Don’t mess with IBM
cringely.com
cringely.com
http://www.informationweek.com/ibm-responds-to-overtime-laws...
Workers' petition, with names and an occasional email:
http://www.petitiononline.com/petitions/ibm1701/signatures
Short legal recap:
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/features/overtime_calif...
I did an intern year with IBM UK in the late eighties and (with hindsight) it seemed to have very good employment practices. I wonder if IBM in the US was once like that, and if so when things changed.
- We all believe we're above average in our field, and unions would hold us back.
- We all know people who have skated by on incompetence, and wouldn't want a union to protect their jobs.
- Our field moves quickly, and we don't want a union that would hamper our ability to make quick moves.
- Union is a dirty word, especially when the mind disease of libertarianism is more prevalent among tech workers.
I think the easier way to solve this is for IT/computer workers to stop being paid salaries, and get paid hourly. If it weren't for a special exemption from congress that was passed in the 90s, we would be paid hourly as a matter of law. I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting.
Employers value your time when they have to pay for those extra 2 hours of meetings each day, when they have you work a Saturday, or stay a couple hours late to push to the finish line. In addition, things like software efficiency upgrades where I can show 10 hour savings for 3 hours of cost are suddenly on the table, where on a salary you're not a "team player" if don't just put in the extra hours for free to save the company some bucks.
This has been my experience as well. My time was considered more valuable, people respected my input and expertise more, I was treated with more courtesy. The works.
These customers seemed to be valuing my time by how much they paid for it.
Maybe I was just better at picking my work when I was a consultant. Hard to tell.
On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend working for IBM at all; there are reasons my resume reads like a list of major software project disasters of the '90's and it has a suspicious dearth of shipping products.
Say what you will about unions, but they do exist for a reason.
Unions further complicate the relationship between employer and employee. It created "us vs. them" in every single implementation of unions. In the traditional 'Employee Relations' model, you could at least find a handful of good employers that value people. Not so the case in unionized environments. Employers' hands are forced to treat every employee as equal; the amazing, the good and the horrible all get the same treatment.
You don't like working conditions in the company - leave. You don't like conditions in your industry - switch specialty, go elsewhere. Too lazy to switch or too gifted to leave? Well, sure, OK, let's instead arm-twist and blackmail employer.
Given, there are circumstances when you can't leave or switch. Say, if you are a miner in a small mining town. One employer, one skill set, no possibility of re-training. But unions are essentially an artifact of the 19th century.
Edit: upon reflection my original comment left a lot on the floor so I'm circling back to pick some of it up.
Here's what a "typical" union experience looks like:
The union hall staffs individuals that find work for you. The bulk of back-office paperwork and other hassles (including wage negotiation) are handled on your behalf by the hall. When you first hire on it's typically as a pre-apprentice (no prior experience) or apprentice (some applicable experience to the trade). OJT and training/certification materials are provided for you.
Your coworkers are trained, experienced craftsmen. All applicable safety guidelines are rigidly enforced. From day 1 you are presented with the kind of benefits package that is no longer available to your average worker. In addition to credible health insurance this includes pension, annuity, on the job training and certification, and death benefits. In addition to your wage you are guaranteed additional compensation for overtime and hazardous work.
By way of comparison, working in the trades for a non-union shop is at best a crapshoot. There's no guarantee SS and other taxes are being taken out correctly or at all. I've known several subcontractors who've gotten royally screwed by the IRS come tax time when they found out that they (unexpectedly) owed thousands in taxes. Safety guidelines are routinely ignored, it's nothing to get shorted on your paycheck (or go weeks without pay), benefits are typically non-existent, no guarantees of overtime, and you're working sink or swim with whoever the boss could scrape together to form a crew, typically for less money than you'd make in a union shop and that's after dues. General contractors also tend to maintain a good-ol-boy network, so you go rocking the boat about substandard pay or unsafe working conditions and it's a very real possibility that you could find yourself blackballed in your area.
TL;DR: Union: guaranteed pay, safe working conditions, training provided for career advancement, benefits, retirement plan. Non-union: good luck, buddy.
Full disclosure: I worked in the trades (both union and non-union) for several years before changing career tracks to become a programmer. I do not regret my time with the Union and would go back in a heartbeat if for some reason coding was no longer a viable career option.
Union:
- Everyone is complacent with work, majority of time is spent faking work or finding ways out of work (pay raises are not tied to performance)
- Net pay below average for industry (Below 50th percentile)
- Under-skilled workers protected by the union from being let go.
- Successes & Failures of the company are shared amongst the entire employee base. As a result there is no motivating drive to work harder to push better products out faster because there is no direct feedback resulting from it
- Training is provided on a seniority basis
Non-Union:
- Identical benefits (or at the very least negotiable) but higher base wage
- Skilled workers who are hired based off of recommendation of trusted employees exclusively
- Strong motivating factor to produce more deliverable work as it is a direct correlation to the business's success and therefore yours (profit sharing)
- Pay raise is tied to performance
- Training provided on an as needed basis -> The new guy might get training before the 10 year vet because he/she is the one going to be working with that particular skill set in the short time frame
----
Shared amongst those is equal work/life balance and safety. Labour laws have protected the workforce from shady practices you experienced (arguably an isolated incident). I'm thankful for what unions of the last few centuries have brought for us, but speaking in the majority of cases I've heard of, (anecdotal: take it as you will) they are now power hungry bodies that are corroding industry from the inside out.
One thing I can address is this:
" Labour laws have protected the workforce from shady practices you experienced (arguably an isolated incident)"
In manufacturing and trades (especially trades) this isn't even slightly accurate. Laws don't protect people, they provide a theoretical framework for compensation or punitive action after the fact. In practice a private citizen has almost no chance against a corporate lawyer in court, so it's almost impossible to prove workplace safety violations. On the rare ocassion that something does stick in court companies caught violating worker safety laws typically get a slap on the wrist, meanwhile whistleblowers better have a spare career up their sleeves or line up a settlement big enough to retire on because they won't be working for any outfits in their industry once they pull the trigger on a court case. Good luck proving the last company you interviewed you didn't hire you because you blew the whistle on your last employer. :/
The unions discussed in this conversation are collective bargaining units that negotiate employment agreements with a single employer, and such negotiations are often huge, nasty, and difficult. I went through such a dispute with a telecom, and everyone not unionized had to work as a scab (doing the job of those who were unionized and not working). The union people would picket outside our building and insult us when we went for lunch, and we pulled 80 hour days to do their work (with fortunately amazing OT pay, and I was part of a team in charge of trying to automate everything in sight). But it was a nasty dispute.
The current NHL lockout that's happening is another similar union dispute, though you obviously don't see NHL players picketing NHL headquarters. :)
Unions are a way to redress the imbalance. Think of union membership as a mutual defence agreement.
You shouldn't evaluate the worthiness of unions based on the average HN situation of a young professional with relatively little debts/commitments working in a specialised and in-demand field.
What I do find outrageous is the way certain unions start getting heavily involved in politics. They should stick to protecting employees from abusive action by specific companies.
Which union do you think has more power: The AMA or a union for miners? In one, the employees are scarce, limited, and irreplaceable. In the other, the employees are numerous, easy to train, and very replaceable. Why would you try to justify a union for one and not the other when it's clear that there's no value in dealing with a mining union - it's cheaper to just bring in new employees.
On the other hand, tech workers aren't in a commonly harmful, let-alone fatal, profession and we enjoy pretty good mobility. We don't need unions half as much as we need to take a principled stand and vote with our feet.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/05/148930/top-five...
Thank you.
The main role of a union is to provide for collective bargaining agreements.
The unions for teachers exist because teachers are (wrongly IMHO) considered by their employer to be in the parents poster's category. If teachers weren't considered a commodity I think they would have less need for unions.
And professional athletes unions are usually restrained to sports where the employers are a cartel (or even a single entity). The cartel phenomenon is similar in the case of actors.
Interesting point about the employer cartel, since the SV Tech Giants (Google, Apple, etc.) were outed as colluding to keep salaries down and not poach employees from one another earlier this year. Maybe that is a starting point for grounds to consider unionizing? Maybe?
"Having a union that endorses members" doesn't lead directly to the creation of "a professional body that is superior to non-unioned workers". IT/IS workers are usually considered "superior" (and thus more marketable) based on the degree of their knowledge and the effectiveness of their problem solving skills, to which membership in a collective bargaining society adds neither.
Perhaps rather than forcing people to join, you want to force employers to exclude non-members? So that rather than being "under management's thumb" I can be under the "union's protection"?
As I've asserted, information workers are valued for their knowledge and problem solving skills, so unless this hypothetical union were going to certify people as having certain knowledge and problem solving skills and include/exclude members based on that certification (or give them a grading level), it will be meaningless as a value indicator to any employer. If I think the level they give me is too low, I won't be likely to stay associated with them. If employers think they rate people too high, they'll avoid them also.
If the "professional" union is just a middleman, I'd prefer not to have it, and I'm fairly certain sure employers wouldn't either.
Of course, professional bodies (outside of trade organizations) exist like this, but they are called consulting companies.
* Potential age-bias for older workers ([1] is an example of the discussion related to this, without being exhaustive obviously) * Local job market (relevant and equivalent positions) * Physical mobility (family situation, value of house in market relative to mortgage for re-location) * Spousal situation (Spouse may not be able to relocate)
It's always so easy to dismiss the workers in these cases and say "they should just leave," but this meme gets out-of-hand. The reality is it's often no easier to leave than to stay, and in some situations quite difficult to do so. This should never be used to excuse abusive practices by employers with the line "well, the market will take care of it."
There's not enough growth in the US to support the revenue requirements of the behemoth, and as US employees are both expensive and easy to get rid of, they tend to be the first to suffer.
(compared to, say, EU employees who are also expensive but harder to ditch).
It ends up smoothing over some of the friction that discourages people from changing jobs, because if you quit your job and take a few months to find another one, you still get a livable salary in between, so there isn't this huge fright of being between jobs that keeps many Americans from jumping even when it would ultimately be advantageous to do so (the fact that you don't lose health care coverage when you quit your job helps too).
In the US, benefits usually run out at 26 weeks. Congress took note of the Great Recession and extended that to 39 weeks, or 48 weeks in states with over-6-percent unemployment, but that extension expires at the end of this year.
And Americans only get unemployment benefits if they are laid off; if you quit or are fired for cause, you’re screwed.
There's a hard to quantify cultural element to the difference, which I think is part of what makes it work reasonably well, at least in many cases. The a-kasse project a fairly positive image, of job-finding assistance for people temporarily out of work. People are both assumed to be finding a job in good faith (at least initially), and are encouraged to view the chance of getting one as likely (perhaps with assistance or upskilling). So it doesn't have the same aura of charity/leecher/etc. or dead-endness that Americans tend to associate with welfare (and which even many Danes associate with the "regular" welfare system, e.g. people receiving Kontanthjælp).
There's even some hope that it'll produce a sort of win-win, viewing unemployed people who aren't long-term unemployed as untapped resources that can be used to solve various labor shortages in Denmark. Part of the a-kasse's job is monitoring their sector for what kinds of skills are needed, developing relationships with companies, and figuring out how to plug their unemployed members (perhaps after training) into unfilled needs of those companies.
By the way, the max is 73 and 63 weeks (was 99)
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/unemployment/a/unempextension....
Someone who came right out of college, made $50k for two years, is entitled to double digit weeks of unemployment benefits.
Edit: Egg on face. Just looked up the details, while I pay taxes, it seems none of these go towards unemployment insurance, unlike when you're employed, which is why the self-employed don't qualify. Lots of differences from state-to-state too, but in NY it's impossible to "participate" unless you set it up as an s-corp.
"flexicurity" is an eupheumism invented by the EU for the central neoliberal tenet "you are now a product". It's not only making it easier to fire someone, it also reduces employees to the subjective opinion of the manager; whether or not you do your job properly is no longer the main issue, your personality is.
The idea is that since you can get fired at whim, you'll be able to get a job faster and you'll be more productive, which is great because the economy is the only thing that matters in today's politics.
Wal-Mart has responded to the union drive by trying to stop workers from organizing -- sometimes in violation of federal labor law. In 10 separate cases, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Wal-Mart repeatedly broke the law by interrogating workers, confiscating union literature, and firing union supporters. At the first sign of organizing in a store, Wal-Mart dispatches a team of union busters from its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas...
...The retaliation can be extreme. In February 2000, the meat-cutting department at a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to join the UFCW -- the only Wal-Mart in the nation where workers successfully organized a union. Two weeks after the vote, the company announced it was eliminating its meat-cutting departments in all of its stores nationwide. It also fired four workers who voted for the union. "They held a meeting and said there was nothing we could do," recalls Dotty Jones, a former meat cutter in Jacksonville. "No matter which way the election went, they would hold it up in court until we were old and gray."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/03/against-wal-mart
"The FLSA requires that covered employees in the United States be paid at least the federal minimum wage for each hour they work and overtime pay at one and one-half the employee's regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek."
For the FLSA section 13(a)(1) exemptions to apply, an employee generally must be paid on a salary basis of no less than $455 per week and perform certain types of work that: [...] is in the computer field, or [...]
> A number of states have also enacted minimum wage and overtime pay laws, some of which provide greater worker protections than those provided by FLSA. In those situations where an employee is covered by both Federal and state wage laws, the employee is entitled to the greater benefit or more generous rights provided under the different parts of each law.
Companies are supposed to be money making machines that always follow logical decisions to make more, it's supposed to make selling business services/software to them easier because you just have to prove you'll save them money, but I don't think a lot of them would have changed over like that. They play hard ball, even with themselves.
That said, I've worked for IBM, and was treated very well. I worked overtime all the time, though, and it wasn't odd to see managers around even very late at night doing the same thing. I don't think I've ever had a full time programming job where everyone didn't work overtime for salary without overtime pay, actually. I think there were some contractors around when I was there, but they counted their hours, only did little jobs that amounted to exactly what they were told, and were not very effective or useful. You didn't want one on your projects, that was for sure.
So it doesn't surprise me if IT professionals who start demanding that start getting listed as more expensive for the business and cut out. It is the logical money making decision by the business after all.
Were they doing the "unofficial" 80-hour workweeks?
If the jobs market is so badly screwed that they can treat server admins as slaves, maybe USA is no longer sustainable after all?
Because you know, in a normal job market, those server admins quit. And IBM has to hire new server admins. For considerably higher salaries (because of bubble inflation and because of haste to fill positions).
1. How low a quality of service are customers willing to bear, trading off price and quality?
2. What is the supply of such lower-rate employees who can continue feeding the beast, once the trained employees become too expensive for the company to keep? If they could afford to keep well-trained employees, they probably would be able to attract good employees from the get go.
3. How good is the company's employee retention rate for keeping well-trained employees without significantly raising salaries?
Many countries recognise this, however, and regulate companies' behaviour towards its employees. IBM's exploitation of its sysadmins would be totally illegal in (most of?) the EU.
> Next IBM restricted the workers to 40 hour weeks so there would be no overtime. > VP approval was required each time someone was needed to work overtime. The net result was all the server admins worked exactly 40 hours a week and for 15 percent less pay.
I'm assuming they weren't physically allowed to work for more than 40 hours a week and I wonder why it's perceived as a bad thing.
I'm not one to normally subscribe to the 'if you don't like the working conditions don't work there' line of reasoning, especially in the US where unions are so weak. But in tech, eh, we have options.
a) The lawsuit was settled in 2006 (ref andyjohnson0's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687336). The article doesn't say when it was instigated, but it was likely a couple of years prior to that. In 2006, the tech industry was still working its way out of the collapse of the tech bubble.[1][2] Workers and companies were still pretty shell-shocked.
b) A lot of people live in places where the technology sector is not that strong and thus there are not that many options. Often moving is not a viable option due to family responsibilities or other circumstances.
What's naive is subjecting yourself to a company with known practices of this magnitude.
What's the saying again? "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me?!"
Of course some people's options are limited, but most aren't.
a) I don't really care about. I doubt much has changed and I don't think it was from fiscal necessity. Also, if they were shell-shocked in 2006 I can't imagine things have improved since then. It's actually disappointing as I rather admire IBM's leadership in open source. Alas, much easier to damage a reputation than build and keep a good one.
As for b), okay point taken. So, don't work at IBM, if you can help it.
You can't really help it because there is no guarantee that IBM won't just come along and buy the company you work for. I know lots of people that quit my company when IBM bought it. For this one older lady (HR Director) she has had to keep getting new jobs because 2 of the last companies she worked for got bought by IBM. She doesn't want to work for them so she just had to find another job and then quit.