Seems to have worked amazingly well based on all the times I recall reading the comments of stories posted here involving unions.
If the views expressed regularly on HN are really a window into how the typical Googler thinks then presumably Google should be shutting down its ad networks and personal data tracking services very soon...
Where do you read this? It seems to me that every thread about unions is filled with former union members that dislike unions but don't back up their dislike with any information.
I was part of Teamsters Canada for 10 years. I made $25/hr where similar positions at other companies were for $10-$12/hr. Overtime I worked was paid, always, that's literally never happened in software. If we were understaffed, management had to call in extra employees from a staffing firm to bring us to a minimum headcount, no working understaffed. We had guaranteed, mandatory to take, paid time off. When the managers were being idiots, we could tell them such without fear of being fired instantly, the union would back us when the managers were being idiots. Retirement benefits.
That's not to say it was all good though. The union never listened to our shops complaints. They didn't step in for months when things were terribly mismanaged. There was visible grifting by the leadership of the union. They could have done a better job.
That said, without the union, I would have made maybe 50% of the money I did make, the conditions would have been worse, and the chances of fixing things in the workplace would have been reduced.
what unions really are often is something that primarily serves a select few members of the union, which is worse than not having a union at all.
See also: public sector unions.
Which is entirely the point!
Why should we trust a large monopoly like Google to have workers' best interests at heart when there's no counter-balancing force with the same power (be it a union, or trust-busting arm of the federal government)?
Everyone forgets that Google and Apple already colluded to suppress wages! https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
It's not a situation like Boeing where there's a very limited number of other places that you can take your skills.
That is absolutely going to have a massive systematic effect on compensation.
The "take it or leave it" attitude strongly insinuates that corporations should be allowed dictatorial control over the manner in which work is completed. There are too many examples to point to which demonstrate the b.s. in this line of thinking.
I may be reading too much into what you wrote, but I never understand the libertarian need to reject government and union control but embrace everything corporate. It's plain weird.
The answer is that we shouldn't, but the latter solution is much better than the former.
I will no longer work for places where unions negotiate. I prefer the clear incentives of an employer over the unclear incentives of union negotiators. You never know when they're honestly standing side-by-side with you or when they're just there to pick your pockets.
This probably says as much about the wider society that you live in as it does about the unions.
This society is not a gerontocracy either. There's quite a few 30-somethings in the government.
No organization is inherently good. Unions can be led by bad actors, and that doesn't diminish their overall value. They provide employees with a countervailing force to use against employers who would otherwise be mostly free to squeeze them for every penny, whether via cut wages, unpaid overtime, etc.
I'm a single guy who's a senior software engineer with no one depending on him, and I've never had difficulty finding a job (quite the contrary), hence the benefit of being unionized doesn't outweigh the negatives. If an employer mistreats me, then I leave. It's that simple.
And yes, Poindexter J. Smartypants, not everyone has it "as good" as I. For some, unionization might be a real benefit, especially if they are working a job that is physically taxing and where the employer has more leverage. I am not disputing this fact.
In much of tech, however, especially if you are at all adjacent to Big Tech, the employee has more leverage over the employer than in many other fields. Many software engineers are in a similar position to mine, and even the ones who aren't likely need the employer much less than the employer needs the employee.
As much as I've heard great things about being a Google employee, I don't think Google would be concerned about unionization if they were as terrific as is often claimed. Perhaps you don't have to work for Google if they suck. The solution to working somewhere crummy, if the negotiation stage fails, is to leave. Even if you're the worst engineer who ever lived, you'll find another job, and probably a better one.
I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but I don't think the anti-union perspective is as simple as to be explained by corporate propaganda or the HN bubble. If someone tried to sell unionization to me in my position as a software engineer, it would only come off as an added cost with for nothing I would personally be interested in benefiting from, and I don't believe I'm an oddball in that regard.
> the employee has more leverage over the employer than in many other fields
Housing deductions, childcare costs, food, travel, etc are all heavily subsidized by the company making it near impossible to leave without moving out of the Bay Area. Housing benefits alone can be an enormous deterrent because if you quit Google, your rent can jump up 50% easily.
If such rates exist, they are uncommon or not often talked about.
There may be better proof out there, in which case you ought to provide it. But until I see something better, I am very skeptical.
This doesn't follow.
In general, unions are bad for companies. That isn't the same thing as saying that they're good for employees. If they do nothing useful and increase overhead, they're bad for both.
Unions also have structural incentives to impose things like seniority rules, because existing employees have a vote in the union and future employees don't, so they vote for things that benefit one at the expense of the other. But that can interfere with the company's ability to attract new talent, which is bad for everybody.
To take my argument to its logical extreme, let's imagine the real world probability that an asteroid may hit BigCo HQ and completely destroy its main data center and most of its key staff, killing the business both figuratively and physically; while that possibility is extremely remote, it's still a non-zero probability. Is it a good use of time for BigCo's execs to come up with a plan to lobby the government to build a giant laser to obliterate incoming asteroids? Would any individual bother? Probably not, because a more likely an immediate threat to BigCo is competition from other BigCos and even SmallCos, government regulation and so forth.
In comparison, if a particular company or industry happened to have such a culture where everyone was generally benevolent, everyone was making lots of money hand over fist, and the work-life balance was optimal, then it really doesn't make sense for big wigs to seriously consider dealing with the possibility of employees taking collective action to gain leverage because the will among individual employees may not exist. Maybe it'd manifest as a topic during a meeting between big wigs only to be shrugged off and replaced by the next agenda item.
On the other hand, if BigCo realized that something is creating a high probability that its employees will unionize, which is adversarial to BigCo, but the thing that is generating said will to unionize is too ingrained and there's no incentive for leadership to change it, the path of least resistance may be to develop techniques to persuade employees not to take action that may be in their own favor.
Indeed, unions can be bad for both employers and employees. That doesn't really matter, though, because either enough employees are going to believe they will benefit from a union or not, despite whether that becomes effectively true, and businesses know that unions are bad news for them; the business also couldn't care less whether a union is bad for their employees unless that hurts productivity by-proxy, as is the case with your example with talent attraction.
All that rambling is to say that I believe that all the individual pros and cons of unions can be presented and weighed, but ultimately the primary driver that creates the will to unionize comes from just how disgruntled or alienated employees feel. If employees don't feel alienation, if they feel they are treated with respect, they like the work they are doing, they are paid fairly, and can go home without stress at the end of the day, then what's the incentive to unionize? So that I can give yet another boss a slice of my paycheck that they didn't earn? Rather than think about all that, I'd rather just hit the gym after work, go home and not harbor that stress.
This is why I make presumptions about life as a Googler in a general sense. If being a Googler is the kind of career apex it at least once was seen as, it seems odd that those who have "made it" would think they need to spend time and money on unionizing. And why would Google's solution be so tactical? My guess is that there are reasons why Googlers in particular would want to unionize, that Google knows this, and have decided that the best way to address the issue is to weaponize psychology. Otherwise, it wouldn't be such a secret. Hell, they actually hired a company that specializes in this.
I could be way off base because I've never worked for Google, and having worked for Apple I'd presume that there are divisions of Google that operate significantly different from the others. Nevertheless, I still think it's reasonable to see a relationship between the employee experience and whether unionization is a real threat to a business.
No question unions led to many improvements historically in the lives of American workers, but they're also responsible for a lot of problems (including causing many businesses to close entirely). In many cases their tactics have been questionable.
Sometimes those demands lead to a lot of long term side effects for all of us too. Want to know why your healthcare goes through your employer? Unions. Maybe you see that as a good thing? Maybe not? But unions are the reason it's there.
In a software industry that's seen dramatic increases in demand and compensation, it's also questionable why people would even see a need? What is supposed to be the big benefit in this field that pays well, offers great flexibility in hours and location, cushy benefits and numerous opportunities for personal development?
Exactly. I really can't name one reason, besides in a hypothetical scenario where an entire tech firm was made up of employees who are married with kids and aren't being paid enough such that 2 to 4 months of unemployment would be a big deal. But even in that case, I have a hard time seeing that being a huge problem because it just seems so rare that anyone gets let go unless the company is in serious trouble.
Plus in tech so many of us have the skills to be our own employer if need be. That's not to say it's always an alternative to employment, but that's an opportunity there for many of us that doesn't exist in most other fields.
A particular company would have to have serious problems and its employees would need to lack leverage for a union to be conceptually necessary in tech, at least in the United States. I can't speak for the rest of the world.
I get the point you're making that this seems like an individually unfalsifiable proposition. Fair point. It would require massive amounts of data to show the arc of people's beliefs and I'm not certain it's a tractable problem.
That said, I already believe that many things I care about I only care about because they are issues that society (or rather members/organizations there within) dedicated time to considering. I think that discourse is inherently limited because attention span and time are limited and, as an extension, I believe that there are issues that most people/all people never think about but by metrics that we deem relative importance we'd find worth major consideration. I would give an example but you can understand the difficulty of describing something no one finds important that is important.
By extension of the above, I believe that organizations, through concerted effort, are able to crowd out the marketplace of ideas (either at societal level or at organization level) with issues that they deem less threatening to their interests, so long as they have hooks that draw attention. I don't think this idea is particularly unbelievable because we can see similar concepts outlined by even the government in the forms of documents suggesting how to disrupt organizations [1]. I think that this idea also dove tails quite clearly with the concept of propaganda and mass media influence like that discussed by Chomsky.
I would argue that there are many arguments that are valid (and sometimes valid from both sides) but at a societal level not productive. I think the American issue of abortion is a great example of this: would you agree that in 70 years of debating the issue, we as a society have made the implicit choice to not debate other issues? Not that we discuss nothing els, but certainly we'd have filled that time with some other issues if there had been a conclusive resolution on the issue. There is no resolution to the debate which is what makes it such an effective tool for politicians to rouse support, so why would they seek a longstanding resolution instead of this continue back and forth of the judiciary as members die and are added? I am happy to continue this conversation but I've rambled enough now and must work.
Not even if it's true?
I can imagine someone presenting this as an argument for being open-minded, and that might make sense. But in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded because the people who hold it have been tricked. That kind of selective skepticism doesn't make sense.
Is it, though? We've got here an article about a multibillion dollar company using its money and influence to peddle a view that's beneficial to them and trying very hard to make it look like it's not actually coming from them. This is absolutely not always the case. This is more than just run of the mill people being open to changing their minds then, is it?
>in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded
I think you've misread the post above, because at no point in that comment was it suggested that said belief should be disregarded.
Every multibillion dollar organization I'm familiar with has a PR team who's responsible for shaping news coverage in ways that benefit the company. We just don't normally think about it this way. Nobody looks at the coordinated release of reviews about a week before video game launches and says "aha, Nintendo has dishonestly manipulated the media once again".
Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them. If you have all 3 of those traits, which are both from your discipline and genetic predisposition, the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't.
Core R&D, hardware, B2B services, networking companies, etc. and then also the factor of geographic places that aren't considered "sexy" in the HN crowd revert to the mean for that geographic area in regards to the mix of political leanings.
I disagree it's about hard work, but about ego about how society deserves to value them. That correlates only really under the age of 35 before their first health scare when suddenly society owes something to them that they never previously wanted to feed a cent into.
At universities though, the libertarians had actually read The Road to Serfdom and could debate with you. Today’s libertarianism is google search deep, just another veneer over tha antipathies of our time.
Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others.
That's interesting. I wouldn't suspect that to be the case, but perhaps I'd need to think about that more. I would guess that while abstract thinking may not have much of a relationship with empathy directly, it may be a pattern of thinking that benefits highly emotional individuals in that if they are capable of empathy then being able to make connections between disparate concepts can help them intuit where someone else's emotions are coming from, hence helping them be better empathizers. Of course that doesn't mean abstract thinking creates empathy, but perhaps it helps existing empathy.
People with terminal diseases also usually become religious. Perhaps atheists are faking it too.
> the world looks like a meritocracy, and it isn't.
Tomorrow an asteroid may, very unluckily, fall and strike me so as to kill me. It would not be due to my merits or lack thereof.
Yet if you want to get ahead, you should generally work hard and do the right things while being sufficiently savvy.
It is surprising to me since I'm not from US. Don't tech workers at Google have good health and life insurance for such cases?
I lean libertarian because I see all of the problems that come from federal level programs trapping us into a status quo that we are mostly powerless to change. You want to change the way that healthcare or education works...let's just say in your county of residence. It's virtually impossible, not because we lack smart people with better solutions but because the money for healthcare and education is already tied up.
Wealthy people can afford private schools or alternative approaches to healthcare if they want. The rest of the population is stuck with what they are given, whether they want it or not.
I don't know anyone who is happy with the state of public schools in the United States: teachers, students or parents. We're all mostly powerless to change it though.
It's not a lack of humility that creates these views, it's empathy for people who are stuck and want things to be better. I lean libertarian because I see the effects that are making it harder to improve all of our lives.
I simply want to reduce the barriers between a person having an idea of how to do things better and trying that out with other people who agree with them. If it works, it will be imitated and improved upon. If it doesn't, it will be discarded. This type of experimentation naturally leads to constant improvement.
People need freedom to make their own choices without having to ask for permission.
Many libertarians are above average in intelligence, in part because it's a less mainstream viewpoint, but I don't think it follows that intelligent people tend to be libertarian. I could be wrong about that, but I've met enough intelligent people whom are the opposite of libertarian that if there is any relationship between intelligence and libertarianism that it's probably small.
> Competent, capable, hardworking people often fail to see the bigger picture, and dismiss others that aren't like them.
It's interesting that you say that. I can't say that you're wrong if that's a result of your experience. On the contrary, I've found that those who are competent, as you say, and have their heads down in hard work a lot, are as liable to viewing the world as being anti-meritocratic. Though I wouldn't go as far as to say whether the world is strictly meritocratic or anti-meritocratic, I think there's more of a relationship between having such black and white viewpoints and having one's head down in work for so many hours that little time is left to read about different facts and opinions.
My best example is a good friend of mine who is also above average intelligence, but works in a field outside of tech where he is, in contrast to me, much more of a slave to the office, hence he spends a great deal of time staring at one subject and not interacting much with information outside his field of view. His perspectives are often very black and white, and he would view the world as being entirely anti-meritocratic. Being an openly communist type, I could make some educated guesses about why that is, but I'll leave my opinion on that vague for now. When we have discussions about any number of things, including meritocracy, it's pretty obvious to me that he holds these black and white opinions because he's rather oblivious to the various counterarguments and experiences of others outside of his narrow field of study. Yet he is at least 120 IQ.
I just realized I indirectly insulted your view on meritocracy. I'm not really here to debate that, and your conclusion may be entirely valid. (and I would say not completely unjustified)
Yes, it's one anecdotal example, but that's a repeated observation of mine. Besides, pigeon holing people into single categories is a flaw of its own.
In that case, so is this very conversation, the fact that we're both on this website, and even the fact that we are both interested in tech.
If it's simply a roll of the dice, then nearly all aspects to existence are pointless, there's no point in trying to think for oneself, etc. Perhaps this is what you truly intend to convey, but until you explicitly state this, this is an incoherent perspective.
Having conversations on a website is a choice. Interest in tech is probably a blend of luck and choice (hard to be interested in something you're never exposed to, and hard to sustain interest in an environment where people consistently discourage it; people ending up in those situations are the "roll of the dice" the author is referring to).
In short, justifying a lack of empathy with "they made their choices" underestimates the amount people do not choose their circumstances in life.
I'm not saying everything is pointless at all. I've earned every one of the few pennies I have the hard way, believe me. I have a non-stop work history going back to when I was 11 years old, grinding down spot welding tips on a lathe to buy my own video games and toys. My efforts mattered. These experiences and my self-discipline built my character and who I am today.
There's some luck involved though. Whether it's your genetic makeup, how you were or were not groomed by your family, and simple right place, right time. To dismiss everyone as "failures in the meritocracy" is short sighted.
For example: John Carmack is a very successful programmer. I'd bet there's many here just as hard working, and as intelligent. He did the right thing, when he was at the right place, at the right time. That's all that separates Carmack from swaths, or multitudes of programmers on HN.
> That's all that separates Carmack from swaths, or multitudes of programmers on HN.
I am astounded by HN's hatred for the extraordinary every day I remain on this putrid hellhole of a site.
Notice how all of those variables are outside the individual's control. I never chose to be born in the shithole that is Greece that was ravaged by the debt crisis, yet it affected me as an individual significantly. Sure I may have had the ability to fight my way through, but I know many who didn't. Furthermore, Bill Gates and Bill Joy never chose to be born into the year they were born just as computers were taking off, they just did. And they used their smarts to make billions.
The sad truth still remains that the strongest predictor of an individual's success is their economic and family background. No one has proven otherwise.
Where did you store the lathe at night? Where did you plug it in? And how did you get the electricity to that outlet, was there an account in your name with the power company as an 11 year old?
I'm not the GP but you're being obtuse and counterproductive. The idea that no one does anything completely on their own is not particularly revelatory or insightful. It comes off as dismissive more than anything else.
That's the thing- I'm 50/50 on this issue. I believe there's inherent advantages that people have, and it's also about discipline and will.
Some people will never grasp opportunity when it comes knocking. That's why many that do grasp (and are lucky to have) opportunity are often pretty upset when others try to dismiss their success. I get that. It's true too. Both can be true at the same time, some are fortunate by no effort of their own, and some are unambitious. It's a Venn diagram of conditions.
But in 2022, everyone wants to be the victim. I don't believe in victimhood as a lifestyle. I firmly believe that "no one has more control over your life, than you".
I've never been in a union, but my wife is. And I've worked as management with unions in a factory setting. It was fine, actually. The company I worked for that was unionized was the best, most efficient corporation that I've ever seen.
In fact it was a superior there that told me, when I was more anti-union, that "companies get the union they deserve".
I did everything I could to get my wife into a professional career with a union, so that when I die she'll be as safe and protected without me. I never wanted anyone taking advantage of her in her career. The union may sometimes do stupid things, but overall to not have one is an absurd, and small-minded idea.
All that said, unions should also be sector-wide not worksite based. And there probably shouldn't be any government unions- I wouldn't budge on anything though as things are today, without real and significant gains for unions in the private market.
I do believe small business under a certain number of employees should be exempted from unions. Say <10 employees. I know France does this, or something similar to it. Big corps keep out competition too easily, and should be doing more to keep the American middle class around. Their contribution can be unionizing. I also think unions would help the world, while I'm certainly not overpaid myself, my Indian colleagues deserve the same pay I receive. I'd strike for that. They, and my employer, deserve it.
The rule of thumb I go by is "If the company has an HR department protecting the company’s interests, then the workers should have a union protecting the workers’ interests."
* What changed your mind when you were more anti-union.
* How upper management perceived unions.
* What joining a union means for your spouse.
* Why you would support a union today.
I've only worked in one place that had a union. I couldn't see the benefit. The union seemed to be contributing to collective laziness and complacency. Being motivated to go above and beyond always put me at odds with the union people who would snitch on me for working after hours. Maybe I wouldn't feel so motivated to improve things if more employees were contributing higher than the just bare minimum? This was a union for a US government agency.
>And there probably shouldn't be any government unions
Seems you understand that perspective as well.
What does that say about the companies that don't have a union?
> I did everything I could to get my wife into a professional career with a union, so that when I die she'll be as safe and protected without me.
The safer option is to make sure she has a skillset which is in high demand.
What's the union going to do if her company goes under?
> I also think unions would help the world, while I'm certainly not overpaid myself, my Indian colleagues deserve the same pay I receive. I'd strike for that.
Different places have different costs of living. That's the competitive advantage of people in poor countries. Have you considered that if the company had to pay them the same as they pay you, they might have hired entirely workers who are in the same timezone? Much to the chagrin of the people you thought you were helping.
> Big corps keep out competition too easily, and should be doing more to keep the American middle class around.
Big corps should be broken up. That's the solution there.
I didn't preclude her skills. I just wanted her to have a union, whether skilled labor or otherwise. Having both has her very well positioned. She doesn't need a union, but it certainly has boosted her pay, vacation policy, and treatment. She could easily put a grievance in at work. I cannot, my grievance is to quit.
I don't honestly think my software development skills put me in a better position. Skills are good if you're a basic worker. Helps. But you aren't in some magic land of success, you're just a worker that gets a job easier than the rest.
I have her well positioned. Everything I learned about reality, I passed onto her, before she got into a real career. Skills + union = a pretty nice life, one that everyone honestly deserves if they get out of bed to work in the morning.
Most people seem to think workers should be "skilled", or abused in some way. I think it's the non-contributors that should be punished or treated harshly. Workers should get all the good things. I don't ask that they build up a skillset.
That’s how it works in Germany and it’s much better than the per company unions in the US. Workers also have a seat on the board of directors by law which also helps balancing things a little. The capitalists and CEOs still make plenty of money within that arrangement, companies are competitive on the world market so it seems to work.
The Betriebsrat approves major HR policies, like how long open positions need to be advertised internally before they can be advertised outside the company, or approving non-shift Sunday or night work hours (kind of a pain, but also a protection against abuse), as well as employee data privacy matters, such as whether MS Teams presence status can be visible to people outside of the company.
Their cooperation is also necessary to fire permanent employees for cause after their 6 month trial period is over. This is a mixed blessing - it means that there are some useless people who can drag things out for ages, but also means that a PIP is more than a bum-covering exercise for management.
If you're having an issue, and don't feel like your boss is hearing you, you can go to a Betriebsrat member instead of HR (especially if it's an issue with HR), and there are enough of them that it's likely that you know one of them, or a colleague does.
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