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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

They absolutely should. And companies/management have a fiduciary duty to give them as little as possible. This is the competition that gives rise to capitalist efficiencies.

The concern from people like myself is that another word for a union is a cartel. When companies form cartels and engage in anti-competitive behavior, we penalize them severely (in theory at least...but that's another issue). Yet when labor colludes, we simply call it a union.

Tech is especially interesting because the usual claims of "workers have less power individually" (which is always true in all industries) is really really not a great argument in tech. The labor market in tech is so unbelievably competitive, and the average worker has leverage that is only seen in the upper echelons of other industries.

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> And companies/management have a fiduciary duty to give them as little as possible.

This is a popular myth but if you do any research you’ll learn it’s not true. There’s no such requirement because there’s no way to reliably predict the future impact of decisions: for example, does paying “too much” for employees lower turnover and avoid them starting competitors? Skimping on maintenance, outsourcing jobs, or taking on debt will definitely “maximize” shareholder value for a little while, until the bill comes due.

Think for a minute about how you’d argue any of those points in court and you’ll understand why the real laws have significant deference to executives’ judgement. Neither side would have any trouble finding people to say their decision was best, and even after the fact there are inevitably many factors which people can point to when explaining whatever happened.

I think more accurate to say the fiduciary duty is to make money as much as possible. At least that I would want the my company to do.

Try to find a legal statement to that effect. You’ll find a lot of people claiming that but there’s nothing binding for the reasons I gave: nothing is certain in business and people will reasonably differ about the best ways to produce growth over any non-trivial time scale. Remember all of the people who very confidently said that Apple was wasting its time with phones and would never overtake Nokia?

I would liken unions to corporations rather than cartels.

What about the definition of cartel doesn't match what a union does?

Sure, but will these salad days continue forever? I feel like most of HN is too young to remember the dot-com crash.

Seems far better to unionise and try to institutionalise and lock-in better pay and working conditions then to count on always having a hypercompetitive labor market and obscenely profitable employers.

Management is a cartel. I can't negotiate my pay directly with my manager.

That's not the legal or economic definition of a cartel.

Nor is a union the economic or legal definition of a cartel. A union is closer to creating a company that acts as a negotiating and protective apparatus for its employees as they do contractual work for other companies.

That isn’t a cartel and there can be multiple, competing unions working for the same type of workers in the same industry.

an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level

That's the definition of cartel. Unions exist to maximize the amount they extract from buyers of labor. This is rent seeking plain and simple.

What's more, they don't compete with each other, which is what corporations must do. Why does the UAW get to enjoy a monopoly on the sale of autoworker labor? Should Ford and GM and Chrysler be able to unionize together to keep wage costs lower?

>I can't negotiate my pay directly with my manager.

Why not? If you go talk to your manager and tell him "I have another offer at XXX, I want you to match it or I'm leaving" what is going to happen?

If I were the manager, I’d respond to this by wishing the person luck and asking when their last day will be.

You absolutely can. Managers will push back with "rules" that only apply if management doesn't want to pay you more. Or they will go to HR to get an exception if they think you are worth that exception (that is, if they aren't worried about not being able to match an offer for an employee that they really care about). You can absolutely negotiate.

In the past, I've been quite open when I thought that I needed more money to my manager, and have even given specific ways of making me "not distracted by money concerns". Sometimes they can meet those goals, sometimes they can't.

Personally, the offer as you've given it is probably more adversarial than I'd prefer. Something like "I feel like I'm worth more to the company than X, I feel like I'm worth Y, and here is a list of reasons, here is my career goals, etc etc". Then if they don't match it, you can accept that other offer. But YMMV.

Not at Google you can't

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