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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

When you are an employee, you are literally selling your labor, knowledge and experience in exchange for money and services (healthcare, etc). Think of yourself as your own for-profit business - a business of you.

Just like selling anything - if the terms don't satisfy you, then don't sell. Find someone else willing to accept your terms of sale.

You have the power folks... not the employers. Many have been led to believe the power-dynamic is reversed, and that the employer holds all of the power. That's absurdly untrue.

You have the labor, knowledge and experience (aka talent). Be your own advocate.

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I individually have almost no power to shape how the industry treats its laborers, I'm forced to maybe find the job marginally better than the median position for my needs. Collectively though...

Don’t waste your life trying to unionise.

They almost never work, because they are a bad deal for the company and a bad deal for above average workers.

You’ll waste years trying to push a rock up hill, when you should have just changed jobs.

Follow the money...

Unions make money off of your labor - and the more people they can convince to join the union, the more money they make. Put another way, a Union is a business and you are the product.

How much value does the average union provide a highly-skilled in-demand employee, such as those working at JPMorgan or FAANG companies? Very little if any at all, it would seem.

Negative value, because unions standardise wages.

They are under-performers teaming up to peer-pressure (bully) over-achievers into averaging the fruits of their labour.

If you’re a high achiever the absolute last thing you want is to work for a company that is unionised.

Check their post history, don't waste your time...

Just to offer a little counter point to your motivational speech.

I took a stand at a company where they asked for RTO. They fired me, I sued them, and the first phase of the trial just ended where the judges cut the baby in half and dismissed the "firing with cause" and offered a 3 months severance (to cover what would have been a notice period), but without asking anything more of the company. The lack of empathy for the worker was surprising to me, frankly. Overall it was basically pointless.

So, if you do try to offer resistance to RTO policies, make sure you're not entirely alone, and probably leaving on your own with garden leave is a better option than trying to fight them in court. (This was all in the EU, so YMMV.)

Fighting RTO is going to be an uphill battle. First off, it’s a fairly narrow class of job that can be performed in a WFH environment. Those same jobs can arguably (because there is no real solid productivity data either way) be at least equally productive in an office too. Prior to 2020 and the pandemic WFH was a rarity.

So you are fighting against work tradition even within your industry, poor productivity data supporting your assertion, and frankly a general work culture where most everyone else doesn’t work from home. Your deck is stacked against you.

I work from home, but if my company chose to RTO, I wouldn’t challenge it. I know from my team’s experience (same base group pre-pandemic) we are not measurably more productive WFH as in office. It would suck to add a commute back to my day, but prior to 2020 I did that for over 3 decades anyway.

Sure, but people need to start fighting that battle. Not in the least because asshole employers want it both ways: get people back into the office, but keep the precarious work environments of Corona times: shared desks, noisy environments, long commutes with no compensation which are not part of the work time, etc.

I'm all for going to the office if they're willing to compromise. But no, it's their way or the high way.

Seems like your battle is more about the work environment they are providing you in the office then WFH vs RTO. Still an uphill battle, it’s not like they are asking you to work in a dangerous and dirty factory for 8+ hours on your feet.

People need to get over the “long commutes” complaint, that is not your employers problem unless they just can’t find workers due to their physical location. If they can find suitable local employees without a long commute, your long commute is a “your” problem to solve vs. employer problem to solve.

I resent your paternalism a little. I understand your opinion, but please don't patronize me or anyone that might think like me. Nobody needs to get over anything that is important to them, despite not walking barefoot in the snow uphill both ways. Small problems for you can be larger for others.

If you're comfortable hypothetically giving up extra free hours in the day for a company that's fine, but please don't try to make me feel guilty for wanting something else in life.

> is not your employers problem

Of course it's my employer's problem, If I'm unhappy at work I do a less good job. It's baffling to me, and forgive me for being patronizing in turn, that individual people can have the same mentality as organizations, where people are just replaceable cogs in the machine. Yes you can replace them, but the cost, monetary and of knowledge is greater than retaining them.

> If you’re comfortable hypothetically giving up extra free hours in the day for a company…

You are not giving those hours to your company. The company gets no more or less for your hours of commute time than they do from your colleague who can walk to the office in 5 minutes. That is an investment you are making (because of your location), along with your labor, in exchange for money. If the investment is not worth it to you—why would you do it?

The “get over” comment is really meant for the realization that your location in proximity to your office is really meaningless to your organization. No need to feel guilty if you don’t want to make that time investment or location change. You do you. Just realize that your company’s concern for your individual happiness will be limited to what it can do for the aggregate net happiness of all its employees. Your individual reactions and feelings and how the relate to productivity outside their net HR benefits are kind of in your ballpark to solve.

You might hate the metaphor, but we really are just cogs in the machine. I have had a long career and can tell you that I learned long ago that the organizational cost of an unhappy cog is much much more than the cost of replacing them.

This is kind of true, but it depends on risking your financial stability in the short term. Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike. What are they going to do, not have IT? they’d be out of business in a month.

Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…

> Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike

Why would you do that? That is by definition, a hostile work environment.

Find a place where you don't need to pull a bunch of shenanigans to get what you want.

Especially in the IT field, you have a massive amount of options. People tend to only think about FAANG and friends, but there's millions of SMB's out there that need IT of all levels, pay well and offer generous benefits.

> Why would you do that?

I think they were offering that as a solution to the difficulty of finding new equivalent jobs quickly.

While it's true people can "just quit"... there's usually more factors that make that very difficult, like having enough money saved up to last until you get a new job, and actually finding a replacement job that pays enough to let them keep a similar quality of life as they have now.

You’re just making excuses for laziness.

It has never in all human history been easier to find a new job than it has been in the past few years.

I think a hostile work environment might be a fun outcome of ‘return to office’ mandates.

> Better to get a bunch of IT workers on board and then strike. What are they going to do, not have IT? they’d be out of business in a month.

Last year there were nearly 100k tech layoffs in the US, the year prior nearly 200k. Every tech opening is saturated with a few hundred resumes. Do you really think your company couldn’t hire replacements?

> Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…

Shame on your company if they don’t control security to prevent this. Shame on you if you are willing to withhold more than your labor in a strike situation. There is work stoppage and there is sabotage. If you are not relinquishing the only set of keys to the factory, that borders on intentional sabotage.

Taken at face value you are just repeating what Jamie Dimon said.

> And at the end of the day, Dimon stressed, employees have a choice in whether to work for JPMorgan at all. “It’s a free world,” Dimon said.

And isn't it interesting that your worker empowerment talk is aligned with what the billionaire CEO publicly says?

> And isn't it interesting that your worker empowerment talk is aligned with what the billionaire CEO publicly says?

And that means the GP is wrong when he says, "you have the power folks... not the employers." The employers have the power."

He'd be right if there was a lot more worker solidarity and unionization, but that's not the world we live in. Right now worker power is too diffuse and unorganized to make a difference. Individualism divides and conquers workers.

> And you might wish to consider whether there are any implications to your argument given that you and the billionaire CEO agree

Why? Are we now saying anything a billionaire (gasp!) says is automatically wrong or nefarious? Come on people, I expect better from the HN crowd.

I edited my comment for better wording.

No you got it backwards: Jamie Dimon isn't wrong—he is in fact a highly effective business leader. You are wrong. He knows that the company is more powerful than the workers and the at-will employment is theoretically fair but in practice tilts the balance of power towards the company. And yet you have not realized that.

While true, this is a bandaid and frankly a battle the common people will never win. Small, organized groups that have no morals will always win. There may be small victories (5 day work week) but they will eventually be eclipsed (nearly all households are dual income - the capital class ended up with 10 days worked a week per household instead of 7).

Americans need unity, and from that needs to come leaders who have a concept of noblesse oblige. We need rulers that care for their people and are judged by the state of their poorest. Unfortunately, America is far too diverse (both genetically and spiritually) for this to happen. Diverse democracies never succeed (there are many books on this - one was even on Obamas reading list). People will pattern match the solution to “facism”, “Hitler”, “tyranny” - reject it - and continue to live in a time of technological miracles worrying if they’ll be able to afford a place to sleep. The knee jerk rejection is exactly what the capital class has engineered to continue leeching off the rest of us.

We could unionize but what’s the point? Our leaders should love us and we should love them. And wealth gaps as large as they are are anything but love - they’re a moral failing.

> Diverse democracies never succeed

May be I get this wrong. This sounds like a bold statement. Switzerland, Canada, Belgium but also India are multi-lingual or even multi-ethnic democracies. They know tensions but they are not failed.

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