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Comment by dolni | Hacker News Reader

As a worker, you can exercise your voice... by getting another job. That is your vote.

The power of your vote is proportional to the value you bring.

A while back I threatened to quit because I had a team dynamic that was untenable. I made a management change mandatory.

I got a new boss. The old boss was later terminated.

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No, this is called exit and it assume that monetary reasons are the only important thing in an economy. That is false, workers should be allowed to exercise their voice about bad management and change bad management. If you want to leave that is fine but thinking that every worker wants the same thing as you is extremely foolish.

Congrats as a single individual doing something, LMK when it amounts to real material change like obtaining a pension, or securing more PTO, or getting better health insurance.

You can also exercise your voice by... talking. That might mean trying to convince leadership, it might mean trying to coordinate a bunch of people who agree with you but don't want to act on their own, or, who knows, it might mean something else. But there are quite a lot of things you can do that are short of threatening to quit or simply leaving.

(And sometimes just leaving really is the best step!)

I would argue that’s an asymmetric game. If your boss’s boss or higher already dislikes your boss, then convincing leadership would be easy. But bad bosses don’t become the big bad boss by winning over their subordinates. They spend more time with their own boss than you do, your boss is likely going to have a better relationship with their own boss than you do, simply by proximity. Assuming they aren’t just a flat asshole of course.

A vote would in turn provide a mechanism to prevent such abuse. The boss works for the people not for their boss. Likewise the boss is no longer bound to the whims of their own boss. Their boss is the people below them. A group they will inevitably rejoin with new found appreciation for the troubles of management.

It just gets you in the bad books of the management for pointing out faults.

You are talking about what is.

Shimman is talking about what could be.

Responding to "hey, we could make our workplaces better by making it possible to elect our bosses rather than having them imposed on us as absolute dictators within the workplace" with "but you can already choose your boss—all you have to do is abandon all your coworkers, your salary, your routine, and likely your home and geographical region to go pick a different unaccountable absolute dictator" just shows that you aren't even having the same conversation that shimman is having.

And the worst part is you don't even seem to recognize it.

You got yourself into an extremely lucky position one time, and now that's made you think that's a viable solution for everyone who has problems with their bosses—and that anyone who thinks otherwise is just "not bringing value".

The only possible way to make our workplaces systemically better is by collective action. Unions. Workplace democracy. Stronger labor protections.

Everything else is just crab-bucket mentality.

>by getting another job.

Depends on the job market, sadly. No way in hell people are doing this unless they already have "fuck you money" or are truly the best in their field (which usually comes with "fuck you money"). Otherwise, people who can't t afford to take 6-12 months off a job can't really do that.

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