In my experience unions suck when they overemphasize fairness over real world practicalities (see almost anything seniority based). They don't have to be that way.
In an output based system the number of high level people is relatively small and terminal level is far from the top level. It doesn't take much for people to realize that there's little chance of them becoming an L8 so why shouldn't an L8 get paid less? Moreover in my experience people have little insight into the value those at higher levels provide so will consider them dead weight.
Union shops still have compensation levels. If your pay is defined as 85% of a scale L8 and the collective agreement says it gets increased by 2 and half percentage points each year, you will eventually reach 100% and will just sit there and still make 10k less than L9. The scale itself is adjusted yearly.
I would suggest considering who stands to benefit the most from the belief that high-performers don’t need unions, and whether the same companies which have been found guilty of wage-suppression would be above funding amplification for that sentiment. Tech workers gave up a ton of bargaining power for decades and while we certainly aren’t badly paid it’s worth remembering how, say, that settlement with Apple, Google, et al. didn’t fully make up the difference, not to mention the number of former high-fliers who hit things like the ageism wall long before they wanted to retire. In an uneven market with a huge imbalance in data visibility and negotiating power, unilateral disarmament by the weaker side doesn’t seem like the winning strategy.
Of course everyone likes to think they're santa's special engineer, so they don't need hurdles like protections and a level playing field. But, simultaneously, the industry has been doing everything in its power to make engineers as fungible as possible. The "wet dream" is to make engineers practically assembly line workers - you can just plop some rando in at any time, and it'll probably be fine. You can see this with the extreme turnover in a lot of the industry.
These concepts are in almost perfection contradiction, but they both have the same goal: to convince you and me that the status quo is desirable for each of us personally.
This is something the 10x mythology tends to leave out: there are a vanishingly few people who are significantly above the 90th percentile in terms of individual productivity but if the discussion shifted to team dynamics, that’s where you can actually see really big gains by helping a larger group be more productive.
There are definitely people who are more or less productive but I think we’re very prone to focus on the individual while ignoring the environment they’re working in, as well as the question about broadly applicable that result is.
Over here the purpose of unions is to: Provide a strong enough legal response and guidance to deter companies from trying shady shit, pay better unemployment fees than the government and provide training/networking. They also negotiate collectively with the employers on behalf of everyone for things like paid sick leave, paid vacations etc.
I pay a flat fee every month because the union I'm in has always had relatively low unemployment, for others it's usually a percentage of their monthly gross salary (usually around 10-50€).
In what scenario would capping people's salary be good for the workers?
No, it's a thing in most of Europe like France or Germany for unionized trades. All trades there have publicly documented salary bands based on education and YoE per job, where the negotiations starting point for a wage for a position must not be below the minimum threshold but also can't exceed a certain upper threshold. In some cases, the company can decide to place you outside the union agreed tariff/band range to give you a higher wage, but then you might be exempt from some strict union rules like 35h/week working hours and such.
And they cap the top end of the salary bands because the yearly budget for wage increases is a fixed pie for most companies, and so to have money left to give entry level workers the great wage increases as mandated for by unions, they need to cap the increases to the top wages to prevent bleeding/bankruptcy. Do you think all European companies have unlimited money to give all their workers X% wage increases?
This is how it works in Austria.
But in case of layoffs you will be kicked out first and he would be kicked out the last and with a far better severance package.
For IT jobs I haven't seen an official salary band anywhere and there basically is no union mandated maximum and the minimum is mostly a suggestion.
We also get universally negotiated percentage raises every now and then, but it's like 1-2%. Personal raises are on top of that and can be a LOT more.
The maximum cap sounds just stupid. When you hit the limit, why would you do anything past the absolute minimum to stay at that level?
Conceptually unions are a democracy and people are selfish. Why should I let some other worker make 10x what I do when I can instead have them make 1x and spread out the other 9x around including to me?
If the company can't pay more to a high performer they surely won't just give thast money to the average folks. It'll just go to C-staff bonuses and conference trips to exotic countries.
(Provided that the average performers are above the union minimum already)
Trickle-down would be giving him the full 10x salary, then by his own choice he'd be doing something with it that benefited everyone else.
Forcing it by spreading it around instead of paying him is more like socialism or communism.
THat's how a lot of companies in Austria apply wage increases per union mandates. Take a budget and spread it around so that workers bicker amongst themselves for not receiving what they think they deserve.
All others are performance based and determined by the employer.
This is how it often works even without unions. Everywhere I worked there were salary ranges you can't go out of without changing the role, and I was never in a union.
Never seen any upper threshold except just what the company décides.
By law people with the same job and same qualification etc in a company must earn the same thing but that's theory more than practice, except maybe large companies.
Also being in an union or not does not change anything.
We here live in an eco-social free-market economy, where a company can pay an employee however much they want. In union terms, the collective agreements only regulates the minimum an employer has to do.
Huh? If you have a collective agreement, all the compensation ranges are written down there. You get level 11 comp contract and your manager puts you at 85% of the scale, then the union decides the scale goes from say 85k to 95k. The next time the agreement is renegotiated, the scale gets bumped to 90k to 100k and you can't get past 100k until you promoted to the next function with a different comp level in a contract.
That's excluding pager duty hazard pay, may the God allmerciful steer your path away from it.
Unions are more about making the job conditions better than about maximizing the comp. Want to grind, go full 996 and sleep at work to afford that fancy house in Las Vegas.
But me personally, at 51, I have said before that I plan to go by the Ben Kenobi strategy. When things get too bad, my wife and I will just become hermits somewhere and when the evil empire comes looking for us just give up and die.
We are seriously looking at “Plan B” countries to live in after retirement and are planning to spend 6 weeks in one of those countries starting next month. I work remotely.
And there's no guarantee the empire won't find you wherever you go. War is an excellent counter to inequality, it works much better than progressive taxation or collective bargaining.
I can absolutely guarantee you that the average enterprise CRUD developer living in a 2nd tier US city is better off than a developer in the EU. Let alone the top 10-20% working in BigTech or equivalent.
Every professional company gives sick leave (usually 10 days), holidays (usually 10 days), paid vacation (usually 15-20 days), I have never had a job where I was expected to work for more than 40 hours a week in 30 years across 10 jobs. If it did, I would get another job .
If you make three times the wages, it pays for a lot of stuff - including self funding your emergency fund, child care cost etc.
I don’t make the eye popping BigTech salaries (been there done that). I spent my entire long career until 2020 as an enterprise Dev in a second tier city.
That said, I always point to the NFL Players Association as one that seems to be able to provide value to highly and diversely paid talent apparently without kneecapping their high performers. Though it's not something I've researched deeply.
I'd love a tech union that simply says:
Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate.
This ensures everyone shares in the burden of off-hours work. If off-hours work is happening often, then engineers are going to be spending a lot of time away on PTO, and if the company pressures them to not take the PTO, then the company is going to be paying them a lot. Let's align incentives, I don't want to work on off-hours emergencies, and the company doesn't want me to either.
No mention of pay anywhere. Unions can do a lot of good without ever touching pay.
The union is the party that negotiates my annual salary increases that are not performance related. They will however not negotiate it up to FANG level because it's not FANG and I'm not in US. I will also get mostly the same comp as the guys on the left and on the right even if they aren't really bright (I'm not either).
>Every time an on-call engineer has to work during off-hours, they get compensated 4x that time in PTO, and that PTO must be used during the next 30 days, or it is paid out at 20x their normal hourly rate.
why not 100x? why work off hours anyway?
Sorry, hard sell.
Well, inkind-of sort-of makes sense. It happens that companies would like to spread the salary increase budget as they please, while unions tend to request that the lowest salaries get a larger share.
My union have never done that, why would it?
When organizers came to town I'd always sneer and turn them down I thought the boss was my best friend He'd stick by me to the end
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ain't got a word to say He chiseled down my pay Then took my job away "Boom" went the boom one day It made a noise that way I wish I had been wise Next time I'll organize
This one wasn’t that rapid either, you had plenty of warning. I remember discussing inequality with friends in 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street (2011). Or earlier.
Again, they are not part of the capital class. They were lucky to come across a special moment in time where there was a paradigm shift bringing with it enormous wealth and the capital class did not part with some of their wealth out of charity but out of greed because they realized that in order to capture this new found fountain of wealth they needed engineers...at least for the time being.
This allowed one generation (maybe two) to live a dignified solid upper middle class life but since the beginning there has always been a push to eliminate them.
Things such as low/no code, "learn to code", bootcamps, and now AI are attempts to destroy this avenue for people to rise above anything more than just worker class.
Also remains to be seen how long this process will take. Could take a decade or two but hopefully it will happen. Its just so nice to see little wins like a Democratic Socialist like Mamdani getting elected in the finance capital of America. It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs.
Good luck fighting offshoring.
> It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs.
That means nothing. I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road.
I always wondered why they don't try tariffs on this? American companies that produce overseas get tariffed regardless of origin. It changes incentives and forces production closer to areas of consumption. I suspect we are going to get there eventually, leadership needs to become more left progressive like Mamdani.
>That means nothing. I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road.
His ideas were not that radical. The fast and free busses came on the heel of a successful pilot they did with one line in each borough so its not like they are starting from scratch. They have an existing model and data from that trial to build on top of.
The grocery stores consist of one store in each borough. That is not an impossible task and it does not risk really affecting bodegas since the majority of income from most bodegas are lotto tickets and cigarettes/vapes.
Universal child care...well that have already passed this in his first week.
It's always easy to pass laws to give people free stuff and it works well initially ... until you run out of money of course. That's how Venezuelan leadership also got popular. Who doesn't want more free stuff? It's how elections are won is most of Eastern/Southern Europe too. Until the bill is due and the next generation has to pay.
Sooner or later there will be a reckoning with all the money that has been stolen by the upper class. Without these small programs, that help people that reckoning will come faster but it will come either way.
I'm in the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp since if all political promises were cookies, i'd be fat.
I vaguely remember reading something recently, probably by Branko Milanović, about how there is a class of workers in the tech sector who earn so much money that they are gradually starting to become capitalists. When you have so much money left over that you can start putting your capital to work for you, you cross that very line. I don't mean a home savings plan or ETFs or anything like that, but if you have seven figures and can skim off returns that you could live well on, then you're definitely no longer working class.
"Working class" isn't an adjective+noun that refers to anyone who works, it's a compound noun that specifically refers to physical labor. Knowledge workers of any sort are not part of it, despite both using the word "work".
"The working class is a group of people in a social hierarchy, typically defined by earning wages or salaries through their ability to work. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most common definitions of "working class" in use in the United States limit its membership to workers who hold blue-collar and pink-collar jobs, or whose income is insufficiently high to place them in the middle class, or both. However, socialists define "working class" to include all workers who fall into the category of requiring income from wage labour to subsist; thus, this definition can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class
Since I am referring to a hypothetical in the future, let me be more clear: I believe software developers will be relegated to blue collar or worse roles given enough time because it is in the interest of the capital class to find a way to make this happen. I gave examples in my prior comment.
Engineers were never part of that class. They work for a living while capital owns assets that work for them.
Engineers were part of the "Intellectual Elite" class that made good money but were super socially progressive. (Think putting BLM signs in their yards while at the same time pricing out the people they claim to help).
They ended up becoming a lot of the Elizabeth Warren cohort after being the Hillary and Obama cohorts(before it fractured into part Bernie part MAGA with the rest going to Hillary).
Extremely socially progressive but don't you dare touch economics.
Maybe it is an attempt to slow the shift in the Overton window?
The last time there was really a movement like that was the 1999 WTO protests...more than a decade separated from Occupy and it being a pivotal moment for Gen X to realize the same lessons millennials learned in Occupy.
Since Occupy, a movement consisting of many of the same people who were disorganized in 2011 started to learn the ropes and become organized, first in the realignment of Labor (SEIU starting a "Fight for 15$" in 2012/2013), then the emergence of BLM in 2013(Yes they started back in 2013) as a result of death of Eric Garner and the Ferguson rallies among other events, to finally Sanders running in 2015 and the emergence of a semi organized movement combining various progressives groups (economic & social progressives).
This led to the whole saga in 2016 which there is plenty of youtube documentaries about to the wave election in 2018 (of which there is an amazing netflix movie about) to the showdown in 2020 between Bernie and Biden, to winding up wandering the political woods for years after Biden managed to hold on to now finally electing Mamdani as a Democratic Socialist in the largest city and the financial capital where Occupy started. From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years. Amazing!
White washing history doesn't change the reality of what the people actually making up the movement wanted. Not what the self-elected spokespeople who had no actual power since there were no leaders said to make it all sound less threatening.
> From 2011 starting as a completely unorganized group to running the finance capital of America in just 15 years.
Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)
>Always interesting how both the left and right forget democracy and checks and balanced and just assume the executive branch is a dictator when it's their wannabe dictator in power. :)
Where did I assume that? Mamdani was elected with an amazing margin bringing out people who had given up on voting and many who had never felt to vote before. Essentially he began his term with a strong mandate. This is while everyone clearly knew he was a Democratic Socialist. He didn't become a dictator, the actual overton window of what is considered mainstream has shifted in just 15 years. Thats whats extraordinary.
So... 500k is the normal pay and 2.5mil is the staff+ pay, right? How many people you know actually make that?
Levels.fyi puts it at $67k median.
Glassdoor puts it at closer to $40k.
Neither of these are above the levels given above.
Also, even if you did not mention it, UK is a bit of a special case (English-speaking countries that has thus been attracting quite a lot of international talent (and companies) at least until recently), I wouldn't put it in the same bucket as EU countries.
I'm not sure where the UK part comes from zo? Nobody upthread mentioned it.
>I think the most I heard of was someone making $10m/year and being deathly afraid of a layoff.
Jeez, some people.
Now it's 20x at the AI labs instead of 5x at FAANG.