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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

This seems like another good moment to bring up that time the FAANGs and adjacent companies literally colluded to abuse their workers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

It went far and wide, and they knew what they were doing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...

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Why the workers never colluded to flex their considerable latent power against these employers is the real question. A lot of these cloaks of victimhood are very expensively tailored.

Because since the 1980's, the US government (as well as other western governments) have been dismantling the ability and protections for worker unionization. Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney were all notable for being anti-labor.

Any excuse about anti-labor policies has to account for why cafeteria workers at Facebook managed to unionize in 2017 while tech workers there just sat on their ass. The Wagner Act is still law and is remains a powerful tool for those who can be bothered to use it.

“If working in the warehouse is really that bad, why don’t the warehouse workers unionize?”

I wouldn’t really say it’s a cloak of victimhood as much as a disillusionment of those that aren’t acknowledging they’re labor is being exploited combined with the fact that attempting to organize can be met with a loss of work.

But warehouse workers did unionize. It was the programmers, who back then could get a new job whenever they wanted, who lacked the foresight and self-discipline to exercise their latent power while it was at its peak.

Some of the warehouses have organized, is there a union that represents all of these workers as a whole against leadership?

Could it be an issue of scale? The Facebook cafeteria workers were able to organize, and that was about 500 workers. Engineers are in the tens of thousands at these big tech companies and without substantial laborer support from the beginning, any potential organizer is taking a huge risk by attempting to organize.

Yes, and some of the Facebook cafeteria workers were getting up before 3 AM to make the commute in to Palo Alto, which meant that they had much more time in the mornings to think about organizing than the unfortunate techies who slept in.

The excuses really are endless in this business.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here, I’m simply trying to understand what has previously stopped tech laborers from organizing. As a relatively new tech laborer, I would like to learn from these mistakes in order to actually organize and get our rights recognized.

Sounds like they had a great need to organize, and they were able to— I’m trying to extract patterns that could be applied to other organizations. Do you have any insights on that, or would you simply like to dunk on the out of touch techies that have it oh-so-good?

They did. That's what the WP article section I linked to was about:

> In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California 11-cv-2509 [10]) is a class-action lawsuit on behalf of over 64,000 employees of Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm (the last two are subsidiaries of Disney) against their employer ...

I used to think we (high tech labor) didn't need unions (you can actually find comments of mine here on HN several years ago arguing that.) Then this crazy and illegal scheme came to light. Now I think that we need something, maybe not a union per se, but something, to "flex [our] considerable latent power", eh?

The thing that really grosses me out about the "no-poaching" collusion is that Apple, at least, famously has more money than Scrooge MacDuck yet still actively and stridently worked to rip off their own people.

And Subway made their wage slaves sign non-competes for $8 an hour to stand and make sandwiches all day.

The claim is that they're treated better than nearly everyone else. Not that it's some sort of platonic ideal of employee employer relations

Fair enough.

Also worth noting that once this collusion was stopped and exposed, salaries went up across the industry. If you work in tech, even if you never worked for one of these companies, this collusion made you poorer.

Abuse is an unnecessarily strong word there. It is true they colluded to keep salaries down, but I don't think that compares with actual abuse. Software Developers make several times the median salary in the U.S.

The doctor cartel does the same thing but in the other direction, keeping doctor's salaries in the U.S. inflated relative to where they would naturally be under a normal supply/demand curve: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...

(not to mention how much U.S. software developers benefit from an overly restrictive immigration policy which limits programmer supply)

Tech Leaders / Managers are the ones that hold the power; they are not given a free-pass to lead because they pay living wages for Engineers (that speaks to the fact that other careers should be paying better wages, not that tech workers should accept their position and not argue for better treatment).

Expressing for 2.5 years that we’re able to work from anywhere, then immediately saying “well actually come back in for a day… or 2… now come back in everyday” is a misuse of power because the workers have no say in the conversation, the only option is to express your discontent and leave.

Abuse doesn’t have to mean they’re hitting us, but it can mean a misuse of power which is one of the main points of the article.

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