Kickstarter Union voted 97.6% to ratify one of the first tech union contracts
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[1] https://medium.com/kickstarter/kickstarter-is-a-pbc-heres-wh...
I'm personally in tight with a whole bunch of (ex-)Kickstarter people from rank and file to leadership.
Glad to be friends with people but happy they're not my coworkers.
So this isn't a classical union that's requesting more money for the workers or anything. It's the new sort of union which tries to force companies to take sides in the culture war.
It's thus not a surprise that a significant proportion of workers wouldn't want to be a part of that, and well, the sort of people who were unionizing the firm were doing so explicitly to support physical violence. US unions have a long history of violence already.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/10/how-debat...
Let's be clear; the title was "Always Punch Nazis", not "Always Punch Conservatives". If you're mixing the two up, that's more on you than the author.
I've definitely noticed an overlap between the kinds of folks who want society to embrace and normalize violence against "Nazis" and the kinds of folks who go around accusing opponents of Nazism with little to no restraint.
Edit: I'm struggling to articulate this, but I also sense a rhetorical sleight-of-hand along the lines of "By definition, we only go after Nazis. If you claim that Nazi we went after was actually a conservative, that says more about you than it does about us and it makes us question your sympathies."
Indeed, there was a very high profile example of just that a few months ago. It even made headline news, you've probably heard about it.
C'mon. Beating up and killing Nazis has been a core part of American culture for 80 years or so. Comics, video games, movies. Is Inglorious Basterds anti-conservative? Is Captain America?
It's also a diversion from the actual argument about inciting violence against _anyone_ being both wrong AND illegal.
>"Is Inglorious Basterds anti-conservative? Is Captain America? "
Obviously not, and the fact that this is even being asked illustrates the concern because the association between Nazism and Conservatism has already taken root in some way. If you had just left those last two sentences out of your post, the first assertion would have stood on its own.
It is a reference to a tweet from writer Mike Monteiro, who declared “It’s ok to punch nazis AND white male libertarians who wanna talk about free speech.”
It is not about literal German Nazis, It is about attributing the title of Nazi to US conservatives and validating physical violence.
I said that the idea was about labeling conservatives in general as nazis and justifying violence.
I don't agree with the idea that you get to punch someone in the face if you disagree with them, even if you label them as a fascist
I think most folks would agree that at some point Hitler's Third Reich could be opposed by force, but I think folks would struggle at exactly when to draw the "ok, it became OK to punch Hitler's brownshirts" line.
But these aren’t “conservatives in general”. These are people who are at the very least fascist sympathizers. No one serious is calling Mitt Romney a nazi.
It happened a lot more often back in 2012 when he was running for President.
Meanwhile Richard Spencer's Wikipedia page starts with "Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 1978) is an American neo-Nazi..." It is entirely fair to call that guy a Nazi and it is the reason the modern "punch a Nazi" meme centers on him.
But I must beg the question, if society normalizes and encourages violence against Nazis, doesn't that mean that calling someone a Nazi is a potentially serious act? And, what if they aren't really a Nazi?
The term "stochastic terrorism" has been discussed and I believe it applies here. This is the definition I pulled from dicitonary.com: "the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted"
Context is important and it seems like you are trying to blur that context for the sake of an argument. "Mitt Romeny is a Nazi" is not a serious opinion. "Punch a Nazi" is only a slightly more serious notion, but there is firmly a tongue in cheek aspect to it. There is a reason why the only "punching of a Nazi" to reach any type of penetration into pop culture was from the year before this Kickstarter was launched. This comic is not a serious threat anymore than your average issue of The Punisher.
I think we are debating cross topic.
There is a literal argument that if you think someone is a Nazi you should punch them in the face. It is not a widespread sentiment but advocated by fringe people.
Others are arguing against the literal interpretation. If you disagree with the literal interpretation, I think discussion of abstractions would be more fruitful
That is basically all comic books. Why are you criticizing this one and not like Batman or something?
I don't think it should be illegal to print, but can see how Kickstarter employees could see it as advocating violence in the context of it's name and origin.
I think employees would be similarly outraged if someone was crowd funding a comic called "how to mow down leftists" after the Charlottesville car attack.
Again, not illegal, but you could see it as advocating vigilantism and not want it on their platform.
In general, I oppose vigilantism and violence, and think both sentiments are detestable.
One of those could maybe be called vigilantism. The other isn't, its terrorism.
I don't think violence is ever warranted against another non-violent person whom you have ideological differences with.
I don't think it is moral to act as an individual judge against any non-violent person and Carry Out violence.
Punching someone because you think they are a Nazi or communist is not okay
"A graphic artist...raising money on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to bring a comic book, called 'Always Punch Nazis,' to life" doesn't obviously sound like a call for violence [1]. I see enough ambiguity here to hold judgement.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/10/how-debat...
Calling conservatives a detestable name of a former global enemy doesn’t make it acceptable. Instead it’s encouraging blind “hate” AND violent crimes
What? The article you linked says this is about a comic book about punching Nazis. How is this "not words" ? We are seriously getting angry at comic books about punching Nazis? Captain America comics have been doing that for 80 years. Is there more to the story that I am missing or are people just equating a comic book about punching Nazis to literal "violence against conservatives"? This sounds exactly like the "words are literal violence" idea that conservatives are always mocking.
"Sometimes they're called Nazis. Other times, they're the far-right or alt-right. White Nationalists. No matter the name, hateful groups are spewing vile, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-POC, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-anything-but-white-Christian-views ideologies.
SCREW THAT.
ALWAYS PUNCH NAZIS".
I doubt the book is about punching near centenarians who were members of a specific political party in the 1930s and 1940s. "Nazi" is now colloquially used as a general term to describe fascists and bigots.
Here is the Merriam-Webster definition for the word[1]. The traditional definition is definition 1. The definition the book is using is definition 2.
You don't need to wear a swastika to be fairly categorized as a Nazi according to that second definition. Some people espouse Nazi and Nazi-like ideals without self-identifying as Nazis. That seems to be the underlying meaning of the above passage.
Given that most conservatives hold positions that are perceived by the nazi punching crowd as one or more of those evil stances above, I feel like the concern is genuine. Emphasis on perceived, because there is a tendency to exaggerate just how "anti" such stances are.
And there's the issue, front and center. If someone like me is worried that labels are getting thrown around in a wanton and haphazard manner, and such labels are used as justification for violence, why is it seen as a character flaw for me to worry that such labels might be foisted upon myself in the future?
>"only to immediately think "they are talking about me" that is a problem on your end."
Honestly, part of why I'm so concerned is that I can't read this as anything other than an insinuation.
The comments are literally just rehashing a conflict. Would anyone want to work in a place where such a discussion was part of daily working life?
That's already the default in any non-union workplace, which is to say, the majority of workplaces.
I guess some people think human excrement on the street isn't very "vibrant", they're probably racists or something for not liking it I'm sure.
You can't fool me about Boise. I've been there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting
Historically, it would be hard to argue otherwise. It is lucrative to remove bargaining leverage from labor.
There were some really dirty tactics used by the activist camps (on both sides) and even some press written about such at the time. Things like demanding that management accept the union without an employee vote (back when their internal polling showed that only 30% would vote to unionize...). Negative articles in the press, etc.
The tactics employed and employee-vs-employee culture caused a number of folks I know to leave. Some even from the pro-union side.
Internal polling is always skewed, which is why you have the NLRB process. Negative articles in the press about working conditions and demanding that the management accept the union without going through a vote are both normal. Pretending they're "dirty" is kind of weird.
And if the people left, that's fine. I instigated and ran an organizing committee and left the shop after we won. It's a draining struggle, and one that wouldn't have been successful if things weren't already fucked up for a lot of people at Kickstarter. Ultimately, the success of a union campaign shows that people don't think informal channels will get them what they need at their jobs, and they're willing to commit to long-term conflict in order to make it happen. They wouldn't do that over mild dissatisfaction.
Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective, but industry wide unions are effectively a monopoly on labor supply and bad for society. Look no further than the MTA in NYC.
Terrible cost overruns and bad governance of the subway system, for what? So employees can clock extra hours and get egregiously overpaid? No thanks.
Competitive markets produce societally best outcomes, as is proven time and time again throughout history. Competition applies to labor too, by the way
Badly run companies will get weak talent and become uncompetitive.
Both labor supply and demand needs to be competitive for an efficient society.
If there's a single employer in town, and lack of mobility for residents, that's a monopoly on labor demand just the same as a union is a monopoly on labor supply
With the information and power imbalance between companies and workers, it seems the companies are already an oligopoly. Unions are the oligopoly on the opposing side to balance that out.
Contracts and unions aren't some magical cure all. Unions are political organizations and come with all the problems that political organizations have.
I feel like this happens, from time to time, in virtually every company or institution. I know of people who work for public-sector unions and this kind of thing is commonplace there as well.
Yes, which is why unions are great.
Corporations bargain collectively by default; each is a large unit, with a lot of resources, composed of many people.
Unions allow individuals to bargain collectively, to match corporations in terms of leverage, because few individuals are valuable enough to even come close.
Bargaining collectively = monopoly. They can raise wages up to the level of marginal profit of the employing company.
Just the same as a company that's a monopoly could raise prices up to marginal value of the good to the customer.
If the company can bypass the union to hire others, then it's not a monopoly. But if the union is influential enough this may not be possible.
Distorted wages for labor is not good for broader society, only those being paid beyond their individual market power. Raises cost of goods and lowers quality for the rest
If the whole union will quit unanimously if they do that, then they have effective monopoly power over labor for the company.
The company will die if they try to bypass the union. In this case they could distort compensation far above what a competitive market would bear, and consumers of Kickstarter eat the cost (e.g. broader society).
It's definitely not a free lunch where workers get paid more and there's no societal cost, as many would like to believe
This is no different from having to accept any other company policies.
A company has a monopoly on its own policies, including whether joining a union is required.
Employees can join a different company. Companies can't magically become a different company. If they have a single union they are forced to work with, that union has monopoly power on labor supply.
Good for union employees, bad for the rest of society
Real life on planet earth disagrees pretty hard with you. Google "___est countries". Pick a metric that shows policy impacts. Say, health, happiness, etc. The kind of metrics that aren't abstract BS and can't be cherry-picked.
Pick the first, say, five. Then look up their unionization rates.
I'll spoil it for you. Nordic countries win (it doesn't even matter the metric lol... they even top CATO institute freedom rankings somehow). They have massive levels of unionization. Finland has unionized entire sectors of the economy.
Counter-examples welcome. But say "GDP" and I'll show up at your house and throw a pie in your face.
If the US went the way of Europe, technological innovation would slow dramatically, which I'll argue is a bad outcome for the world in the long run.
What do you think the cost of basic goods would rise to if all the Chinese manufacturing centers unionized?
IRL datapoints > counterfactuals: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/nordic-state-i...
Also I said "Google it" for a reason. You picked an abstract one, and Sweden still beat us! And who could have guessed (me!), but Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland sit there in the top 10 as well :) [0]
> What do you think the cost of basic goods would rise to if all the Chinese manufacturing centers unionized?
You're not only dodging my point, but your own. You asked what was best for society.
0: https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2021/article_0008...
e: Man the "mooching" argument, in this context specifically, is really gonna stick with me. In a work meeting once, someone with knowledge said that each engineer in my org was earning the company $1.5-3 million. This is against a ~$200k salary. This is kind of subjective, but as an """innovator""", the idea that Finland is the one mooching off me is _hilarious_. I'm not gonna comment on what I "deserve" though because dessert theory isn't sound anyway.
E.g. cloud providers must provide cheaper and cheaper service to stay competitive with other cloud providers. This in turn drives down costs for all technology in society.
Sure a union could try to take that profit and feed it into wages instead, but that's worse for society in the end.
When profit margins maintain at excessive levels it's typically an indication that there's either a first mover advantage, or the company is a pseudo-monopoly.
I'd argue there are some big cases where that applies today
Yeah, that's the whole assumption I'm challenging with real world data.
Your ideas sound great on paper or in a vacuum, though. This conversation is way asymmetric, where I'm the only person pointing to facts you can look at with your eyes, so I'm gonna leave and wish you luck with your theories.
PS: > Chinese manufacturing. Manufacturing that is not unionized, by the way.
Unintentional comedy? Natural language model trained on Econ podcasts? Arguing from opposite day? Or the most embarrassing gaffe you could have possibly made in this convo? Not that their unions are good. Just a funny thing to write, caveat-free.
I am not familiar enough with the data to argue one way or another. But a counterargument would involve productivity. There are several fields where good-paying shops run rings around their budget-minded peers. Even for relatively unskilled roles, e.g. Costco. Sometimes consumers care about that directly. More often, it shows up in productivity.
Again, can't argue one way or another. Removing competition opens up novel channels for corruption. But I wouldn't say that a conclusion can be reached from first principles.
In the real world competitors don't always form immediately, it can take quite awhile. But the broad strokes are true, and bear out over time, barring monopoly formation in a given sector, free information etc.
Of course Costco does have competitors, they just haven't been able to execute as well up to this point.
It's a good environment for doing business. There is plenty of capital available, and the laws are usually reasonable. It's a large country that's sufficiently centralized that you don't have to localize everything for each state. And it's a stable environment that has mostly been isolated from the rest of the world and not touched by war in over 150 years.
As a drawback, the system really favors those who own over those who work. Even in places like the Silicon Valley, how much of the wealth goes to those who innovate and how much goes to those who fund the innovations? And how much goes to local property owners who just happened to be in the right place at the right time?
Americans don't study STEM as often as people in other developed countries, because they correctly see where the money is. There are many top STEM schools, but even they largely consist of foreign talent teaching foreign talent.
If the US went the way of Europe and stopped attracting foreign talent, I have no idea what would happen to tech innovation. The innovators and the innovations would still be there, but maybe there would not be as many people capable of taking advantage of the innovations.
The crucial paragraph.
You have it completely wrong. The US is mooching off of EU and Chinese brain talent and has done so for the past 75 years, since the end of WWII. Most innovation that occurs in the US has been done thanks to exploiting highly educated labor that migrated here from elsewhere on the planet.
If we're talking about the tech success of Silicon Valley, again that has mostly been mooching off of the lack of regulations regarding the sale and use of personal user data. Thankfully, EU is finally beginning to install some protections in that sense.
> Google "___est countries".
How about I Google which countries have the largest revenues for their technology companies, and the senior-level salaries of their employees?
It’s also kind of unsustainable in a globalized world, and even more so with remote work: The Nordic model is that you give everyone more or less the same compensation regardless of contribution. But how is that going to work 5 years from now? It’s already coming apart I would say.
> The thing about unions in the Nordic countries, though, is that they’re different from unions in most other countries. I learned this in Denmark in 2007 when a union steward at Lego A/S, which had just announced plans to move a bunch of factory work to Eastern Europe, gave me an impassioned lecture on the positive economic aspects of outsourcing. Unions in Denmark saw (and presumably still see) preserving the competitiveness of Danish industry as a much higher priority than protecting specific jobs. They arrived at this mindset in part because Denmark is a small country trying to succeed in a big, scary world, but also because access to generous unemployment benefits is what leads many (perhaps most) workers in Denmark to join unions in the first place.
> Denmark, Finland and Sweden are what are called “Ghent system” countries, where unions administer the unemployment insurance program with help from government subsidies. Norway used to have a Ghent system but abandoned it in 1938. Belgium, where the actual city of Ghent is located, has a “partial Ghent system.” In recent years, the link between union membership and unemployment insurance has weakened in the remaining Ghent system countries too, with most union-affiliated insurance providers now formally independent, and scholars from those countries have written lots of papers about the pressures the system is under. But from the perspective of many outside observers it still looks pretty great in the way that it combines continued union strength with a flexible, pragmatic approach to serving workers that seems quite compatible with economic competitiveness.
https://archive.ph/2ExBA#selection-6089.0-6961.1
From “ The Conservative Case for Unions”:
> This is not to say the old style of American industrial unions will come back, or should. The mid-20th-century enterprise model, as it was called, relied on confrontational tactics to organize particular companies or factories. That may have succeeded in an era of oligopolistic, locally rooted corporations. However, in an era when even a slight increase in labor costs at a North Carolina factory sends jobs to China, organizing just a single company can boomerang against workers and management alike.
> Fortunately, other models have emerged elsewhere in the world, models that can benefit both companies and labor. A well-known example, popular in Europe, is the so-called works council, which gives workers a voice in company affairs without triggering the fraught, complex process of creating a formal union. In Germany, unions can organize entire sectors, rather than particular companies, giving employers and workers incentives to cooperate in ways that improve industries’ competitive position.
> Even more intriguing is the Ghent system, successful in Denmark and Sweden, under which unions administer government-funded unemployment benefits. Providing that safety net helps unions to shift their focus from protecting individual jobs to maintaining workers’ overall income security; this in turn allows employers more flexibility in hiring and firing.
The best argument for unions is to evolve them from the large rigid bureaucratic ones that protect bad workers to ones that focus purely on wages, while keeping the country competitive (Unions 2.0 if you will).
Also I was surprised to find out France has less unionization than even the US (9% vs 13%).
Otherwise I think reducing anything to a single metric like that is silly.
There's an opportunity for tech to create a less antagonistic form of unions. Simply creating a Board seat for the ESOP, voted in by the ESOP holders (excluding senior management), would be shareholder aligned and beneficial to employees.
Only with unskilled labor.
My profession is skilled and the skillset is in demand and hard to find. I bargain for myself, thanks.
I have repeatedly and at length discussed on HN about my 3 separate union membership experiences and how I will never again repeat them.
What an extremely elitist phrase.
This! I hate when people talk about "unskilled labor" because there is no such thing. There definitely is work that requires less training than other jobs, but there is no such thing as unskilled labor.
Besides, driving a car safely is very much a skill. It's life-saving by definition.
Flying a plain certainly takes a skill. So does driving a car. Both are skills. They certainly differ in the time required to obtain that skill, but that does not change the fact than an unskilled person can't drive a car through dense urban traffic bringing you safely to your destination, neither can they land a an airplane.
If a job was really unskilled, anybody could do it without any training at all. People usually don't pay for actually unskilled things because they can do it themselves just as good
There's a meaningful labor liquidity difference between a job that takes 2 years of training and 2 days of training, and it's important for policy decisions. Sorry?
The starkest difference that I recognize between people in those jobs and people in my career is that in the former people have a hard time showing up to work on-time or at all and in the latter everyone is pretty tuned in and works hard.
It only hit me late in life that success in life really can be just as simple as showing up.
I guess what I would say here is that the kind of people who feel that they need collective bargaining agreements probably overlaps quite strongly with the group of people that have a hard time showing up.
Also you're missing the point. I didn't say anything about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. You DON'T have to work hard. I said just show up. Every day. On time. That's literally the one thing I've seen in life that differentiates people who are successful in life from those who aren't.
And I know bank security guards who show up every day and live fulfilled happy successful lives. What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day. Not all of them but a large number. They won't do the minimum to succeed in life. They need the coddling.
> What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day.
Mind sharing the study of workplace absenteeism that you're basing that opinion on?
I correlated lack of punctuality with overrepresentation in low-wage+low-skill jobs.
There are also plenty of high-social status, skilled, low-income jobs that are thoroughly dominated by the upper classes, like college professors, journalists, rank & file media/fashion, and orchestra musicians. Those jobs are not low-skill and people in them tend to show up to work.
Apparently the euphemism treadmill is on low-wage labor [1]. Which is dumb, since it literally though not conceptually covers graduate students.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp
If you pick a job that literally anyone else can learn to do in a few days, then the cap on your salary and lack of bargaining power is on you.
The comment above was clearly using it as a pejorative.
Unskilled labor can have decent bargaining power if there's a shortage of unskilled labor.
It just so happens that there tends to more frequently be shortages of skilled labor
Not really, because that’s the definition of unskilled: it takes no special skills to do the job. So if there’s a shortage and wages go up dramatically then skilled labor can take its place. (The opposite is not possible/ advisable though.)
E.g. think about customer facing roles and social skills/aptitude. Having all friendly/nice employees can drive greater revenue for a business. Chick fil a and costco are famous for hiring friendly employees, can have meaningful results for the business
Heck, I haven't even worked for any of those yet and last I checked at least 2 of them were offering less than what I make for my role.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
I'm a strong believer that government's number one priority should be to maintain a competitive market, as in the long run that produces the best outcomes for broader society.
Unfortunately they've failed quite badly at it. Especially in regards to big tech.
Important to direct ire towards those that are responsible, representatives need to be held accountable
Judging by that history, you aren't doing so well. Good luck, and hopefully things improve!
Well, that's good to know. I guess the rest of the world can stop worrying about themselves since you're taken care of.
Letting others do that for you is much closer to indentured servitude or slavery.
The problem with all of these collectivsts' arguments is that they all believe themselves to be in their utopia's social planning committee rather than themselves a laborer. And that's if they made it past the "shoot all the troublemakers" phase of their revolution.
Edit: This forum has some sort of empathy deficiency in aggregate.
Define "societally best outcomes". By using the word "societally", you are saying it's not he best outcome for the business, nor is it the best outcome for the employees, nor the best outcome for the customers, but the best outcome for the society at large. Your MTA example shows that a union is great for workers. Please explain.
Considering unions are used successfully in many industries and are supported by both major parties in the US, you'll have a difficult time explaining how they are all wrong.
> Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective,
Isn't this the KickStarter union?
Also, what's a "Smaller and wide union"?
Finally, if unions are so bad, why do many of the largest companies in the world continue to hire from unions?
You can't assess these things in isolation.
If the Foxconn factory unionized, you can bet iPhones would cost hundreds of dollars more. Who bears that cost?
Consumers of iPhone/society at large (when extrapolating to other businesses)
I'd be willing to bet that they don't. iPhone prices are set at the highest price that Apple determines people are willing to pay, not by the cost to produce it; even the costs that do exist are mostly materials, not labor costs. Labor costs are close to 1% of the sticker price [1]. This is the same as the argument that erroneously claims that if you paid fast food workers well it would lead to $10 big macs, when other countries with much higher wages have comparable prices to ours.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/what-it-costs-apple-make-i...
i.e., at the scale they operate, they are beholden almost exclusively to demand, rather than supply, and what supply constraints they do have are mostly a matter of material costs and logistics as opposed to labor.
As the other commenter points out, my argument is that this pricing method (and the comparatively tiny input labor costs) mean that the cost of labor has an effectively negligible effect on pricing, and only would eat into profits.
Because it's illegal not to. I dunno if you know this but if you have a union shop, the company can't just hire non-union employees. (In most cases) Once your company unionizes you can hire union employees, or go out of business.
Realistically what companies do is incorporate a subsidiary in a non-union jurisdiction and outsource the jobs to the subsidiary.
But it goes off the rails when there’s a big difference in productivity between employees, and it gets even worse when managers are allowed to unionize and use strict labor laws to protect them while they play corporate politics.
Source: I’m Swedish and have seen it myself from most angles.
Edit: also, there’s a history of multiple private subway companies in NYC, it didn’t work out.
1. https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2021/01/how-the-mta-...
Given the lack of a profit motive, a well run government needs incentive structures to motivate results towards societally good outcomes. Too bad none of the local, state, federal governments do. Would be easy to institute if the will were there though
Edit: To address your edit, the private subway systems failed after NY instituted a price cap on fares, IIRC. And inflation destroyed their profitability over time due to this.
Once the subway system was made public, development pretty much halted entirely, outside of an extension every few decades.
Subway systems are private in Japan
Sorry, but I don't buy this guilt by association: How does the union cause a significant portion of MTA's problems?
Two separate problems for sure, both bad for the rest
Can you demonstrate this, or provide any evidence for it at all?
The reason I ask this is because you seem to be automatically assuming Union=Bad with no reason to do so.
That's what I wanted to know, thanks!
I personally think current market rates for contractors, esp the staff Aug kind, are still lower than they should be, all things considered
(It’s like $20k per year, and you’ll pay taxes on that when the day comes. You may have to move to Sweden to survive on it.)
It would be wise of you to listen to the Swedes and Norwegians when they complain. They have some of the most funded and legally-guaranteed pensions in the world while economically times are becoming tougher and tougher for their citizens.
Especially for the Norwegians it's looking like pensions can't even cover basic living expenses Norwegians face _THIS YEAR_ and that's on the back of fantastic oil wealth.
We're making six figures here. Want more pay? Sit on your butt and do leetcode or practice interviews and network with other rich programmers. Move to a tropical island and work remote. Heck, you don't even need to go to college and just about anything you want to learn is a $9.99 class away or free on in video format.
Not every worker can or wants to work for a FAANG, whether because of skill, time available to study, logistics like location, moral reasons, or anything else. We all deserve good working conditions now and in the future.
Tech workers are absolutely spoiled compared to most other laborers. We also have higher leverage and thus a better chance at unionization compared to many others. Others having it worse should not prevent us from raising our own conditions, and actually helps improve conditions of other classes of laborers by making it more likely they'll unionize themselves or causing employers to improve conditions as a preventative measure.
When I want 'better', I work for it and get it myself, not by schmoozing the union bosses to get on their good side or paying union fees for 20 years to build up tenure.
If you are vastly more productive than coworkers in the same title band and wish to capture more of that surplus value, you should look to change employers, found a company, or become an independent consultant. Those are the available options with or without unions.
I think most of these tech-unions are ideologically motivated and have no interest in actually improving working conditions.
Do you feel like you already make a lot of money, and you don't need more? If so, there are two actions you could take. You tell me which results in greater good in the world:
1. Don't push or struggle for better pay. Be happy with what you have, and let upper management and stockholder dividends soak up the extra. I'm sure they'll spend it making the world a better place.
2. Organize, push, and struggle to improve your pay. Since you're already happy with the pay level you get, donate all surplus to the charity of your choice. Put your niece through college. Save some of it, then retire earlier and spend more time with your family.
Turns out there are other countries outside of the US. And even in US not all developers are overpaid.
Moreover, software developers are much much more likely to drop out of their career before pension and/or face burnout than other fields.
According to Wikipedia:
Net income: $1.3 million after tax (2019)[1]: 1
If you hate where you work this much, improve yourself and work somewhere else.
Replacing at-will with "just cause", progressive disciplining, with criteria for performance improvement plans.
Adults don't give feedback in a transparent way and this is because they don't want to look discriminatory. Modern employment and HR policies have done great things, but they've made the waters for this kind of communication even more opaque and pushed incentives that way as well.
Being unable to effectively communicate in a competitive professional environment as an adult and unionizing to solve this problem is at best juvenile, even worse when you think about long-tail consequences in terms of babying future hires.
As someone who previously worked at Amazon and found it shitty, Amazon is a stupid point of comparison for unionizing in tech because it's a shit-show run like a hedge fund. However, as a heuristic, people who've spent more than two years at any kind of Amazon should be avoided IMO.
Organizing means you want more power, more control.
Also, there are many dimensions to liking or disliking your workplace. You may love the product your working on. You may really like your colleagues. You may also love the office environment. However, you may dislike the amount of vacation days, the lack of ability to work part time or the lack of paternal leave.
Workplaces have literally hundreds of properties, each of which you may like or dislike. So organizing to tweak those you dislike (while, on balance, you actually still like most properties) is very normal.
Admittedly, I was able to work on some very cool shit at Amazon - however the job made me hate my life.
Ergo - adult logical cycles were spent, decided to get a new job after leetcoding for a bit.
The people who aren't skilled enough to get new jobs or improve themselves (also holds true in any industry) will always be some degree of fucked. I admit, some unions are good, but engaging in a system that grants most benefit to people not willing to improve or make the bar of performance set by the industry isn't good for anyone involved. That said, never work for a place that makes you hate your life. And yes... having the ability to make that choice is a privilege.
Can you define that bar? That's the problem - there aren't any solid definitions without a contract, and it varies by company. The company can screw over people who are actually meeting the bar by simply saying the bar is higher than it actually is.
For instance, for a while I had a CS degree and was solidly above average, but I didn't quite meet the bar because I sucked at leetcode and didn't have enough experience. So I accepted this, improved, and now have a higher paying job.
If you don't want to have to care about improving / competing work as a paralegal, in retail or for the government.
Yes, it sucks but it's a reality of working in an industry as well paid as software engineering.
I'm convinced that sitting on your laurels even if you're well above average for say 4-5 years and not actively improving / being cognizant of others around you and their skillsets will always result in poor career outcomes.
You're complaining about the establishment, in black-and-white, of such a bar. A bar that will be enforceable via the contract terms.
We don't know the terms, so we don't know whether the bar will be lower or higher than the unwritten one that management decides through opaque processes / on a whim.
If we can agree on that, then I’m not sure how we can disagree that unions can be an important tool in helping employees achieve greater representation in a system which generally privileges the will of execs and board members far above those of employees - you know, the people who actually make the company run.
If unions ever dominate the tech industry to the extent that they control the labor pool, we can discuss whether that’s a good thing. For now, that’s just a bogeyman. But having real leverage to increase your bargaining power in the workspace — IMO that’s very good. No one is stopping you from spending your time doing Leetcode, though.
I don’t get it. Could you explain that.
I would switch if I thought other places wouldn't lie. But it seems to me that all companies do.
You wouldn't buy a house or a new car without a contract. It seems stupid to me to enter a job without a real contract (as opposed the the ones we see now that are basically "we the company make the rules and can change them with or without notice anytime").
Objective criteria for PIPs has nothing to do with niceness. Are you aware that this is a standard part of union contracts in general... like one of the first things usually negotiated?
> Adults don't give feedback in a transparent way and this is because they don't want to look discriminatory. Modern employment and HR policies have done great things, but they've made the waters for this kind of communication even more opaque and pushed incentives that way as well.
If I'm understanding your comment correctly, you're against opaque communications? Then, establishing these criteria in a contract is as transparent as you can get.
Perhaps it might be different in tech, where software engineers are usually already very well paid. Hard to say.
It's funny the groups that claim to be non-partisan while simultanously advocating a list of positions...
What is this a reference to? Do you think at-will employment has something to do with woke language or am I reading this wrong?
In a world where it isn't illegal to fire everyone who even thinks of joining the union, you might have some (ethically wrong) point. That's not in this world.
And it's not really "scummy" of the union that health insurance had weird loopholes for kids.
In many industries it's a requirement of the bargaining agreement. But many states have passed 'right to work' laws which state you can't be forced.
And still, I know of positions where there are 'union' and 'non-union' people basically doing the same job at companies. Non-union usually comes with a pay bump to offset not having the union benefits.
Unions are weak because the deck was stacked, the same way it is in every kleptocracy.
Humanity is endlessly capable of finding ways to do anything (good and bad).
Unions and employers negotiate what kind of decisions are made and how, but they're hardly inclusive of every last thing.
Some of the worst employer's I've had were union shops. It's entirely possible to have the opposite experience too, but there's nothing about a union that prevents toxicity.
For the record I've zero experience with how Kickstarter is / this isn't a comment about how or if there are issues at Kickstarter with such things.
Often what people think of as “toxic” are informal actions and behaviors that unions don’t resolve.
Maybe they can sit with you in a meeting but that doesn’t change how that manager can behave.
I think they changed CEO recently, no? It seems like the ex-CEO, one of the founder, wasn't "a good cultural fit" after all. They had a round of layoffs a few years ago where some activist employees were weeded out, seems like it didn't work.
They fired 2 activists who were poor performers but not even the people leading the activism. The press made an enormous, outsized fuss over it. A bunch of non-activists left the company half out of disgust and half out of strong encouragement from their peers.
The company's culture is "very toxic" because 80% of the people there are moralizing to all of their peers instead of doing work.
Just kidding, I think unions are pure evil, and the above is not even the worst one of the many reasons.
- Minimum 3% annual CoL raises
- Profit-sharing bonuses
- Putting their current benefits in the contract, so management will have to re-negotiate if they want to make them worse.
- Replacing at-will with "just cause", progressive disciplining, with criteria for performance improvement plans.
Looking forward to more details & seeing how this plays out, especially as the market collapses (probably will end up looking like amazing timing on their part, btw).
Interestingly, for the people that like to paint unions as wokies, the progressive discipline item (if implemented well) actually _curbs_ 'cancel culture'. Because at-will employment is basically the enforcement mechanism for cancel culture.
Weird that they call it a CoL raise. If it isn't tied to cost, it is just an minimum annual raise.
That plus sign is pretty subtle there.
I'm not sure where you are getting that inflation has been pegged to anything. 2% might be an average, but it has gone everywhere from -2% to 6% in the last two decades.
Besides, inflation is not CoL.
It's what the company supports, not what the union supports. And "performance based raises" are obviously not CoL raisesm
(reading solely from this wording, I don't work at Kickstarter and so don't know the details of the contract other than what's published above.)
What does "progressive disciplining" mean? I like the idea of criteria for being pipped, though I wonder if Kickstarter had a pip culture like Amazon.
These sorts of policies don't generally mean that, for extreme circumstances, larger punishments can't be used, just that you can't start with a harsh punishment for a mild issue.
"high performers" aren't going to be satisfied by Kickstarter's compensation at first place thus won't apply there.
Also good luck arguing to your boss you are a "high performer" in a company that has "progressive performance evaluation", by what measure?
This is a none issue.
High performers in tech do not have a problem with the heirs who own a majority of their corporation's stock telling them what to do, but are allergic to the people alongside them doing the work and creating the wealth from having input.
Do you know how hard it is to already weed out underperformers in large tech companies? I wouldn't be surprised if half of Kickstarter's engineers pumped out fewer than 3 PRs a week. Only the underperformers will choose to stay in the long run.
Ah yes. That always super meaningful metric of high performance - number of PRs. Doesn't matter what it is, if you can't solve it and push some code in less than two days, it's a clear indicator you're a terrible engineer.
If you're talking about keeping 'high performers' in sales, that's what commission is for.
If you're talking about keeping 'high performers' in engineering, ... well, do you even need high performers? Due to the nature of their business, there are no challenging technical feats to accomplish. You really just need solid engineers to push the product and maintain the infrastructure.
You can prove anything from a false premise.
If you read the highlights, they're just asking for documentation on termination and disciplining. Not at all unreasonable.
This idea that unions MUST be antithetical to the company or performance is silly. We have counterexamples on TV almost every day. Further, the idea that job insecurity is the best way to motivate people to perform also seems silly.