Ask HN: How's the Kickstarter Union Going? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How's the Kickstarter Union Going?

58 pointszachrose21 comments

I haven't been able to find anything about it except for news of the vote back in February.

I’m a contractor working in Poland right now. I work through a vendor that finds contracts for me at different companies. I recently found out that all the major vendors in Poland have non-compete agreements with each other, meaning they're not allowed to poach each other’s engineers. It actually goes beyond that, I recommended a friend of mine who was looking to switch from his current vendor and got refused an interview with my vendor because of the no compete thing. I think this practice artificially drives down the price of an engineer’s salary and generally is not good for the market. I think HR divisions do something similar as well.

I don't exactly see how a union would fix that. Instead, a better solution might be stronger enforcement of anti collusion laws

Unions could endorse politicians who promise to enforce anti-collusion laws, incentivizing them to do so.

In the US unions do stuff like that all the time.

The idea in using contractors is to avoid the legal framework associated with regular employment.

Non compete clauses, colusion amongst employers, blacklists etc. is regulated in most countries when it comes to employment but much weaker regulated when it comes to contractors.

It pays more but long term contractors often get the short end of the stick.

We need to unionize the tech companies.

What would the union be negotiating for? We're some of the best treated non-executive employees in the world.

Additional ball pits, and lifeguards for the jacuzzis.

Speak for yourself. But I’ll start with demanding offshore folks are paid and treated the same. An international union is necessary for any industry that can be sent across a wire.

you do realize the company will just hire foreigners that are happy to be payed what they are offering?

I live in Poland and in general I would say this is true. I've also noticed that salaries are rising at a very fast rate here for engineers since foreign companies have began setting up shop.

That's not how collective bargaining works. The entire company goes on strike if they do that, it'd destroy their entire business in a week.

It's cheaper to just pay and treat everyone fairly, which is what they do not want to do. Imagine if all Amazon or Netflix engineers were on strike.

Unions don't just negotiate salaries. They assure rights aren't being violated, promote ethical, safe and healthy workplaces, prevent and fight against discrimination and unfair treatment, fight wrongful dismissal, etc.

Will your imagined Union require all employees with the same title to be paid identically, restrict promotions to people based on years of tenure, and require layoffs to fire the newest hires first regardless of skill? Because that is a large part of what unions do in factories, trades, and teachers. Unions remove the ability of talented individuals to rise faster, while also disallowing and restricting management’s ability to select who they want to promote and retain.

That has not been my experience with unions, but I have never worked in the US, so it might be different there.

In most countries where I've worked (Europe and Asia), unions have been nothing but beneficial.

Working in Germany in IGM pay scale, I do see these effects here.

However, you can spin it positively as well. For example, firing young ones first is done because for people nearing retirement finding a new job is harder. Overall, the system is more "socially minded" with the tradeoff that disruptions are slowed down.

Like anything, I prefer choice. So if some software shops want to unionize, great. But I want the ability to join a company and not join the union, or failing that, be able to join non-unionized companies. If the goal is to force all software engineers to unionize, and then forcibly prohibit all non-unionized people from working in software, it's simply coercion and I absolutely cannot support it.

It’s not always that way: in the entertainment industry, for example, union contracts often set only the minimum wage scales and working conditions and leave individual workers (or their agents) free to negotiate for anything better.

I’d expect to see more work done in existing areas of tech worker activism:

- Racial and gender equality in recruitment, compensation, and promotion.

- Better working conditions for contractors and other workers who aren’t classified as employees.

- Non-participation in human rights abuses in the US and abroad.

Some other ideas:

- Right to work remote? Without a major compensation cut?

- Limits on oncall shifts, or rules regarding extra compensation for oncall time.

- (At some companies) an approach to PIPs/firings that’s less up to the whims of asshole managers.

> - Racial and gender equality in recruitment, compensation, and promotion.

You're going to have to show that it's a problem, because it doesn't seem to be.

I'm not sure that is true everywhere in the world

Kickstarter did unionize, that's why I want to know how it's going.

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