If you work for a company like Amazon, and you don't want to be laid off, the only thing you can do to move the needle is join a union. (You can also be a top performer, but it's not clear how big of a difference that makes; top performers with big salaries make big targets for layoffs as well.)
Doctors don't use unions. They instead artificially limit supply by erecting massive barriers to enter their workforce. This keeps them in demand. Software contrasts this with an open-door policy. On top of that, all white-collar labor jobs barring software involve serious licensing requirements as further gatekeeping.
Lawyers maintain leverage by making sure the it's Lawyers all the way up. No MBAs, people-persons or bean-counters controlling their profession. This means that the workers control important intangibles like customer relationships & hidden information ...both of which make you irreplaceable. Software instead pushes technical people from the stable-and-monetarily-rewarding positions by making the management-track entirely distinct from the working professional (IC). At the same time we obsess over building tools and systems that make everyone replaceable and automate ourselves away.
Immigration is another form of leverage. Tech being majority immigrants, means that they lose all leverage in what they can ask for when the ultimate guillotine is held over their heads. Do tech workers vote as a block on matters of immigration to improve their leverage ? No.
Work culture & pressure to conform can also be a type of leverage. If someone likes being well groomed, then professions that expect you to spend those 30 minutes getting perfectly ready are not cumbersome, it is leisure. Afterwork drinking ensures a good social life, but also ensures that everyone leaves work together at 5. It excludes, yes. But if you fit into that clique, then the conforming is effortless and the leverage comes for free. Consulting & finance are some examples of such businesses.
Tech isn't the only broken business. Restaurants & game design are broken for similar reasons.
Unions have their place, but a nation-wide tech worker union is a logistical impossibility. All too often, other levers are over-looked. Tech has made its bed : "learn to code. be a college drop out. get PMs to do the boring work and let them be promoted faster. I will let a glorified secretary be my manager. we will never put my community's 'legal' immigration priorities over those of the greater social issues I 'facilitating illegal immigration' my tribe asks me to commit to....and so on. No we have to lie in it.
You can get totally socialized profits at one place and totally performance-based at another.
If there was a sudden influx of 5000 doctors, we’d end up with 5000 doctors seating idle.
I doubt the same would happen with 5000 engineers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Hundreds of thousands more doctors could work in America without any sitting idle
I think we'd actually see an uptick in the amount of americas getting treated for their conditions. And a decrease in the number of doctors that work over 60hrs a week. But maybe not, there are a lot of Americans that need help.
That's not true. Not sure about US but in many european countries doctors are organised in strong unions. There is otherwise no artificial supply limit initiated by doctors or hospitals.
I wasn't really sure what this is getting at. H1Bs?
The murkiness of the current H1b allows anxiety which companies can exploit.
A dual-intent, 5-50 yr green card wait-times, lottery system with underdefined qualification criteria has to be seen as a terribly drafted visa. Replacing with it clearer messaging and more predictable rules (predictable doesn't mean looser) would return a lot of leverage to tech workers. The weird rules of the H1B mean that every I know has violated some under-enforced parts of their H1B at some point. Every once in a while it gets enforced, and someone's life gets uprooted. The 2 month deportation timeline is joke, when it takes 3 months to catch up on leetcode.
The visa doesn't even have to be more permissible. Just a more sensible & clear.
Reading over the rules (it’s not clear what you mean by “rules”) they all seem clear to me. What examples do you have of unclear or nonsensical rules?
And a lottery is the best way to do it ? Points based systems, merit based systems or even seniority based systems make a lot more sense. How is complete and utter randomness (lottery) the best answer ?
> unclear or nonsensical rules
You have to find a new job with 2 months or leave the country
Spousal work visas can take 6 years from start date in ideal circumstances.
Greencard queues are now 25-100 years long for certain countries.
Going back to school in the US is technically illegal.
Can't have any secondary income.
I'd go into all the irritating bits of the H1b if I had hours, but the H1b can effectively be summarized with this video - https://youtu.be/mKc32jQIY0w?t=88
Because you’re building a system in which you have preference over others. While we need high tech workers, it’s unfair to only invite them first.
> You have to find a new job with 2 months or leave the country
You are here on a work visa. While I do think it should be a bit longer, rationally if you got a visa to work for a specific company then your visa should be invalidate at the end of that employment. The visa was granted because the company said they needed a particular skill set and they couldn’t find it in the US. This doesn’t mean once that job has ended that this skill set is still required in the US.
> Spousal work visas can take 6 years from start date in ideal circumstances.
This does sound odd, but is in line with how slow the US gov is in my experience. I remember for my wife's citizenship we were looking at around 6 years for them to simply process the paperwork and perform an interview.
> Greencard queues are now 25-100 years long for certain countries.
This one is very understandable. Given green card applications have been skyrocketing since the 2000s, and only ~1mil are granted per year. Then you have people like me who have priority, who as a citizen request their wives green cards (and ultimately citizenship), which takes another slot away.
Securing the US border is something I'd also like to see done, but that's a highly politicized discussion that's off topic here.
> Going back to school in the US is technically illegal.
Well as a student you are not providing much / any value to the US, at least not yet. I can see why they keep these separate, as on an F1 you are here using our schools and our educators, our research, and could potentially take that back home. Meaning we see no value. An H1B does not give you the permission to use any of that, and again is only because a company could not find the talent within the US. An H1B can be more viewed as the US exploiting you for gain, whereas an F1 can be more viewed as you exploiting the US for gain.
> Can't have any secondary income.
An H1B was granted, again, because that person had a skill that was not able to be found within the US. Many people think H1B visas are granted to anybody and everybody that's smart that wants to live here. If you're a webdev from another country, and we have webdevs sitting on the bench, you should not get an H1B visa and should have any existing one revoked. It is a US first policy.
Continued immigration in the USA is vital to maintain business as usual, for one basic reason: It is too damn expensive for US Gov to give great education for everyone. Starting from daycare to college - if you sum up cost of raising a kid in private daycares/preK/schools/colleges it will be > $1M.
Account for probability 1/100 of a kid being gifted/talented in certain area like IT, and you are looking at spending $100M to get one gifted specialist. Just one!
It is much cheaper to cherry pick and import foreign talent and give them education at top tier places like Ivy leage/MIT/etc.
The gov doesn’t pay for private education, they provide infrastructure for a free, public education instead. Some cities give vouchers if parents choose public over private but it does not pay the entire tuition.
The actual cost to educate a kid using public infrastructure is average $15.5k/year/student, which brings the total cost per pupil to $186k. Given there’s about 50 million school age children in the US, that puts total cost at $775 billion a year, or a total of $9.3 trillion.
We can easily afford it.
I am opposed to the vagueness around everything having to do with legal immigration. If you want to import the top talent of the world permanently, then make it easy for them to get a Green Card and regain leverage. Let them start startups, let them spend longer durations between jobs so they can figure out that one brilliant idea.
Lots of people exploit the H1b brute-forcing every single grey-area loophole to get here. Many aren't even well-educated. On the other hand, the MIT/Ivy League straight shooters follow the rules and find themselves locked out of any future in this country. Other 1st world nations have fewer immigrants, but the process is transparent, cleaner and has well defined boundaries.
Yes, import the top talent of the world. But the H1b does more to kneecap them than enable them.
They do stifle the ability for ultra-rich CEOs from becoming even more ultra rich at the expense of their workers.
american automakers produce one of the low quality cars, and heavy lobbying from lawmakers is the only thing that keeps them afloat.
Argument: I do not see a single [union] effective at "Stifling CEO's from becoming rich".
1st Proof: American Automakers produce low quality cars.
2nd Proof: The only thing keeping them in business is lobbying from American Lawmakers.
Your proof has nothing to do with your argument. At all. They're not related. They're also very subjective and impossible to actually prove. They're not proof; they're opinion.
A more effective argument would be:
Proof: The largest Union employers are x, y, z, and their CEO's make $x, $y, $z.
CEOs are not the rich class, they are elite but they are employees. Plenty of CEOs get fired for doing bad job, or get softly pushed out.
Argument that labor union keep CEOs from getting rich is absurd because CEOs are part of labor force.
it is shareholders who get rich by squeezing profit, so I dont get why bring up CEOs. A CEO maybe get paid $10 mln a year. But shareholders get dividends/buybacks in order of hundreds of mils/blns
My argument was that labor unions lead to piss poor quality due to mediocrity (example: US automakers).
the japanese automakers have factories in the US and produce much higher quality cars without labor unions. How come???
While this is sometimes true, the executive status class overlaps significantly with the haut bourgeois economic class (and most of the rest of the executive status class is in the petit bourgeois economic class; there are probably working class “CEOs” somewhere, but they are very much not the norm), and very typically they are specifically significant holders of capital in the firm of which they are CEOs. CEOS are not just employees, and their relationship to either the firms they control or the economy more generally are not very much like those of regular employees.
tech is more merit based, compared to traditional boomer's industries. I dont see how CEOs in tech are part of elite, while they are simply hired managers. You do your job well - you can become ceo one day
Any CEO making $10M/yr would only need to work for a year before they could retire and live comfortably the rest of their life without ever touching the principal.
Layoffs affect these groups differently.
Audi Q5
BMW Serie 3
BMW Serie 2 coupé
Honda HR-V
Hyundai Accent
Infiniti QX50
Infiniti QX55
Jeep Compass
KIA Rio
KIA Forte
Mazda CX-30
Mazda2
Mazda3
Mercedes-Benz GLB
Nissan Kicks
Nissan Versa
Nissan NP300
Nissan Sentra
Nissan March
Nissan NV 200 Cargo
Toyota Tacoma
VW Tiguan
VW Taos
VW Jetta
[1] https://www.motorpasion.com.mx/industria/autos-produccion-me...
Engines, tranny, suspension parts are manufactured in US/Europe/Japan and simply shipped to Mexico for assembly due to NAFTA favorable trade agreement and cheaper labor for simple assembly
You removed a major conditional.
I do not care if the CEOs become rich, the dream of getting rich via business success is why capitalism works, what I care about is if they do it by underpaying their employees because of a power differential.
there is a bell-curve for leadership, and it's pretty damn clear after centuries of mercantilism and capitalism that they're not smarter than you are. it's a cartel, and the bellcurve applies to them just as much as it applies to your SWE I's straight out of college.
problem is most retail investors never even vote for annual shareholder meetings and never bother to read proxy statements and shareholders' meeting agenda.
For example startups where early engineers have options/shares and management listens to them and wants to keep them happy.
Sadly in most cases with big tech - there is no reason to give a vote to employee class because they are not critical.
I mean look at twitter - musk fired everyone he could and twitter still works.
Same with google - google could fire everyone outside Search&Ads and still run its cash cow machine.
All critical code is written by early and now very senior engineers, current employees are tiny tiny cogs that are not critical to business.
Why would anyone gove a vote to these people?
Employees are critical in literally every industry, otherwise they wouldn't be employed.
> For example startups where early engineers have options/shares and management listens to them and wants to keep them happy.
You're confusing "importance to the business" with "market power". Tech employees generally tend to have market power in the current economy. And how many of those options (read: lottery tickets) and shares even grant the employee voting power?
> All critical code is written by early and now very senior engineers, current employees are tiny tiny cogs that are not critical to business.
This is absolutely not true at the companies where I've worked. Can't speak for FAANG.
> I mean look at twitter - musk fired everyone he could and twitter still works.
This is a really weird example to generalize from. Most businesses are absolutely not organized this way.
> Same with google - google could fire everyone outside Search&Ads and still run its cash cow machine.
This is speculation. Google does a lot of things that aren't directly "making money on ads", but if they didn't think those things were worth doing, they wouldn't do them.
> Sadly in most cases with big tech - there is no reason to give a vote to employee class because they are not critical.
Weirder still is the notion that businesses ought to give their employees voting shares based on some notion of criticality to the business. I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions. Some leftists argue that the union should be entitled to this share. I won't even go that far, although I think it's a good idea.
if we talking in a context of unions, then there is nuance. Employee class can be critical, but unionized employees - may not be critical to business. If unionized employee is replaceable cog that anyone with Associate degree/IT Bootcamp and 3 month training/offshore worker can do the job, then unionized employees lose their bargaining power, and the incentive to unionize disappears.
US airline pilots enjoy unionization because US laws require quite extensive training&experience to become pilot, so that only former US Air Force pilots can qualify. With these Government protections it is easy to enjoy labor union benefits.
Try to pull it off in tech? Unionized folks will be fired and their jobs will be offshored very quickly.
>> I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions.
This argument could work in 20th century, where the barrier to create business was huge. To become factory/steel mill owner you gotta have huge capital$$$, and most ordinary folks had to be laborers for life. So there was natural divide between owner class (capitalists) and labor class, so labor unions provided some sort of bargaining power and a seat at the big table.
Nowaday in tech - literally anyone can create a startup. Anyone with a pulse and a PowerPoint deck could have create a startup funding during zero interest rate era. Some FAANG engineers earn more in salary+stocks than some business owners make in profit (talking about traditional small-medium businesses like barbershop or corner shop owners)
That means there is no real divide between capitalists class and laborer class. In 21st century your brain is the capital, not money. Money is cheap and investors are willing to fund good brains with good ideas.
Because not everyone is gifted with good brains, this created a natural divide within modern laborer class. People with good brains don't want to share big pie with every other laborer (via labor union). They'd rather become capitalists and get the biggest slice of pie for themselves.
This is why capitalism and market forces always win, and archaic schemes like labor unions are unfit for 21st century where quite a bit of jobs can be offshored/Automated/ChatGPT'ed
I frankly dont see this idea getting any traction
Like in Cuba, Russia/Soviet Union, DPRK, or Campuchia during Pol Pot's time?
"workers should organize for greater market power to prevent abuse by employers" - tech engineers dont need it - because if you dont like it - you can simply leave to another employer. market forces will find equilibrium, labor union is only an obstacle in reaching market equilibrium.
it is telling that people who escaped communist countries never want to see any sign of communism in their life. Because communism doesnt work, never worked, and will never work
This is my whole point. This is only true for some, and it's not distributed according to merit. People get mistreated all the time at both tech and non-tech companies, even in career fields that are traditionally high-paying and high-mobility. The only way to stop that in a way that also promotes a relatively free labor market is for workers to self-organize, and for the government to legally protect their right to do so.
I understand your concerns about communism. Nobody in their right mind is proposing that we bring communism to the USA. The fortunate workers who have market power uniting to support for their fellows who lack market power is not itself communism, nor does it lead to communism. American labor unions are not communism, and never will be.
The USA once developed a strong tradition and culture of organized labor that brought us out of the brutality of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. There were plenty of smaller socialist and even anarchist groups at the time, but in general most people were not that radical, and no group anything resembling the Bolsheviks ever gained popular support in the USA.
Ironically however, communism indirectly enabled big business to crush that tradition of organized labor, because the Red Scare of the early 20th century allowed them to label pro-labor policy as socialist or communist and therefore anti-American and anti-freedom.
If anything, the kinds of labor unions that people join the USA are a uniquely capitalist institution, being dedicated specifically to the purpose of balancing asymmetric market power.
How do you define if it is or not distributed to merit?
Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?
I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.
You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.
You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping? You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol
Work performance?
> Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?
No. The price system is very efficient at certain kinds of allocation, but not in all or even most cases.
> I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.
Only if you have enough savings to survive without income and/or you can easily find a comparable job, which is not even true for many high-wage tech employees anymore.
> You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.
Yes, that was temporary.
> You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping?
It won't, because it currently doesn't. This is not at all an established phenomenon.
> You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol
This simply isn't true. Even labor unions that struggle to negotiate with management are doing better than 1.5% over a decade. I'd be interested to see some data on this, but I'd bet that median union-negotiated wages are rising at about the same rate as median non-union-negotiated wages (read: slower than inflation). I say "median" and not "average" because there will be high earners who have seen huge pay increases recently that would skew the mean upwards.
I am in camp of owner-operators, cause I see myself one day creating a startup and hiring engineers and I dont want to deal with unions in any capacity.
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
In a market economy, successful unions are powerful interest groups. They tend to have more influence on political parties than the other way around. Much like big businesses, but on a different subset of politicians.
Oddly enough, I don't see too many former communists movie to Somalia or Ethiopia or Afghanistan. Former communists seem to favor the EU and the US, where we have heavily socialized large aspects of our public life (health care, etc.)
Looks more like minimum safety net, rather than socialism
There is no concept of "safety net" in capitalism.
"Approximately 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the next generation, with 90% losing it the generation after that." [1]
1: https://fortune.com/recommends/investing/generational-wealth...
in the end only smart ones will have $$$, everything according to their merits/efforts
So it's not a meritocracy - it's an inter-generational relay race. A meritocracy involves a level playing field. A 100% inheritance tax would help.
Do you like capitalism, where everyone gets unequal outcome? Like in Liberia, South Sudan or Chad?
The context here is about unions. Democracy at work is important and unions are the best way to achieve it in a capitalist nation.
Did you obtain you theoretical knowledge of what actual communism is - purely from Lenin's books? Have you tried to reconcile communism theory to communism in practice?
In any case it segued into Stalinism .. and all of these were oppressive authoritarian top down rule.
People that think of post revolution Russia as a good example of communism are the kind of people that think of the USofA as a good example of capitalism.
Btw, I didn't even claim that communism is the best way forward, you just assumed it. I would rather advocate for socialism which has better chances to succeed in US. Still, the moment we wave off 10k from student loans people start shouting "communism". Those same people got millions of dollars in PPP loans, still fired their employees and saw nothing wrong with it.
The main context here was about unions and people still cry "communism" whenever they hear the word union. I have seen immense benefits of unions from past generation and feel sad that they are not as prevalent today. "United we bargain, divided we beg" is the whole point of unions and still people choose to beg because "big bad communism". This propaganda has been enforced on us so much by govt that we forget what's good for us and that makes me sad.
However there are many cases where it's hard to fire underperfoming unionized employees. And there's always the possibility of the union playing a kind of long game with management where they are willing to trade away the possibility of rewarding standout individuals in order to preserve the baseline.
There are a lot of ways to do a union, you don't have to set one up exactly like a detroit auto factory
Do you want Tech labor union to gatekeep profession?
IT is already merit based and is good because there is no gatekeeping, just spin up your own website and start making money if you are that good.
As an IT professional I simply dont understand why I need labor union to dictate rules to me, when I can negotiate on behalf of myself perfectly fine.
If company decodes to lay me off - well it is company’s loss and fault - I will simply go work elsewhere or freelance, while company will struggle retaining skilled engineers
Maybe interviewing or freelancing lead generation is a hassle - your local IUP (International Union of Programmers) could help sling jobs your way like a pipefitter union.
Maybe you want something different? I bet we could find a model of some union doing that; the world is big
We dont need formal union, but informal one - through information dissemination over Internet and absolutely voluntary participation and knowledge sharing - this is fine for me.
This is how we get leetcode practice, interview prep, job hopping, quiet quitting, overemployed, and other “best practices” to get edge over employers
They do not gatekeep. They provide contractual minimum pay and benefits for their members, and that's it. Members are free to negotiate for higher pay, and many do. (In the NBA, the cap is imposed by the owners, not the union. There is no cap in Hollywood.)
Hollywood productions and NBA teams are free to negotiate with and hire non-members, with the caveat that such individuals may become members of the appropriate union upon the signing of the contract and that contract must then adhere to the union minimums.
In both cases, union membership is automatic upon certain events. For SAG, this means appearing in one or more SAG-governed productions (depending on the level of the role, i.e., lead vs supporting vs background). For NBA players, this means getting signed to an NBA team.
If you don't like how one party can make changes to your job without your meaningful input, you should throw in so two parties can make changes to your job without your meaningful input? Also, you should be sure to pay some part of your wages to the second party, even if you don't like what they're up to.
I'm not particularly pr-union but I'd argue for another dimension: to the company, you're an employee, but to the union you're a customer.
If too many people dislike an union, it can dissolve. If too many people dislike a company, things aren't as simple, because they depend on their wages (and in the USA: insurance) to live.
I think that's a fair summary of my worldview. I don't like unnecessary complexity in most of my life, and adding an intermediary to an important relationship needs to get over a high hurdle for me to consider it's necessary.
Maybe if there's an example of software development under a union shop that you can point at and say this particular Union improved working conditions for people like me in this particular way, I can say hmmm, maybe that's worth the added complexity. But most of what I've seen from unions is that they add a significant chance of not being able to work because of disagreements between the union and the employer or solidarity in disagreements between other unions and other employers; as well as most often salary rules that are based on time at the job rather than quality of work. Quality of work is hard to measure, but I've been generally happy with the results of that measurement.
Maybe the model of talent unions rather than blue-collar unions is a more appropriate model, but I'm not sure how that works. Do I need to give union dues and hire an agent, too?
You may not be able to work on the same problems when you work for yourself, or at a company you can stand working for. But there are lots of things you can do in tech as a company of one. This is in contrast to a lot of industries; you can't meaningfully mine for minerals, or build cars or even car parts as a company of one; although there certainly are artisanal car builders, and small auto repair shops.