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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

Join a union. I know they're not particularly popular in the USA - and especially not in the high tech sector. But if these actions don't convince you that they're necessary, nothing will.

In the UK I pay ~£16/$25 per month to be a member of Prospect, a union for workers in the telecoms sector. When I was made redundant (downsized) they were able to get me an excellent settlement and provided me with incredibly useful professional advice.

I also know that if I'm in a disciplinary situation, they'll have trained employment rights specialists available to fight my corner.

The best way to think about a union (IMO) is as legal insurance. You pay for car insurance in case someone plows into your automobile - why wouldn't you do the same for your career?

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Can't emphasize this enough.

I once got into a conflict with my immediate supervisor which escalated into legal territory. The hows and whys doesn't matter right now, but suffice to say I had every right on my side, but I still couldn't have done it without a lawyer from my union who knew exactly who to contact and what to do.

As you say, unions are a form of insurance system and when they work they are irreplaceable. It's a win-win situation for the company and the employee to get rid of the situations I mentioned above.

Does anyone know if something like Prospect exists in the US? In the U.S. the only unions I'm aware of are collective-bargaining type per-workplace unions, where either your workplace is unionized (and therefore has union representation) or it isn't (and therefore doesn't). When I worked in the U.S., I was unable to find an organization that would let you join individually, and then provide employment advice and representation. There are professional associations like the ACM, which you'd think might provide some employment & advocacy type services, but the ACM at least doesn't provide anything like that. I'm not sure if that's because of American labor law making such an arrangement difficult/impossible? The Danish quasi-equivalent to the ACM, IDA [1], does provide those kinds of services, but the labor system is quite different overall.

[1] http://english.ida.dk/about-ida-0/about-ida

US unions are notoriously combative cold-war era affairs. I wouldn't give up the search, but the average union differ quite a lot from country to country.

> You pay for car insurance in case someone plows into your automobile - why wouldn't you do the same for your career?

Few people willingly pay car insurance; fewer still have any confidence that their insurance will pay-out. But we pay the premiums because it is a legal requirement, even though it might be more effective for some people to put that money into a bond instead.

It's a similar situation for unions; few people expect that a union really protect them from a determined private-sector employer, so they assess the cost-benefit of such "insurance" to be negative. Particularly when the premium, much as in your example, costs a lot in terms of minimum wage.

> Few people willingly pay car insurance; fewer still have any confidence that their insurance will pay-out. But we pay the premiums because it is a legal requirement, even though it might be more effective for some people to put that money into a bond instead.

What country are you from? In the US most people who can afford it have more than the legally-required car insurance and insurance companies are expected to pay out in the event of an accident.

A bond isn't insurance because, on average, it won't cover your expenses (if you earn enough on it to pay for a catastrophe, that means you didn't need it). The whole point of insurance (and unions) is to share risk over a large number of people, only some (random) fraction of whom will ever "need" the insurance.

FWIW, if any Australians are reading this : Union fees are tax deductible. And your employer doesn't need to know your part of the union until absolutely necessary. Seriously, I know there is a lot of bad press about unions because of a few arseholes, but they are necessary and you may find you need them the longer Abbott is in power.

Just to add, union dues and initiation fees are also tax deductible in the U.S.; however, you can only deduct the amount above and beyond 2% of your AGI.

Is it really that different in other parts of the world? Over here a minimum car insurance is mandatory but pretty much everyone pays for increased coverage. You don't want to be on the receiving end of the bills after a chain reaction of traffic accidents.

Regarding unions, it's first and foremost not a question of protection from a determined employer, but protection from specific parts of the company doing illegal and/or wrong things.

As soon as your company has more than 10 employees, it gets a whole lot more complex than "employer" and "employee".

Huh? I certainly expect my car insurance to pay out. I expect them to pay the minimum they can, which for collision insurance means "not quite enough to actually replace my car", but I expect them to fully cover any liability I might have, up to the limits of the coverage I bought.

Actual experience has borne out these expectations.

But to pay that amount for prospect membership you on 50% more than median salary for the UK.

I remember one jokey comment that low pay in prospect terms means some one who isn't paying any higher rate tax :-)

> Few people willingly pay car insurance

By that rationale, no-one would by the more expensive fully-comprehensive insurance (where your own car is insured, not just third parties) but they do.

Many people only buy the comprehensive insurance because their loan contract and/or lease terms require it.

And that makes sense, you can just return the car and get a new one. And lease contracts fees reflect this. If you have a fixed term lease, then returning a car ahead of time costs you, so you opt to repair it, and probably the leasing company wants it repaired at a brand licensed garage, so higher prices on that means you're likely to get a proper insurance, but you get the lease for cheaper.

In the UK, fully-comprehensive insurance can often be cheaper than third-party only cover.

Unions aren't the panacea you think they are. My experience with unions has been that they cater to the lowest common denominator. My salary increases were built into the union contract as was my "work out of class". I could only get a 5% pay differential when I did a work out of class, rather than having the ability to negotiate that on my own.

Then when I became a manager and was no longer a union member, the union attacked my management position so hard, that I rage quit because I simply couldn't take it any longer.

I was going to say the same thing. Unions are not too expensive, and mine has probably already paid itself simply by reading job contracts and advising me in payment negotiations.

It's also nice to have a group of people lobbying for the interests of IT workers, say.

> In the UK I pay ~£16/$25 per month to be a member of Prospect, a union for workers in the telecoms sector. When I was made redundant (downsized) they were able to get me an excellent settlement and provided me with incredibly useful professional advice.

Thanks, I didn't realise we had a union for our sector.

Prospect coves pretty much any job in technology/science not just telecoms.

The problems with "unions" is that they are a nebulous thing. The main thing they do varies enormously from sector to sector.

They are associated with and often still do a lot of things that I really want to part of. I associate joining a union more with joining a political party than what you describe, rightly or wrongly.

YMMV. I paid to join a union when I worked in the public sector (Unison, I think) and they ended up being useless when I had a problem with my employer. They just 'advised' me that there was nothing I could do and to let it go.

I think an actual lawyer would probably be better value for money.

Without any info about what the issue was, your anecdote is useless.

If you murdered a customer, your Union will probably "advise" you that there is nothing you can do to keep your job.

I explained the situation to a lawyer I knew years later and they stated that there were options and the union probably just couldn't be bothered to get involved.

>If you murdered a customer

Oh yeah, that was totally it eyeroll.

As you say, YMMV.

yep some times all you can do is help manage the situation to the members best advantage or get say a final written warning down graded to a verbal informal one.

If you are living in a small mining town where everyone else works for the one and only company, then an union makes sense, because it gives everyone a leverage against a monopoly.

High-tech industry is not a monopoly. The only thing unionization would do is to complicate life of capable people who actually work by forcing them to work alongside unmotivated lazy-asses that are employed just because they can't really be fired. I can't pay good people better money and I still have to drag around these useless clowns that religiously observe their mandated 4 coffee breaks and time their arrival and departure with sub-second precision. This is counter-productive. Unionization in high-tech is a seriously bad idea. It's just a way for unqualified personnel to hold on to their jobs instead of developing themselves into someone actually employable on their merit.

If all you are looking for is a legal support in tight spots, then there's an actual regular insurance coverage for that. Just ask your insurance provider.

"High-tech industry is not a monopoly."

While that may be, employers in the same field with geographical vicinity are known to negotiate on shared terms of employment - in effect creating leverage over individual employees when negotiating the terms of their employment.

A union may devolve to many things but one of the valuable facets are that it creates leverage for the employees against the employers.

I don't have to like it, you don't have to like it but that is the way the market works.

"still have to drag around these useless clowns that religiously observe their mandated 4 coffee breaks and time their arrival and departure with sub-second precision."

I would have just used the words 'non-productive' - that amount of verbiage creates the feeling that there is non-spoken behavioural pattern that is used as the metric of an employeed value rather than the value they produce.

Especially in high tech the moments when an employee actually performs value adding work can be spurious, unlike in lower tech industries like logging where the work you see is actually the work input you are getting.

Assuming this is what you're referring to when you mention shared terms of employment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Li...

Including that, yeah. It's a known fact companies have a tendency to form informal syndicates to game the market to their advantage, be it employment or pricing.

That is true for union-shops. There is a hell of a difference between paying a union to negotiate on your behalf and paying a union to come up with relevant courses for your speciality and paying a union to lend you a lawyer.

This is actually a really good datapoint.

UK: Has software union. Developer salary in London =~ $65k

US: No software union. Developer salary in SF =~ $200k

I'll be sure to pull this out next time I'm trying to explain to somebody why unions are such a terrible idea for software developers.

But please control for confunding factors. Supply-vs-demand in SF and London are rather different, costs of living, union membership statistics, and so on. And even after that you are in for a hard case to argue that unions are responsible for this difference.

And, that said, unions have very bad failure modes, as experienced by the problems with regards to (allegedly?) bad teachers. Also, they are able to mask problems for quite some time, and when they finally implode you have a half-broken sector on your hands with cascading effects and unemployment and defaults and ... well, Detroit-like consequences.

Furthermore, software developers have it good, and probably will be in demand for the coming part of the century, but that won't stop labor exploitation even in the tech sector for specific regions.

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