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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

That's not actually true. If you're a skilled worker, you're livelihood (and security) comes from your skills. This is the core issue with unions for skilled people. If you work hard and move around, you can make great money and be secure without a union. So why unionise? That's why there is no union of doctors or investment bankers...

Imagine you're a dev at amazon, and you get 100k basic and share options worth another 100k. If you throw in with the union, you risk your job. And if you win, they get 2usd an hour more. And your 100k of share options is worthless. How does that sound like a good deal?

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Professional organizations take their place for regulated professions - so the AMA for doctors and the NIBA for Investment Bankers.

But programming isn't a regulated profession. It doesn't have a professional organization. Your "cred" is reputational and based on work history, not on actual credentials or licensure. It's closer in this sense to a trade, like electrical work or plumbing, where members frequently are unionized.

Why unionize? Because your facial recognition tech is being used to round up Uigurs, or bomb Yemeni weddings, or bake cakes for gay people. To have actual say over the products you work on, and how they're used.

You can also unionize for better conditions and more money! NBA stars do, and rightfully so! I don't understand why many engineers feel like collective bargaining for more money is somehow dirty or an appropriation of a tool that is reserved for extremely oppressed workers. Engineers are extremely valuable to their employers, and are still probably under-compensated relative to the value they bring in.

Tech companies have no problem working together, illegally, to keep wages down. Workers should work together, legally, to push wages up. This does not mean that compensation needs to be based on seniority or anything like that, and union contracts do not necessarily mean an end to worker flexibility. Engineers can propose whatever rules they think are fair.

However, I do agree that ethical concerns are a strong reason to organize, and a proper subject for union negotiations.

> You can also unionize for better conditions and more money! NBA stars do, and rightfully so!

No you can’t. This is a very young and naive view. The NBA is a monopoly. It will absolutely not be the same when implemented in the tech industry. Not only will you earn less, but your stock will take a huge hit.

> Tech companies have no problem working together, illegally, to keep wages down.

This was 10 years ago and isn’t happening. The incredible salary inflation makes this pretty obvious.

I don't see the relevance of some professions being regulated. A dev is skilled labour whether they're regulated or not. Being not easily replaceable puts them in the same category as the others I listed.

Your points on Why unionise? have wondered a bit if you don't mind me saying. Again, I'm all for people having a moral stance. But if you do, why did you join the Amazon Facial Recognition and Military Tech department? And why would unionising actually stop that work being done, rather than just move it to MS or Apple or Halliburton? And even if you did, why bother including the pickers? They don't care about amazon tech and you wouldn't need them to close the tech centre down...

> I don't see the relevance of some professions being regulated. A dev is skilled labour whether they're regulated or not. Being not easily replaceable puts them in the same category as the others I listed

First you say, Doctors don’t have unions.

Then you move the goalpost when it’s pointed out that many skilled professions do have something effectively similar.

The reason for having one isn’t just about pay.

I'm trying hard here to give the benefit of the doubt. Help me understand: how is the AMA a union? Especially the sort of union people are suggesting for amazon. Specifically:

* do they negotiate standard wages, hours and work conditions?

* do they organise strikes and other action when they don't get what their members want?

* do they also represent unskilled workers, say hospital cleaners (as was being suggested for the amazon Union)?

Help me out here. Am I missing something? I'm no expert so I'm happy to be corrected...

Sure: First, throw away the narrow conception of what you think a trade union is.

A trade union is simply an organization of workers to achieve a shared goal. That’s it.

For many trade associations, safety standards is a big one, and it becomes more important as the trade is more skilled.

So for instance, it’s the AMA that promoted the standards of medicine over the century and a half and lobbied to prevent quacks from practicing as “medical doctors”.

Do you believe the fragmented and haphazard standards in software today and management’s race to the bottom is beneficial to consumers or to society?

> If you're a skilled worker, you're livelihood (and security) comes from your skills.

Didn't protect James Damore.

According to his linked in (first result of googling his name), he got a job at a startup a few weeks after he finished arbitration with Google. So it worked fine for him. He didn't move city or change industry or job. Just went back to work using his skills elsewhere...

His "special" skills didn't protect him from getting fired. Not that hard to understand.

> That's why there is no union of doctors or investment bankers...

Wrong. The AMA sets an even higher bar than any union.

1) I think the point is that all skilled jobs by definition benefit from a barrier to entry. As far as suitability to unionization, it hardly matters whether the barrier is experience, education, or taxi medallions.

2) AFAIU, for many years now the bottleneck in the United States for doctors has mostly been residency slots, which aren't controlled in any manner by the AMA, AFAIK. Skilled nurses are even more supply constrained than doctors despite having relatively lower barriers to entry. The issue there seems to simply be not enough teachers.

The point is a classic straw man.

There’s more reasons to support an influential trade organization other than just pay and job security.

- Ethics : Litigating the worst behaviors (Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.).

- Quality and security: There is no cost advantage to supporting security, unless somebody pushes to make it that way. I can’t find a large US bank that supports Yubikey.

Also think of the chaos with Experian.

- Solidarity with very important (and struggling) fields like investigative journalism. My field destroys jobs and creates others, but quality information is just too important.

I can go on.

> The point is a classic straw man.

It depends on whether you're coming at the question from a prescriptivist or a descriptivist viewpoint. The point about skilled workers isn't a strawman from a descriptivist viewpoint--i.e. understanding why there's less demand for unionization. Even from a prescriptivist viewpoint the point is relevant as to why alternative approaches might be better--e.g. giving consumers and users more power by rolling back limitations on class actions, and statutorily creating new rights of action designed to force companies to internalize more of their costs (e.g. regarding security). Why rely on unions, which are principally designed to look after employee interests, to address issues related to consumers or society as a whole, especially when there are alternatives that empower groups whose self interests are a better fit for your prescriptivist goals?

That said, many skilled nurses are unionized. So there's definitely reason to believe that if unskilled Amazon employees become unionized, other skilled employees might follow suit, and that could be a good thing for all the reasons you described.

It’s a strawman in the sense that this entire conversation was a response to the following: > They're only closer to management in the sense that they make more money and have better conditions. Their livelihood is just as precarious and just as dependent on their bosses for income, and they can be fired just as easily -- and they have their own grievances about scope and purpose of work

At least when I read it money and stability (or lack of) is a given, but scope and purpose of the work is really the distinguishing factor.

Though looking at it again maybe OP meant all of the above is a reason for a trade organization.

> Why rely on unions, which are principally designed to look after employee interests, to address issues related to consumers or society as a whole, especially when there are alternatives that empower groups whose self interests are a better fit for your prescriptivist goals

Because it’s necessary?

Currently how can an employee blow the whistle on unethical practices, without significant repercussions?

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