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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

And when has a union ever stopped a multinational company from just closing shop and opening up overseas? If a company making physical things can do it, how hard do you think it would be for a software company?

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sweden has unions and sweden has software companies. could it be that reasonable approach that benefits both parties can be achieved?

Sweden isn't famous for good tech salaries and stock grants though, even among the best/high profile engineers.

Yes, to get rich in Sweden you have to start a company. Wages are terrible.

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.

And this is where the union threads die, every time.

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.

So show us non-US countries without SWE labor unions that have high SWE salaries.

I don't know???

I'm an American SWE, I still haven't seen one good reason why I would want to be in a Union.

It's ok to not have an open mind. You can just say that.

You haven't given any good reasons why unions are bad that I and other people haven't already given counterexamples for.

Solidarity with the users of the systems you make. Collective bargaining is useful for more than salary and perk setting. It also gives you a front to push back against unethical project requests by management. Without a Union, you just get shluffed out of the way and the work gets handed off to the next sucker. With the Union, things like Google's "Don't be evil" can be more effectively enforced from the bottom.

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.

The residents of many of these countries are able to tolerate lower salaries because they have guaranteed free/cheap at POS healthcare, stronger employment and disability protections (yes, often union-won, see Denmark), controlled and low educational expenses, and so on. Not to mention, after you get below top companies, dev earnings are much closer to other white-collar jobs

The average tech salary in Sweden is $50K-$80K from doing some quick Googling. In at major city in the US just doing run of the mill CRUD development a US developer should easily be making $130K-$150K after 3-5 years in the industry.

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.

Is your argument for unions that if we had them software engineers may get the benefit of making 1/3 the compensation in America that they do now?

Or close the location and just reopen later on.

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

Ideally there'd be laws against this, and public backlash as well. Even non-unionized Workers in Germany will be better off than their American counterparts, but they still deserve strong protections for unions.

I’m not familiar with that particular story, but it’s worth noting that there is a nationwide union for franchise restaurant workers called NGG. They negotiate standard wages with the franchise restaurant association BdS which all the big names adhere to (McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, but also, for example, Starbucks). Your story sounds like it’s about a “Betriebsrat”, which represents workers within a specific workplace, complementary to wider unions.

While they cannot stop something like that (a Union never gets to control the business), they can at least negotiate good terms for the departing employees, and help ensure everything is in order.

> a Union never gets to control the business

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...

A seat at the board is great, but that won't stop a company making major changes like those described.

Have you ever heard about someone who was laid off from a major tech company complain about the severance amount? My n=1 experience at BigTech is that I got $40K severance after 3 years (and anecdotally had 3 offers within two weeks of looking in 2023. But I realize the market is worse now than then)

And that severance was from Amazon.

FAANG maybe not, but there are heaps of horror stories from plenty of other big and medium tech players.

And I bet you a paycheck that those developers are making at least twice the median local wage and definitely more then they would make in Europe. Why weren’t they saving money? My first goal out of college back in 1996 was to build up savings and this was in 1996 when I was working as a computer operator making $33K in Atlanta.

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.

If it is indeed easy to move operations wholesale, I think we would see far more and quicker cases (not just arbitraging differences in labor organization, but also e.g. tax and regulatory regimes). It certainly happens, mind you, but my read is that different forms of institutional inertia puts a damper on the willingness to "re-home".

I don't think anyone's saying unions can do that? They can protect workers and provide some balance in the power dynamics, but there absolutely are limits.

It's not as if companies aren't shipping non-union jobs overseas or importing labor from overseas anyway. There's also a certain amount of irrational sentiment around silicon valley and the west coast generally. There's little doubt that companies could move shop to places in the US that aren't so insanely overpriced and without the high cost of living, especially with work from home being so popular, but for whatever reason (the weather, the "scene", the culture) companies are happy where they are and I don't expect that to change so quickly. It sure is nice having a lot of money and having a lot of nice options on where/how to spend it anyway, which might not always be the case in the overseas neighborhoods filled with unionless sweatshops.

This is very much an HN bubble sentiment. Most of the 2 million+ developers in the US aren’t anywhere near the west coast and are still making twice what they make in Europe working for boring old enterprises like Delta, Home Depot, Coca Cola etc. I am mentioning these three because I spent all of my career as enterprise dev working in Atlanta between 1996 anc 2020 and those are the well known enterprise companies.

Choose any other major metro city in the US outside of the west coast and you will see the same.

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