Why would you be miserable? Union dues? occasional union communication? I'm just trying to understand what hypothetical issue you feel would be super arduous.
From a quick search:
> If your booth is a 10×10 or smaller, you may install and dismantle your own exhibit – provided you meet these requirements:
> 1. The Set-up can be accomplished in 1/2 hour or less.
> 2. No tools are required.
> 3. Individuals performing the work must be full-time employees of the exhibiting company and cary identification to verify this fact.
> Exhibitors are allowed to unpack and repack their own product (if it is cartons, not crates). They are also allowed to do technical work on their machines, such as balancing, programming, cleaning of machines, etc. Exhibitors may “hand carry” or use nothing larger than a two wheel baggage cart (rubber or plastic wheels only) to move their items.
* http://www.absoluteiandd.com/union-rules/new-york-trade-show...
> Convention center guidelines dictate that any gear one person can't carry with their hands alone must be handled by official union labor. In other words, you have to pay for people to lug your TVs and booth props from the loading dock to your booth, and it's not exactly cheap.
* https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-02-21-the-costs-...
Now if you have similar rules internal to your company, if you annoy the wrong people, they can simply act in a strictly 'compliant fashion'.
One would easily imagine a software engineering union to be the complete opposite of that, as such a union would be completely new and hungry.
At the same time, I think software engineering is in a position where a lot of employees have the power to switch companies and have more control over how the work is done than other types of jobs. I can see people leaving jobs in mass or starting a union quickly if industry conditions ever get worse.
> I can see people leaving jobs in mass or starting a union quickly if industry conditions ever get worse.
There's some signs of that happening at some companies. Certainly it's a high time for video games tech companies to push for it, against the bad conditions unique to that industry.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. How do unions dictate the way you perform your duties?
And suddenly the union has made me very uninterested in performing my duties at that company at all. I want to be able to work with flexible hours. I don't care to be compensated at 1.5x just because I start at 8:30 and leave at 4 one day, then do 9:30 to 5:30 another etc. I want to work from home every day of the week and I'll manage the separation of family life and work just fine, thank you very much but instead of being stuck in transit hours each way and effectively spending at least 11 hours for work related stuff (actual work plus travel, coz you know, union rules prohibit me working from the train, coz it's not in the office and it's not 9 yet), while WFH means I get up at 8:58 and in a meeting at 9:00 and that's great!
Real life example btw. from where some friends work, not theoretical. While I am flexible to take the kids to school, summercamp etc. at the required hours and just work as soon as I come home and made coffee, they gotta plan everything around their commute and timing it so that they don't come in too much earlier than 9 (wasting their time) and not get cited for clocking in too late, e.g. coz there was traffic.
I was in a union for a little bit, and there was a set process for this. You simply requested & justified a modified schedule, and so long as your boss signed off that it wouldn't negatively impact operations, it was all fine. Not all unions may do this though.
My dad was at a sort of unionized place. The core business wasn't Software but they spun their own IT needs out into an IT service company that became quite large on its own too. This was in Germany though. The actual union negotiated with the core business and for their employees. There's also another system in Germany that's a little separate from unions (which also exist) called roughly translated the "workers council".
The core business for example (manufacturers union) had a 35 hour week. The IT company had an agreement of "what the union contract says but with these modifications e.g. +5 hours." (and some other stuff) the unionization was great for a junior as it guaranteed a minimum pay scale for example with set minimum raises after x time etc. You had to track your time (clocking in and out was provided but not mandatory) and weren't allowed to do too many hours etc. But things were still flexible. Come and go when you want to within reason. And that was already like that in the 1980s. Obviously no WFH at that time :)
When the union renegotiated to 37.5 hours that suddenly meant all IT company personnel had to work 42.5. But the workers council and the company were on good terms and workers were told not to worry, the official stuff will take a week or two to hammer out and put in writing but keep working your 40 hours. The intent was the 40 hours and the +5 was just how it was written down. A technicality.
So yeah it can also be good.
As an example of the individual/departmental level where there was no union involved: I was embedded within a large, mostly customer-facing area. A scheduling change came down that said everyone had to work late hours twice a week on a rotation, for two six-week periods each year when there was increased demand. I don't work with customers, there was no need for me to modify my schedule. I ran things up the chain and a few days later there was a minor policy change that basically said "everyone except him".
Where unions or worker organization (even without a formal union and dues and such) come in is if this doesn't work because individual pull is not enough.
Your case you were lucky, in many an organization you would just have been told "you gotta take one for the team, we cannot make exceptions, then everyone wants one" (note that I don't agree with that but seen/heard this too many times)
They are not into old school craft union practices.
Note I'm not saying that is good or bad... In fact I liked it a lot - work can wait! But the person who said they'd be miserable may just not be able to hang with that.
if union leadership was volunteer, and dues weren’t required, maybe that sort of union would be less susceptible to corruption.
Is the screen actors guild punishing Will Smith and rewarding struggling, untalented commercial actors?
Is the NBA player's association punishing LeBron and rewarding D league players?
Is there even such a thing a "superstar" plumber? I mean, I'm sure there are awful plumbers and amazing plumbers - but do how much can they scale, realistically?
SAG is a weird example. Hard to get in without doing union work. Hard to get union work without being in the union. Can't do non-union work after you're in. The structure reeks of being rigged to temper the rate of newcomers.
When there is a pool of people waiting to take your job, and a company willing to lower working standards, you have little choice but to comply with company requests — unless you are part of a union that collectively acts in the interests of the workers.
For software developers there are forces against unionisation:
1. Global outsourcing. What's the point in unionisation if your job can be done by a motivated pool of workers overseas? A union has little bargaining power at the level of outsourcing complete business units. Or buyouts: I am in New Zealand and whole companies here are purchased by American companies.
2. Many software developers are not easily replaceable. It is difficult to replace a person who has specialist software skills or internal organizational knowledge.
3. There is no pool of easily identifiable talent.
4. Developers have to be dissatisfied with working conditions.
5. Developers have to have reached a ceiling (experienced). In a fast growing industry with technical churn, less experienced developers outnumber older developers? Hard to argue with new blood why unionisation is in their interests?
Edit: I did a quick search for "software developer" on https://seek.co.nz job board and about 1% of jobs were for USD140k+ and most of that 1% were not dev jobs. I know zero developers earning >= $200k. AFAIK pay in NZ for developers is significantly below the US. Opportunity there if you want trustworthy highly skilled remote workers that speak English. Main bummer is NZ is 16 hours ahead so 3PM EST is 7AM NZ time, and Friday in the US is Saturday in NZ https://www.worldtimeserver.com/time-zones/nzst-to-est/
There are a TON of actors in SAG (160,000). Sure, that's more than an order of magnitude smaller than the 4.4M SWEs in the US. But the idea that everyone in SAG is a "star" is absurd.
Similarly, deep bench players in the NBA - sure they are really good - but they are far from stars. And yet, most of them make substantially more money than overseas "stars". This is because of the players' union.
> A labour union is all about fighting for the rights of the undifferentiated many, not the situation where there are named celebrities in a winner's zero-sum market.
I think you missed my point entirely. SAG and the players' union are good for both stars and non-stars.
GP seemed to think that unions by definition are bad for stars. I was merely pointing out that there are examples of unions that are not bad for stars. It just so happens these unions are also examples of unions that are also not bad for non-stars.
> When there is a pool of people waiting to take your job, and a company willing to lower working standards, you have little choice but to comply with company requests — unless you are part of a union that collectively acts in the interests of the workers.
Google is not unionized, and there are a million people that would take my job for much lower pay - and a lot of them could probably end up doing my job after a substantially long learning period. Despite that, I have my job.
The same is true at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft (and many other companies). Theoretically, since these are global companies with large presences all over the world - this isn't (at least) entirely because I'm a US citizen.
I agree with your point for most other professions, though. And maybe this will be truer in the future for "FAANG". But, it's not really true now.
> Edit: I did a quick search for "software developer" on https://seek.co.nz job board and about 1% of jobs were for USD140k+ and most of that 1% were not dev jobs. I know zero developers earning >= $200k. AFAIK pay in NZ for developers is significantly below the US.
The majority of people working at "FAANG" in NZ should be >$200k - if for no other reason than because of RSU appreciation.
Not trying to be rude - but if you want to make more money - just read Cracking the Coding Interview cover to cover and get referrals at FAANG. You honestly might triple your salary. You can DM me on Reddit if you want more feedback / advice / referrals.
I can't think of examples of punishing good ones though. Union contracts frequently have defined procedures for requesting a merit pay increase with a mandatory review process, along with similar procedures for reclassification to a higher level position, also with more pay, when a person's scope of responsibilities shift over time to encompass more than the original job description indicated.
I'm not in a union any longer, but that happened to me when I was: I was very good a specific portion of my job and gradually took on more complicated aspects of it. I applied for reclassification. My workplace had a maximum of 21 days to review & reply to the request, which they granted, and I got a higher title & a nice 20% increase in pay.
As for punishing good workers... I've heard plenty of stories where someone was really good at their job and they just needed some small thing done that they couldn't get the right department to do, so they did it themselves. The union jumped all over them because it's contractually obligated that the other department perform that function.
It was absolutely in the way of the "good worker" and they needed it to be done to improve their morale and get work flowing well. But their only choices were suffer through it, or be sanctioned for fixing it themselves.
That's the punishment.
That depends on the reason for the separation of duties. Think of a unionized construction work where a few people specialize on heavy machinery. You aren't designated as such, but you happen to know how to drive a forklift and you need something moved. I'd be pretty pissed off at you for taking it upon yourself to do it because knowing how to operate a forklift isn't the same as knowing all of the safety protocols and idiosyncracies of operating heavy machinery at that specific site. You could put yourself or others at risk, or screw up the project. Or maybe the construction company pays certain insurance premiums for each designated operator and you just opened them up to bankruptcy if there was an accident.
Sometimes these barriers exist for a good reason. And sure, when you run into one it can be frustrating if it seems harmless-- even productive-- to break protocol. But it's not for each individual worker to determine which protocols they will follow and which ones they will break. That's a recipe for disaster that I have seen happen in & out of unions. The right path on that is to work to change protocol. I've done it plenty of times myself so that I could be more productive but also be in the loop on any special considerations I should be aware of, like not querying the production system directly during certain hours when it could be under high load.
That doesn't means there aren't any useless barriers, but it my experience a barrier is usually--initially-- put into place for a reasonable purpose, and people get frustrated because they don't know what the purpose was. Going cowboy isn't the solution though. Asking questions and finding out if the reasons still apply, and initiating change if they don't, that's the path forward. Sometimes it doesn't work, for stupid reasons, but stupid reasons aren't the sole domain of union beauracracy. They exist everywhere. I don't know if they're more prevalent in unions, but it doesn't make sense to look at unions as useless or bad when they simply share the same behavioral patterns as any other organization of sufficient size and complexity. I have seen unions that are completely dysfunctional, I have also seen businesses that are the same (and had the misfortune of working for one or two)