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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

"you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that"

False. People who worked there before you decided the rules. Once you have an entrenched senior workforce the probability that they will vote themselves less power or money is remarkably low. It's basically the same problem as NIMBYism.

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In a blog entry by Micheal O. Church [1], he argues that in the companies that most need unionization, the downsides like wage normalization and seniority rules are already in place, and adding unionization to the mix almost can't make things worse.

He also provides examples of unionized industries where "star performers" have no wage limits -- that the only limit is in the minimum pay for a position. And he points out the many ways a union could support programmer rights (for instance, the right to own personal projects), and kill damaging practices like stack ranking.

We need something. That much is clear. Whether it's a professional guild or a union, I'm not sure. But the status quo is awful for most of us. [2]

[1] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/it-might-be-...

[2] I'm actually one of the "1%" who is quite well compensated, but I think more of us should be compensated based on our abilities. And I do want to get rid of the "we own your free time projects" rules everywhere; I consider those to be morally reprehensible.

Edit: Added "unionized" to the second paragraph to make it clear what I meant.

But the status quo is awful for most of us.

No offense, but I think that statement is ridiculous. You admit you're in the top 1% of income earners in the US and you choose to use the word "awful" for your predicament?

He's the 1% and the "awful for most of us" is for the 99%.

Just because he's rich doesn't mean he can't sympathise with or understand the plight of the middle class, just like most people understand and sympathize with the plight of the poor.

Unless I'm reading the post wrong, he's saying it's "awful for us". That would include him, someone in the 1%.

My point is, the "plight of programmers" comes nowhere close to "awful" when you actually look at what some workers have to put up with.

As others have mentioned, I wasn't complaining on behalf of my own situation, which is exceptional.

Practices like "stack ranking" hurt all of us when they result in good people being fired or reprimanded, though.

If you want to see how a professional guild works as a union, see The Animation Guild.[1] TAG represents the animators at several major studios - Warner, Disney, Sony, Pixar, etc. Their contracts set minimum wages, but not maximums. Most importantly, they have serious overtime provisions - 1.5x after 8 hours a day or 40 hours in a week, 2x after 6 consecutive days of work or 14 hours in 1 day. Hollywood has "crunches", but they're rare, because of that. (This is also why film scheduling is a serious discipline while game production scheduling is not.)

[1] https://animationguild.org/ [2] https://animationguild.org/about-the-guild/organizing/

I'm very strongly pro-union, but this is an indisputable fact. If labor is to make a comeback in the 21st century, this is an important lesson that needs to be learned.

Interesting. How would you set up a union system that is self improving?

Normally organizations need to compete to survive, with the more ineffectual falling off. You can't necessarily have unions compete for members, because the power of the union is in how many members it has and fractioning them would diminish their authority.

In general, self-improving institutions operate by setting goals, evaluating those goals with metrics and iterating on the underlying model so as to improve those metrics. I know that's a simplistic answer, but I lack the specific understanding of how unions currently work to provide better insight.

There are unions in the nordic countries. They generally work quite well and don't hurt those countries competitiveness - those nations are quite competitive.

I believe Germany is also highly unionized.

So maybe we should learn from them ?

And BTW in all those countries one thing about those unions is that they are highly responsible - they understand the market realities and understand that people need to justify salries or else there would be layoffs.

no. hard working europeans leave europe to escape the system where they have little hope of bettering themselves in the european system. lots of them showed up in china working as part of outsource or manufacturing firms. talked to several myself.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-19/volkswagen... describes the tension of having a company with German-style union-values operate in the US.

I don't think it's the case that people will stay in the same employ for many years like they used to; unionised or not. People expect to change jobs much more often.

Unions that are well run frequently recognise the realities of business finances, and there are multiple examples of unions that have indeed voted to take a pay cut, if you care to go looking.

This reminds me how senior pilots will vote against raises for junior pilots so the senior pilots can preserve or increase their pay[1]

[1]http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

Doesn't voting for a board control in the Union allow for this? Like you have 4-5 people in charge but they have to be elected by the body of the Union.

Right now the above post looks about -2 despite being absolutely correct.

Downvoting informed people is the worst way to express disagreement. It contributes nothing, and makes your side look bad.

It deserves the downvotes because it ignores reality.

Many of the steelworkers unions in the early 80's went out of their way to try to get people retired so that the younger people would still have jobs. They also worked very hard to get people transferred to other sites to reach the point where they could retire even if it meant sacrificing some salary.

Or, for something more recent, many of the unions involved with Hostess took several rounds of cuts before finally standing up and taking a hard line that eventually led to the bankruptcy. And, it looks like Hostess is going to be better off because of it.

The downvotes are well warranted because he spewed propaganda instead of citing real facts.

It's the same problem businesses have everywhere, except the good ones know how to weed it out. Same rule applies to unions.

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