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Comment by objclxt | Hacker News Reader

> if union is generally flatten the salaries to make me receive less for others more

Who says that’s what will happen? Tom Cruise is a member of SAG, do you think he gets paid SAG union rates?

Union busters in tech have done a fantastic job of convincing engineers that all unions are blue-collar. Which is funny, because you only have to look to Hollywood to see unions like SAG, the DGA, and the WGA which exist to protect all workers from exploitation and not cap compensation at all.

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It’s the work rules that make a lot of American unions distasteful to workers. A lot of people just don’t want to work in a place where people routinely say stuff like, “that’s not my job, union rules.”

The Wizard of Speed and Time is a great film about how difficult it is to be an independent creator in Hollywood due to the costs of getting anything started. The unions make it very hard to bootstrap anything without massive financing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j5a_00YVVkQ

Funny thing about unions. If you form your own union, you get to write the rules. The agreement with the employer is a matter of negotiation, but the operation of the union is entirely the prerogative of the union as long as it's legal.

Don't want to operate a holywood-style guild? Then don't.

In reality most unions dominate their industry to the point of monopoly.

In reality there are almost no unions operating in tech spaces. The world is our oyster, and the only way to let huge unions into the industry is by voting them in. It's a space ripe for disruption.

> It's a space ripe for disruption.

I want to add that disruption is what huge unions excel at, so if anybody wants to keep them out of tech, the best approach might be to fill the space they'd otherwise sweep into unchallenged with a compelling organization.

Always insane to see tech workers claim that labor unions are inherently flawed and unable to innovate upon, when so much of Silicon Valley's own rhetoric is about disrupting everything else under the sun.

I don’t like absurd rules and unions seem like an out of touch project manager to the extreme. This may not be true.

But I don’t see this as a problem in tech that needs to be solved. The barriers to entry and exit are so low to me as a programmer that I think organizations already have to compete to hire and keep me. So any unions wouldn’t do much to help me and seem like an extra layer of bureaucracy that would stop me from having fun while I work.

But industries are always joining some of the mega-union because they have most effective lobbying, I will quit before I join aflcio or similar.

There are two sides to that. I was representing a German union institution inside our org for one simple reason. The employer had gone out of his way to ignore what peoples responsibilities were and showered them with work that wasn't there's and then tried to punish them for pushing back. Usually the reason people respond with this is not my responsibility is because they have been burned by doing things that wasn't theirs. It's a cultural issue and the solution which you describe is a crappy generic solution to a cultural problem.

That said the very same union would frequently respond with that's not our responsibility when I pointed them to take up actual legal issues that they were responsible for.

A lot of the old union representatives were there for decades with no desire to change anything and enjoying the good relationship they had built with the leadership.

At the end of the day any human organization that grows too big seems to end up in its own lazy comfort zone, whether it's the employer side or the employee representing union side.

The thing about forming your own union is that major unions also have big lobbying institutions saying that their union is the only thing with real power, while the other side has their own lobbying groups pressuring workers into believing that all unions are bad.

Unions in Germany are also a pain in the bottom when they are populated with incompetent people who want to show how important they are.

Adding any security technology is a nightmare because they have an obsession about being spied on.

Take a standard EDR: the security team just wants the company to be safe from hackers. The unions think that all they wish is to spot on them. What will happen is that the company will crash after repeated hacks and they know they will be the last to be fired because they are there to protect people...

Of course this is just une side, unions are fantastic when they actually do their job and this is thanks to them we have the Labour Law we have. It is just that the people today are not the same as the ones who actually cared.

Fully agree, but I recently had the thought that DLP actually to some extent is to shut down law enforcement and whistleblowing into companies shady behaviour.

Take for example machine learning algorithms, a lot of the actual model definition you could just copy yourself even when there is DLP. What you can't take with you is the source data and the labeled data.

DLP allows you to prevent people from leaking sketchy and incompetent leadership from investors, SEC and law enforcement. I get the logic behind it, but most of the actual critical stuff you can just take with you in some fashion or another. The situation is obviously a bit different when you're talking hardware manufacturing, CAD models etc.

I don't have to see that at all. In fact here's a movie about how much those Hollywood Unions suck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5a_00YVVkQ#t=16m50s

What about sports unions? Or airplane pilots?

Guild is some exception, not so common in unions. Always it end up more like typical aflcio union. I also have made some switch between front end and back end in job, have done some security job and back to normal developing, all these are usually harder in unions. Maybe in theory it is not required but in practice it is almost always this way.

Also I have started prior tech company, it would have been hugely difficult if i had to make negotiations with unions.

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