I suggest we should have something like an actor's guild instead, where a floor of basic protections are necessary but there's no ceiling on payment and benefits.
Often times when someone criticizes the idea of unions, it is because they don't fully understand their purpose, flexibility, and flaws. For example, that comment could imply that unions somehow cap payments and benefits, but that isn't some universal truth of unions (that person also could just be using guild as a synonym for union, but that isn't necessarily true and it doesn't appear to be how they're using it). Unions negotiate on behalf of their members. If the union members don't want caps on compensation, the union can negotiate for no caps.
On the east coast, you're going to be working probably for 10 years before you can get into your union and it's an uphill struggle the whole way.
And union or not, you're only going to get work if people like working with you. One day with a bad attitude and you can find yourself unable to get hired by anyone. Film and TV is long hours and a stressful environment and nobody wants to work with anyone who makes the day harder.
Or are you just stuck in the local that you started in (and would then definitely be unwilling to relocate once you’re in?
(Not sure how the regionalization works if the unions are national)
Tyranny is a pretty hefty word for "can't get a particular job without agreeing to the rules of the employer"
It works just like democracy does at larger scales. I can't just declare my property its own new state with me as governor just because I don't like the political opinions of the state's leadership. I can however leave that state or leave the country entirely just like a person can leave the union. However, there are obvious repercussions for that decision.
You say a small group can't just form their own country, or in this case, they cannot just form their own union, but they actually could if only the mega-union did not already exist. Thus, my claim that large unions prevent small groups from organizing and collectively bargaining is true. The small group could form their own union if the large union hadn't removed their ability to do so. I feel about large unions the same way I feel about any large group that prevents small groups from organizing.
The small group can form their own union. They just won't be a part of the big union anymore. Like I said, they need to leave the union/state/country.
I don't understand what argument you are really making here. Even within your hypothetical small group, there can be an even smaller group. You effectively are arguing against any type of collective because there will always be some people who disagree.
How is this different than, let's say, Amazon telling a group, "that's fine if you want to organize, but you'll have to find another company to do it at" and then firing the group. I believe it is illegal for a company to prevent a group from organizing, but apparently it is legal for a union to prevent a group from organizing.
I'm not sure what the solution is, I'm not that knowledgeable about unions beyond recognizing that people within a union lose their ability to form a union (because they're already in a union). I also recognize that once a union is large enough, sub-groups within that union might want to organize independently, but they cannot. Probably what I would argue for is making exclusive contracts with unions illegal.
Amazon is preventing the union from organizing. The larger union is not preventing another union from organizing, it is just saying you can't create a rival union while staying a member of another union. People are still free to create a smaller union, they just need to leave the big union.
The smaller union can negotiate with Amazon, the Hollywood studios, or whoever else. The bigger union is also free to negotiate on behalf of its members and get Amazon, the Hollywood studios, or whoever to not work with the smaller union. That is just a negotiation. The group with the more power will get a better deal. That is the whole point of a union. A smaller union has less power and therefore will inherently be less successful than a big union.
Unions often work to solidify power because that results in better deals for its members. That will include both mergers like the previously mentioned SAG-AFTRA merger and this type of behavior to squash rival unions. It all depends on what its members think is the best strategy.
>I'm not that knowledgeable about unions beyond recognizing that people within a union lose their ability to form a union (because they're already in a union).
I just don't understand why this is a flaw. What value do you think this second smaller union will bring to its members that the bigger union can't? If the smaller union wants its own seat at the negotiation table, then it no longer acting as part of the bigger union anyway in which case there is no restriction on the second union being created (unless the big union negotiates for this exclusivity which is within their rights).
There are lots of different unions with lots of different structures. This person is saying we should have a union with a structure similar to that union.
This is the current Master Agreement.[2] It specifies minimum wages, but not maximums. "Nothing in this Agreement shall prevent any individual from negotiating and obtaining from the Producer better conditions and terms of employment than those herein provided."
See section 5, "Hours". "Time worked on the employee's sixth workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Time worked on the employee's seventh workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification. Minimum call for the sixth and seventh days shall be four (4) hours. ... All time worked in excess of fourteen (14) consecutive hours (including meal periods) from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two (2) times the applicable hourly rate provided herein for such employee's classification."
These are standard union terms in Hollywood. This is why film scheduling is a discipline but software development scheduling is a joke. Hollywood has crunches, and they hit the producer's budget hard. So planning goes into avoiding crunches.
Despite significant efforts, TAG has been unable to unionize game developers.
[1] https://animationguild.org/
[2] https://animationguild.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2018-2...
If you work less than 40 hours in a week, your paycheck is likewise adjusted.
You won't be able to work a 9/80 schedule since the payroll week starts at midnight on Sunday morning. Nor would you necessarily be granted permission.
If you work 6 hours on one day because you were out for some reason rather than 8 hours, you will not necessarily be able to make it up on other days - or even be granted permission to work overtime (because that would be time and a half pay) to compensate.
As programmers we tend to take advantage of the "if all the work gets done we get paid." Get into work at 10 am, leave at 4 pm.
Under the hours provision in that agreement I suspect many programmers would chafe a bit. Under these (and similar) provisions people are butt in a seat for 40 hours a week if they want to be fully paid. Taking a sick child to the doctor on a day for 2 hours means you will only be paid 38 hours for that week.
What ?
No, you aren't going to be paid $450k a year to work on our website... that is fantasy land.
There's so many tech jobs available at all sizes of companies, including mega-corps you've never heard of - they're just not as sexy as your FAANG's & co.
Plenty of insurance companies, restaurant conglomerates, car dealership conglomerates, banks, manufacturing companies, big-AG, medicine, commercial property management companies - not to mention all the consulting companies adjacent to nearly every industry imaginable. They all need tech...
Tech != FAANG, was the point.
For example if go to "who is hiring" and do a search for c++ I find almost nothing. The few c++ Jobs that do exist require you to already live nearby because they can't offer relocation assistance or VISA sponsorship.
Meanwhile same search years ago I would find plenty of cool openings to send my resume to.
I am not even getting recruiter spam anymore where people offer me jobs that are unrelated to my skillset.
There are endless dev jobs, the market's a little softer for pay thanks to megacap collusion once again, but I see an endless list of jobs online...
follow up - what market and which company(FAANG counts but must be a single org)?
edit: down votes. look i get the math but who laid off 1k js devs?
I think that's what they meant
Now there is an argument that operating in our 'capitalist' system introduces incentives to be a shitty manager (I think this is approximately Chomsky's perspective).
To get an a less biased view you can chat to people on public transport (in Europe) or talk to your neighbours (in the USA).
Why?
Reddit has shown little appetite for combating this issue because their value is the number of eyeball-seconds they receive every day. They want to report huge eyeball numbers you investors and advertisers.
Evaporative cooling (if an environment appeals to people they'll join and if an environment gets more extreme those who least like that direction will leave). The presence of visible up votes and downvotes magnifies this effect.
Founder effects. Reddit in general and any given sub in particular was initially populated with people who are a bit unusual in some fashion. E.g. the initial reddit population was very techy. This effect also applies to any Internet forum (both in that Internet forums are used by somewhat odd people like us and that an Internet forum on Thing will pull people interested in Thing and interest in Thing very likely correlates with many other factors, such as socioeconomic status, culture, gender, subculture)
General interest in going online to talk about things. The vast majority of people do not go online to talk and argue with strangers, those who do are different along a number of axes (such as a lack of young kids or higher disagreeableness) which in turn correlate with other traits and beliefs.
In Reddit case there's also an element of active moderation, mostly due to founder effects, but also due to them being the only ones actually caring a lot (being activist) the main subs are policed by a bunch of supermoderators (who are mods in hundreds of subs) with similar views on issues such as trans rights and as a moral duty will actively attempt to remove people who express other viewpoints to keep the place tidy (without the viewpoints that are offensive and wrong).
This is easily evidenced and is not true. You can check for yourself. Parroting this talking point shows that you do not check your facts.
Top 100 subreddit moderators and number of subs moderated:
* https://gist.github.com/bspammer/d6059d2bfa222a0f340353ae0be...
For example, r/GetMotivated and r/ContagiousLaughter which are not in that gist.
I picked a couple of other users on the list at random such as Sunkisty, TreKs and Blank-Cheque and they're also all over 100.
Where did you get the gist from?
The list is the top 100 subs.
Anyone can create a sub to moderate, so one person having 200+ is going to be mostly squatting -- almost all of those subs are going to be empty.
I got the list from someone who made a script to get the info and posted the results in the github I linked to.
Not sure how relevant that list is tbh...
I'm also perplexed as to what criteria is used for "top sub" given that r/ContagiousLaughter (which has 6.7 million subs) and isn't on the list while r/EldenRing (which only has 1.9m) is.
Anyway, are you satisfied that I was not just parroting talking points and had checked myself?
This is a common talking point and you are backtracking. By 'main subs' you meant something which you are now trying to get out of on a technicality. You have not proven that what you initially meant was based on any fact checking and my contention is that you were spouting hearsay.
The main subs (e.g. the most popular ones) ARE policed by people who also police hundreds of other subs, right? That was what I meant (and indeed what I wrote). I'm not actually sure what you think I wrote any more...
When the system intrinsically works by producing shitty managers the problem is in the system, by definition.
Is bad management intrinsic though? Wouldn't that make the presence of good management surprising?
It seems to me that people work better when they enjoy their job and nobody likes working under a bad manager, so bad management is a sign of incompetence and degrades operations.
The presence of bad management is an opportunity to optimize operations; treating people well is generally good for the people and the business.
Part of me thinks so. I think if you renamed every managers title to other titles like “clerk” and “facilitator” and basically reset what it means to be a manager, it feels like things would be different. At least for a while.
But then my theories swing back the other way. I have observed that many of my peers want to be “managed.” What they like about the arrangement is the feeling of isolated from responsibility and liability. Do as told. It’s sort of an “anti self reliance” thing. An attempt to be, as an adult, in a relationship that looks more like a subservient child-parent relationship.
Of course training alone is insufficient. The organizational culture and incentives also have to be aligned. The US military puts a major focus on training officers to be effective leaders, and yet the results have been mixed. Toxic leadership is one of the main problems driving their current retention crisis.
I strongly disagree with this. MBA programs are part of the problem in my opinion. They train people to be good "managers" for a company's interests which is often actively hostile to the people who report into that manager.
The MBA-ification of management and companies is to treat people like units of work not humans.
What a bizarre take. I like programming, I don't like dealing with all the people stuff. I've run my own business and it involved focusing on all the things I find uninteresting and focusing very little on the things I find very interesting. So for me it's just a matter of not liking that position. This belief that everyone who isn't in management is some sort of troglodyte who can't pick their own nose is very childish.
We just saw multiple banks collapse with zero financial penalty for those who were in charge when it happened, even as they were collecting tens of millions in bonuses.
When your compensation is structured in such a way that you can be a monumental failure at your job and you STILL make hundreds of times more than the rank and file employee, then the system is broken.
This is an ownership class problem, not manager class. The owners and their lackeys are the ones approving and justifying these insane compensation packages even as companies lay people off.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/cbo-american-wealt...
This could be the answer.
I think tech workers so far have been paid and treated well (at least where I work) and so haven't felt the need to unionize. But having a union would certainly protect against these kinds of problems. (Being relocated and then immediately laid off)
My experiences in unions were awful and I would never go back to that.
"If I was the company owner or the boss, I might do that to in order to protect my money"
It seems weird to me to have professional unions, doctors are an outlier there, where it's common, and (partly I suppose because) there isn't a professional institution (which overlap slightly) - it's split between unions and the GMC (licencing body, and as a doctor you'd whistle-blow to them for example).
I'd like to see more software engineers be professionally registered, and it be more worthwhile to. (Yes, quite chicken-and-egg I'm sure.) I'm a member of the IET, but to be honest their light on software-relevance. The chartership requirements for example seemed like they would require quite a bit of bullshitting (not lying exactly, just sort of business-speak style forcing something to fit the very specific irrelevant questions) to satisfy; I abandoned it, so far at least.
American workers do put up with a lot. But the cruelty of having one’s health care access perfectly intertwined with employment probably explains much of their reluctance to engage in the sort of individual and collective action needed to address malignant employer behaviour.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
[1]:https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....