desk moved 9 times.)

What conclusion can we draw from this anecdote, combined with the one by the parent poster? Why does one gather positive karma, while the other negative?

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