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Comment by RomanPushkin | Hacker News Reader

Corporations will do whatever they want to until we have unions in this country. Mass layoffs, termination with no reason, dictating how they want the workforce to be exploited. If this generation cannot see that, I hope younger folks or our kids will make this country a better place to live and work.

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I think the data is in on this and most companies have regretted implementing RTO so if it wasn’t Amazon I’d be shocked with the decision.

Sorry to break it to you, but a shortage of software engineers is what brought all these perks in the first place, not unions.

The five day work week has entered the chat.

We'd still have people dying from keyboard accidents in mine tunnels too.

This is funny on two levels. On it's face, it's absurd and clever.

It's also funny because when you or someone you know falls ill or is injured and is unable to work you'll realize that all the boot licking you did when you were able bodied means precisely nothing without worker protections. This comment will be in your history and maybe you'll even remember writing it. There will be no safety net for you - private or public - because before you needed one you made efforts to ensure it wouldn't exist for anyone else.

On second thought, it's not that funny.

I know where you are coming from. I migrated from a European country with a very robust public safety net (14 months parental leave, long term disability, etc) to the US where similar protections largely don't exist. I don't think unions have played any role in the difference.

You are welcome to have your mind reside in an ahistorical fantasy world if you prefer, but please don't vote before at least learning the bare minimum about the history of labor organizing, and the political influence of workers' parties.

Maybe it's because I'm in my 30s and not in my 90s, but all good things I've ever seen unions do is from history books. Thanks for that I guess, but no reason to organize in the software industry in 2023.

No, it's because there's been a systematic effort for the past 70 years or so (in the US) to weaken the legal ability of unions to accomplish their goals. "Right to work" legislation is the most well known effort at the state level in the past 30 years, but there's also been repeated amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to weaken unions and eliminate their negotiating power.

1947: Taft Hartley Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act 1959: Landrum Griffin Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Management_Reporting_and...

One very concrete, recent difference between US Labor Law and Labor law in places with strong labor parties and unions is that US employment is almost entirely "at will" with each side having no contractual obligation to one another. That's why European Twitter tech employees could not legally be laid off en-masse with no warning and a couple month's severance - they had contracts, and those contracts stipulated terms on which they could be fired with or without cause, and those contracts were binding. They had time to find another job without a huge disruption to their lives and income.

'round these parts your safety net is your own damn responsibility, not mine. The default of life is nasty brutish and short, everything else is our efforts.

I would never even consider working in a place with fixed, tenure based pay, and have significant trouble believing anyone who has actually worked in a software engineer team would either.

Best of luck to you.

Asking salaried employees to spend three days in the office isn’t exploitative, and it’s certainly not equivalent to mass layoffs or termination without cause.

Changing the conditions of employment unilaterally is exploitative, especially within a system in which employment is required to maintain access to health care.

No it does not qualify as exploitative - is it a tough adjustment? Probably yes, exploitative? No.

Your health care example has little weight unless you are in a one employer town as you can always find other employers if you don't like one as much as that process isn't great.

Don't like being exploited by Company A? Try being exploited by Company B instead!

Out of curiosity, what would qualify as exploitative behavior in your opinion?

Only situations where people have literally zero alternatives? Only situations where other employment alternatives meet your personal subjective threshold of "worse"?

On top of the promise of remote work for the last several years and then changing the terms of employment w/o any tangible reason, asking salaried employees to pay for incremental childcare, transit cost, potential COL increase, and personal time cost w/o any compensation is definitely exploitive.

Sure, you want me to go back on two years of financial gains? Pay me the difference I've gained in that time and I might give it some thought.

Its simple really. Just go and ask your employer to pay difference. If they say no don't move.

In many cases, asking salaried employees to spend three days in the office is constructive dismissal [0]. Those employees may have moved to places with cheaper housing. They may have multi-hour commutes, kids in new schools, and may have just paid the high fixed costs of a real estate transaction - because they were told they did not need to come into the office. It may be infeasible for them to come back, so they'll quit without needing to be paid severance.

As a sibling comment said - changing the terms of employment unilaterally is exploitative - I'm just providing some color to the same sentiment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

Those people made a choice to uproot their lives completely of their own volition. Sometimes those choices don't work out and they always come with consequences.

It's not obvious to me why you made this comment in this thread. Are you under the impression I would disagree?

Making choices based on the best information you have, because your employer provided it to you, and then having your life unilaterally uprooted by that same employer seems like a bad thing. It also seems like something that an employer should probably explain / justify with a business reason other than "vibes" and "everyone else is doing it." If the employer doesn't do the bare minimum to even explain the decision to the employee, people are gonna use words like "exploitative behavior" and "kinda fucked up" and I'm going to agree with them.

To the degree that people were explicitly told that they'd be able to work from home indefinitely, it certainly deserves more than an "Oops. We changed our mind."

On the other hand, during the pandemic, companies (somewhat understandably) made a lot of fairly vague and open-ended statements about future plans and a lot of employees read those statements in accordance with what they wanted to be the case even if it was far from set in stone.

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