If you think politics is not the realm of intellectual curiosity and that there's nothing political about this article you're a fucking sickening human being.
737 karma · joined March 26, 2014
What a self-serving narrative that an employee must have come in when terminally ill because he "didn't want to die alone" instead of that he was falling in line with the calvinist dogshit work culture this publication helped to sustain. Fuck the national review, I hope Alex finally got some peace.
We can begin to reverse this by electing DAs like Philly just has: Larry Krasner, a civil rights attorney who has made lowering sentences where he has prosecutorial discretion and refusing to try insufficient cases a part of his platform ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsEFPHMrAKc ). It will also take citizen pressure to ensure these people follow through on their program as they join a thoroughly racist, punitive institution. Also, people must be willing to elect representatives that will cut criminal penalties across the board. Simply cutting them for nonviolent crimes will not solve the problem: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the...
The 100x line sounds like the kind of deluded optimism about meritocracy you hear from a lot of people in tech, and the line about "dogfooding" is like a startup school trope that is kind of beside the point when you're talking about basic human decency towards your workers. You shouldn't have to "test" the ethicality of overworking your employees or paying yourself a huge amount of money while your worker' wages stagnate. Then again, I'm a socialist and find the entire idea of these companies to be ethically compromised because they aren't worker coops.
> I'm very excited to see the helmet cam video of Jeff Bezos serving a customary 8-10-12-14 hour shift at the Dallas Amazon Fulfillment Center and walk out with a smile. Can you do what you ask of others? That's leadership.
Sometimes I just have to sit and marvel at how many layers of ideology some of you folks are on.
It's a neoliberal trope to try to work markets into every social problem, but this is really an issue concerning ethics and justice, not allocation.
Haven't seen a single comment in here acknowledging that our immigration policy exists solely to benefit the wealthy (the wealthiest immigrants, or the ones with the most marketable skills and the wealthiest employers who often choose to exploit their immigrant employees via the precarity of immigration status created by an H1B). It would be great if people started having the conversation that we can have a mutually beneficial policy if we expedite citizenship for foreign born workers and actually work to build labor power in our industry instead of adopting nativist rhetoric or attempting to justify the various ways in which workers in tech are marginalized.
Maybe we have different perspectives on how popular the anti-immigrant position is in tech (and how many neo-reactionary/dark enlightenment dipshits there are), I guess I'd just ask that you keep an open mind about this and make a decision if and when workers approach you to join a union. I certainly wouldn't knock you for opposing a group that doesn't have your interests at heart, but the union I want to form would take solidarity seriously and would explicitly go to bat for women, people of color, lgbtqia people, disabled people, and immigrants.
Even though we earn good wages, its relatively easy to see that workers are not often reaping the benefits of surplus value and have no ability to weigh in on determinations of how that value is allocated. More importantly, the advantages of a union are not limited to being able to negotiate a better salary, there are lots of workplace conditions that can be pretty oppressive in the tech industry, and unions offer the ability to improve all of them.
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/29/business/curbing-the-suppl...
At one point the AMA had about 75% of American doctors as members but has declined for various reasons (growth of specialty professional associations, change of employment in which many doctors have gone from private practices to hospitals which has accompanied a change in political objectives, etc.). The AMA probably does still serve as a professional association in the interest of some segment of doctors, but I take your point that it definitely don't work for doctors writ large. This is actually a good example of why professional associations can be inadequate, because they fundamentally are limited to advocacy for a profession instead of working for gains for a workplace.
The beauty of a union is there doesn't have to be an objective definition. A union gives you a democratic voice to advocate for what you think is fair. Without organized labor power, your voice is completely ignorable.
> Speaking generally, if employees aren't getting a fair deal, they should look for better jobs. If they can't find better jobs, they're getting a fair deal. There are certainly anti-competitive exceptions, but nothing posted so far suggests we're in such exceptional territory.
This is a completely naive understanding of what finding a job is like. Leaving a job can be a strike against a person in the hiring process, not to mention it consumes a lot of time, leaves someone uncompensated and without benefits during the process, etc. This also assumes engineer competency is something we can effectively gauge in the hiring process or otherwise (just search "hiring" on hacker news to get the general sentiment among engineers about how good we are at this).
Imagine if this was the suggestion given to factory workers and coal miners and the early 20th century (not that I think the worker conditions are comparable, but its illustrative of how naive it is to believe that market forces are sufficient for providing fair compensation). This is a marginalist's definition of "fair" that doesn't jive with any real human person's.
The real question is why you are so fervantly against having a democratic voice in the workplace.
You seem to believe there are separate stratifications of tech workers that do not have shared interests. Even though I pretty strongly disagree, you're in luck, a union is still what you want. You want a craft union that recognizes something like "senior engineers" as a collective bargaining unit. As long as you can justify that you constitute a real unit with a shared "community of interest" to the NLRB, you can still collectively bargain only with other senior engineers.
However a professional association is effectively limited in what it can do in a labor dispute because management has no obligation to collectively bargain with them, hence this is not really the purpose of professional associations.
A professional association by contrast does not work to help workers in a workplace dispute. It is fundamentally an advocacy group for the profession itself and works to advance it by creating professional standards, lobbying, offering education and certification, etc. The AMA for example, does not engage in collective bargaining with the management of a hospital and has no legal right to compel such a thing under the NLRA. The AMA does however lobby politicians and puts its people on medical boards to limit the supply of doctors. Furthermore a professional organization works at the level of a single profession and doesn't organize workplaces in strikes, which is the major power of a union.
Unions can aggregate under federations that often resemble and provide the same function as professional associations, but a professional association provides almost none of the benefits of a union.
Even if this we take this for granted, its completely untrue that all unions commoditize a trade by flattening pay. There are plenty of unions that have chosen not to put standardized salaries in contracts or have advocated tiered salary agreements or merit pay. Whether or not these are good things, they are things that unions have done and should dispel with the notion that unions are inflexible towards these concerns by workers.
As for your concern that unions "force employers to do things", well I suggest you consider all of the ways your employer can coerce you to do things and whether you actually have a mutualistic relationship. Many workers don't feel that they do.
If you're interested in learning more about how to do this, I suggest you look into one of the following orgs:
- Tech Workers Coalition (https://techworkerscoalition.org/) based in the Bay Area who holds a monthly organizing meeting in SF
- Tech Solidarity (https://techsolidarity.org), which has been holding meetings in a bunch of metropolitan areas for educating tech workers about organizing
I suggest you seek out other opinions if you believe tech workers are under-worked. Perhaps this is the case at your job, but the majority of tech workers I know and have worked with are tired of having to put in hours on nights, over the weekends, etc. They're tired of "unlimited vacation" policies not actually guaranteeing them any time to take a vacation. I've had a boss prevent me from leaving at 10PM once before. I mean its not exactly a new realization that many of the most trendy perks for tech companies are ruses to get workers to stay extra hours at the office, that tech companies pursuing the youngest workers often leads to a culture where there's little differentiation between work and company time, etc.
Not to mention that tech workers are often asked to do dubiously ethical things by management. We're asked to automate away the positions of other employees, asked to be lax on security or privacy standards, etc.
Whether or not you believe there are any demands to make, I kind of find it bizarre to suggest that workplace democracy is something tech workers shouldn't demand.
A union is what gives you the ability confront management about these kinds of things.
It's not a panacea, and there are several historical examples of union leadership betraying the trust of workers and neglecting the demands of the most marginalized members (such as the UAW in 1941), but a union correctly structured and rooted in worker solidarity is the only proven way to fight management on these kinds of issues.
Even aside from the ethical coherency of viewing civil rights as a comprehensive struggle for ordinary people, there are political advantages as well given you can widely expand your coalition across racial and income barriers. People of color own guns and enjoy using them, but will back a candidate supporting background checks, assault weapon bans, etc. if their alternative is pro-gun law & order racist.
That being said, if the dilemma is gun violence, you've presented a false dichotomy for options. Harsher criminalization likely doesn't do anything, it may just make recidivism worse and temporarily relocate violence into prisons. Economic violence and inequality is the root cause for much of the gun violence in the US (along with some cultural psychological heritage related to frontier life and individualism, but this is a more difficult issue to solve). Deep poverty, racist and invasive police, lack of access to nutritious food, lack of access to childcare and quality education, etc. Not just for people of color (although they disproportionately suffer from inequality), but for white poor people as well. Economic violence is the backdrop for violent crime, and if the NRA actually cared about solving their image of being an advocacy group for middle income whites and cops, they would spend time lobbying to solve these issues, not locking up poor people.
> The NRA, funded (to a significant but unclear degree) by an industry that depends on a huge market for illegal guns to ensure profitability, has called for putting those very same black-market (and, not incidentally often black) customers in prison for extremely long periods of time.
> At the NRA’s May convention, Donald Trump, accepting the group’s endorsement, complained that “President Obama tried to take the guns from law-abiding Americans but has reduced prosecutions of violent criminals who use guns.” Trump, as usual, knew his audience well, and his speech was in line with a recent push by the NRA to double down on foreboding law-and-order talk, warning that liberals, in the name of reform, want to flood the streets with criminals and disarm the citizenry.
> But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction. And it has relentlessly warned that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The notion is not only vigilante but profoundly carceral, grounding the right of certain people to own guns in the criminality of others.
> When a Minnesota police officer shot Philando Castile dead by in his car, he was carrying a legal gun that his girlfriend has said he told the officer he possessed. His bloodied body, viewed by millions online, called the gun rights movement’s bluff: is a black man carrying a gun that he was licensed to carry a “good guy” when he is shot dead by the police? The NRA was criticized, seemingly even by its own members, for, like the officer who shot him, failing to acknowledge Castile’s right to carry.
I think you're kidding yourself if you think the NRA exists to support anyone except for white gun owners and cops.
The NRA is not a civil rights group for all gun owners.