Ask HN: Would a tech recession vindicate calls for tech unionization? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would a tech recession vindicate calls for tech unionization?

28 pointsApocryphon99 comments

For years, the idea of unionizing software engineers and other tech workers has been mostly a fringe idea. While there have been some high-profile examples such as the Kickstarter union and organizing in the notoriously cutthroat video games industry, the idea has been largely scoffed at. The idea is that because SWEs are in such hot demand, it is one of the very few examples where employment relations benefit workers greatly.

Now with large scale layoffs already and who knows what else on the horizon, it seems like that leverage, once present during the low interest rates environment of the pandemic bubble, is fast disappearing. So does that vindicate the idea that tech workers should have codified the benefits they enjoyed during the good times, through unionizing?

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Maybe the reverse. You're assuming that a tech union would prevent people from being laid off and maybe it would to some degree. But more likely there would be rules on how you have to treat workers. And they would necessarily be rigid. For instance, layoffs would likely happen by some rule that favors how long you've been at the firm or some meaningless objective measure. That obviously doesn't make sense because layoffs are an opportunity to cut weaker performers or entire teams that don't really do anything. It would also hurt hiring and make employers more risk averse if they know they cannot get rid of poor performers easily. This impacts young inexperienced workers especially and is part of the reason places like France have youth unemployment is around 20% while US youth unemployment is around 8%

https://www.statista.com/statistics/460548/youth-unemploymen...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/217448/seasonally-adjust...

A tech union doesn't necessarily have to behave like traditional unions that favor seniority, and not all unions prioritize seniority anyway.

It doesn't have to, no, but it probably would. Certainly most unions seem to.

[EDIT] I'm poking around the sites for various unions for technical workers and engineers outside the software industry and, at a casual glance, many seem to factor in seniority as well. Are there examples of technical or engineering unions that are not seniority-based? Seems like those would be better indicators of what a software workers union would look like than the usually cited actors or sports player unions.

Why "probably"? A union is whatever its members make of it, and most engineers at any given tech company have relatively little seniority. It's hard to imagine them voting to join a union that would so obviously not prioritize their interests like that.

My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped, and perhaps include an option for everyone to take a pay cut instead (which might be bad! but it's an idea I've heard floated by engineers way more than seniority based protections).

What's wrong with employees just voting with their feet, instead of mandating rules like this? If a company behaves horribly just go somewhere else

Doesn't seem to happen in tech judging by Amazon horror stories about PIP culture and the like.

I think it's pretty easy for an average US citizen or green card holder engineer who gets pipped at Amazon to get hired elsewhere.

The people who really get screwed are the OPTs/H1-Bs who have a very short grace period to get a new job or leave the country.

Sure, but 1) it goes to show that tech workers won't necessarily "vote with their feet", 2) in the event of an industry-wide downturn, that ability to vote becomes far more limited.

Amazon pays software engineers very well (compared to software engineering jobs in general). Perhaps people don't vote with their feet because they like the money.

Amazon comp was entirely predicated on stock, wasn't it? Because they uniquely have a salary cap that's not particularly high.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/amazon-salary-negotiation.html

It seems like there is more Amazon non-warehouse employees interest in unionizing now anyway:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-layoffs-corporate-emp...

Not exactly - while the initial stock they grant vests on a 5/15/40/40 schedule, they also have a large cash "bonus" which "vests" monthly for the first two years. With their assumption of 15% stock growth per year, you should have equal TC per year for your first 4 years. Of course, assuming 15% annual stock growth is silly, but you can run the numbers however you want. The point is that compensation for the first two years is predominantly cash.

No? I've definitely heard stories that Amazon is having a harder time hiring people because many workers are churning out.

> an option for everyone to take a pay cut instead (which might be bad! but it's an idea I've heard floated by engineers way more than seniority based protections).

We already do that, it's called RSUs. If a portion of your compensation is in RSUs and the market goes down, you automatically get a paycut. Better than being laid off, isn't it?

This is like doing the same thing but expecting a different result. You think unions follow some optimal logic but I’ve seen no examples that do. The only real expectation you can have is that it would end up roughly like existing unions.

I have had personal experience with men in leather jackets giving you the “better vote x or you might have an accident” unions. So I’m a bit biased.

> This is like doing the same thing but expecting a different result.

Tech culture, and Silicon Valley in particular, is so obsessed with recreating things from first principles and experimenting for the sake of it, that you would expect that they'd give reinventing unions but under a different name a shot.

There are a few problems with unions, many of which can be summed up as principal/agent problems. But another issue is that unions are fundamentally democratic, which leads to some misaligned incentives.

Seniority is a completely legible and unambiguous criteria, and it’s one that most workers can eventually benefit from in the long run. Merit is more of a judgment call. Management at least has the incentive to get that judgment call right (which isn’t to say they do get it right, but at least they have the incentive to, modulo the same principal/agent problems that unions also introduce), but unions don’t. So if I’m part of the top 20% of workers at a firm, or part of the top 20% that the firm could reasonably hire, my incentives are actually better aligned with management than with the other 80% of workers who would dominate the union. The classic union solution to this problem is closed shops, but that’s hard to achieve without specific legal and regulatory moats.

Also:

> My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped

This is another common failure mode of unions. People who already work in a given field are in the union, but people trying to break into the field are not. So it becomes harder to hire new people, which actually leads to longer tenures and makes seniority seem like a better deal for the union members.

I tend to imagine that tech unions would be different from organized labor cultures in the past. Partly because it's a newer industry with different culture, and actively seeks to use technology to try to invent new social relationships, from the FOSS movement to the gig economy. But perhaps that's being overly optimistic towards tech/Silicon Valley's pretense of disruption, innovation, and doing wildly different things from the past, and naive towards its hypocrisies.

What way would be ideal? It would have to be an objective measure applied universally. I challenge you to come up with a reasonable measure. In reality, front line workers and managers (the good ones) know ability of people and how much they contribute. In my experience it was very obvious and agreed upon for the most part. But none of the (in)effective people could be discerned in an objective way.

My point isn't that unions could necessarily protect layoffs, and thus I am agnostic about how they should respond to layoff criteria. My point is that unions could protect benefits that might go away in the event of a market downturn, when tech labor power is similarly weakened.

Right, but everything has tradeoffs. If the org chooses to protect benefits, then it may mean more cuts. For instance, to save $X a non-unionized firm may have to cut 5% of the workforce, and it would likely choose weaker performers. But if they have to provide more benefits and severance to those they let go, they may have to cut 10% of the workforce instead. In my experience layoffs were always measured. The people affected were usually weaker performers or in functions that weren't practical anymore (e.g. recruiter during a hiring freeze).

For me the tradeoff is not worth it. I understand that there will be ups and downs and I may one day be a victim. But I appreciate the flexibility that likely led me to be hired in the first place without a traditional background in tech. Basically they took a chance and luckily it worked out. But if the firm had a much higher cost to get rid of someone, they likely would have went with a more traditional candidate

By benefits I don't mean simply TC pay package items or employee perks, I mean not being subject to games industry-style unpaid overtime crunch, or forced RTO for those who had moved hours away from the nearest office during the pandemic, basic QoL "luxuries" who might be put into jeopardy as labor power weakens in poor economic situations.

> It would also hurt hiring and make employers more risk averse if they know they cannot get rid of poor performers easily. This impacts young inexperienced workers especially and is part of the reason places like France have youth unemployment is around 20% while US youth unemployment is around 8%

Youth that are in post-secondary education and not looking for work are included in that 20% figure you cite, and France has a much higher post-secondary education rate than its neighbors. I don't think your assessment that it's caused primarily by unionization holds up.[0]

> You're assuming that a tech union would prevent people from being laid off and maybe it would to some degree.

A primary goal of such a union would be to negotiate better separation terms in a layoff scenario, not necessarily avoid layoffs altogether. Markets are unpredictable and things happen, but people should be taken care of in the event that it does happen.

> Youth that are in post-secondary education and not looking for work are included in that 20% figure you cite, and France has a much higher post-secondary education rate than its neighbors. I don't think your assessment that it's caused primarily by unionization holds up.

That's incorrect. Unemployment is defined below and includes only those that are available and seeking employment. You're thinking of workforce participation rate.

> Youth unemployment refers to the share of the labor force ages 15-24 without work but available for and seeking employment (modeled ILO estimate).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLUEM1524ZSFRA

Traditionally, unemployment measures exclude those in education and those not seeking work. Are you saying Statista is using a peculiar measure that includes these people for some reason? Are you sure you’re not thinking of the “workforce participation rate”, a different statistic entirely?

People that make statements about what the primary goal of such and such a union would be seem to implicitly assume that the union would be run according to their particular vision, when in fact it would be run by majority rule at first, and later (once employees don't have a choice about whether or not to join) to satisfy whatever hidden constituents hold the new levers of power.

I've heard before that in France it's basically impossible to fire people and due to that, some tech companies stopped hiring there, is that true?

Either way, I think people who advocate for tech unionization blindly (not those who consider it carefully, I'm talking more about people on the internet who likely have never been in a union) should understand that it's not without tradeoffs, it's not always a net good depending on what the higher order effects are.

The thing about tech unionization is that too often the conversation is to assume that such an phenomenon would be exactly resemble that of mid-century heavy industry labor unions, when that is neither predestined nor even feasible. Given how relatively new the software industry is, how its production processes differ from those of manufacturing or mining, and how tech seems to embody its own unique Silicon Valley culture of its own. Not to mention, a sweeping all-encompassing unionization of tech is unimaginable given how for a long time now, unions have been seen as completely unthinkable, due to libertarian sentiments in the industry and employer relations favorable to labor.

Thing is, tech unionization is most likely to happen in gradual patchwork efforts, as it is now, and is far from the bogeyman that critics pose it as. Not to mention, there are different halfway compromises that could be a good initial step, such as introduction co-determination or bringing back board ombudsmen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367243

> The thing about tech unionization is that too often the conversation is to assume that such an phenomenon would be exactly resemble that of mid-century heavy industry labor unions, when that is neither predestined nor even feasible.

I’d definitely welcome more comparisons with professional guilds or similar, and especial non-English sources. For example, I’ve been told by multiple people German and Scandinavian unions are quite different culturally.

> You're assuming that a tech union would prevent people from being laid off and maybe it would to some degree. But more likely there would be rules on how you have to treat workers. And they would necessarily be rigid. For instance, layoffs would likely happen by some rule that favors how long you've been at the firm or some meaningless objective measure. That obviously doesn't make sense because layoffs are an opportunity to cut weaker performers or entire teams that don't really do anything.

“weaker performers” is either (1) an objective measure that unions can be sold on, or (2) a cover for “management discretion”. Usually, what management wants is #2, which is why unions tend to oppose it.

Union agreements do often allow shutting down locations/functions with notice and sometimes meet/confer rules, but if people are laid off for that reason and not for cause, they tend to have rehire priority if the company hires for the same job classification, preventing closures being paired with new (but surprisingly similar) new units and discretionary rehiring to do bypass targeted firing rules requiring process and evidence of violation of rules/standards.

> “weaker performers” is either (1) an objective measure that unions can be sold on

Do you have any examples of unions accepting that?

What's an objective measure for weak performers? I haven't found any. When someone is not performing, is disruptive or just not a good fit, management usually starts building up a paper trail with poor reviews (subjective with documentation) and an improvement plan. I think it's reasonable approach.

Also the rehire thing sounds fine but its one of those benefits that would have to be negotiated but in practice almost no one would use.

Laying off locations and functions make a lot of sense. If it becomes prohibitively expensive or inconvenient for a location why would you want to make it harder for the employer to adjust?

(American biased) I think too many in these conversations fail to show good unions (sports and entertainment) and harp on the bloated ones (teachers UAW). Ideally the union should just be a floor, what protections we’re provided, benefits for when corporate feels trimming happy to soften these blows, and to reduce inherent biases within the industry. While I’d love for one to develop in this time, it’s still too many thinking they’ll be the successor versus the next to be expendable.

I think the only reason people think certain unions like sports or entertainment are “good” is because they have no interaction with them (as opposed to teachers unions). I had some family that made a TV show, and SAG (screen actors guild) was a huge pain point. They are one of the reasons you don’t see more small scale movies and tv shows.

The entertainment unions may be good for those already in them, but they make it really difficult for new people to enter the profession.

One of the reasons unions exist is to provide some sort of job protection for the members. If anyone can just join up, then the effectiveness is reduced. Having an entry bar also guarantees some level of experience to the employer, making the union an attractive hire, in theory.

> does that vindicate the idea that tech workers should have codified the benefits they enjoyed during the good times, through unionizing?

It seems like one is unrelated to the other. The goal is good — to get back to the good times. But the path from here to there seems unlikely to pass through a union, at least for most tech workers.

It would help to list some of the perceived benefits of unionizing. Then we’d be able to quantify an answer. Without a specific target, it’s hard to say whether a certain proposal might get there.

Later: The recent layoffs are a good example of one of the benefits of unionizing. Theoretically, companies would have a tough time reducing head count if we were organized. But that raises the question of whether 14 weeks of severance is sufficient. For me it would’ve been, but there are a great many who wouldn’t have.

Are there other benefits besides layoff protection? Discussions like these often focus on the downsides of unionization. It’s hard to recall one extolling the virtues.

> It would help to list some of the perceived benefits of unionizing.

It helps to look at other highly-skilled workers that are unionized, and pro athletes are a particularly interesting as a case-study for modern organized labor. They get profit-sharing and guaranteed raises built into their contracts. No need to wade through the BS of exercising shares that may or may not be worth something down the road. There are obviously many differences between the revenue that pro athletes generate and earn compared to tech workers, but if anything, I believe that it shows that tech workers leave a lot on the table by not unionizing.

Additionally, organized labor would give more power to workers in termination situations. Right now, lots of people are being laid off because companies raised headcount irresponsibly and are now dealing with it by trimming their staffs. A unionized workplace is in a much better position to demand more favorable separation terms (guaranteed insurance, severance, etc.) in order to disincentivize employers from irresponsibly hiring and firing. If we're gonna be sacrificed in a market downturn, we should always be taken care of.

Given the P/E ratio for tech shares are generally better than profit sharing, especially in R&D heavy industries.

The companies that go under don’t tend to have a lot of profit.

Pro athletes are orders of magnitude away from tech workers in terms of how valuable and irreplaceable they are. There are fewer than 500 NBA players and fewer than 1700 NFL players on current rosters, and few of them can be usefully replaced by anyone not currently in the league.

Also, tech is a fairly open marketplace. John Carmack can start his own company and has done so multiple times, but LeBron James can’t start or even buy his own NBA franchise if he wants to play. So while professional sports owners are an obvious, fixed counterparty to the players in a collective bargaining sense, the top tech workers can be and often are the owners and management of tech companies.

Doctors, psychiatrists, and lawyers all of professional organizations that effectively function as unions. And the SAG includes many workers beyond the marquee film stars.

Yes, let’s talk about the doctors, then. Thanks to the AMA (the de facto US doctors union), there is a deliberate and structural shortage of doctors in order to deliberately prop up the pay for US doctors. It’s also virtually impossible for any practicing physician outside the US—even in other developed countries—to immigrate to the US and continue practicing medicine. This has obvious negative consequences for the availability, affordability, and cost of health care in the United States.

The AMA's actions were undesirable, but that just goes to show the power it wielded on behalf of its members, and the occupation it represented. Imagine if the IEEE/ACM could lobby for SWEs as effectively, but in a socially desirable way. Also, perhaps in the present or future, the AMA could use its own power to undo the mistakes it made in the past:

https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope...

Yes, if we had a powerful union that exerted power in the specific ways that you agreed with, I’m sure you’d be happy with it. In fact, why stop there, we could just make you dictator! Or at least someone who exclusively did things you agreed with, if you didn’t want the extra work.

Failing that, we have a bit of a fork. Either we have a union that acts in the interests of its members (which the AMA has done!) or we have a union with some serious principal/agent issues that follows some other agenda, and the odds aren’t very good that you or I would always agree with that agenda.

All beings act in the interests of its members, and can still do so while in compliance to some greater system. That is why perhaps a union, like any other association of sentients that have ever existed, may be governed by a greater set of rules, such as laws, designed to preclude abuses such as in the AMA case. Which is why it is possible to support a ruler- even me- while simultaneously be at ease that they are not a dictator, because we live in a society of the rule of law.

Sure. Which laws stopped the AMA’s abuses? Conversely, which laws made those abuses possible? How are laws made, and how has the AMA, or unions in general, influenced that process? How often is the answer, “the union is a de facto segment of a specific political party, always contributes to that party’s campaign funds, and due to closed-shop employment arrangements, those funds are collected from workers’ paychecks regardless of their personal opinions”?

Certainly, if both parties worked with unions, labor would not be seen as a partisan topic. And perhaps the continued rise of inequality might have been stymied.

https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-decline-inequality-ri...

And again, the AMA is not a union, but a professional association.

> And again, the AMA is not a union, but a professional association.

Yes, one of the “professional organizations that effectively function as unions” that you mentioned earlier as a positive example.

Yep, so we agree.

> Are there other benefits besides layoff protection? Discussions like these often focus on the downsides of unionization. It’s hard to recall one extolling the virtues.

It's less about preventing layoffs, than preventing employers behaving differently from they did during the good years. Slashing benefits, imposing harsher conditions, and so forth.

It just feels like we're in a grasshopper and the ants situation and if winter comes, we're going to be inundated with news stories about tech corporate management undertaking gross and appalling actions that would have been unthinkable, or easily avoidable, during the boom times.

> Are there other benefits besides layoff protection?

Yes. I want:

- union-paid lawyers to back me up if I refuse to follow illegal or unethical demands from management

- H1B Visa protections and networks to help laid off H1B visa workers to find work

- non-visa workers to legally back and support their visa peers to prevent abusing visa workers knowing they can't leave

- sane on-call standards I can point to when negotiating my employment

- extra pay if my manager wants to make me work evenings, weekends, or holidays

- union-paid contract lawyers to protect my open source and personal side projects from my employer's greed

- union-paid advisors on equity offerings, including tax effects

- sane layoff requirements and legal teeth to sue if layoff contracts aren't met

Honestly all of these are pretty appealing, and reasonable. Excellent list.

I didn’t expect to be swayed, yet that was a tilt in the direction of unionization. The H1B situation in particular is indentured servitude, and I’m not sure why it hasn’t become an issue yet. I remember one fellow in particular from my time at Scottrade; it seemed like he was there 14 hours a day. I only noticed because of my erratic sleep schedule. In hindsight it was pretty obviously an H1B situation.

The advisors are a benefit I never knew I wanted. In hindsight it seems strange to have to navigate it by ourselves.

Any organization including a union eventually gets captured by corruption.

See teachers unions that don't let bad teachers get fired even after abusing students.

The iron law of bureaucracy dampens my desire to have the feeling of safety that may come from being in a union.

This is true for corporations too. C-suite suits effectively collude to benefit themselves the most. The only difference is the interpretive frame we decorate their behaviors with. In the case of unions and government, it's bad, but the same actions taken in the corporate world are inevitable and good. "Of course they would do that! That's how it works!"

The difference is that you have a choice about whether or not to engage with a corporation, but not for your union or government. If you don't want to engage with a corrupt corporation then you can switch jobs or start a new company, but if you don't want to engage with a corrupt union then you basically have to switch industries.

On the flip side, there can be industry-wide practices that are only avoidable if you switch professions. Prior to the pandemic, unless you were lucky to already WFH you were basically guaranteed to work in an open office as a SWE in tech, not even a cubicle.

I'm glad you brought this up. It allows me to get to my point which is that choice between corrupt corporations isn't really a choice at all.

It highlights the absurdity of choice under markets, namely that markets frame choices in a way that constrains thinking. Markets don't provide for choices beyond their horizon while making people think that they have all the choice in the world.

These are in fact the same thing. It's just as absurd to say, "why don't you create your own government if you don't like this one?" as it is to say "why don't you just not engage with corrupt corporations?" The question itself is ill-posed and assumes its own conclusion.

This very mechanism is addressed in Žižek's summation, "I would prefer not to," and in the topic of choosing among the least corrupt corporations, I too would like to affirm the non-predicate. I would prefer not to.

> Any organization including a union eventually gets captured by corruption.

How is it not just "any organization eventually get captured by corruption?"

I have seen this happen on every scale and even with seemingly frivolous things, like my mom's garden club.

I think corruption is an emergent trait of groups of humans. We socialize. We're political. We have goals. Favors happen. Boom - corruption!

As someone that used to work blue collar jobs, I would never join a tech union.

Skeptical POV: tech management culture is so consistently awful I hardly want to add another management party to the mix.

I don't buy it. It's like saying, "Of course the executive is bad, we wouldn't want to add legislature and judicial to the mix because it would make it even worse."

Hardly. Seeing how the nyt union organizes against employees, I’d fight any unionization effort at my work strongly because I’d be worried the union would go after me if it could

I'm not certain that I want something as simple as a union that just works to make sure I'm not fired.

What I'd love to see is a collective of employees that owns a significant portion of the company- the group, not just the individuals within it. It doesn't need to be the majority ownership, but enough that this group is a major player. They get consulted, and their support matters.

As owners, this group would be incentivized to help maximize profits. But those profits would then go to the employees. The leadership would be elected, and be tasked with trying to divvy up those profits among employees in whatever way seems fair.

There's a lot of flaws in this idea. It's initial. But I would love to see something tried where employee power doesn't just come from the threat of holding out labor, but from actual ownership.

It would be interesting if the next tech boom sees startups and other new ventures set up with co-op structures and democratic management structures, certainly.

Even something as simple as allowing worker reps to have a seat at the board, codetermination, would be innovation for the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

You can start a co-op, I was in one. But it necessitated finding our own work and that was too much of a hassle for me compared to simply working at a regular company, even if I don't get all the fruits of my labor so to speak.

What will unionization do for recession? Will they create jobs ? Or will they force employers to keep people on their payroll, who will not be doing anything productive? Recessions happen for a reason, which is the economy tanking in general. An in a long roundabout of thing, most of the time an overzealous union or two can be found close to the heart (root cause if you will) of the recession. Unionizing even more, will not help the situation of workers but will fatten the union organizers. IT industry is not a good place for unions as far as the tech workers are concerned. If you are good at what you do, your unemployment period is negligibly small. Call it an unpaid vacation. If you are one of those crash course graduates who call themselves IT experts, then all bets are off. This IT unionizing thing getting pushed more and more by the inept people in IT as well as the few clever guys who are looking into living the life of dolce-vita off of the backs of unionized workers. Screw all of them.

> Or will they force employers to keep people on their payroll, who will not be doing anything productive?

I don't know if unions could actually affect hiring or retention, but they can protect benefits, the sort of things that might go away during an economic downturn.

> An in a long roundabout of thing, most of the time an overzealous union or two can be found close to the heart (root cause if you will) of the recession.

That's certainly not the case of a tech recession, if one was to happen this year.

> If you are good at what you do, your unemployment period is negligibly small. Call it an unpaid vacation.

It's not a matter of unemployment. In harsh times, who knows what direction the industry will move towards as labor power disappears, in contrast to the past two years. Perhaps some firms might start moving towards 996, even. There are a lot of good things everyone took for granted during the good times, and in bad times, who knows how it'll change. This is simply a "memento mori" sort of caution as we appear to be on the onset of bad times.

> This IT unionizing thing getting pushed more and more

Is it really? Software is an industry that has been around for perhaps half a century? Any chatter towards unionization in the field seems as hypothetical as it always been, except at a few companies, so the usual anti-union alarmism is as hysterical as ever in a field as anti-union as this.

I feel like a union would do really well in situations like the layoffs at twitter.

How so?

People who architect systems know that there can be value from a management layer, especially where scalability is a concern.

People who look at history often see unions becoming a solution in search of a problem.

> People who look at history often see unions becoming a solution in search of a problem.

Unions are the reason we have a 40-hour workweek, minimum wage and the Civil Rights Act. If you're not working today (Saturday), you can thank organized labor efforts for that. They've deeply impacted our work lives in ways that are not immediately apparent to those that haven't read about them.

> Civil Rights Act

Do you have a source for this? The Wikipedia entry on the Civil Rights Act hardly mentions unions.

Unions were integral to the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Without them, boycotts would not have been successful. MLK Jr. spoke often about the rights of workers in his speeches, although this is rarely discussed today outside of leftist circles.[0]

There's quite a bit of literature on organized labor's relationship to the Civil Rights Movement, here are just a couple of examples[1][2].

0: https://www.afscme.org/about/history/mlk/dr-martin-luther-ki...

1: https://teamster.org/2021/02/civil-rights-and-the-labor-move...

2: https://www.epi.org/blog/labor-rights-and-civil-rights-one-i...

Sort of. The truth tends to be more complicated. Religious groups were important in the weekend becoming a thing. It's not a coincidence it includes the two days Jews and Christians typically attend religious services.

Unions did have a role in the Civil Rights act, but they were not the only backers, and were hardly uniform in their support. Unions in the South had pushed blacks out of entire industries.

> Unions are the reason we have a 40-hour workweek

I'm open to a discussion on this, but I'd make an argument that the biggest direct factor that caused improvements like 40 weekly hours of work being possible isn't unionization, but the overall process of industrialization.

Many people always seem to forget that employers also have to compete for labor. Once a society becomes wealthy enough through industrialization, the setting for better working conditions emerges and becomes possible; whether it's union agitation or simply market competition for workers that pushes them there. The root condition that has to be in place is industrialization.

To illustrate this, I'd offer a thought experiment. Imagine a dirt poor country with no machinery that multiplies their labor. People there currently need to work at least 80 hours a week just to feed their families low-quality gruel and give them rags to wear. How does this hypothetical country ever get to 40 hours of work a week without starving? It doesn't matter how well-intentioned and powerful their unions are, their only path to living at 40 hours per week is going through the shitty process of industrializing and becoming efficient enough first.

> minimum wage

I would strongly argue that an enforced minimum wage isn't the act of love it sounds like, but an act of supreme hatred. It completely locks the most disadvantaged out of the labor market. I know some borderline mentally/physically limited people who hate feeling useless and would love to have some kind of routine and feel like they can contribute to society in a small way and benefit themselves a bit with some kind of job, but due to their working speed and special challenges, there's no way they can be employable at a normal minimum wage for any task. The minimum wage doesn't help them: it just makes the least advantaged among us as depressed wards of the state who rot away their lives because they're completely locked out of a normal life in the world.

It depends on the shape of the recession. Collective bargaining is a way for workers to demand some of the surplus that's otherwise flowing to owners. If the tech labor market crashes by itself, such that tech firms are able to increase their revenue per employee, then a union could claw some of that back. But if layoffs are coming from companies with thin or negative margins, then to the extent that employees can secure higher wages or make themselves harder to fire, those companies will only go bankrupt faster.

i'm trying to skip the corporate union layer and just start a co-op with my other talented friends

Perhaps a guild? Or does that sound too old-timey?

I've always held that guilds would be the perfect name for a tech union, given their MMO connotations.

Of course skilled professionals have formed guild forever and this is where the concept comes from, but also, I think plenty of us secretly want to join the IRL equivalent of a Mage’s Guild.

Why do I feel a tech union would just cause companies to outsource everything overseas to places where there is no union? I love the idea of unions but I don't know how to get around asshole companies.

https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2011/04/25/mo...

Those places might also start forming unions, even if those unions might not be in their members' interests.

https://www.protocol.com/china/china-tech-companies-unions

If companies started outsourcing and we had a union of tech workers, we could just collectively replace those companies. They’d either play ball with us or we’d do a nuclear option & GNU an equivalent tech stack that obsoletes them.

The market in tech still seems pretty hot to me. All my news is "layoffs" but all my unsolicited emails are invitations to interview...

Also, it's not clear to me how a union would assist. If your startup is shutting down because it cannot get funded because interest rate rises mean there is no more cheap cash, what will a Union do? Convince the FED to slash interest rates to save your company?

I think most workers in tech and in most industries can recognize many areas of waste and inefficiency at their employer that have nothing to do with interest rates.

> All my news is "layoffs" but all my unsolicited emails are invitations to interview...

What kind of firms are there? Saw a comment on HN last week saying that recently-funded startups are still hiring, which means they might have a year or two of runway before they get into trouble. We're not actually in a recession yet, and hopefully there won't be, but the smoke we're seeing before the fire is not great.

> If your startup is shutting down because it cannot get funded because interest rate rises mean there is no more cheap cash, what will a Union do? Convince the FED to slash interest rates to save your company?

It's less that a union could have prevented this situation, and more that a union could protect whatever benefits SWE in tech are taking for granted right now, that might be removed later on. Pushing back against involuntary RTO, for instance, which may or may not happen regardless if there is a recession.

Perhaps it could be argued that unions could have cautioned against management from overhiring during the last two years, but given that would be seen as gatekeeping, which is a common accusation against not only unions but professional orgs such as the AMA, I'm not sure if tech unions would have affected the current industry predicament. They might have even agreed with managements' actions during the gravy train years.

I am in FinTech in London. Everyone from Tier 1 banks down to startups seem to be recruiting here. I work at a crypto company, about 200 employees now so not a start-up anymore really. We've had plenty of bad news this year :). But we're actively hiring and revenue is ok.

I think it's important to remember that a recession is a whole-economy event. A 20% drop in one half of the economy and 10% growth in the other half is still a 5% drop over all. But if you work in that growing part then you, your company etc don't have a problem...

I am not fundamentally opposed to unions, but I am also not convinced they will improve things either (either for me or my colleagues or the company). Like you say, maybe a union would have reduced hiring and put companies in a better place? Or maybe they would have increased it and made things worse? Who knows?

We could go back and forth and be right or wrong. But I don't think and of those factors change significantly in a (possible) recession that may or may not affect tech...

Maybe the tech scene in the U.K. and Europe is different, perhaps companies there have not overhired as zealously as the American tech industry thanks to Fed money. And as far as banks go, they're hiring on this side of the pond too, other industries do not seem to have made the same mistake as tech has.

> I am not fundamentally opposed to unions, but I am also not convinced they will improve things either (either for me or my colleagues or the company). [...] But I don't think and of those factors change significantly in a (possible) recession that may or may not affect tech...

My overall point that when the boom times end and employee leverage goes away, who knows what benefits will disappear as well. A union could help maintain that leverage even in bad times.

> Everyone from Tier 1 banks down to startups seem to be recruiting here

In my experience, everyone seems to be recruiting but with salaries that no longer correspond to the cost of living (and especially housing) nor will allow you to save anything meaningful to eventually get on the property ladder.

Actually good roles that allow you build a future (in London at least) are far and far between.

An issue with unions is they can only really form at times where workers have leverage and wouldn't benefit much from the union. Once the labor market is tight, unions don't really have the leverage to negotiate unless they fully monopolize labor.

Given tech working conditions are pretty nice, tech unions would likely quickly devolve into some DEI and politics catchall worse than current HR stuff, and I can't imagine many of us would want to work in union shops.

Working conditions are pretty nice until the floor drops from the bottom of the market and we have an entire generation in tech who has never known bad times suddenly become relive the history of the dot com bubble.

Even then, we just lost our jobs or companies folded, it's not like we were working in coal mines or sweatshop conditions after dot com.

Perhaps, but it seems like rather wasteful folly, to not have protected good things taken for granted earlier on. The grasshopper and the ants.

Only if these so called "tech worker unions" start acting like they have an "R" in their names. Not a peep from the lot about recent layoffs or abuses going on at Twitter. All they seem to care about is everyone being called by their preferred gender pronouns. They act pretty much like management plants to prevent formation of real worker-centered unions. After all, it costs much less to replace gender pronouns on various corporate websites than to give a raise.

Also, no political donations from member dues please? I can already donate to whomever I want and might be amenable to follow union guidance if I see how that will make my life better. But for example, I am fine with Biden, however I am not sure if I want to support Harris reelection campaign in 2024 (let's be real about the inevitable). Have to at least see who the other candidate is, maybe DeSantis is lesser of two evils? In any case, there is no way I am paying thousands of dollars in dues every year to support candidates and causes I might oppose. For better wages / benefits / job security, maybe.

While it does certainly seem like Silicon Valley unions like the Alphabet Workers’ Union have a tendency to weigh in hot button issues, the ones I've seen are more about protesting against management taking on defense or border control contracts, not culture war issues. Do you actually have cases to back that up? On the flip side, the Tech Workers Coalition for starters certainly weighed in on the Twitter layoffs.

https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/03/issue-16/

Well, defense and border control contracts are good for employees' job security / wages while uncontrolled immigration could potentially hurt jobs and wages of existing workers. I understand that immigration also has benefits and humanitarian considerations and defense tech can be potentially misused. But if I pay $2K/year to join a labor union, I expect them to focus on protecting and improving my job and then I might separately get involved in other causes. Right now though I would gladly work on military tech to protect Ukraine and Taiwan rather than focusing on "US also has been bad sometimes".

All these geniuses on HN and none of them starts a company founded from Day 1 on worker-coop model. You can start a consultancy or some low-risk business on such a model. So many people here had solid exits and have $XX millions - why not prove out some worker socialism without coercing everyone else to do it? Do it voluntarily.

It would definitely be great to see examples of co-op software companies! Though one wonders if the voluntarist nature of the FOSS movement is not dissimilar to such structures.

I did, but like you probably guessed, I found it too much of a hassle to find our own work and I'd have rather worked at a traditional company that just pays me every two weeks for work done, even if I'm not getting 1/n of the profits.

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