You Deserve a Tech Union – Together, we can build a better tech industry. (book) | Hacker News Reader

You Deserve a Tech Union – Together, we can build a better tech industry. (book)

abookapart.com

44 pointstoogley27 comments

People deserve to be paid for their work but you are approaching an industry that does not believe unions are useful and trying to convince them that they are useful so you should try to get the information out as freely as possible.

The other factor is they're speaking to an industry that is accustomed to all discourse and even much of the actual innovation taking place in radically open spaces. We're far more hesitant to purchase books than other industries, so couple that with widespread resistance to the idea in the first place and it does seem like an odd choice of medium, and actually communicates a bit of a disconnect.

A book in the style of Crafting Interpreters would probably have been a better rhetorical tool—free to read online as a manifesto, with the option to purchase a hard copy.

Given the current visa worker situation, how are unions possible?

I understand, in traditional engineering fields, they're possible. Also I'm pretty sure (correct me if wrong) European tech jobs have them. But do they have the same visa problem?

Should we all just pull a drew devault and move to Europe then?

Can you elaborate on what visa worker situation you're referring to and how it affects the feasibility of a union?

Technically visa workers can join a union, but if they get retaliated against, the stakes are much higher

Also part of the appeal of having them is that they're easier to bully into overworking because of the threat of deportation. If unions standardize working expectations, that's in direct conflict with one of the primary benefits of visa workers

We deserve federal laws to protect worker rights, not just for tech employees.

What do you think is missing? In the US we have whole government agencies (themselves unionized) dedicated to protecting worker rights.

A bunch of things come to mind: minimum vacation and sicks days, minimum wage and unemployment benefits that are adjusted to inflation, health care coverage as part of unemployment benefits, etc

There is next to zero labor solidarity in the tech industry and I predict tons of comments in this thread rationalizing why an industry that just laid off like 300,000 skilled workers doesn't need unions.

Unions don’t really protect against layoffs. All they can really do is whine about it.

Yeah case in point

"But what are unions? And why do they matter?"

It's pathetic that they have to start with that question.

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,

There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,

But the union makes us strong.

Solidarity forever!

For the union makes us strong.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo2SbjELxUY

I'm often confused at what would be the leverage tech workers have.

You can outsource code and services to the other part of the world or well paid consultants any day really.

Unionized industries in general have a geographical, physical and very specialized knowledge others can't replace easily. Ships don't get offloaded, cars don't get produced.

But software? You could fire 90% of your software developers, retain the few that you need to keep the business running and that's it.

Need new features? Good engineers working on a non cryptic codebase will be able to sort the things out given some weeks.

And the paradox is that if we do a good job (documenting, implementing best practices, separating different layers and concerns, writing good automated pipelines) we rend ourselves even replaceable than does that do a crap work.

Hiccups meaning losing over 75% of the value of the company.

I edited that part cause irrelevant, but the counterpoint you make is irrelevant from a software engineering perspective.

No I don't think Elon getting rid of 80% of the institutional knowledge at Twitter is irrelevant from a software engineering perspective. There's been a clear degradation in the algorithmic feed and moderation services that has driven away users and advertisers. Software developers were responsible for a lot of those systems.

one’s degradation is another one’s advancement and who needs moderation services when you have “free speech,” right? /s

elon successfully got rid of 80% of SWEs because he wanted an entirely different platform (which he has now)

I believe this is how most existing pre-internet companies do business now. Hire consultants to build the product and let the contract expire. Employ a minimal staff to add new features and keep it running. Expect this to work for 20+ years, but repeat the process in 6. Since, as you note, we have no leverage, we should be happy to wade through all the table-scrap tech debt wrought by offshore consultants (and in the future -- AI) as a way to keep our dependents fed. Why should tech be treated differently by business than delivery drivers at this point? The market is flooded and the skills are no longer unique. The only leverage we have at this point is where we spend our money, but the markets are so consolidated now we can't pick somewhere to get a product that doesn't feed revenue into the company we chose not to buy from.

What did unions really do for people in their heyday? They worked to improve working conditions, pay, and benefits. Literally nothing there really applies to tech nowadays…especially in FAANG (although most orgs too) and in the US.

What is a union going to get you that you don’t have now? You will still have no protection from layoffs. You will not get measurably different pay increases. You will not get full time WFH if your company values in office work. There are a plethora of offshore scabs that your company can employ should you want to strike—people who will not be shamed taking your place because virtual work eliminates the need to physically cross a picket line.

Unionizing tech simply does not have the same threat to an organization…it’s an annoyance, not a danger.

Not all tech workers are in "stereotypical" software engineering roles at Big Tech firms. It seems like those in defense-related industries would have the most leverage, for all the reasons you describe. Yet there's not much of a push for unionization there.

Is "tech unionization" really just a matter of visa leverage? That's a non-issue for people in defense because they're nearly all US citizens.

All hypotheticals. In reality not all software became outsourced. In reality you can earn a good living as a programmer in the West. In the US you can even earn a great wage.

Look at reality if you want to honestly determine your leverage.

One should be extremely wary of their leverage in a rapidly evolving and changing world.

Especially as more and more people are fleeing into it.

Don’t change your tack now. All that you said could have been said fifteen years ago.

I live in a country with great unions. And I am happy for both parts of the force; workers are treated fair and company has no option for exploitation as such.

But in a world where manufacturing has gone down in the west since the 1970s, and money shuffling and soft office jobs has become the way of work life, unions has little benefit.

In the west people has shifted from a solidarity way of work to a far more individualised career path. We work for ourselves, to become wealthier for ourselves, while the struggle is still as real as ever, in terms of who holds the wealth.

The control of money has never before been on such small amount of hands and the only ones not benefitting from that is the workers. There is no class building or leverage any longer, the fight is fought individually. The winners are corporate and people in power.

Try to look up the history of unions in USA just for study, and see how its almost baked into politics that unions will never happen.

Hope it's a good book

Wouldn’t be a HN thread on unions without half the first-level post being about the concept itself being doomed from the start.

No. In the country i live in, 2/3 of us is in a union. So around 66% of the work force.

In the US its 10% of the whole workforce.

Now, you explain to me why that is. I will help you. It's not about democracy.

USA is such a shitty country. Also with regards to unions.

The reason is the neoliberal shift. The US used to have more union activity and was more social democratic when it did.

> Now, you explain to me why that is. I will help you. It's not about democracy.

What democracy? Capital is stronger than any democratic system that I know of. But unions etc. provide enough of a counter-weight in some nations.

The US has a particularly bloody labor history according to Chomsky. From memory that was probably in contrast to other advanced nations which happen to have high union participation. In case that’s where you are from.

> I will help you. It's not about democracy.

You will help me understand. With what? Because your FUD “less manufacturing” and “more individualized” BS reasons don’t help explain it.

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