The Brief Origins of May Day
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Bashing people who hold opposing views with harsh phrases driven by pre-existing emotion is not only not curious conversation, it poisons it.
Unfortunately, quite a few of you have been doing that in this thread. That's not ok, and no, the topic does not excuse it—on the contrary: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
If you aren't feeling curious, or can't post thoughtfully and substantively, please take a break until you are and can.
I know that we’re not a monolith and are actually a heterogeneous mix of opinions, but there frequently talk about job dissatisfaction (career burnout, comically stingy equity grants, etc).
But when organizing comes up, it’s usually treated with disdain because so many have bought into highly individualistic hustle-culture and the narrative that unions only exist to help lazy freeloaders
In fact they tend to be some of the most anti-union, anti-labor folks I know.
I will grant that not every single person in the "comfortable middle class suburban" category is anti-union / anti-labor, but it's a pattern I see often enough that it is worth remarking on.
When you work in a trade where you could easily be killed or injured on the job the calculus is a bit different.
Just because you likely won't be killed in a crane collapse or someone dropping a hammer doesn't mean that the workplace is safe and that working conditions are good.
But at the end of the day most people are dropping from heart disease, diabetes, obesity. Sitting 8+ hours a day is basically worse for you than smoking.
Since it’s so, so slow I think we all have the belief that surely this will not happen to us. We will not be frog boiled, because surely we will notice once we are fat and hyperventilating going up the stairs. Surely, there will be some indication and we will turn the ship around.
But looking around us, I don’t think so. Clearly people are getting frog boiled. And they get so beaten down, so worn, that eventually they do not fight it.
I've seen what you describe in Amazon - high pressure, constant thread of being fired, stress, no work/life balance, etc...
Many other jobs are different. Sure, things are inefficient, but the expectations are not very high either. You come in, do your 7 hours of work (or don't even come in if you are remote), and go home. It's pretty hard to get fired, so as long as you are putting a nominal effort, you'd be fine.
Some people are trying to get a promotion, or are just full of energy - they may work very hard, skip work/life balance and stress out. But it's all optional, if you are happy with your initial salary, you don't have to do it.
(The major annoyance with this is if you are trying to actually get things done, like ship a product, there are just _so many_ people around who seem to work very slowly, and that cannot be relied on to deliver things in time... but this is all in your head, you only stress out about this if you choose to)
Every place I have ever worked has been "up or out". Maybe 20 years ago that kind of job existed, but it does not now.
I am in embedded/robotics though, other industries may be different.
Indeed the bar is so low that even with all the bullshit in the tech industry, we seem to have it better than most- on salary alone. Throw in “full remote” (although that’s disappearing) and it really can’t be beat, even when your boss yells obscenities at you every day.
Even here in Europe salaries can match Doctors and Lawyers but the barrier to entry is much lower and in my experience employment is still based on merit more than anything.
Perhaps there's some element of "don't rock the boat" but maybe some guilt too. We really have lucked out.
Not sure how comfortable I'd feel taking union action over my job that requires me to leave the house once a week but pays 3x a teachers salary.
I don't care that much about "labour issues" because it seems like a logically flawed avenue to explore to begin with.
To be financially successful under any market system I can think of requires you, in a mathematical sense, to be close enough to the top within a company that you get a greater proportion of the profit than simply 1/employees.
In simple terms - I can't employ a maid unless I earn more than a maid, a maid can never be paid enough that I would want to be a maid (being the maid's employer, or at least having that optionality, is strictly superior).
Some jobs have comparative advantage, e.g. I might enjoy working on my car but know that a mechanic can do the same job in 1/10th the time. But a lot of stuff is just straight - I earn more than you, you do it for me, so I can get more things done.
Wages and hours for low level jobs feel like a distraction, barely anyone needs more toys, the issue is that the necessary items for life are monopolised.
So from my perspective the only thing that labour regulation can achieve is to basically just compress that experience, we still won't build more housing or make it easier to do so etc.
They’re related. Unions aren’t just labor movements, they’re efforts to reduce the power of corporations.
Monopolies form because they make a lot of sense for the people on top. Competition is cool, but mostly a fools errand. The true winners know how to work together to widen the gap between their in-group and everyone else.
What’s evident to me about market theory is that it naturally tends to monopolies. To me, it is human nature. So therefore, we need extra structures, extra systems, to keep it in check.
(1) demanded flat payment increases for all workers based on seniority etc. Which may make sense for factory workers but I am not enthusiastic about flat rates for programmers not taking into account actual experience/availability/output etc.
Factory workers in many cases do job that can be easily rated and measured and do some specific amount of it.
While measuring output of programmers is notoriously hard.
I expect that union agreement of this kind would in fact benefit only lazy freeloaders not doing any work but having seniority.
(2) are guilds that existed to keep jobs for members and to outlaw or ban hiring outsiders.
I strictly prefer for exclusionary guilds to not exist and one of my big worries is that one would be setup, in area affecting me. One way or another, not necessarily an obvious self-naming itself as a guild.
(3) are gangs existing to steal public money - for example, see coal miners in Poland. Main union achievements was to steal billions of public money to help lazy freeloaders doing work that was not worth doing or outright harmful.
I do not support theft, also in terms of parasiting on public resources. Even if I would get some of proceeds of theft.
(4) intended to achieve more free days, flexibility etc. On my freelancing agreements I sacrificed large part of earning to get about 100+ free days a year, very significant flexibility where and how and on what I work. So this part is achieved for me - and I am not sure how many other tech workers would actually prefer more free time over being paid more.
I am not automatically against unions for tech workers but my first reaction and assumption is not that it will be positive or useful for me.
Do you think I would join an organization like that? There is a clear conflict of interest between blue and white color workers and the more numerous blue color workers push the union to prioritize them.
If Factory workers longer and more efficiently my job becomes more secure. So obviously I want a union which advocates that factory workers work longer hours, it is clearly in my interest. The same goes for strikes, if factory workers strike they endanger my job and reduce the size of the engineering department, reducing my chances to get promoted.
this is a bizarre simplification, sounding like some kind of silly propaganda
I am well aware of enemies not fitting into such labeling at all (and probably there are more less obvious ones)
Soccer hooligan vandals.
Corrupt local politicians.
Some vandals obsessed with damaging community-run geodata collection project.
People who thing that overregulating everything in Europe is an exciting adventure and we should have more of it.
Climate change deniers, people misunderstanding vaccines and in effect trying to resurrect diseases that were extinct locally.
People with Saruman-like approach to trees.
Coal miners parasiting on billions from public funds to fund coal mining (as selling coal does not allow to pay for it, at least with how much they are paid for it).
I realize that many other users have been doing this as well, but each HN commenter needs to stick to the intended use of the site regardless of what others are doing.
Fortunately, it looks like your comment history is mostly fine (at least the parts of it that I skimmed back through) so this should be easy to fix.
Ethan Hunt play by Tom Cruise and Waitress #2 played by Jane Doe aren't very homogeneous with regards to pay and fame, but they're both part of SAG.
EDIT: another commented mentioned that NBA players are also unionized. I think there is a second element to it, which has to do with how monopolized the employer market is.
not only would the collective provide benefits to the individual workers, but it would serve as an (optional) form of licensure/credentialing that ensures each member has a baseline level of competence. it could make hiring so much easier if you could skip the fizzbuzz screening rounds by pulling from a pool of vetted talent.
As a union member (not SAG-AFTRA), I find this curious. SAG-AFTRA is a Union. They have a cool name but, like many other groups with Guild in their name, they are recognized by the NLRB as a Union. There's no special classification for Guild, at least in America.
When you look at Wikipedia's list of largest unions in the US, only 2 of the top 10 have Union in their name, but that doesn't mean the other 8 aren't actually Unions. Or that the ones with Brotherhood in their name don't allow women, or any other silly extrapolation one wants to concoct. It's just a name.
We're not in the 13th century any more. There is no longer any functional difference between Guild and Union. Of the alleged benefits of Guilds enumerated in HN threads (vetting and certification of members, continuing education, ability to be paid above scale, etc), literally every single one is already offered by unions today. And if you thought of a new one that wasn't, you could bring it up at your next union meeting and vote on it.
It's frustrating to read discussions of unions by online commenters who have never been union members or paid dues, never read a union contract, never attended a union meeting or voted with their coworkers, never worked similar jobs in both union and non-union workplaces. It's like a bunch of people who have never lived in a free society arguing over whether they should form a Democracy or a Republic, by picking countries with these words in their names, and selecting attributes of those countries they do or don't want to emulate. That's not how it works.
But what does Tom Cruise get out of it? He certainly does not need a union to get his wage, pension and benefits.
Is this a solidarity with other, less known actors? Prestige? Something else?
[0] https://www.sagaftra.org/membership-benefits/member-benefits
The wealthy class makes multiples of your salary in passive income and their marginal tax rate is lower. You work and fork over 40%. They do nothing and pay 15% or less.
You put your retirement money into a 401k. They put their retirement money into a “charitable foundation”.
You draw down from your retirement money. They take a loan against it.
What’s the difference between a billionaire and a meat packing worker? Billions of dollars.
What’s the difference between a billionaire and a faang engineer? Also billions of dollars.
My point is simply that if you are 1 of 50,000 in a meat processing plant, you do not really have any way of competing with your fellow workers. You might try to work harder and faster, but then you end up raising the bar for all, and you now have to maintain the new pace. And once the rest catch up with your pace, the pay for all will be lowered again.
In tech, every job is slightly different, and there is a real opportunity to meaningful differentiate yourself from the rest and compete in a much more dynamic job market.
Also, who are the ones hurting currently? The juniors or the seniors? Seniors are mostly doing fine. Juniors are the ones hurting. And juniors would have an even harder time, if you transitioned to a unionized system, because entry requirements would be raised significantly to account for the fact that you cannot fire people so easily.
Also, their output is relatively easy to measure and stand arise.
This is not true for programmers, making standard pay increase for programmers less useful as a target. What would be measured? Hours in office? Commits? Lines of code?
1. Heterogeneity/homogeneity of labour.
2. Tight/lose labour market.
I think Argument 1 is the weaker argument. There's a lot of fungibility between software roles. However, there's a higher learning cost. Moving to a new software company requires a few months before someone is close to full productivity. This in contrast between a painter moving from a Ford supplier to a GM supplier will likely close to full productivity within a few weeks. The cost (to the employer) is lower to rehire someone.
Argument 2 is the stronger argument, but may not be forever. In a tight labour market, I see very little need for unions. If the marginal worker can (and will) leave their position for a better position (pay, benefits, culture, etc), I see little need for unions. However, if the labour market for software engineers shifts in favor of businesses, this will change rapidly.
I don't know about you but I don't make anything even remotely close to six figures...
It is still labor and we are still exploited - most the revenue we generate goes to capitalist interests, not us, the laborers, which are the creators of all revenue.
It's just that we have it comparatively good and so are less inclined to seek out systemic change - a less favorable reading would be that we are bought off to split us off from the rest of the proletariat.
unions in the past are portrayed as remove physical dangers, limiting to reasonable hours and fair wages. but tech workers already have that stuff, so they don't see an upside.
codetermination (getting workers on the board), four day work weeks, full-time remote, sabbaticals, open source support, rethinking startup equity, ... there's all sorts of things we could be pushing for that would make our jobs better that we could to push for if we worked together.
I have never been to a politician's dinner. I have never changed a law. If I were fired, which can be done at any time for no reason, I would have no source of income. Money is the weakest form of power, and a well-paid job is the weakest form of money.
If you make a cushy salary and the biggest physical risk is carpal tunnel, you might think ”I dont have it THAT bad. It’d be greedy and disrespectful of the sacrifices that were made to use unions in my situation”
While software developers just starting out are apt to be working class, when you receive a comparatively high income for your labor it soon becomes hard to find things to do with it if you don't start investing in land/capital, so one in that position doesn't stay working class for long.
Structurally we are more similar than different, even if tech workers have had it good for the last while.
It sounds much better for them to be on the team of all workers rather than the other team, or to be out of the game entirely.
You seem to be claiming that empathy is always “hollow” but I think this is at most a statement about you. Many people can be both well off and want to make things better for others. Not everyone, for sure, not enough maybe. But attacking people for showing empathy seems weird.
It’s not virtue signaling. There are material gains that could be made by organizing. Layoff protection and the power to set company direction are two big ones that come to mind.
It’s okay to want to unionize for selfish reasons. In fact, I think it’s borderline propaganda to suggest the only reason a wealthy person would organize is because of their own class guilt.
Prior to that I was a military commander as a Major in the United States Air Force
Before joining the AF I had jobs in construction, freelance web design and car stereo installation in high school
The singular difference is the personality of tech workers is “I can do this faster and easier by myself - I have no desire to communicate with other people”
It seems to stem from a large swath very technical people coming from isolated environments when they were children.
Specifically ones in middle to upper middle class families, where the computer was their creative outlet and they were spending more time with a computer and understanding the computer than they were other people.
They were able to get excited about and learn and get deep into a topic where you really didn’t need other people — you need to documentation you needed books and you needed time to experiment.
Almost every single other job I’ve ever worked in you *need* other people in order to make progress. That is not true for writing really small functional and precise software which is the “job” of most swe.
As a function of that the majority of SWE’s (and frankly this applies to most technical experts who have a very specific niche) have neither of the interest nor the belief that the organization is valuable in of itself as the organization and they are way more excited to jump companies in order to promote themselves because that is how they are incentivized and are happy to find themselves in that position.
If you wanna actually make an organization that creates sustainable software, you need an entirely different way of thinking. you need to think organizationally you think you need to think about how to help people how to get things out of their way communication etc. etc. etc. all these things have nothing to do with“shipping code “
And for a lot of people who are good at programming they really genuinely could not care or have the capacity to understand about anything other than their narrow frame of view and they do not see their coworkers as part of their community they see them as competition.
This will continue to remain true so long as expected pay bumps for job-hopping outpace loyalty raises.
Well, the engineering union I was in as a student member was most interested in selling me the great credit card deals they'd negotiated for their members. They were not into any kind of "class solidarity" nationally, much less internationally. They were at best into securing good deals for their members (and not so much that they couldn't still have a VERY cozy relationship with their employer counterpart). The last straw was when they got into promoting climate denialism. So yeah, I didn't think the organization was very valuable in itself, but was I wrong?
Plus, at the risk of too much head-shrinking, I've never gotten the impression that tech workers liked each other very much. There's a lot of disdain in the industry, for the guy who uses that language or framework or operating system that I think sucks. You don't see that so much with, say, truckers. There may be some good-natured rivalry based on truck brands or long-haul versus short-haul, but not the real disdain you see in tech.
I could join and try to influence them, but if I was good at that sort of thing, I probably wouldn't have been a software developer in the first place.
Because many tech workers don't see themselves as workers, with some justification, many having substantial capital investments alongside labor income, making them, in class terms, petit bourgeois or at least close enough to it to perceive their own interests in more bourgeois than proletarian terms. And even the tech workers that are clearly part of the proletarian intelligentsia tend see themselves (rightly or wrongly) on a path that leads into the bourgeoisie, with bourgeois interests.
The difference is public policy. Owning property in the US absolutely elevates you to a higher privileged status above renters. How many homeowners were being evicted from their homes after missing a couple mortgage payments during the pandemic? Precisely zero. While thousands of renters in red states had the sheriff at their throats within 60 days. That's all you need to know about class in this country.
different circumstances are treated differently?
Yes, exactly. My entire point is that owning a home is nothing like renting, even if you're spending the same amount, and is treated as a privileged status.
Working class: you are sustained by your current labor.
Upper class: you can sustain yourself based on the returns from your investments more-or-less indefinitely.
Middle class, between the two: you can sustain yourself off your investments for so long that you can’t practically be threatened by unemployment.
It is a labor relations issue explicitly, you need a union if you are in the first of the three classes, because otherwise you can be threatened by unemployment to do something dangerous or dehumanizing.
In the middle class definition, practically there’s some element of the fact that our skills are in high demand, so you can become unthreatened by unemployment by having just, like, a 1 year buffer. But I do think we can overstate how in-demand our skills to satisfy our egos…
If you have to think about which one you are you are working class. At a stretch you might consider the owner of a small tech company (say 5-10 employees) as petit bourgeoisie but the vast majority of small business owners (say mechanics, shop owners, small companies) are squarely in the working class. They may have employees but they still work, either for wages or as managers of those employees - which is work.
The middle class (petit bourgeoisie) is real, but its not centered around middle income (it is middle in the sense of being between the dominantly capital-dependent class and the dominantly labor-dependent class, primarily in how it relates to the economy, but in practice also on average, in income and wealth, but it is still an elite minority, just less so than the haut bourgeoisie that sits at the top.)
I like the definition I provided because it seems functional to me; it describes classes with labor-capital relationships, and describes how the incentives influence their behavior.
What I don't like about the middle class definition is that it is to my mind just a subset of the working class but designed to drive a wedge between people who should be looking out for each other. It has the effect of attempting to align working class people with super rich capitalists. Interesting that "middle class" was the original name for the capitalists who were between the working class and the nobility, now we pretend that the middle class are working class adjacent.
One definition I found reasonable was that it it "starts" with those that can meet their basic necessities (housing, food, transportation, healthcare) and still have funds left over for discretionary spending:
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin...
Where it "ends" at top-end is perhaps more arbitrary (not Top 10%? 20%? 1%?).
Like if you by groceries, rent an apartment, have a bus pass, qualify for Medicare, and you have a Netflix account or get fast food (discretionary spending), then you seem to be middle class by this definition. Is that right? Maybe Medicare bumps you out. But ok, you can get the cheapest marketplace plan.
I mean, to be below middle class by this definition your expenses have to exactly match your revenue, or you are living beyond your means. So other than some tiny slice (in some perimeter vs area sense) of the populace, being working class seems to be definitionally unsustainable.
Middle-class is a spectrum like being "rich" is.
This would put a trader earning $3m/yr as working class. That’s fine I guess, but then we need another distinction, for the difference between that person and a minimum wage worker.
Now in all the conversations where we would say “working class” we use this new term, because we almost always mean things relating to income level rather than labour vs owner.
And so all we’ve done is changed the name for “working class”
You can be rich working class. If you acquire enough capital where you no longer work and just deploy your capital you are no longer working class.
At the very least the second camp is the only one that can effectively vote with their wallets, Poorer and you can't afford the better alternatives, richer and you have better means of influence (Or deal with things that are low volume and less price sensitive)
People who don't make a lot of money struggle to afford all those things, and are worked to death despite it. They don't just have enough and want more. They literally don't have enough to live a life free of struggle.
Unions exist because workers were literally being killed by their employers. What's a tech worker's biggest gripe? Being on-call? Not getting a bonus on top of their fat salary? The only time I've ever done a hard day's work as a tech worker was when I joined a shitty startup that was abusive with long hours. I left and joined a normal company and it was smooth sailing. The most painful part of the job is my tennis elbow, but hey, I have a corporate healthcare plan and a $1000 swivel chair. I don't see the point of a union in this environment.
Not compared to many unionized industries. Workers in professional sports and entertainment, for example, which fully embrace labor unions, make software developers look like they work for peanuts.
> Unions exist because workers were literally being killed by their employers.
Labor unions have formed when death was actually on the horizon because death was on the horizon, but labor unions today are almost exclusively a rich man's sport. The poor aren't poor enough to face certain death, but aren't rich enough to risk the consequences of not working (i.e. striking) for beneficial-but-not-life-threatning demands, so it is not a reasonable choice for them to make. Hence why you almost never find labor unions in low paying jobs.
Tech doesn't like unions simply because, as a group, tech doesn't like people. That's what a union is, after all: A group of people who have decided to associate with each other.
I am pretty sure that union is not the most significant part why pay is high here.
"We're all pretty sure of that. Where did you dream up this straw man?" is just the kind of provocation that produces that kind of discussion, though.
One thing to keep in mind is that most of us underestimate the provocation in our own posts (let's say by 10x) and overestimate the provocation in others' posts (let's say by another 10x) and that leads to quite a skew in perception [1]. I believe this is why everyone always feels like the other person started it / did worse [2]. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear! [3]
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I suspect that this drives wages high for highly paid individuals in sport and entertainment.
Note that stars in entertainment, in fields without unions also earn a lot.
They do! What doesn't resonate with many tech workers is working together with other people. Tech workers are largely used to working alone, and many even struggle in social situations more-so than in other industries, so when a labor issue arises they believe it is a problem they must solve on their own.
Industries with significantly higher economic status and autonomy are all over unions (sports, entertainment, politics, medicine, etc.), so that doesn't really explain it.
Particularly this part:
> nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."
The tech track works great if one falls into line and doesn't rock the boat by questioning authority or trying to see the big picture. If one clings to original teenage fantasies like the idea that intellectual prowess and financial success eventually bring esteem and a social life. If one chooses to avoid becoming mired in dead end physical labor jobs like everyone else, even for a time, in worship of their own cleverness.
But should the unthinkable happen, say, the loss of a loved one due to a hyper focus on work, or witnessing one's work being used to take from others, or waking up one day to find oneself disillusioned with the direction tech is going, then suddenly tech loses its luster. One starts to recognize it for what it is - just another way to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Tech has come to symbolize sheltering from reality, like a state sanctioned drug. It's a way to pat oneself on the back and downplay the wisdom of those outside it. Blindly worshipping it to the exclusion of the other wonders of life is the surest way I know to separate oneself from the soul, other than money perhaps.
In good conscience, I must add that the vast majority of tech today is phantom tech, not real tech. It serves to entertain and distract rather than be a labor-saving device. So in that sense, it's understandable that people invested in solving anything except any real problem have a disdain for the plight of labor.
Is this true?
I thought senior engineers were expected to push back as a matter of course, and staff engineers were expected to think in broad, business needs and translate that down to the code.
An engineer who just shuts up and writes code, is so we are told, the first casualty in the age of AI.
I agree with you, that the best engineers weigh the business needs when working towards a solution.
But I've also seen how the top problem solvers rarely get promoted beyond a certain level. A lot of us got into this to change the world, but ended up settling at middle management.
It's kind of a learned helplessness. It's strange to see the best and brightest commanded by people who aren't necessarily dumb, they just view the work as almost a sunk cost rather than something that pays dividends if done right. So there's this constant constraining of ideas that rubs off on us and gradually diminishes our light. Until eventually we're just another cog in the machine, showing up day after day only to keep things running and not rock the boat. And making up stories about how critical we are to the process without seeing our own expendability.
It's sad to say, but we're about to get tossed out and replaced by AI. I don't think that rising above being code monkeys is going to save us.
So on that note, we're also about to get radicalized. Imagine spending one's entire life in discipline learning the most esoteric knowledge, hoping to get ahead someday, only to find out that there wasn't enough time. Having to watch the most vacuous blowhards become millionaires at the highest levels of power and casually destroy everything we worked towards.
Now, we need a 4 day week (1 day less work) at the same pay, just as back then they moved from 10-16 hour working days to 8, for the same pay at the end of the week.
Something that groups of people rarely seem to realize: you don't have to accept a binary. You don't have to put all hierarchical structure to an end. You don't have to do ONLY one thing or ONLY another. Life is about balance.
Doesn't matter what side of a spectrum you're on. Conservatives, capitalists, evangelicals, anarchists, socialists, leftists. Each group is often dominated by a polarizing, binary force. Some fiery personality is agitating so hard for their point of view that they will only accept total capitulation and domination of their position. But that doesn't leave room for the middle way, compromise, a diversity of states of being. And so it creates conflict, even warfare.
I've worked in both systems (capitalist hierarchy, anarchist non-hierarchy). Both are useful. Both suck. The reason they both suck, is their incapacity to accept that sometimes the "other way" is better to get a specific thing done. But they can't see outside their own limited model. They're 2-dimensional, when they need to be 3-D.
They won't allow the "other way" in, because they're afraid it will taint "their way", and in some way ruin or defeat it. But if they did finally compromise and allow an alien system to co-habitate with their own, they'd see the truth. A composite of glass and plastic is better than either of them alone. Foreign organisms living in your gut make you healthier. It's the sum of the good properties, closely aligned, that contribute to a better whole.
I do not understand your framing. You don't "have to" do anything. These are people talking about what they wish to do.
> Life is about balance.
Pseudo-Buddhist bullshit.
You are lost in abstraction. These arguments are actually about material conditions, they're not just personality conflicts. Middle-class people lose contact with this fact, because they have no material worries; or rather their material conditions are simply tied to whether their employer believes they are profitable to employ. Of course middle-class people have to "compromise." Or rather they have to paint their total and continuous submission as a compromise, complain about the inflexibility of their bosses, and dream of one day having the leverage to order people around themselves.
Arguing that the best solution is in the middle is just the moderation fallacy. It's not profound, it's the law of averages. It's the kind of thing you can say regardless of subject, an invariant, that will always make people who believe in the law of averages believe you said something profound.
I.e. justice for all, not just for the rich or the poor.
People often react to something wrong in society with another wrong that is diametrically opposed. In that case, the term "balance" is appropriate - it's about correcting what's wrong without overreacting.
I know for sure that not knowing union members and not truly knowing that family worked in government influenced my views and some choices.
In the UK, also a nation with a very rich history of labour movements and philosophy (Engels family owned factories in Manchester, which he and Marx used as justification and evidence for many of the points made in Conditions of the Working Class), has also seen a recent decline in labour movements - but that's partly because working conditions have improved so massively in recent decades: employment rights, statutory holidays and minimum wage have all improved.
However, in recent years something has changed, and I think a lot of people are now looking at holidays and working conditions in other countries: France (a socialist republic), Germany and Canada all seem to have better work/life balance, strong productivity, remain in the G7 and the roof hasn't fallen in.
I do wonder whether the rise of zero-hour contracts and the gig economy, the debate in the US over tipping as a basis for not paying a higher minimum wage, the lack of holidays and so on, might lead to more interest in either new labour movements or reinvigorating the old.
What's interesting for me is the productivity data shows that many businesses that need knowledge workers to function make more money and grow faster if they allow more work/life balance, but the messaging from the leadership pushes back against it. RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks. AI should, in theory, make that even more possible, but I don't think that's how most in the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 want it to work out.
It's going to be an interesting thing to watch/be part of in years to come, but history tells us transition moments are often violent: can that violence be avoided?
It does depend on how you measure it. Given diligent workers you could argue that working from home is better for 'on task' work, than the distractions of the office - however some of those distractions create value for companies that's hard to measure.
I've lost count of the number of times I've had the polite - how are you type conversation - via a chance encounter in the office, that has lead to an idea or new connection that moved something forward, ( have you tried X? Have you talked to Y ).
These don't happen when you are on task working from home.
For companies which are knowledge based - this sort of spontaneous creativity happens more when people are all together and less when people have to intentionally reach out.
Companies aren't just the simple sum of the individuals and a lot of the creativity happens off-task.
Today's working environment is 40+ hours in open plan offices with too few social spaces or meeting rooms for meaningful collaboration, so both focus work and casual collaboration have to be fought for.
Regardless, what's interesting to me at least is that even while we can see productivity rose for many decades even as people moved to the 5 day, 8-hour week (which must was counter-intuitive - there was an expectation of a drop in outputs), we're seeing potentially more gains from moving to a 4 day week.
RTO - for my type of work, and most work that needs "flow" for 2-3 hours a day, minimum - doesn't work for most people in 2025. Leaders are holding onto it in an irrational way, and that is leading to growing resentment. That, coupled with trying to pay people who have to show up (service workers, gig economy workers), with ever fewer working rights and poorer conditions, means something's going to give at some point.
If all the menial work was done by robots, and we were all going to Bell Labs-style environments for 3-4 days a week, I think we'd all prefer that and actually, society might be a lot more productive as a result. But it's never going to happen. Not in our lifetimes, any way.
However I do consider there is a general element of selfishness/ social atomisation in the reluctance to return to work - both in terms of travel time costs, and focussing on personal tasks aspects ( ie a reluctance to give other people time ).
Work and how it's done, is at the heart of society - yet the society aspects are being hollowed out.
What’s interesting is that tariffs helped American workers back in the day — whether or not that happens again remains to be seen.
Unless the entire world gets onboard with worker rights, trade barriers remain one of the only ways to improve the working conditions of local people.
Regarding the French example: they do have the so-called 35 hour week, but compare disposable income for the same job in the U.S. versus France: Americans have much higher disposable income than the French (even after accounting for health care costs.) The US could improve conditions, but pay will drop accordingly. That might be ok or it might not, but there is no free lunch.
Those barriers work by raising the minimum price of a product, making it profitable to produce it in a more expensive labor market. When you make products more expensive though, it comes out the other side as people have to pay more to get the things they want, and you get inflation.
If that is what people want, OK, fine. I don't think it's what has been sold to most Americans though - not only is the narrative that inflation going to be avoided, but income tax is going to be scrapped too. It's hard to find credible economists from any part of the political spectrum who agree.
I hope it does work, because if it doesn't, what will follow will be horrible to watch from afar, even if as a result we end up with prices for most things coming down (if Chinese companies can't sell to the US, they'll just dump to the rest of the World).
The French have higher disposable income because Americans are too busy wasting their income on sky high rents, sky high healthcare costs, paying for cars because it’s necessary, higher food and alcohol costs, etc. (Plus they have more of the thing money can’t buy: time). And these tariffs are going to make American’s lives even more expensive. (No one release in the world is going to oh these taxes: only Americans).
One example: in retrospect, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia resulted in much death and starvation. But the people of Russia in the 1920s were fed up with the working conditions and effective two-lane legal state in Russia (i.e. the law bound poor people and protected rich people) that had existed for hundreds of years under the Tsars.
As far as I can tell, rule of law is always the best answer to injustice - a law that reflects the will of the people, binds all equally, and protects all equally. But when injustice has persisted for a while, people can be vulnerable to ideologues and ideologies that can take advantage of the situation, create a new ruling class, and cause an overcorrection.
> There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[18] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative,[19] formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day#Labor_Day_versus_May...
Labo(u)r Day of US/CA/JP/AU/NZ:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Observance_of_Internation...
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/history/the-histor...
It is very important to remember that many of the things we enjoy today as workers only exist because of the enormous courage of workers from the 19th and early 20th century who fought really hard for a better future.
that is a remarkable generalization, that overstates things to the point of being misleading
> They are they muscle of the state.
still, there are better and worse states
if you go fully pacifist and disempower yourself and your state it will not result in peace - it will result in someone else, likely worse, taking over
Police in my country did some bad things (and far more bad things when we were a Russian puppet state) but last time I had an actual contact with police it was on railway station when they have cordoned off a group of aggressive football hooligans.
I assure you that I preferred policeman over group of drunk abusive hooligans. And some kind of "muscle of the state" is needed to keep such people in check.
(at the same time, police power should be kept on a leash)
Not really? It may apply in some very specific area but it does NOT generalize worldwide.
And for direct purpose: even taking maximally cynical view and seeing police as muscle power existing to enforce tax payments by threat of force and to disrupt threats to state...
Then I, as a citizen (and many other people) would agree that gangs should be disrupted and that they prefer to pay taxes over every lowlife able to steal all their stuff and burn down their home.
Sadly, it takes only few people to make area terrible for others. Some do it with no benefit for themselves and there is no way to reason with them. Taking out such people (for whatever reason) by police is an useful service. That - even with quite badly managed police - is overall beneficial.
The union wants my job outsourced so that factory workers can keep theirs.
Please tell me why I should have solidarity with them.
I am curious to take a read for myself, as I'm sure many other readers are
I recently had to deal with them (as part of the Betriebsrat) and, just as human beings, they seemed to be some of the worst people I ever met.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(btw just in case this response feels one-sided, we've already asked the parent twice to stop breaking the site guidelines, so I'm not going to pile on here with a third)
> Sure. And that is why protesting looks so ridiculous. The oppressed working class, making six figures typing away in a well furnished office.
You’re pulling out all the stops.
1. Developers are too privileged to care about the working class
2. But actually, the working class (or at least the unions) are my enemies, and they anecdotally come across as bad people[1]
There’s more.[2]
> Easily the worst holiday. More hilarious is that it celebrated by those who hate work and working the most.
So add that to the eclectic mix: people who celebrate it hate to work. Of course if you think about what it is for two seconds you realize that it has nothing to do with “celebrating work” or the fact that you have to work as a wage laborer, a completely farcical assumption.
Both of your posts to this thread (this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43857366) have broken the site guidelines.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
hard to say without knowing what was there
It really goes to show you that capital has no ideology and will adopt whatever shape it needs to as the political climate changes. The United States government is now fascist, and therefore the investor class is also fascist.
"Eschew flamebait."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That means the users who flagged your post were correct to do so.