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Comment by jollofricepeas | Hacker News Reader

Great point.

The funny thing about unions is that the HN community believes that every other organization and industry can be disrupted...EXCEPT unions.

It’s hilarious. The comments are usually all anecdotal with some story about an uncle or father who was “screwed over” by his union back in the 80s or 90s.

We are capable of creating a new type of union and making collective bargaining better than what previous generations had in this current era of the greatest wealth inequality since Rockefeller and Carnegie.

What do the tech elite and robber barons have in common?

- They are all anti-union and collective bargaining.

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The HN community doesn't "believe" that—people have different opinions, as on many topics. As evidence you don't need to look any further than the massively upvoted subthread that you replied to. It's at the top of this page because a large slice of the community obviously supports this view. That many others don't agree is evidence that the community is divided, not that it's lined up against you; it's basically a variation of sample bias that makes things feel that way [1].

Would you please review the site guidelines [2]? They include this: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." One common kind of sneering is this sort of supercilious dismissal of everybody-else-in-the-community and their dumbass "hilarious" opinion—this is an internet genre we need to avoid in order to have real conversation. If you're posting here, you're as much the community as anyone else is.

I understand what it's like to feel surrounded by enemies/jerks/assholes when you constantly run into comments saying things you strongly disagree with. But it's important to understand that this effect is largely a consequence of the fact that everyone is crammed into one big non-siloed space here—i.e. there's no self-selecting into silos the way other sites do it (follow lists, subscriptions, social graphs, and so on). If you don't understand that, this place will feel much more fractious than it actually is [3], and the consequences of that are pretty stark: one ends up feeling surrounded by demons [4], and tends to retreat to things like defensive sarcasm, putdowns of others, etc.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

What can be done and what will be done are two entirely different concepts, though. What makes you confident that this time it will be different or that this union would be immune from the same issues that occur in other unions?

If we’ve reached the point where the strongest arguments for unionizing is that maybe this time it will somehow be different than other unions, that’s not encouraging.

Precisely - I'm not anti-union, but I've seen the worst of unions (where they become boss #2 instead of being the collective voice of the worker). Anyone planning on starting a union should look at cases where unions _failed_ and avoid creating a union structure that resembles the failures.

I like this framing. This sounds a lot like how entrepreneurs should also look at failed companies rather than only successes.

One thing that every disliked union seems to have is the goal of permanence for the union itself. Maybe instead of having elected or long-term leaders in a permanent union, some should try a sortition process in a conference-like structure that reconvenes when enough employees vote to convene, then disbands until called upon again.

> the strongest arguments for unionizing is that maybe this time it will somehow be different than other unions

I think the strongest argument for unionizing is that we know that this time is different from other times - wealth inequality is staggeringly high.

And so why would tech workers, who presently are generally in the upper decile of compensation, want to join an organization that may seek to diminish income disparity?

Seems like a leopards ate my face moment.

I was pretty darn clear in saying wealth inequality, not income inequality. Also, inter-industry disparity doesn't matter in this case: your argument would apply equally to NFL players who are unionized, but it doesn't matter that their compensation is high relative to the average American, what matters is getting a higher share of the profit from management/owners in a highly profitable industry.

Similarly in tech, unions can be a way of gaining greater profit sharing for the high-skilled workers necessary for the business to function. Where tech workers lie in income percentile is irrelevant and distracting to this question.

Income and wealth are not disjoint concepts. Income begets wealth, and wealth begets income.

From a societal standpoint, it doesn't particularly aid widespread inequality if a small number of tech workers receive a bump in income; the union may cause the situation to worsen, as the union has an incentive to keep the supply of employees restricted in order to maximize their compensation. The unionized employees would be protected from public competition.

Having pro-sports players in a union hasn't exactly improved widespread inequality.

Not disjoint, but different especially when over half of all money in the US is acquired via inheritance rather than earned income during one's lifetime [0].

Moreover, much wealth (especially at the top) is held in equities, often that aren't sold before being passed on to inheritance. That means:

a. that this wealth isn't counted as income

b. that decreases in equity prices due to unionization (and corresponding decreased expected returns to owners/shareholders) will burden the non-working rich disproportionately.

Sure, it won't solve wealth inequality - but where there is a zero-sum tradeoff, that tradeoff will mostly be from rich tech owners + management to affluent tech workers, not from the rest of society to the tech workers.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/people-l...

Because income disparity has larger effects that will in the long-term screw over tech workers as they have the rest of society. In the Bay Area alone, income disparity coupled with housing shortage has contributed to mass homelessness; cue highly-paid tech workers Tweeting about having to step over human waste on the way to work. On a national and indeed international level, income disparity leads to political upheaval as populist movements capture discontent from slipping standards of living in diminishing middle classes.

Mass homelessness isn’t related to income inequality. That’s entirely caused by a failed local government that will not permit housing fast enough to deal with the demand.

Zuckerberg making $80 billion instead of $1 billion has literally no impact on the homeless in the bay. He only buys one or two houses at most. If the Facebook employees made even more money, that would only exacerbate the housing crisis because they could bid prices much higher (thousands of Facebook employees vs 1 Zuck).

A more effective change for the Bay Area would be for tech workers to leave, not unionize. The issues spring from the market pressure that the hoards of highly-compensated tech workers place on the community.

Given that there seems to be an exodus in motion, even as unionization efforts begin, it would seem like this is an industry that can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.

I suppose the union could aid the exodus by lobbying against any new positions opening in the bay area, and lobbying for existing positions to be relocated. I'm not sure how popular that would be with wealthy tech union members who like living in the bay area, though.

One thing that's been brought up in the past is that prior to this pandemic-driven WFH present (and probably is still true) is that secondary and satellite offices tend to not have limited openings or paths towards advancement. While a union might not be the best tool for the job, that seems like the sort of thing that organized employee opinion can try to influence. Maybe a lot of workers want to live and work in Austin, and management needs to invest more in the satellite office there, allow more career development opportunities, etc. This industry often seems to led by hidebound opinions that the rank-and-file often disagrees with. Fixation on Bay Area HQs, along with rejection of WFH and obsession with open offices, are examples of such policies which are seemingly only changed by something drastic as the threat of unionization- or more realistically- a worldwide pandemic.

> the HN community believes that every other organization and industry can be disrupted...EXCEPT unions.

The thing about this is, when other organizations and industry are "disrupted", according to the usual west-coast definition of "disrupt" this typically means exploiting a market to the benefit of shareholders by eroding labor standards. What does one erode while disrupting a union, when those same standards are that org's goal?

The only thing I can think of that the modern form of "disruption" would do to unions is to allow them to "screw over" their members more efficiently.

Sounds good. Tech unions can exploit a market to the benefit of shareholders by eroding labor standards.

- The market is labor

- The shareholders are the union members

- The labor standards are the current status quo, which made Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe owners and managers believe this (https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...) was acceptable until the government forced their hand on it. "Erosion," here, would be a disruption that makes the status quo worse for company owners... Makes that kind of one-sided back-room dealing no longer safe for the companies that engage in it, since they no longer fear merely government intervention, but their own employees banding together to say "Knock it off."

We might well be capable of creating a new type of union, but that's not what these organizers are doing. They're seeking to join a branch of the CWA, one of the existing union powerhouses.

Can someone explain why a small union may or may not want to affiliate with a larger union organization?

Did Google workers have other options here?

The details of the initial organization aren't public, but it's likely that it went in the other direction, as part of the pre-existing project CODE-CWA trying to convince software developers to unionize with them. There's no reason I can see that they would have had to join the CWA.

The advantage of affiliating with a larger organization is their weight becomes a part of your collective bargaining strength. That is, if Google does something the union doesn't like then the entire CWA might get mad at them. I don't know that there are any clear disadvantages from a union's perspective, which is why basically all organizing efforts do it.

From a bird's eye perspective, the disadvantage is that there's no meaningful competition or innovation, because all new unions see themselves as part of the traditional union movement where solidarity is prized. If someone else formed a competing union with a clever new idea for how to organize Google workers, the CWA-backed union would denounce it and demand that Google refuse to talk to the second union.

Disadvantages from a union perspective:

1) a substantial part of your dues are passed on to support the larger organization

2) some member services are delegated to the larger union, and some larger unions are better at member services than others

3) some larger unions spend a lot of money on political activism instead of member services

4) less independence of action, as larger unions might have different priorities than what ground level members want (e.g. wanting to get a contract settled instead of fighting for more; external organizing over internal organizing)

> We are capable of creating a new type of union...

Can you give examples of such new types of unions that have been established the last 1-2 decades, and how they differ from the "legacy" versions?

IWGB and UVW (International Workers of Great Britain and United Voices of the World) are examples in the UK. IWGB in particular has done great work representing some of the most precarious workers in the gig economy, a risk that bigger unions cannot or will not take. Partly this is due to the UK unions playing it safe with direct action such as strikes, since labour laws in the UK were made rather stringent since Thatcher and the NUM had it out in the 80s.

This is a great article about them. Maybe paywalled, sorry!

https://www.ft.com/content/576c68ea-3784-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3c...

If you Google "IWGB deliveroo" or "UVW St. Marys" you will find interesting case studies where each have represented delivery riders and nurses and won concessions where a bigger union wouldn't have bothered cos of the risk involved. Echoing the comment a few levels up, this can definitely be seen as a "disruption" of what a union is or is expected to do.

> What do the tech elite and robber barons have in common?

I heard Hitler liked dogs, so if you like dogs you're obviously anti-Semitic.

EDIT: The point of this was to show how absurd adjunct comparisons like this are.

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