Comment by lithos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lithos | Hacker News Reader

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While not union myself watching how IBEW (international brotherhood of electrical workers) works, it ends up working well for all involved parties. For workers pay is kept higher, benefits stay active between jobs, and benefits stay unchanged between jobs at different companies. Companies also gain the ability to support surges/drops in manning requirements (without ruining life's of workers), and know workers have a minimum level of training (along with that training not leaving workers a debt addled depressive). I also see the best workers rising through the ranks, and bad ones either never actually entering the union or quitting when they realize they're not going anywhere.

Not every union strangles their company like automotive unions. Though those unions start to look better looking at nonunion companies like Tesla which somehow manages to pay their workers less, in one of the most expensive areas in the world, and maintaining an accident rate that would shut a union shop down.

Also it makes sense that Google would fight unions. Since the current implementation of unions for SV companies has been Kickstarter. And that union mostly exists to drive profit to their competitors by choosing what is allowed on Kickstarter. Something like that for Google would just end up making an easy paper trail for a prosecutor to follow for SV platform bias.

My experience with unions is setting up a booth for a trade show and being unable to plug into the outlets myself because I had to wait for a union electrician.

Total scam.

I've had that experience. Also the experience of not being able to carry a monitor to by both to replace one the broke because "only an authorized union person can carry things into the convention center"

I my one experience, they were more than happy to let us breakdown the booths at the end of the show rather than stick around after 5pm on a Friday.

But setting up or carrying things things during the day had to use union people.

>Total scam

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the union electrician is there because once upon a time someone setting up a booth daisy chained a bunch of extension cords of small gauge to run lights and demos and started an electrical fire in a crowded convention hall.

You are really stretching here.

>I also see the best workers rising through the ranks, and bad ones either never actually entering the union or quitting when they realize they're not going anywhere.

This doesn't sound like an advantage for software engineers. Surely unions can't decide on someone's competency. It kind of raises a red flag about potential gatekeeping methods (e.g. the tax status where you have to join or else).

Arguably, unions are the best judge of someone's competency, because its supposed to be a group of peers. It's already how it works in tech, software engineers evaluate the skill of prospective software engineers, not management.

But yes, there are gatekeeping effects, as the union is incentivized to prevent increases in membership or decrease in collective skill. It typically works out great for those in the union (and things like the Bar or Medical Association), not so great for those kept out.

>Arguably, unions are the best judge of someone's competency, because its supposed to be a group of peers. It's already how it works in tech, software engineers evaluate the skill of prospective software engineers, not management.

I'd much rather have 8 companies with bad interviewers and 2 with good interviewers than 10 companies with the union who block me because I made one of their evaluators personally mad at me.

This just sounds like it is ripe for corruption and nepotism.

We already have corruption and nepotism, there are no regulations on the hiring process at all except for some impossible to enforce laws about protected classes.

It's not the union choosing to promote, it's the employer for IBEW.

Also disallows noncompete clauses. So if your current employer says no, you can go to another. Which is how I've seen quite a few promotions. The latter of switching employers is far easier, since life changing benefits (medical/retirement) aren't tied to employers. (Considering SV workers get their "share" by switching employers every few years, that would be a nightmare scenario for big tech as well. Since it further reduces employee stickiness, if SV unions decided to offer benefits).

Companies also gain the ability to support surges/drops in manning requirements

They have that ability already without unions - much more easily because they can reduce staffing without the entire company falling over due to strikes.

and know workers have a minimum level of training

They have that ability already without unions.

Not every union strangles their company like automotive unions

By and large the only unions that remain large and powerful in the west are those organising government employees, where strangling the host is impossible because tax revenues mean it cannot die. In most other industries they did indeed strangle their host industries until they declined.

Look at this thread. People keep talking about Hollywood as an example, apparently unaware of just how much business foreign film studios have taken from it, particularly the UK, due primarily to a much less aggressively unionised workforce.

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