This also describes an environment where the union doesn't seem to be offering any significant benefits to developers. If unionizing doesn't improve your working conditions, what's the point of the union?
I’m also happy to be able to negotiate myself.
Obviously, I wouldn't mind better job security for just myself; but if the downside is that my employer can't get rid of the dead wood, I'd rather work elsewhere.
It’s mostly protection vs the Amazon style fire people regularly so we can avoid paying unemployment insurance when we do seasonal layoffs etc.
Some of this just comes down to both being local government jobs run by a multitude of independent systems some of which are going to be far below average. There are ~13,506 school districts in the US, so the bottom 5% consists of 675 different systems with a huge range of issues.
The other issue is it can be hard to get replacements.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/...
A cop can be fired for sexually assaulting a teenager in his squad car, and end up getting rehired by the same department.
I'm not anti-union but it's a double edged sword.
I believe the GP was saying that unions can deliver when circumstances give individuals large amounts of leverage, but they don't need to. But we all know that good times don't last forever, and unionization does provide sufficient leverage when individual leverage evaporates.
Organizations run on precedent, policy, and consistency. Arguing for the potential for inconsistency seems to me to be a rather weak reed. Especially since the WSJ's been a union shop for 80-ish years.
More likely, IMO, is that the union as a whole did not care much about the developers and was more concerned with other parts of the membership. There's one union covering the whole shop, so this seems pretty likely.
In bad times (demand << supply), the difference between individual optimal and union optimal is very large.
Ergo, you're not going to see a lot of union benefits in good times.
A union is not a panacea. For many people, unions are just as much of a hassle as a bad job and without the benefit of self-representation. And when all breaks loose, the last thing most reasonable is trade their agency
That's a pretty poor analogy. Some people do keep lawyers on retainer. Also, if you don't have legal representation at the point in time you're sued/charged, you're not required to represent yourself, and can still hire a lawyer.
Unions are probably closer to insurance. You can't buy insurance after you crash your car and expect them to pay out, neither can you join a union after you've been given the sack and expect representation.
I think this analogy is more apt than you realize. Internet commenters absolutely love to shove insurance down the throats of people who can afford to self-insure against or simply are not exposed to the particular outcome in question.
I don't see unions as being useful, unless there's some pre-existing guarantees that the union can provide (like insurance - you pay a premium and get a known quantity of payout).
Sure they do. TurboTax offers for an extra fee on filing legal insurance that covers a legal defense if the IRS challenges you.
One of my past employers offered a legal program as an optional perk we could opt in to, as well.
https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/law-firm-subscription...
The turbotax product is also not called "legal defense" but "audit defense" presumably for that reason.
> If you receive a speeding ticket or other moving violation, you can call your lawyer and they will handle the situation for you. This plan benefit is one of our most popular as it can reduce or eliminate points on your license and reduce or eliminate fines with no additional lawyer fees. Representation under this benefit is provided when you or your family members have a valid driver’s license and are driving a non-commercial vehicle.
> Your lawyer can represent you in uncontested divorce proceedings. Uncontested Divorce is a divorce in which neither party is represented by separate counsel and all issues are agreed upon in writing without negotiation by your Provider Law Firm, net assets of the marriage are under $500,000 and no division of retirement benefits or QDRO is applicable.
> Your membership includes representation by your lawyer if you or your spouse is a named defendant in a civil suit. Each year of membership, through your fifth year, earns you additional lawyer trial defense and pre-trial preparation hours as follows...
A better example is perhaps liability insurance. The insurance company will pay for a lawyer and has an incentive to pay for a good lawyer since the insurance is on the hook up to the policy limit if the lawyer loses.
People do not pay monthly subscriptions for a lawyer because they are extremely expensive. Those that can, do have lawyers on retainers though.
My hometown use to be booming with multiple manufacturing plants. Every time the union got involved, the plants just picked up and left.
Unions have been around - especially in manufacturing - long before they started offshoring production. The cost of labor in China and elsewhere was simply too low, unionized or not.
Sure, that's their job. Individuals do the same thing; unions just mean everyone negotiates as a group instead of one at a time, with a more balanced power dynamic.
> But regardless, what good would unions be to prevent outsourcing?
Unions aren't magical. That doesn't mean there's zero value in such a scenario.
They can negotiate rules and limits on layoffs, they can negotiate severance and healthcare coverage during such an outsourcing, etc.
Unions negotiate in advance. They set up multi-year contracts between employees and management. These often involve limitations on the company's ability to lay people off, or otherwise meaningfully change employment conditions.
They're not unlimited, and they don't go forever, but it tends to mean there's a lot fewer "surprise! you're all fired tomorrow!" scenarios, because there's contractual protections in place that companies won't give individuals without bargaining power.
Again, unions aren't magic - they can't prevent all layoffs. They can make them harder to do, and they can protect employees better during one.
That's hardly the only scenario. Sometimes they're chasing more profits.
> When has a union ever protected workers when a company was in distress? The auto industry? The airline industry? Flight controllers in the 80s?
Auto is a good example. In the last recession, UAW made significant compromises to keep the industry afloat. https://newrepublic.com/article/155088/gm-uaw-workers-strike When the industry bounced back, they struck to ensure those concessions were rewarded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_General_Motors_strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_John_Deere_strike is another recent example of unions winning significant concessions after a company threatened to offshore.
> Investment bank William Blair & Company estimated that the strike likely reduced Deere's output by between 10 and 15% for the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.[29]
The strike led to an increase in the already-inflated auction prices of used Deere equipment such as tractors and other used agricultural machines.[30]
The unions didn't destroy those towns. Those companies did.
Not all insurance policies are good.
Seems like just saying No to them would be the saner option.
(Similar also for unions you don't want to participate in. Or political parties, or companies etc.
Joining and getting involved is fine, if that's what you want. But avoiding is just as valid a response.)
Most kinds of disaster preparedness are thankless, seemingly pointless work until the disaster in question happens.
I agree that is some forms of insurance are useful. Eg catastrophic health insurance at a good price.
But that doesn't mean I need to insure my phone. Or buy health insurance that covers glasses.
If someone doesn't want to work with you anymore, they should be allowed to just fire you. Instead of having to come up with false pretenses.
See also how Orange in France ended up bullying their own employees in order to entice them to quit; mostly because they weren't allowed to just fire them. (Some of the victims were even driven into suicide.)
Often, the unions themselves are corrupt.
Money has diminishing returns. Paying to gain a small chance of winning big is generally foolish; paying to eliminate a small chance of losing big is often wise.
> Often, the unions themselves are corrupt.
This seems to be a distinctly American quirk. Maybe figure out what you're doing differently to the rest of us that causes that, rather than attacking an institution that works very well elsewhere.
Not so much American. They are very corrupt here in Australia. There are union leaders or related staff in court pretty much every working day in court down here.
Not at all, they're pretty much corrupt across all of South America as well. I don't have first hand experience elsewhere, but have heard similar stories from who do.
That said, because corporations seem to default to exploiting workers to the maximum degree possible, they are a necessary evil.
I don't know how bad working for the NYT is, but I wouldn't be surprised that instead of arguing for employee conditions, they try to influence editors and dejure editorials the might not like.
* Access to remote work
* Pay that isn't adjusted by location
* Transparency in performance review and promotion processes
* Better leave policies
* Better equity access policies
* Opportunities to fire shit managers
* Elimination of forced attrition policies
Software engineers are paid very very well. We have better working conditions than most. But there are still big things that bother people.
A lot of people lost a lot of money for a lot of shareholders with a lot of disastrous projects and by and large it was shrugged off and swept under the carpet as management realized that tech couldnt be treated as a production line affair.
Seems kind of like insurance - you pay for it when you don't need it so that you have it when you do.
This leads me to wonder if it's really doing anything of value for the workers it's supposed to be defending, supporting, and empowering. Like the insurance policy that you suspect will be cancelled the first time you try to make a claim.
My solution for 25 years as always been to change jobs.
Unions offer engineers more opportunities for democratic decision making at work, a place most workers spend 8 hours a day or more at. They also offer strong bargaining positions that can help developers own more of the value they create.
I'm sure there are things about the industry and employers that developers could improve. For example, there are quite a few engineers out there that have on call duty expected of them, sometimes unpaid or inadequately compensated. On call duty, often in places with higher rates of unionization or good labor laws, is compensated by 1.5x to 2x+ rate multipliers, includes additional bonuses, and on call duty isn't an expectation, it is voluntary
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0160449X16643321
But, so what? You can just work elsewhere instead.
If the organization that I work for creates an environment that is not conducive to retaining employees then I’m just as likely to leave as my team.
Companies adopting this model will collapse very quickly with the lck of good talent. Good people will work elsewhere and their employers will thrive.
If your company manufactures a commodity, like screws, they are also easy to challenge.
What keeps you from talking to your team?
This disparity is the reason behind a large part of wage stagnation and other areas where employment conditions are far behind of what has been achieved and fought for in Europe.
Wages have not stagnated in the US, either. What measures of inflation do you use to come to that conclusion? The labour share of GDP has been roughly stable over the last few decades.
They are, but do not forget that in Europe, our take-home wages already have healthcare, social security and pension contributions taken care of, and our housing and general cost of living (e.g. groceries) are also vastly lower than in the US.
> Wages have not stagnated in the US, either.
They have, at least for the wide masses [1].
Well, Europe is big. Cost of living differ between different places.
You can look at measures like 'disposable income' or similar metrics.
Doesn't really matter too much what specific metric you use, US incomes are higher.
Thanks for the source you linked to. To quote them:
> Changing the price deflator used to adjust wages for inflation can boost measured wage growth. But wage growth would still lag far behind growth in economywide productivity, [...]
They are either using difference inflation metrics for productivity vs wages, or their definition of 'far' is different from mine.
Have a look at the labour share of gdp. Eg at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG or https://taxfoundation.org/labor-share-net-income-within-hist...
Since 1950, the amount of compensation going to labour has fluctuated around 59% - 65% of total GDP in the US. A fairly narrow range; and no reason to say anything like 'lag[ging] far behind'.
Because we are looking at a ratio, it doesn't matter how or even whether we adjust for inflation here.
So all productivity improvements that make it into GDP also make it proportionally into wages. You can't really ask for more, can you?
Whether wages have stagnated is then a question of whether real GDP has stagnated. And, alas, unions aren't really known for driving productivity in the US. Just the opposite.
Of course, you can argue about median vs average. And that's a very valid discussion to have.
Labor is not only allowed to collaborate in order to form monopolies and cartels, but is also legally protected when it does.
Please do explain how this disparity is in favor of employers.
It's plain to see that the inherent coordination problems facing workers are much harder than the ones facing managers. It's plain to see that a capitalist is far better positioned to negotiate a labor contract than someone trying to feed their family.
Please explain how history has repeatedly shown capitalists more ready, willing, and able to exploit their position. See the recent labor price-fixing scandal in the tech industry for one relevant example.
It is not plain to me. Employers are just people too, but if they try to conspire with other employers they must do so in secret lest their conspiracy be discovered and punished. Your example of wage fixing in the valley shows this in action perfectly. Yet if employees want to do the exact same thing for the exact same ends (manipulating labor prices), they are not only allowed to do it in the open, conferring great advantages, but they are also protected by the government from any sort of retaliation. They may even be allowed to use company property to organize with!
It's pretty clear therefore that labor has the advantage here.
"Please explain how history has repeatedly shown capitalists more ready, willing, and able to exploit their position"
It hasn't. That's a Marxist trope, not an accurate reading of history. History is full of businesses going bankrupt or being outcompeted because of rising labor costs, or indeed, being exploited by unions. The history of Detroit is a good example of that, or the entire British auto industry. Alternatively, look at all the software companies struggling to compete with FANG-boosted wages. It's hardly an environment where capitalists are exploiting the workers.
The history of labor is full of people killed and injured by police and other thugs-for-hire by capitalists who couldn't be bothered to care about anything but their profits.
Yeah? Then how comes unions are often bigger than companies, sometimes containing entire industries? This "fact" sounds made up. People are not random graphs.
As for violence, the history of unionism is full of union thugs beating up scabs, management, and anyone else who got in their way. Anyone can play the game of "long ago some people were violent". It's not relevant to today's situation.
Meanwhile, 90% of workers are completely on their own.
Unions, even when they're not doing much, bring in stability.
2. What part of firing people do you think is going to fix the bureaucracy?
There was a guy next to me who hadn’t read about the required paperwork and tried to argue. His experience probably wasn’t great but that was his own fault.
I remember decades ago standing in line literally for 3 hours to finally get to talk to the person at the desk only to be told I had the wrong form. Then back to the end of the line.
I honestly can't think of anything that has improved as much in my lifetime as the DMV.
The only time it has ever taken me longer than a month to go from “I’m looking for a job” to “offer” is for my current job. That was only because I wasn’t really looking and was focused on this one job where the interview process took a month to schedule.
Being in a union gives you a slice of ownership in the company you're working in. It allows you to have support if you're getting bullied. It also creates a wonderful dynamic with your coworkers.
But yeah, framing this as a technical problem is missing the point entirely.
It is purely about you taking control of your own career and not wait for the union or government to protect you.
The demand for software developers is not new. It’s been there since I started working in 1996.
This is what you're saying: Do you use any type of insurance? If so why are you waiting for these companies to compensate you? Just take control of your own life and don't use them.
Unions are a system of mass negotiation. The same systems that make our economy work.
Our economy works based on supply and demand and individuals making the best choices for themselves. Again I get back to Amazon (where I work). They weren’t forced to completely redo their compensation packages across corporate because of a union. They were forced to do so because SDEs were quitting like crazy.
SDEs quitting like crazy would've had a much stronger impact if it was an organized strike and AWS literally went down.
Alas, unions can have their own principal-agent problems and bureaucracy and hubris.
In complicated situations it may be that you want more than one insurance against bad things happening.
I'd just be against being forced to join unions, or against giving unions any special legal privileges.
(Eg one such privilege would be not enforcing contract clauses about employees giving up their right to strike in exchange for some pre-agreed compensation.)
The automovotive market used to have garage based startups a long time ago. It used to have fierce competition and workers could get pay raises without unions.
Then gradually everything fell under 3 big companies, workers fought the concentration of market power by unionizing (and lost) and for decades there was just the big 3.
It's not even a question of if or even who tech will consolidate under any more - it will be someone who is currwently a household name. It is when.
It's coming.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
And still people trust management...
And you might be driving safely, but you can't control what other people are doing.
In any case, what does this have to do with unions?