For me it's simple: Tech has brought me from near poverty to pretty darn wealthy. Why mess with that?
Could a union help increase wages even more? Maybe. Are we being paid too little compared to our output? Maybe. But at the same time I'm being paid more than I could have possibly imagined before I entered the field.
And when the relationship goes bad it also becomes very, very one-sided.
Of course, a union can offer other benefits, but the downside of devaluing good performance seems strikingly not worthwhile.
In the end one of the unions helped me, and collaborated with my manager to push HR to give me an even slightly bigger promotion based on my more recent results.
I drastically changed opinion on the unions after that, and have subscribed ever since. They’re not perfect, but HR can be worse, even if you make them money.
I was an engineer in Europe in a Fortune 500 company, for the record.
I don't think that unions like AWU are particularly concerned with the general performance review process.
Did you really never have a bad manager? Can you truly not believe that bad managers exist? I am really surprised by this comment.
Sure, you can also do nothing.
The only time I’ve seen my union take action was when a previous employeer started bullshittimg about our pay been “industry leading” while in reality it was just average. Having a union that remaims friendly with the industry but isn’t afraid to callout single companies and use it’s leverage in that industry to make that company behave is extremely powerful.
The focus on the unions on public sector, and the horribly distorted and weird policies that result is a negative.
It's hard to imagine a google being started by a union. Did the NY teachers union try to do a charter school in new york to show they could do as well as others? My impression was this was a flop.
In CA union passed rules banning schools from maintaining reserves. This is while the same schools teach students about having some reserves (critical) as a life skill.
It was AB5 which made life miserable for even folks who WANT to try to do right by staff and moved from a principles based a approach to a carve-out / exemptions approach (ie, forcing gig musicians to become employees for a 20 minute opening gig at a bar, forcing writers to clock in and out when thinking of their writing, and a ton more insanity). The list of careveouts they've had to add is mind boggling and illustrates how backwards they got it. Obama had this right by focusing on wage rates and hourly vs exempt. His approach was easy to implement and would have gotten rid of a ton of the "manager" abuse out there.
The fight against someone groups like success academy (delivering amazing results to historically under served groups) - denying primarily minority parents the kind of choices that the union bosses and chancellors take for granted.
I'm aware of a case where a union guy showed up drunk, drove a forklift and injured another worker and kept their job. I mean, more power to the union but I have friends who've quit working in a union workplace because showing up and working was like being a traitor to the rest of the group there (who had figured out how to create weird work rule conflicts for extra benefits with scheduling craziness etc).
The history of corruption also less than ideal. "The unsealed criminal case describes a prolonged embezzlement scheme starting in involving union money from the Warren-based union local that bankrolled high-end shopping sprees at Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga and Apple, and more union funds spent on child support payments and Greektown Casino gambling binges."
Though there are some things that are pretty universal and unions would help with. Things like non-compete agreements, ownership of code written in off work hours, collusion across companies to "not poach", and so on.
I imagine some of that might be a lot worse if the state of California didn't happen to take the positions they do. If Texas were instead the hotbed for tech companies, I think unions might be more popular.
My dad spent his career at a unionized company. There were both union and salaried workers. He was salaried. He experienced all of the frustrations of working in a union shop, such as practically having to bribe people to do things for him like plugging something into an electrical outlet (required an electrician). At some companies, they literally had to bribe people.
Non-developers experience many of the same frustrations dealing with software. It's no secret why "shadow IT" is such a game changer for people who can engage in it.
My point is that it may be technically true that programmers don't need a union, because they have something that functions like a union.
Also everyone seems to forget that the history of unions in the US is inseparable from mafia racketeering.
To the point that the federal government had to break some of the power of unions in order to break up the effectiveness of mafia racketeering.
This is disingenuous, because the sort of unions that were involved with racketeering were manufacturing unions, specifically the Teamsters, and overlapping a period during the late 19th century where corporations often employed actual violence (with paid armed security squads) against workers who attempted to organize.
Both were wrong to engage in criminal behavior, but the incentives to do so were pretty strong. Furthermore, because the workers for these industries were drawn from largely impoverished communities where low-level organized rackets were practically a necessity for survival, it's not at all surprising that the relationships and methods continued into the workplace.
There is, however, no history of mafia racketeering with teachers or nurses unions, and regardless of one's opinion about tech worker unions, there is no reason to think that they would have any affinity for organized crime outfits.
You can even read about the corruption and (non-mafia) racketeering involved in NYC's lifeguard union, which continues literally to this very day.
In most major cities, the mafia controlled a majority of the unions and used them to effectively provide mafia made men and associates with no-show jobs to provide non-earners in their organization with a paycheck -- on top of all of that they would find ways to skim a few percent off any labor being done.
It's also easy for you to bring up teachers and nurses' unions not being mafia controlled -- jobs predominantly staffed with women. The American mafia literally cannot have women members per its own rules, so of course they couldn't influence those unions.
If you do your research though, you'll see that the Russian mafia is heavily skimming from medical services through control of the nurses' union in Germany. There is no reason they couldn't replicate that here.
How about the Aerospace Engineer's union, then: https://www.speea.org/ Pretty sure it's predominately male.
> If you do your research though, you'll see that the Russian mafia is heavily skimming from medical services through control of the nurses' union in Germany. There is no reason they couldn't replicate that here.
Organized crime could get entrenched in any industry given enough incentives and lack of rule of law, and just as much: lack of protection by the law for regular people. I could just as easily say the mafia could start heavily skimming the bagel business.
If you have any evidence that teachers and nurses unions are any more likely to fall into that, or that current manufacturing or professional unions are beholden to organized crime, present it. Otherwise it's just an attempt to smear all industries' organized labor with the past of a very specific sector.
And up until a decade or two ago had maybe a single-digit number of possible employers you could be working for. Also fucking goombahs don't have engineering degrees. Again, you're talking about another field the mafia, largely uneducated street people, could never penetrate.
Let's at least start your argument from a place of intellectual honesty.
Your original statement:
> Also everyone seems to forget that the history of unions in the US is inseparable from mafia racketeering.
As we've discussed, major parts of union history has nothing to do with mafia racketeering.
Falsely associating all organized labor with the parts that were involved with organized crime is intellectually dishonest.
How about no. How about solve the problems that make corruption inevitable and then maybe I'll support your union.
All systems that organize and collect power inevitably experience corruption, including corporations, governments, and religious institutions, not just unions.
Even small businesses and sole proprietorships have incentives to engage in corrupt practices like bribery, especially at the local level. Singling out unions for corruption is selective reasoning.
(Unless you're a hypocrite, that will support government... while using the same talking points against something you personally don't like)
> “Talk about any bad experience you or others you know may have had with unions,” the document instructs managers. “Also talk about the union’s past. Tell employees about documented history of Mafia influence and corruption of unions. Tell employees examples where union leaders have embezzled money from their members’ pension and health insurance funds. Tell them about situations where unions have made promises and have not delivered.”
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2007/03/14/hospital-document-...
Both in America and in Sicily are a trail of dead bodies from unionists who didn't want to play ball with the mob.
It's one of those technically true statements. Like "the history of the web in the US is inseparable from child pornography". Yes, some regulations were put in place because of the existence of child porn, but the implication that the web was created by/for child molesters is wrong.
Union racketeering still goes on today.
People still get killed by hammers today.
Anti-union behavior has been FAR more corrupt than unionizing.
The history bears this out. CEO's and Owners have a lot more to lose, and a lot more to fight with than workers who have nothing and are begging for the scraps they do get.
But we don't hold private corporations to the same standard here. Industrialists cannot be separated from a history of outright murder of labor activists. Rockefeller Jr. had labor activists shot with machine guns. But we don't see many calls to avoid working for any private business because of this connection.
(/s, in case it's unclear)
From startups to mega corporations - sexual predators and outright rapists are systemically protected. (I am aware of a few "hushed up" incidents personally here in NYC)
A union isn't just about wages, it's also about being able to speak collectively against decisions that commoditize human lives.
Historically, the most successful unions in the southern US were those run by communists, because they didn't exclude people on the basis of their race. They correctly recognized that the liberation of the workers could only happen if everyone was united. It was often a hard sell to the white workers, being paid the same as a black man during Jim Crow, but the results ultimately spoke for themselves.
Unions which were whites-only were far less effective. When the white workers would go on strike, temp agencies would just round up a bunch of black men to break the strike. Turns out being able to see people who look like yourself on a picket line makes you much less likely to cross.
Source: "The Noir Forties" by Richard Lingeman
Because the bubble might burst? corps are constantly trying to lowball devs, but for competitive leverage they might succeed. Unions are a way to build the profession while the going is good and bargaining power on our side - good luck getting that foosball table when there are more devs than jobs.