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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Working class as in "people who work"? Since tech workers are comfortably in the middle class when it comes to income level.

Anyway, for most people, compensation and income level are really good, which is why unionization isn't as much a thing for tech workers. This is also because there's a lot of disparity, with some earning $35K / year and others $350K / year for basically the same job; unionization and successful agreements would mean the $35K / year would go up, but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate. And that's just salary, then there's stocks, stock options, bonuses, perks, etc to consider.

I'm not saying tech workers shouldn't unionize, all I'm saying is that the incentives are low. Because if you don't want to work under the conditons that e.g. Meta offers, you can vote with your feet and work somewhere else, pretty much anywhere and anything you want.

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> but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate

That's not necessary. A large portion of corporate tech in Germany is unionized, and union jobs have hard salary ceilings (and also, of course, salary floors). But a company is allowed to offer a worker a non-union contract. They just always have to allow a worker to decline and take a union contract instead.

In real life, this means many team leaders and senior engineers and practically all managers/directors are on non-union contracts.

Non-union contracts that on paper are strict worse than the highest union contract get killed by the union. But when you make the jump, you usually have to do some math. Because leaving the union contract means you go from 35h/week with compensated overtime to unlimited overtime, so you might get screwed anyway if you're not careful.

Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members. Are those members ostracized by the real workers? In the US, taking a management position means quitting the union -- workers don't want management in their meetings, and management don't trust anyone in the union so would never promote you anyway.

> Fascinating that German unions sometimes have managers as members.

Of course! From a theory perspective, it's completely clear: just because capital gives some workers a mediocum of power over other workers doesn't mean that those managers suddenly have different interests than the people they lead. They still need to sell their labour to survive, after all.

> Are those members ostracized by the real workers?

So much for theory. In the real world, bad managers exist everywhere. In union shops, they are probably reigned in much more than elsewhere, because they quickly find themselves in mediation meetings between workers, union and management every time their workers realize that they actually do have rights, and that those are violated by management frequently. Those guys are ostracised, whether they have a membership card or not.

But yeah, managers can easily get into situations where their own performance metrics would suffer if they follow union directives, so conflict of interests are not uncommon. Just like humans everywhere, they somehow live with the cognitive dissonance.

As an example, I worked in a production plant where the floor boss would go through quite a bit of paperwork to hire scabs from a temp agency during union strikes, because missing production deadlines was unthinkable to him. Normally a pro-union guy, glad to take the union-negotiated salary increases, not a bad boss, but seeing that his production lines never stopped was his job, and so he did just that.

> unionization and successful agreements would mean the $35K / year would go up, but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate

Why would the top-level go down? Employers are paying what the market demands. It's not like Jessica Chastain makes less money because she's in the SAG-AFTRA union with the same job as actors making less than $35K / year.

It depends on the specifics of the union. There certainly have been/are unions with fairly strict pay scales based on seniority and related factors. The SAG is obviously not one of those. (It's mostly, as I understand it, minimum pay scales for time actually spent working--a lot of SAG members don't work very much.) Public sector jobs can often be.

> Working class as in "people who work"?

Well yes, those that need to work. As opposed to those whose day to day spending come from capital investments.

I know a lot of investors like Warren Buffet. I bet they work harder than you do.

People usually believe investors are those scammers that advertise in Internet along rented Villas and Lamborghinis talking about how to live without working and so on.

They usually do not spend too much, as they are into the habit of saving way more than what they make.

Those that waste their money are not the investors themselves, but their families, like the trophy wife or the spoiled children.

If Warren Buffet stopped working tomorrow, how long do you think it would take for him to fall behind on his bills and default on his mortgage? That is the basic differentiator. If you work because you have to, then you are working class. If you work primarily because you want to, then you are not. There is of course also a large 'grey' area of people who could stop working and live quite comfortably, but feel compelled to keep working to finance their current lifestyle.

A lot of people on here denigrate executives, management, money people generally. Maube they add value commensurate with what they're paid. Some almost certainly do. Others probably don't.

However, I bet that the vast majority of software developers would hate the job and the lifestyle, perks or not--which among other things generally involves a ton of tightly-scheduled travel.

> However, I bet that the vast majority of software developers would hate the job and the lifestyle, perks or not--which among other things generally involves a ton of tightly-scheduled travel.

The travel is a prison they create for themselves, and generally one that they get off on. If your job is just chatting with and manipulating {employees,customers,higher-ups} then you need to invent a contrived way in which it seems hard, so you can keep justifying your salary.

Even better if you can tie your self-worth to your airline miles balance, and avoid your family for 3/4 of the year!

Warren Buffet does not need to work to pay the bills.

At least according to the Meta employees in the article, people are terrified of voting with their feet, because of the current job market.

As a result, many are communing hours a day, to sit on zoom calls. Wasting their valuable time on earth for the sake of a manager's dictat.

Things are good. But they can always be better :)

Management pretty often do not have the best ideas, and often the people doing the work know how best to do it.

> Wasting their valuable time on earth for the sake of a manager's dictat.

I mean, isn't that what work is?

You get paid, in exchange you spend your time doing stuff at your boss's behest, which you wouldn't do if you weren't being paid?

I mean sure, there are some jobs like being a doctor which you might consider a higher calling, but nobody joins Facebook expecting to do socially useful work, it's an ad company.

"Middle class" is a scam made up by the upper class to turn the working class against itself.

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