Comment by Devthrowaway80 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Devthrowaway80 | Hacker News Reader

The wealthy in the US have successfully lobbied for "Right to Work" legislation and have managed to pump out anti-union propaganda that is being parroted in this thread for decades. This costs money and effort. Why do you suppose they have done this? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because it benefits the individual worker? Or because it allows them to keep a larger share of the output of the economy?

Income inequality is the highest it has been since the beginning of the depression. Real wages have been flat for decades despite large gains in GDP. Is that a sign that workers have excellent leverage in negotiations?

Programmers are in a privileged position right now because there aren't enough of us to fill demand. That will not be the case forever. Look at what has happened with law - people saw the money to be made, flooded the market, and now a law degree doesn't really mean shit unless you're from a Big N school. The majority of programming work is not innovative or challenging - look at how many "I taught myself Javascript Framework 38! Look what I built" posts that flood this site. What do you think the long-term outlook for programming work is going to be like? Are you going to be the special snowflake ninja 10X rockstar in 10 years? Are you going to be happy to have no collective bargaining then?

Target shows its employees anti-union propaganda videos. It's interesting how it presents a union as a big bad "other" that would necessarily work against its members' interests, and to see many of the familiar arguments cast in a ham-handed way towards retail employees. Do we also believe in the 10x retail employee, or do we agree that retail is a sector where employees have a lot to gain from collective bargaining?

http://gawker.com/5811371/heres-the-cheesy-anti-union-video-...

http://gawker.com/behold-targets-brand-new-cheesy-anti-union...

When i was putting myself thru college there was a time I worked at a job which required I join a union. I detested them very much. They were a bunch of fat cats who did nothing for the regular workers and much less for a part-timer[1]. all they cared was the organization itself. the workers were there as a necessary ingredient to keep the organization alive --rather then actually do anything for the workers.

So, to this day, I loathe unions, in practice, perhaps not in theory, but in practice I do. I also did not enjoy the 'machismo' that happens in unions.

[1] I sprained my ankle at work while doing work and yet they did nothing for me. I had to pay the xray bills myself (I don't recall how much it was, but they did nothing to make things better for me). So I have little sympathy for the institution.

Ooh, anecdotes. I worked for an abusive employer once (American corporation, funnily enough), and I joined a union, and it protected me from further abuse because my managers were scared of the union, because it was an activist union.

So yeah. My union good, your union bad, let's not make blanket assertions based on one experience...

And you believe that using the union as an enforcer or as a protection racket was a good experience for you?

Just so I have this straight, you thought that a good outcome was to have your (clearly abusive) manager(s) silently seething with rage against you, but impotent to act on it, because of the union protection?

This was a good outcome to you, over, say leaving that hostile environment as fast as humanly possible, or, I don't know, turning in the manager(s) to higher-ups (or to state agencies if the abuse warranted)?

Whistleblowing on mgmt is a great way to get blacklisted, and one person's ability to quit their job does not address the root cause of the abuse.

Why should the burden be on the worker to find a new job anyway? If the abuse is coming from mgmt, it should be their responsibility to make it right.

I agree, but how might you imagine that management would find this out if the person is unwilling to speak up, instead relying on the silent fear of the union to keep it at bay?

Do you think that leaving the abusive manager in place, but impotent, is a better outcome? For whom? The company, the employees?

What makes you think that they were unaware of the abuse?

It's a better outcome for the employees. They have more leverage over their managers and are protected from abuse. If the manager is seething and impotent over his inability to mistreat his employees, maybe he can do what others have suggested the employee do and find another job.

> How might you imagine that management would find this out if the person is unwilling to speak up

The entire management structure in place was the problem. Are you seriously suggesting I should have attempted to contact my manager's boss in the USA, instead of joining a union?

Yes, I am not only suggesting that, I am baffled as to how you think not making noise about it and letting it lay in some Mexican standoff with the union was better.

With a union, he was able to stay at his job and not experience abuse.

Without a union, his likely outcomes were to leave his job, possibly winding up at another abusive organization that experienced no penalties for abusive behaviour, or report his manager to higher-ups (who may have been aware or complicit in the abuse) and suffer retaliation when his manager found out, or report his organization to authorities and likely suffer retaliation from the organization as a whole. None of these are particularly positive outcomes, which is a direct result of a large organization having more power than an individual, unorganized worker.

> And you believe that using the union as an enforcer or as a protection racket was a good experience for you?

Yes. I had entered that job from a social welfare benefit, and if I were fired or forced to leave the job, I would be subject to a 13 week stand-down.

> This was a good outcome to you, over, say leaving that hostile environment as fast as humanly possible, or, I don't know, turning in the manager(s) to higher-ups (or to state agencies if the abuse warranted)?

My recourses would have required legal action to the Employment Court, and when you're earning minimum wage, lawyers aren't easy to come by.

So yes, it was good that I could keep earning the money I needed to live, until I found a better job.

You are right that the current state won't last long. Computer science enrollments are skyrocketing, and businesses and government alike are pushing hard for even more people to flood the industry.

That happened before. The market was flooded with anyone who could pickup 'HTML for Dummies' but the market was never flooded with 'quality' programmers. They were very easy to sift out after the first round of dot-coms died. Because of the nature of the task it probably will never be, unless the USA opened their borders to other countries.

However wage imbalance isn't much of an issue as long as standard of living is maintained. Unions would not have prevented jobs moving overseas and may have actually accelerated it if not down right encouraged it.

Where unions are likely needed is in the developing world where many workers have unsafe conditions and little to no real rights.

Unions will not protect programming jobs in their resident country short of businesses being encouraged to hire local. How you do that is through various means, least of all is having a favorable employment climate.

The key to your personal success is self improvement and acknowledging when its time to move on. That last piece is the hardest. Its not fun to leave a place you have worked many years but at times it may be necessary

Doesn't it strike you as weird that there's a concept of "jobs moving overseas"? And that it's usually presented as a bad thing? Somehow even apparently reasonable people still have these blatantly discriminatory tribal attitudes and don't stop to see how unjust they are.

Back in history, white railway workers in America were unhappy about jobs going to Chinese immigrants. We even still have that but with Indians and call them "H1B"s which hides the racist undertones. Yet I've never heard anybody complain about "jobs going to local youths". Somehow a baby born near our house seems to be treated as a more deserving human being than one born somewhere else.

When jobs move overseas, that's usually a good thing, we should celebrate it! It means people overseas are getting more jobs! Very often those are even the same people most in need of more jobs so it's win-win.

Yep tribalism/racism is probably the major factor, but nobody wants the local youths to be income-deprived and at a loss for something productive to do, because then they turn to crime, or start ISIS. Which I guess is fine if it's on the other side of the world. /s

Jobs move overseas because employers don't want to pay us if they can find a pool of people that do not expect rights or market compensation for their labor.

It's like applauding McDonald's for replacing its minimum wage workers with indentured servants. They're ignoring basic human expectations about compensation so they can save money.

Now we don't have jobs, but the servants get to live in America! It should be celebrated.

If those people were to receive the same basic rights or fair market compensation for their labor, it would be a positive.

Jobs tend to 'move' to areas where lower monetary compensation is required.

Would you have the same complaints about fair market compensation if an employer starts hiring software developers in low-cost of living areas like Mississippi or Louisiana instead of San Francisco or NYC.

I recently attended a talk by Maria Klawe and she mentioned that her experience has been that if you graduate and enter into a good job market that has lots of demand for positions, in the future there will always be a demand for people with your experience and tenure.

Granted Maria definitely is one of the 10x folks, I like to think there is some sound logic behind this.

Brilliant insight. Who'd a thought it?

It's fascinating. Corporations and rich owners of industry already have bargaining power by... being big and having money. There's a lot of wiggle room for abuse of power and influence while staying within the confines of the law. And if they don't want to stay within the confines of the law, they have more resources and means to evade it.

But suggest that common workers should have some collective bargaining power and people are all afraid of them going too far and abusing their power. I guess they're afraid that they will have to pay 10 cents more for their coffee at Starbucks because of some greedy barrista union. The common worker banding together like that, that's too dangerous! Better have everyman and woman to themselves, and trust corporations, rich people and politicians to do the right thing.

There have been some fairly monstrous cases of unions crippling their industries (printers, watersiders). I think that might have put some people off the idea. Not to say all unions are that broken but it seems that sometimes they grow too big.

It's one thing to negotiate for more pay, but when you actively seek to prevent technological improvements which might make your job redundant, that makes you a burden on the rest of society.

Ok, but it's not like companies don't do the exact same thing. What do you call Microsoft's Windows and Office monopolies if not ways of holding society back so a firm can collect monopoly rents and avoid obsolescence?

Unions crippled print manufacturing?

Not amazing technological progress (from photographic plates thru composite color), long term decline of high margin markets (books, mags, news), and costs of production approaching zero?

Where exactly do you think print manufacturing would be today, minus unions?

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