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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of numbers if there is no unity? Since Covid, there are decent successes in forming unions and collective bargaining, but it is nowhere enough. How many IT workers (as an example) have unionized or even have positive opinions on unions?

A handful of guys can effectively rule large groups of people for a long period of time, if the said large group can't unite, can't help each other.

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Many IT folks were cocky during the post-COVID height. Some even mock Unions for making firings harder, worried that their "incompetent" co-workers difficult to boot.

Many people in software especially have been successfully convinced that any kind of unionisation will be to their detriment. That they’ll suffer lower wages and “difficult to fire bad workers” will be inevitable result of unions, despite both these things happening already.

I'm in a union and I still criticise unions for this. You can't make it harder to fire people unfairly without also making it harder to fire them when they're actively harming the business and/or their co-workers.

Come on, the myth that it's hard to fire incompetent people is total bullcrap, perpetuated by executives to avoid dealing with unions. I live in one of the countries with the strongest union protections and traditions in the world. It's not hard here to fire someone if you want to fire them´, even if in union.

I live in Australia and it's an absolute pain in the arse to fire someone for performance issues, assuming they work at a medium or large business (e.g. of more than 20 people) and they've made it through their 3-month trial period. You have to PIP them and the process takes months.

I've known of two engineers whose managers told me they would have fired them, but higher management wouldn't let them initiate the PIP process. The one case where I worked at the company was pretty bad. We had to shuffle the individual off onto makework jobs where they couldn't do much harm.

I don't think it's fair to blame this entirely on unions when it's the result of big businesses being too scared to follow a process that was given to them by the government. Unions mostly fight real unfair dismissals and only play a minor role in creating a chilling effect. Still, in practice it's hard to fire someone.

I think I'll take that over management doing lay offs because vibes or whatever.

I don't completely disagree and I prefer it to systems with zero protection. At-will employment from the US seems bad. However, siva7 said it was a "myth" and "total bullcrap" that firing incompetent people is hard, and it's just not.

I think it’s because it is hard to hard to fire incompetent people, and the software industry is absolutely flooded with them?

> What is the point of numbers if there is no unity? Since Covid, there are decent successes in forming unions and collective bargaining, but it is nowhere enough. How many IT workers (as an example) have unionized or even have positive opinions on unions?

That is right on the money. The problem is many IT people believe in meritocracy to an absurd degree, a degree not found anywhere else.

Not only meritocracy. A big part also believes that they are better than the rest. So they think these problems will never touch them.

I don´t know. Maybe we spend too much time alone in front of a monitor to understand what´s really going on.

i think the answer is not unions. the answer is having the power to say NO. that means being okay with being unemployed for months, years or however long it takes, even if it's the rest of your lifetime. if everyone did that, employers wouldn't be able to get away with treating employees terribly.

The problem with fields like IT is that the people who can make unions effective are also already employed and likely making decent money, so they have little or not enough incentive to unionize. The worst thing that can usually happen to them is layoffs, and in that case there might be a lot of copium in the form of "It won't happen to me".

Yeah, big numbers and big crowds are useless, if there is no unity, no tendency to help fellow worker. As you point out "it won't happen to me" attitude is precisely why a handful of dudes who run big tech can get away with almost anything. "It won't happen to me" works, until it doesn't. By then it will be too late (maybe it is already too late?) to bring out any meaningful change

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