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Comment by hackthemack | Hacker News Reader

I wish people were not so adverse to unions. The company will never be your friend. You will almost never have much leverage over what the company wants to do. The information you have will most likely be very asymmetrical to what the company has insight into, putting you at a disadvantage. Unions are imperfect. Unions will have its own inside politics. You will pay a union fee.

I think humans are fundamentally flawed in not being able to see alternate history. If they have to pay a union, they will not see all the benefits, and only focus on the 50 dollar union fee.

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Software developers have enjoyed decades of high demand for their skills and the companies that hired them have enjoyed decades of an abundance of capital against a low interest rate. You didn't need a union because you had leverage due to the demand for your skills and companies didn't need to be particularly efficient.

This was a time where companies were hiring talented developers just to deny them to their competitors. Nobody was interested in shaking up that status quo by becoming part of a union.

You need a union when there's demand precisely because there will be down times.

People were never good at thinking about a pessimistic future to plan ahead BEFORE the shit hits the fan. Those who did were sidelined as naysayers or buzzkills.

Just look at European government run pension systems which are basically legal pyramid schemes, that everyone knows are unsustainable the way things are going right now, but nobody wants to do anything about it when it's more convenient to kick the can down the road until it become a problem under someone else's watch.

and we're hitting that point. now. but the gist of the parent's arguement is that we didn't before.

also keep in mind that unions first popped up in places were people were, like, dying, or getting maimed: trains, mines, electrical, gasfitters, ironworkers. up until now programming has been easy money sitting indoors while sipping lattes.

You form the union while you have leverage, not in the down times.

The first unions aren't the only kind. Unions benefit all sorts of fields. They continue to fight on behalf of labor. In all fields, management and labor are at odds and management has a collective bargaining voice so labor needs one too.

As I write on a sibling comment, in many European countries, unions are by industry sector, not specific professionals, so everyone on the sector is able to enjoy being part of union agreements, regardless of their roles.

The amount of unioned workers keep decreasing because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced. I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy. The consolidation of patents in other engineering fields has killed the industry in the US.

>because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced

Sorry, you misspelled "decades of Republicans disassembling labor protections and enacting garbage like right to work laws, corporations hiring thugs like the Pinkertons to break up and discourage them, and conservative media spewing lies to discourage membership".

You're totally correct, but it wasn't _just_ Republicans. The Democrats are incredibly anti-labor. Even Biden, who was marketed as "most pro-labor president since FDR" forced the railroad workers back to work.

Both parties are so in capital's pocket that, at least on labor issues, they are essentially the same.

They are absolutely not, and at this point anyone claiming as much is being malicious.

Yes, Biden could have done better on railroads, but his administration:

* Made millions more workers eligible for overtime pay

* Installed union leaders on the NLRB (contrast to Republicans who fired members, defunded efforts, and gave access to NRLB data to Musk/Palantir/etc.)

* Those new NLRB members issued the Cemex decision making it harder for companies to suppress union voting

* Issued any number of rules in favor of workers i.e. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/olms/olms20230727

* Raised the contractor minimum wage

* Increased funding for the NLRB

* Ensured that companies couldn't avoid penalties by forming smaller companies - a process the Trump NLRB created to make it harder to penalize companies unionbusting

This is only a few things. There is a world of difference.

None of the little technocratic nonsense matters though if you blow it when workers are actually trying to directly exert their power. The power of the workers doesn't come from the NLRB or any of these government institutions, it comes from their ability to withold their labor, and when they do that it becomes clear that both parties are funded by the same oligarchs because both of them will step in and stop it.

So that makes rhem "essentially the same??"

I don’t think there is a contradiction here. Cheap, un-unionized labor has put many unionized firms out of business. It is extremely rare for a firm to be “de-unionized”.

I'm traditionally pro Open Source but I don't see how it helps much in this case, because whatever effort you put into Open Source software equally benefits the corporations you are fleeing from who can just take your work for free now.

And this is more true now than ever before since they can (so far legally, if not morally) also use LLMs to whitewash off GPL and other such licenses that would in the past have put practical limitations on their usage.

If you've built up lots of experience working on a closed-source in-house code base that expertise will be tied to the company you're working for and once you're fired all that knowledge becomes useless to you.

If you've built up expertise in an open-source projects that lots of other companies use that knowledge is a valuable asset on your resume.

> I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy.

OSS? You mean copyleft? Who does that? Who would use that?

OSS, even MIT licensed, embodies an radical idea that is counter to how most other engineering fields operate. The software required to design a chemical plant can cost 60K+ per year, per license, which locks in engineers and drives down their wages.

Yup. The GPL is the software version of a union. You know it works because of how aggressively companies like Apple avoid and hate it.

Yeah, look at union successes like dockworkers holding economy hostage via a legalized monopoly, while having more striking non-working members long useless due to automation than actual workers! I sure aspire to work in an industry like that.

Or like teachers in new York getting paid to sit in the rubber room as union fights for months to defend them after chronic drinking at work. I miss my beers in my terrible non unionized workplace.

And it's not like I plan on doing anything illegal, but if I ever misuse user data or whatever it would be nice to have a wall of silence (just need a color, blue is taken), instead of all those pesky whistleblowers.

I would especially love to be paid based on seniority and have (the small minority, but still) useless, lazy and incompetent coworkers I had keep their job and be paid the same, especially the guy I repeatedly caught playing fantasy baseball. He got fired (I didn't say anything, his lack of performance was also pretty obvious), I think it would be much more equitable and would really motivate me if he got to keep his job and was paid same as me.

Where do I sign up to pay only a small fee for these benefits?

I've always wondered how much one has to lick the boot until they stop tasting leather. Or maybe it's an acquired taste.

Ah, the insightful leftist response. I was born in the USSR, so this drivel doesn't really work on me. I hate marxists/etc probably more than even fascists/etc.

But regardless, American style unions are just a uniquely malignant institution. They do/did unions better in Japan for example or even in Europe; although I still think these are a net negative, compared to them US style unions are just tailor made to suite parasites and criminals. Or as they say, my opinion of them was better before I heard of the union-mafia connections, but now I've lost all respect for mafia.

Join this guys union.

Being in union doesn't protect from layoffs. Part of the recent layoffs were in a union

This. In Germany there have been and still are plenty of layoffs happening, most at jobs part of strong unions like the auto industry. Strong unions just means better severance packages than those not in unions when you get laid off, not that you're protected from ever being laid off. To me that's a pretty fair balance IMHO.

IIRC, only in France unions can prevent companies from doing redundancies if their bottom line looks good, but that's probably also why many companies aren't hiring much in France to begin with, why skilled wages are lower and youth unemployment higher there compared to other equally developed economies like Netherlands or Germany for example.

In Europe though, usually European unions apply to everyone on a specific sector, regardless of what they do in the building.

I enjoyed many years the agreements of IG Metal in the telecommunications and life sciences sectors, as software engineer.

IG Metall is excellent, and I highly recommend working for companies whose employment contracts were negotiated by them - that would be a lot of “traditional” German industrial firms. When layoffs happen, you find out over a year in advance, usually two or three.

I got my dues’ worth in just the agreement they quickly got to during the post-COVID inflation to adjust our wages. Of course, I would have still gotten it had I not been a member, but it takes people willing to be members to make them (us!) strong enough that employers take them (us!) very seriously.

Oh, and the pay is way better than a lot of IT consultancies here, not to mention the hours and general working conditions.

> If they have to pay a union, they will not see all the benefits, and only focus on the 50 dollar union fee.

This is the worst part of averting disaster - people never see you fixed something before it became a problem. That's why there are so many "disaster-driven organizations" out there, where the people who prevents disasters gets passed over by the people who often provoke them in order to be the hero that fixes the problem.

Companies with CBAs can downsize as well. Union or no union does not really matter.

There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve and in many cases they would exacerbate the ones we do have.

Most of the issue is that there's too much administrative policy (whether the imposition is internal or external doesn't matter) for us to effectively communicate and collaborate. Unions would only add to that while collecting fees from us. Most of us are intelligent enough to know this which is why we never form them.

"There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve"

Question for you about this. Is the balance of power in negotiation equal between a lone developer and a company?

I ask, because in my little world, it sure seems like the company has way more of the cards than a developer does.

It's more in favor of the employee than a lot of people admit. The problem isn't the negotiating power it's that there's so much noise when you're switching companies it's impractical.

Unions could only make that worse.

"It's more in favor of the employee than a lot of people admit."

But is it equal? It is hard to scientifically to prove, but it sure seems like companies have way more leverage than a lone developer.

I am not trying to antagonize you, btw, I am just seeing where you come from in your points.

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