For whatever reason collective bargaining is wildly unpopular on HN, which is ironic because tech workers are exactly who should be organizing their labor.
Naturally, these individuals had very little interest in waiting in line behind retiring gray-beards for high pay and job security. They experienced that just being interested in tech was enough for huge opportunities to fall into their lap.
Of course 25 years later, that ship has sailed and almost nobody is hiring people without a degree in C. And now you have the self taught gray-beards bumping up against ageism and the weird effects AI is having on the marketplace, and they're starting to wonder if, "hmmm, maybe unions aren't such a bad idea after all."
What these unions achieve by forming solidarity between the most exceptional talent and more average working members is that they can establish baseline working conditions that are respectful and non-exploitative, a wage floor that allows occasional workers to earnestly commit to their trade even when confronted with intermittent downtime, internally managed group benefit programs that free producers from needing to administer and offer them and give members stability in participation, etc
A healthy union for software engineers, which the gaming industry in particular is well suited towards right now, looks more like one of these kinds of unions than it does a factory laborers union. And by the accounts of both talent and producers, at basically all levels, these unions fundamentally provide a clear benefit to the market. Tension and bluster flare up during frustrating negotiations, but almost nobody with experience in these industries wants to get rid of these unions. Not even the producers.
>A healthy union for software engineers, which the gaming industry in particular is well suited towards right now, looks more like one of these kinds of unions than it does a factory laborers union.
I don't think so. Software engineers are not generally operating in the brand or personality space. Their employers just want work done and nobody cares who does it.
I am running short on time but basically I want to leave you with the forgotten disadvantaged of unions: favoring more advantaged workers over more desperate ones, putting a floor on minimum skill level to get hired, costing everyone outside the union more money (including employers and consumers). Maybe these down sides can be negligible sometimes but you'll rarely hear anyone say this stuff. They talk about fellow humans who want to work more badly than themselves "scabs". I think unions can be a net positive but I don't buy the popular narrative that they are glorious with no disadvantages.
Oh hell yes.
Also, look at the cast of a movie. There are tens to hundreds of people. Very few of them are recognized names, at least to the general public. It's no only the big names that are union members, far from it.
You remember the writer's strike right? The lesser paid writers were all over the internet complaining about their union, saying it was dominated by big name people who can afford to be on strike while the lesser paid people were becoming destitute. The same thing happens in other unions too, no doubt.
Suppose you wanted to work in a different technology stack and would perhaps be 75% as productive as more experienced people in the first year. According to union rules, based on your experience level, you might be shoehorned into a role where they would have to pay you more than you're worth. The same kind of shit happens to less specialized workers. If the minimum salary is higher than your expected productivity, and you can't adjust it according to market conditions, you will be unhireable. However, that is only in an honest system. Nepotism and bribery would be easier to justify when you don't let people get a fair shake.
Oh, but they do! A core part of most union contracts is figuring out how to limit the number of people eligible to be hired.
That’s why “union shops” exist. Or: why (in the entertainment industry) a production pays a heavy fine to hire non-union actors. Doctors do a similar thing by having the AMA lobby to limit the number of credentials granted each year.
Limiting the number of CA who get qualified per year.
No, I don't care about being in a unicorn and I'm not a embarrassed billionaire. But I don't idolize unions either.
I don't want to be paid the same as all other workers with the same title, I like getting personal bonuses based on performance. I don't want to be in a union.
That's not what unions do.
> I like getting personal bonuses based on performance
A union doesn't prevent that.
Film and TV actors, and professional athletes are in unions. They are not all paid the same. They get lavish bonuses based on performance.
Retail and fast food workers are usually not in unions. They don't make much money.
A union can't increase wages (much) and it doesn't decrease wages. Only supply and demand can do that.
Has anyone seriously thought this through or is it just theory.
If not having unions leads to high wages and good working conditions, why aren't retail and fast food workers making bank? Why do they get treated like shit? Please tell us.
"Unions mean every worker gets paid the same!"
"Unions mean I will make less money!"
"Unions make it impossible to fire underperformers!"
"Unions are run by bosses whose incentives are different than workers!"
"Unions mean I can't plug in my own workstation!"
"Unions reward seniority over everything else!"
Like they've taken every spook story they've been told about unions, gathered up the worst parts, and then simply declare that unions, by law, must necessarily be all those bad things.
Tell me why I should want a union for myself.
That's really all there is to it. A "union" doesn't necessarily have to look like the Teamsters.
Yes, of course, I'm human! But the things that mostly annoy me are the other 20 employees, not "the system".
And the little things that bother me, if it were too bad I would try and fix it or move on. I don't see how a Union helps, I suppose you assume that we all have the same annoyances and we band together.
The problem is we are all smart enough to realize how good we have it actually, and nobody wants to rock that boat.
This resonates so deeply within me
There may be reasons union membership is wrong for you personally. That's a valid position to have.
A close female relative declined to cooperate with a unionization effort at her job -- she made good tips and didn't want to pay dues. She started receiving threatening calls at night describing her indoor pets and other details of her home that heavily implied that the caller had physically surveilled it, or was perhaps currently nearby. While the unionization effort ultimately failed, the harassment she endured left psychological scars.
My best friend's brother lost his union job after refusing to work unpaid overtime for them. When he showed up at his second job (with another union) he found out he was also fired there -- the union bosses in town had collaborated to blacklist him. So he took a non-union job framing houses. Months later, some union goons caught him alone on a job site and assaulted him for being a scab. They struck him several times with a 2x4 and kicked him. He nearly died.
Other friends in town have had their tires slashed, windows broken, or had out-of-state union members show up at their house on the weekend after trying to step down as union steward.
Even when I don't know the people involved, I can see the union machinery at work around me. When my local children's hospital awarded a parking garage contract to the lowest bidder, the local carpenter's union wanted a cut of the action. So the union brought in ruffians from out of state to protest the job site, causing delays. Someone covered the downtown with defamatory posters with pictures of the man who owned the construction company, so that his family, friends, and people he'd never met would see him made out to be the devil. The hospital and construction company could have made all the sabotage and harassment go away if they paid their protection money.
All the unions my family has experienced this century are just organized crime.
So what is the plan?
Union membership won't save Kylian Mbappe from being dropped to the bench if he doesn't score enough goals. His endorsement deals or his agent's influence might do it.
I've worked with union shops as clients and I've hit a surprising amount of friction due to things which seemed union related. Things like "that's not my job and we need XYZ to do it" and what seemed like people slacking at their job from the outside. I once needed a desk moved a few feet which required a power strip to be plugged into a different wall outlet, and was told we need to wait for the electricians. Risking the wrath and fallout, I did it myself.
I've also seen this kind of behavior at non-union shops, but it was less explicitly stated and it was relatively easy to do something about it.
I'm sure you're correct about the quality of life at union shops.
What traits do you think are going to be common in the audience it attracts?
Jeez, it was such a stupid movie ruining the franchise. Nobody needed a rushed sequel.
Additionally, software developers tend to be pretty anti-gatekeeper, so if we are opposed to even credentialing, such as other engineering disciplines, why would there be any appetite for a union?
A union isn't any of the things that the capital class wants you to think they are. Have you ever wondered why anti-union propaganda is so well funded? Think about it for a minute.
A union is just when you and your co-workers pool your collective power so that the owners can't push you around. That's it. What you do after that is up to you.
I've never heard of union rules here. Employees are not required to be part of the union in order to get their benefits, the unions just negotiate with employers on behalf of all employees. I've also never heard of credentials/gatekeeping for unions in the companies I've worked in.
For reference, I was working as a software developer at a University on a research project: I got the benefits of the higher education university (nationally negotiated pay scales, holiday benefits, etc) but was not a member.
Pay was lower, yes, but that wasn't mandatory; that was just the budget of a research project.
The United Auto Workers partially funded the Port Huron Statement authored by Students for a Democratic Society, a generally socialist group. Now, it's entirely plausible that the UAW leadership wanted to have some modicum of influence, and that's why they loaned them an entire union retreat on Lake Huron. But I doubt that the average UAW factory worker was excited to see their union dues used to provide elite college students with a mostly-free vacation for political organizing.
I am not a labor law expert by any means, but my understanding of, say, German labor law is that it's much better at actually representing the workers in a given factory, in part because a union that doesn't do that loses its members to ones that will (since there's no requirement that everyone in a given job class has to join the same union).
Does collective action mean everyone gets paid the same? If not, how does that work exactly?
The way it works in the movie industry is actors or writers can sign a contract with minimum union terms. Or, if they're a big name, their agent negotiates a contract on their behalf.
From time to time the union membership will want improvements or changes to the minimum terms. If they don't get these terms then the union - stars and everyone else - goes on strike.
These strikes are well publicized. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them.
I don't know what that means.
The writers could go on strike for years, so what?
That new bureaucratic layer would be designed to benefit you, and if it were to stop doing that and suddenly no longer served the interests of it's members you'd have the power to replace the leadership of that union or to leave it and start a new one. This is a huge improvement from the current bureaucratic layer of HR admin-types which you have zero say in how they operate and which is absolutely not looking out for your interests at all.
It's hard to understand the mindset of "I'd rather just be powerless in the job I have because that seems easier."
Because that’s not the case? In America it is still extremely easy to find alternative lucrative work, or simply start your own business; because in software development the worker basically owns the means of production - himself. This is an extremely powerful bargaining position and it’s why SWE pays so well here.
Athletes, actors, doctors, and other professions still have to negotiate with centralized capital to some degree in a way SWE never will
that new bureaucratic layer would be designed to benefit you,
I am an engineer in a unionized workplace. It's great. I make a ton of money, management is respectful, and work life balance is not based on the whims of whoever has a self-imposed emergency this week. My work is satisfying, and I have an avenue for resolving any complaints I might have with management.
Nobody tells me 'what I can't do' like some kind of anti-union cartoon that some people seem to think represents reality.
Unions aren't for coal miners. They are for anyone who cares about not being abused by the power imbalance inherent to the relationship between owners and laborers.
You are not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. You have more in common with the steelworkers you seem to disdain so much than you do with them.
Software developers aren’t laborers, they’re the capital.
I also think if you do a text embedding on the recent years of HN post and you look for conversations on unions, you'll find a plurality of support.
Top post is essentially saying Americans/SWE are dumb for not being in a union, then comparing to other countries. As soon as someone companies US SWE salaries to these union countries it falls apart quickly.
On the other hand, when I was at $BigTech, interns straight out of college in 2022 were being offered total comp packages of $165K and within 3 years and one promotion were making $240K and that was at Amazon. It’s nowhere near the top paying company.
Right now on my 10th job out of college I’m paying $700 a month pre-tax for family coverage through my company and even that is about the most I’ve ever paid. If I hit one with a low deductible it would be around $1100 a month.
Long Term Disability coverage if added on is around $10 a month.
But the larger point, with the discrepency between comp in the US and Sweden, a US tech worker should be able to build up an emergency fund.
I'm an American SWE, I still haven't seen one good reason why I would want to be in a Union.
Capital hates organized labor specifically because they have to worry about the risk of collective action, which changes the risk calculus to favor less extreme profit generating opportunities at the expense of minimizing poking the workforce the wrong way.
You alone can be ignored. You and your Union brothers, in great enough number, cannot be.
You haven't given any good reasons why unions are bad that I and other people haven't already given counterexamples for.
But this is, I think, a result of a historical government strategy to favour exports by keeping the Swedish krona weak rather than a result of unions. This whole business with alignment between the Swedish social democrat party and the big industrial export companies are a thing which simultaneously allowed Sweden to develop but which also brought enormous problems. The immigration madness of, 1990 to now is probably also a result of this alignment.
Story time: Berlin in Germany is pretty left leaning. So there was / is a MC Donalds which regularly formed union for employees, MC Donalds just closed the restaurant and reopened later, several times lol
This varies. e.g. Sweden: if there are over 25 employees, the union gets a seat in the board.
https://bolagsverket.se/en/foretag/aktiebolag/startaaktiebol...
And that severance was from Amazon.
Fast forward to 2020, I used all of my RSUs/signing bonus to rebuild savings, pay off debt and when Amazon started Amazoning, I had 9 months worth of savings in the bank. But people are being laid off from BigTech after working there for decade having an existential crisis. I’m thinking WTF have they been doing with their money.
Choose any other major metro city in the US outside of the west coast and you will see the same.
Unions are low on my list to address labour issues. They create a whole slew of problems, but I also recognize that collectivized bargaining is one of the few tools workers have to represent their interests so I see them as a necessary evil.
One kinda relevant to the present moment and the fact that dude still has a street named after him in SF - Cesar Chavez running his own border patrol against undocumented immigrants https://humanrights.fhi.duke.edu/chavez-ufw-and-wetback-prob... As much I despise it, I feel the current administration really missed a trolling opportunity, naming their thing Cesar Chavez Memorial Patrols.
The funny one from a 1960ies govt report on UK shipbuilding industry: ...literally took three different workers to change a lightbulb: …a laborer (member of the Transport and General Workers Union) [to] carry the ladder to site, a rigger (member of the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers Union) [to] erect it and place it in the proper position, and an electrician (member of the Electrical Trades Union) [to] actually remove the old bulb and screw in the new one. Production was often halted while waiting
Call me old-fashioned but I don't want to wait for a different union member to run my build! (and the situation like this still occurs - someone I know works at a place where they are not allowed to clean up above a certain trivial threshold and have to wait for a custodian, because otherwise the latter union would be pissed)
Unions are, in essence, a pressure group for locking down certain jobs against anyone else who might want them, and against any kind of technological progress. They will, and have been shown to, do anything - from lobbying for legal monopolies to violence against immigrants, other workers, political candidates; racism, connections to organized crime - in pursuit of that goal. And blocking any attempts at improvement and automation.
The goal itself though, on top of the methods, is fundamentally evil. It's next level up from people who don't want immigrants to "take jobs", at least for immigrants there's some flimsy justification, but unions operate against their fellow citizens.
From a purely moral perspective, compromising principles for personal gain aside, I'd rather join a drug cartel than a union.
No. I think it's a combination of:
1) HN being associated with a startup incubator, and thus attracting a large contingent of people who see themselves as the boss doing this, not the workers affected;
2) tech attracts a certain kind of gullible person who's easily seduced by tidy little systems like the pop-capitalism of libertarian tracts; and
3) tech workers (until recently) had more economic bargaining power than a typical worker, so could delude themselves into thinking they do better by going it alone.
From people I've spoken to personally, I've seen it as primarily #3 - "Why do we need collective bargaining when we have negotiating power from being in high demand with lower supply?" - despite IMHO that is when you should be using that power for such, as that power will never last forever.
Don't need politics/a "type of person" to be only looking at the short term, and thinking the current status quo will last forever. It seems pretty much a constant in every demographic.
The reason I'm opposed to it isn't because it wouldn't be good for tech people. I'm opposed to it because in general I think it would be more bad for everyone else than it would be good for tech people. I expect they would see fewer products, higher prices on the products that they have, and lower quality products. Additionally, I expect the union to advocate for the interests of the tech workers, which would generally be for tech workers to make more money, and not in the interests of broader society.
You can see a great example of this with the AMA, which did a great job advocating for the government to reduce the number of new doctors. It's probably great for existing doctors, but the rest of us should not be happy that we're paying more for our healthcare because of it.
A difference is that there's not necessarily an inherent size limit on companies while there is an inherent size limit on individuals because you can only be one person. One person can only be so economically valuable.
However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up. And that's exactly what we should do. And we definitely should prevent more mergers as well. What I would do differently w.r.t. antitrust is say that instead of only looking at harm to consumers (those who a company sells to), we should also look at harm to workers (aka those who a company buys from).
One flaw in your logic you seem to thing "an employee" and "a company" are peers. They're not. A company is an equivalent level of "banding together" as a union. A company and an employee union are peers, an employee and a company are not.
> However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up.
And you're mixed up here too:
1. The employee-company relationship is entirely different than the customer-company one. Talking about consumer prices in the employee-company context is nonsense.
2. You're neglecting that all companies have certain interests in common as employers. So even if you break them all up, you're not going to solve the problems a union solves.
Use of "would" implies you believe they don't.
This is incredibly condescending. This is exactly the type of elitism speak that tells people how to vote because they know whats better for them.
Condescending towards who? Overpaid code monkeys? Maybe they should start a professional victimhood organization
> that tells people how to vote because they know whats better for them.
A large portion of this country doesn’t even have the self stewardship to not eat themselves to obesity. Such people should have no place in any political process ideally.
Are you one of those people who clutches their pearls and tells on your co-worker to management for discussing how much money they make?
Those are definitely a kind of 'people'.
In short don’t find it condescending to say a bias exists, independently of the agreement with the political line of thinking.
In fact when I was younger I was condescending the other way: surely if you are not into libertarianism your systemic thinking must be limited.
That is exactly what I meant.
Also tech people are often intelligent (in a way) and identify as such, but then let that get to their head and get really overconfident about whatever clicks with them.
bad take.
It seems like there should be room for a happy medium somewhere where some workers in the US maybe don't get the same salaries but are also not having to spend so much on healthcare, get more time with their families, get better just protections, etc. Once you make enough money that you're not really worried about meeting your bills and can pretty much buy what you want the peace of mind is more important than the bragging rights you get over who has a bigger paycheck.
But the answer is that your insurance shouldn’t be tied to your employer in the US. You don’t need unions for that.
So I so 0 benefit for me to join a union.
In the Nordics quite many tech workers are in unions. For most people it's perhaps just about habits and solidarity, but they do offer tangible benefits like free consultation and legal representation in a case of dispute with your employer.
Unions are powerful because they can call for protests and employees who are in a union cant get laid off due to joining the protest. But its not worth if the job already has way better working conditions than like 80% of jobs out there.
Even without unions Europe wouldn't have US tech salary levels, those numbers come from other market dynamics.
Say all the engineers in all the top engeering companies by pay were suddenly in a union, how does the collective bargaining work on pay. You don't think pay would be lowered for high level engineers?
Collective bargaining would not apply to any of these salaries. Collective bargaining as we usually understand it sets the lower bound for salaries in a certain field, think of it as field specific minimum wage. Indeed, some Nordic countries have no minimum wage at all because ~all fields are covered by collective bargaining -- regardless whether the employees are part of the union or not!
So no, pay would not be lowered. I don't understand where this kind of a misconception comes from. Collective bargaining does not mean that everyone gets the same salary. As I said earlier, you are free to negotiate a higher salary, and companies wanting to attract top talent will still have to compete through compensation.
In the top engineering companies, collective bargaining could be used to negotiate other perks, like paid leaves, hour banks where you collect all work time exceeding a regular work day, paid parental leaves, and/or whatever topics are important for the work force. I'm not the one to define that though.
Collective salary bargaining is efficient in fields where the workforce is highly interchangeable, and the workers' ability to produce higher value is limited. If factory workers, miners, or nurses are not unionized they are really placing themselves in a precarious position.