The Class Struggle in Silicon Valley
project-syndicate.org
project-syndicate.org
If you've read anything by him before, you will already have a sense of what he writes in this opinion piece.
As always, he's very much in favor of unionization by tech workers, including engineers.
Read about the Great Railroad Strike of 1977.
If your argument is “consider this anecdote”, and you can’t imagine historical analysis of economic questions other than through non-quantitative hand-selected case studies, you’re falling into the same trap.
It would be a mistake to take historical accounts at face value. They are written by humans, not some objective entity.
> you want to artificially restrict employment options for your potential competitors.
Because wage dispersion and inequality is lower, if you consider your skills and experience extraordinary, you will not be getting pay commensurate with your perceived value to the company at a union shop. That provides a moat of sorts for incumbent workers against "rockstars," "10x," and higher-skilled workers deciding to join the company.
Slichter, S. H., Healy, J. J., and Livernash, E. R. (1960). _The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management_.
Freeman, R. B. (1980) "Unionism and the dispersion of wages," _Industrial and Labor Relations Review_.
Freeman, R. B. (1984), "Longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions," _Journal of Labor Economics_
If anything, the tech industry should be leading the world in new ideas and methods (and dare I say it...technology) to organize labor.
I'm coming into it more from the other side, unionization as a way buffer against (and maybe negotiate something other than) sudden mass layoffs.
If I join a company and day one I’m the top performer I’d want to negotiate a better package for myself and I don’t want other people meddling in my negotiation unless I explicitly hire them to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_salary_cap#Individual_cont...
"The maximum player salary is based on the number of years that player has played and the total of the salary cap. The maximum salary of a player with 6 or fewer years of experience is either $25,500,000 or 25% of the total salary cap (projected for 2017–18), whichever is greater. For a player with 7–9 years of experience, the maximum is $30,600,000 or 30% of the cap, and for a player with 10+ years of experience, the maximum is $35,700,000 or 35% of the cap.[19][33] There is an exception to this rule: a player is able to sign a contract for 105% of his previous contract, even if the new contract is higher than the league limit.[34]"
Don't trust the first google hits, especially if you are in the US. Disinformation by union busters is very common around here.
I would say though this only benefits part of the society and comes with huge drawbacks too.
See also, the surge in recent tech layoffs (which he cites in the article).
Running a unionization campaign is a lot of work and can even entail taking some risks. If people at your company are pretty happy, if management is responsive, if benefits haven't been eroded yet, if lots of people have a strong libertarian bent, then you might not be able to convince enough people. Even when unionization is the best long term course for the workers as a whole, if the actual campaign is futile it's the best course for you as an single person not to get involved in a campaign.
If I had stayed with the acoustic ceiling job, I would be doing the exact same thing I was doing then, for a bit more money. I may or may not have inherited more responsibility if people more senior to me retired, moved, changed jobs, or died. Really this would be capped though, as company ownership has nothing to do with the labor, so if you start your own company, what you are doing has little to do with you having been in the union (IDK how this applies to contracts for city jobs and all that). If I invented a magic spell that installed an acoustic ceiling for $1 in 2 seconds, I would have been actively encouraged to destroy it or hide it. The union ethos I was in was to promote mediocrity, not accidentally provide too much benefit to your employer or customer. I really don't know where this idea that unions would stop mass layoffs comes from that is brought up on HN all the time, but that's simply not true, union people find themselves out of work all the time, and it's very hard to do any job on the side if you are hoping you get picked out of the pool to work a job. Really worst of all, which is the prime driver that got me to leave, is I knew exactly what this path would look like for years to decades in the future - many people promote that as a positive (which makes sense as most people are scared of risk and change), but I found it soul crushing.
I won't go into my engineering career other than it has completely changed my life for the better both financially and just in general leading a rewarding life, and operating without whatever safety net I had in the union (which was basically nothing anyway) is not even a passing thought I've ever had.
Have any other posters either pro or anti union actually worked in a union? Curious about your experience and thoughts.
as a dev, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of incentive to join one (except maybe in parts of industry that get a shittier bargain like gamedev)
In general the people like Doctorow or journalists more generally push tech unions not because they think it will benefit tech workers economically but because unions further their own political agenda
So, it's far more interesting than a pro-union rant.
His "enshittification" observation—i.e. his primary thesis WRT what's wrong with Tech—resonates as objectively true, and I've yet to see anyone offer a compelling counter.
Yeah, it's similar, but not really that.
Bait and switch is more that the advertised value is never provided.
Enshittification is more of a specific process in which the value is actually initially provided to all parties. This is generally done at a loss to the company, which is well-funded.
When, as a result, the company obtains a monopoly or nearly so, it then begins to claw back all of the value for itself. First from the end user. Then from other partners (e.g. advertisers). The end result is a shitty experience for everyone but the now very profitable company, but by then there are limited options.
Of course, that's the simplified version. Doctorow goes into a lot more detail, claiming it's a frequently run playbook in the tech industry and offering many compelling examples.