What recourse do we as workers have? We can soft boycott and quit/stop applying to onsite positions, but there are hundreds of thousands willing and able to take these positions.
But of course the reality is tech workers are the plebs too, far closer to the median than to capital elite. Treasured illusions die hard.
Unions enjoy 71% public support and organizing is federally protected activity. The minority isn’t stopping anyone, they can be safely ignored.
(My note: I recognize I will never be obscenely wealthy; it does not appeal to me. The wealthy just try to buy back their soul with charity after leaving a wake of destruction on their journey. I would rather work for autonomy and quality of life for my peers, which if done properly, will lead to a better life for myself)
From my recent experience, unions can't help you keep remote work they way they work here today. I work(ed) at a unionized German company and when management call everyone back to the office after the Covid vaccination was done, it wasn't protested by the unions and everyone sowed up at the office without protest, and remote work was kept as "in case of emergency" perk you can get every now and then if you get approval from your manager beforehand.
Unions here only serve the purpose to intervene in case of major force like discrimination, health and safety, layoffs, working hours, overtime, and the negociate mandatory yearly pay increases based on inflation and company profits, not help you keep your desired perk of not commuting to the office as the office is seen as the mandatory place of work by contract, not your home, so physical presence at work part is usually non-negotiable.
Actually, unions here are relatively against remote work or at least quiet on the topic, as they assume it'll lead to easier off-shoring in the long run (already happening anyway) and the loss of their jobs , so on-site presence of the workforce is considered as an advantage in convincing the company to keep invested in Germany and not move abroad (generals like seeing their soldiers at work where their money is goes).
Plus, the wellbeing of workers in Germany is already considered (at least on paper) to be top notch that mandating remote work for everyone is not considered necessary as "German workers already have it so good".
And with German labor loosing competitiveness, unions are relatively toothless when demanding remote work as there's no government mandate to offer that like it is with working hours, parental leave, etc. and the companies often threaten with relocation/off-shoring when they get demands they don't like so the German government is in no rush to pressure them for new social perks.
So it's up to you to search for a company that's fully WFH, not wait for your union to solve it for you. Unions can work only when they have teeth.
In Germany, the unions function more as partners of the business owners and collaborate together on finding the general compromise that won't disturb company profits or the way the business operates, while in the US it seems like unions must treat the business like antagonists even at the sake of company profits because "all business owners are evil so fuck them".
So even if the US has fewer unions than in Europe, they're generally a lot more powerful, which is why many were infiltrated by the mob.
If my memory serves me correctly the earliest unions in Germany were very similar to the unions in the US, as in they were started from clashes with the business owners, and they were in charge of handling stuff like healthcare and pensions pots of the workers, similar to the unions in north america today.
But the Kaiser saw the growing unions and their pensions pots getting bigger along with their nation wide influence over the working class, as threats to the state's own influence and control over the workers, so he dismantled them and introduced them under the new state pension plan, so the modern state social pension in Germany stems form the Kaiser's fear of the workers' unions. :)
But German unions are also very subservient given their tacit approvals of things like Agenda 2010.
My point exactly. Unions aren't here to fight for even better working conditions for you like mandatory WFH for everyone, but just to overwatch to make sure the company adheres to existing labor regulations. That's it.
So yeah, unions are relatively toothless and the QoL and the living standards of the working class in Germany has been on the decline for a while.
Like humanity itself and other broad categories, saying as a matter of fact that unions can’t do X, when some unions do X, is pretty asinine, almost as much as lumping more than 3B people into “Asians” or other useless categorizations. Particularly if the article doesn’t mention a country of origin being Germany.
You don’t even have to look very far from Germany to find a union negotiating WFH.
https://rfi.fr/en/france/20201205-why-france-is-struggling-t...
Unions in Germany are usually a lot more submissively than in France and rarely fight for gaining new perks, they just look after maintain the existing ones, moistly following the "don't bite the hand that feeds you" mentality.
A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communication between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to take place.
What amuses me though is that until 1980 or so people thought factory work was the worst kind of work, maybe best expressed in the Ray Davies song "Working At the Factory"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0khnH1qi6M
Once the factories left, however, people realized service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in your town is one of the best things a politician can take credit for.
Workers can try to seize the means of production, but without state support, the police or the military will come shoot and arrest you, like it happened many times in recent history. You need populace and political support for such movements, otherwise you're a terrorist/criminal.
>A knowledge worker who works at home on cloud servers has no spatial nexus to control. All communication between workers is electronically mediated, I guess union organizers can develop a parallel infrastructure, but the workplace itself is a natural place for organizing work to take place.
Knowledge workers have the balance of power in their favor, despite not having ways to physically seize the means of production, but as soon as the individual's knowledge becomes obsolete, commoditized or easily found elsewhere for cheaper, then those workers are shit out of luck if they don't keep up and adapt to a new hot thing.
>Once the factories left, however, people realized service work or no work was a lot worse and now a new factory in your town is one of the best things a politician can take credit for.
Unfortunately, we can't have a well functioning society where everyone is a remote worker. Someone still needs to fix your toilet, teach your kids, drive the train, build new houses, manufacture the stuf you use in your daily life like food and medical supplies.
Sure, you can have all your stuff manufactured offshore and import it, until your manufacturing trading partner has the upper hand and gives you the middle finger because he needs that stuff more urgently or he found a richer buyer, and now you're left wihtout stuff and with a bunch of laptop workers who can't manufacture the stuff you need because that knowledge is not open-source and you since lost all that knowledge over decades of deindustrialization when you gave it to your manufacturing trading partner in exchange for cheap stuff and access to his domestic market.
Sure, executives can call the cloud provider and gain access, but not before significant damage to the business can be done. And regardless, that's not much different than factory workers getting the police called on them by the factory owners.
I think the main issue is that knowledge workers are not organized (and generally look down on the idea of union membership), and don't really have the guts to step out of line like that.
Of course they can. Let's say workers group together and take the website down which tanks the business completely rendering the business owner broke and the workers unemployed. Then what? Who's gonna hire you as part of that grop of revolutionaries who took down a business?
You want unionization per sector with the blessing of legal authorities, and collective protest per industry, not per company.
This will somehow make the employer more competitive, rather than less, and will not in any way incentivize outsourcing and automation at the cost of the domestic jobs in question.
I read it on HN, so it must be true.
I had one employer who would sometimes get stuck in a loop thanking me for what I've done, how embarrassed he was he couldn't pay me more and that he could never do what I did for such little money. I would mock him by listing the instances of terrible things that would have happened if I wasn't there. If he called me right now, years later, I would do what I could to keep his ship afloat just because the idea of having to fire people haunts him in his sleep.
My previous manager asked me to do an extra shift one time. I told him I understand why he asked it but that this must never happen again. Before that I told him that he couldn't just schedule an extra shift but that he should ask me first. If the place burned down around me I would use it to light my cigar after casually tossing my coat over my arm.