As a recent graduate (last 5 years), I can't agree with most works desire to unionize for one reason: demand for your skills.
When I was looking for my second tech job, I turned on that switch in my LinkedIn that lets recruiters contact me. I was immediately inundated with 10-20 messages a day from recruiters asking if I could speak with them about <Role with my expertice>. For me this was the most insane luxury in the workplace, instead of having to go out and look for jobs, those jobs were coming to me and knocking on my door.
What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize? Don't like where you work? Flip a switch and suddenly you have 10-20 offers a day from other companies looking to hire someone with your skillset. Yes, you have to spend time combing through the messages, on the phone with recruiters and going to interviews but at the end of the day with that level of attention to your skillset, you can basically decide where you want to work. Company A seems great but the culture is toxic, ok great let's see what company B has to offer. Company B has a good culture but their data collection practices you don't agree with, ok let's see what company C has to offer. Company C has a great culture and doesn't do the things you consider unethical with data collection, bam we have a winner.
Also on the topic of general democracy in the workplace regarding decisions. As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them. Don't like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more/total control over decision making? Start your own company.
The relative ease of finding employment shouldn't factor into your desire to unionize. In fact, quite the contrary: It's less difficult to organize when you're the strongest.
But more importantly, these are the "halcyon" days of finding tech work, and they are fleeting. There is absolutely no guarantee the job market will look this promising in a few years. Things seemed to be on an endless upward trajectory in the 90s and then it all came crashing down.
If you're gambling on the fact that tech work will always be in extremely high demand, then you have a combination of risk appetite and optimism that makes for a founder.
As someone who worked through the period of the tech industry during the dotcom fallout, lots of stuff people take for granted today was non-existent: You had much less autonomy over the technical aspects of the objectives you were trying to achieve. Mandated tools, crappy underpowered computers, bureaucracy, over project dependencies, process-heavy SDLCs weren't just the norm, but widely viewed as the proper way to build software. It was all a reaction to what was seen as the "inmates running the asylum" during the dotcom boom. It basically took a bunch of promising startups in the mid-aughts to start cleaning people's clocks and become juggernauts to get the broader industry to reverse course. It also became a lot cheaper to do a tech startup.
Basically, understand that a lot of what is enjoyable today about working in tech is a side-effect of supply-and-demand; they HAVE to avoid developer-hostile actions because we're difficult to hire and expensive to employ. Once that's no longer the case, the screws are going to tighten. Just look at China's 9-9-6 work policies and companies using chat tools to spy on their employees to keep them working as a point of reference.
> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them.
I'd like to think we have enough integrity as a profession to fall back on an Eichmann-adjacent justification.
Once you discover later on in your career that seniority and respect of your peers is not transferable between companies, that hopping to the next job from the job board is vicious circle of working on dull dead end projects under authocratic and dumb at times people (with long length of service at the company), you might change your mind. Also you’ll discover that life is more complicated than „just walk away or start your own business”, at times neither of these is possible or even both of these are straight suicidal.
> What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize?
These things are not diametrically opposed.
A union doesn't imply anything other than collective bargaining. Maybe having a union would prevent things like Disney firing a bunch of full time employees after they retrain contractor replacements. This type of nonsense is driving down wages for the entire middle class of workers.
>> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them
I feel that is a very myopic attitude. Engineers and tech workers generally are in the best position to present options that can inform business decisions. In order to identify a good option it helps to have a lot of options. Disregarding the positive input that any employee can have on how a company operates is incredibly stupid.
I think that increasing efforts to unionize or blackball projects will just increase off-shoring. This isn't like a coal mine where physicality is important and can be leveraged. It is easy to open an office in random company and also pay people less. I'm not making a judgment that it isn't important to stand up to companies being evil but I just don't see unions being successful. Most big companies could cut 50% staff on the engineering side and simply make more money. A lot of this is hoarding of resources and using it to create new products to enable more consolidation.
The main reasons I would like to see a tech unions and things I would want out of it:
1. assessment training and rank. my sister is in a union and has been train and qualified for specific kinds of work. she does this work for many clients and the chance that they are getting the skills they need and she has those skills are very high. she can also call in others from the union if needed and the union handles negotiations of changed whatever.
2. unions handles her seniority. she can work for several different companies a year, but time off and other benefits come from time in union not those companies.
There is a lot of other things about her union I do not like, but my biggest problems in tech are finding or developing the right talent (including my own) and constant loss of seniority (pto, retirement, and other benefits). I lost a lot of both early in my career because I didn't negotiate well.
If a union existed that helped protect my interests, develop my talents, and match my skills with work I would join it. If they were good at training/vetting their members (apprentice, journeyman, whatever) in whatever skill set they learned that would benefit both employee and employer. Might help with imposter syndrome. Might help both sides with many issues if done right.
>> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them. Don't like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more/total control over decision making? Start your own company.
Don't you want more out of the roles in your career? I want to work at a place that wants my best self, ideas, opinions and all. I don't want my only career options to be a paid typist or an entrepreneur.
It seems obvious to me that there is a burning need for tech unionization and the reason has little to do with individual compensation or job security (although those are very important ancillary issues that deserve to be addressed and discussed as well). The real purpose that unionization could potentially serve is as a check against what people like Stallman and Bruce Schneier would perhaps call the mass exploitation associated with extreme surveillance capitalism. There are risks associated with unionization, of course, but collective bargaining offers one of the only proven mechanisms for average workers to impact the behavior of their employers. In the past, collective action was taken primarily as a means to improve the work conditions and compensation of average employees; as you point out, work conditions are generally very good for tech workers already, and so the improvement of working conditions isn't such an issue (although there is a good argument for organization as a means to preserve good conditions). I argue that in the case of tech employees, many of whom are involved in the development of systems that carry the potential for horrific misuse against vulnerable populations in the name of corporate profits, unionization is actually a moral imperative. Such unionization would represent a form of evolution in the history of collective action and employee organization, since it would be (at least in part) about challenging large-scale trends that run counter to the ideals of privacy, human rights, and equal society - things that can't be meaningfully impacted by individuals switching jobs. For instance, consider the case of challenging the pervasive use of privacy-violating adtech in products, or partnerships between corporations and authoritarian governments.
As tech workers, we are uniquely positioned within society: we have privileged knowledge of how the most powerful systems and products of the age function and we are incredibly close to the control surfaces of the major pillars of the economy. We are in demand, paid well, and generally well-educated. We have the ability to make a difference in the world in ways that very few people do. This is why organization is important.
Hirschman wrote a book called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that you may find interesting. What I see in your response is this: 'Exit and Loyalty are enough, so why have Voice?' In your mind it's good enough to just go to another job that has better conditions, but why is it wrong to want to change your current job? I don't see a good argument in your post against the usage of voice or democracy in the workplace, just your perspective that you don't need it. But maybe others do think they need it, so let's give it to them.
Professional actors and actresses can also be in-demand and are often 'recruited' constantly for different projects. They get paid sometimes millions of dollars.
A lot of counter arguments here say that this isn't necessary because we can easily find new jobs. Yes that's true, but that's not what I want to always have to do in my career.
I don't always want to cut and run. I want to invest in a workplace and have a meaningful say about my circumstances there and the work we do. I don't want to quit or have to suck it up and deal. I don't want to have to go into management and then have dueling loyalties (what comes first, ethics or keeping my team employed?) If I work at a big company like Amazon, I want a say in what our tech does and who uses it. Even if I cut and run from them, I'm not going to catch up to Amazon anytime soon. In a place like that positive change could much more easily come from within than from competition.
I've started businesses. When I start a business, it's mine (and my partner's). Like a car or a house or a website. I'm trying to do something specific with it, with plans that I've drawn up. It's not just to make money. If all I wanted to do was make money, I'd just get a normal job.
When I hire people, I'm not giving away my business, in the same way that if I give a friend a ride, I'm not giving away my car. If they don't like where I'm driving, their only option is to find another ride.
That's the key difference between starting a business vs getting a job: all the decision making is yours.
And this applies at any scale, even Amazon scale. If you have plans and you start a business to execute them, you can execute them even better at a large scale. Getting Amazon big and maintaining control is the reason you start a business.
It'd be insulting if my hires started wanting to take away control. When you hire someone, it's with the implicit understanding that they respect that the business is not theirs. They don't own any of it. (Unless they want to buy in.)
Violating that understanding is disrespectful. Like your neighbor letting their dog shit on your lawn and not picking it up, because they think "well, he's just going to walk his dog in twenty minutes, he can do them both at the same time."
I don't like working (whether for my business or for someone else's business) with disrespectful people. There's a lack of trust.
I always thought it was strange that we live in a democracy but spend most of our time working in corporations, which are more like autocracies than anything remotely resembling that of a democracy.
I've never been convinced that unions are necessarily the best approach to resolving the employer/employee power differential, but I do believe that in the coming decades something will be necessary.
By luck, the explosive growth of software in the states and relative scarcity of developers has resulted in a lot of wealth and luxury for engineers. There's no reason to believe this trend will continue indefinitely.
On the other side of the spectrum, another country that has explosive software growth but a large supply of engineers and STEM workers is China. China's 996 work policy has been getting a lot of attention lately and I think it should highlight the risk we face in a matter of maybe a generation or two if the software industry does eventually cool down.
As someone who was pretty heavily invested in getting tech workers to organize, I've watched with interest as some version of this article gets written every three or four months. There is always a small group of people actively tilting at this windmill, and they make for a good story.
What I am waiting to see is a significant demand being met by any major tech employer. The end of forced arbitration at Google was a promising development, but the failure of the Google walkout organizers to get their key demand—an employee representative on the board—doesn't bode well.
I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone's capacity. I wish the current crop of organizers the best of luck in trying to make it happen.
> I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone's capacity
I agree strongly. My generation (millennials) often look with disdain at how easy the baby boomers had it, often paying off their college tuition by taking on just a summer job.
I think my future children (or maybe their children) will look with disdain at how easy software engineers had it. Imagine that you get a degree and train for a job, without a particular position of power, and just like that you have leverage and a growing salary that you can increase 30% every time you switch jobs! Just from the scarcity of your skills!
This seems like an all or nothing type of thing. I for one would never join a union so if some tech workers started to unionize I would always be available to take their place for the right price. It seems like incomplete attempts to unionize our industry will benefit those that don't want to unionize the most by making them more attractive employees.
I think it is time for tech workers to force their companies to pursue an agenda that is in-line with the worker's ethics. We are highly paid, we are also highly valuable to the US economy. If we can effectively unionize - we can use that leverage to pressure the government to act in ways we support with regards to surveillance and climate change.
For low-skilled factory workers a union is largely about defending their rights and making sure they're treated fairly.
For a tech worker, a union is largely about providing a worker-focused counterbalance to your companies decisions. Who buys the tech we make? What tech do we make? Do we allow ourselves to make tech that evades, impedes or outright destroys a person's rights?
I don't want tech employees to quit those facial recognition companies. I want a large group of employees with a seat at the table saying that their work should be used ethically. Those companies can always find employees who for a variety of reasons will do the work. My hope is that there is a group of employees there who want to do the work and for the right reasons. More power to them.
Unions for tech workers are ridiculous. We’re not coal miners, we are highly skilled white collar professionals that should be more than capable of finding work that suits us without extra regulatory bullshit.
I find the people who are clamoring for unions in tech are among the least talented and skilled of employees, and they should probably find a new industry entirely instead of trying to change the one they’re in to be more hospitable to the lowest common denominators. Perhaps we can help the process along by putting these people on hiring blacklists and ensuring they never work in this town again.
> I find the people who are clamoring for unions in tech are among the least talented and skilled of employees, and they should probably find a new industry entirely instead of trying to change the one they’re in to be more hospitable to the lowest common denominators.
That's one perspective, sure. Here's another perspective: There's nothing stopping a company from firing it's junior and 'least talented and skilled' employees in favor of contractors or outsourcing.
Unionization is the incorporation and concentration of human capital to gain leverage in negotiations. If that isn't smart capitalism, I don't know what is.
This trend bothers me. Employees are not shareholders, or if they are, they ought to do this in their capacity as shareholders. If they want to govern the company, they ought to buy in or move to management.
Or, they can always move companies. This is always an option.
Also, socialism is an awful idea. I can't believe people actually support it. I have a massive moral objection to its core tenets: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?
Your employer is able to bargain with you as one massive, collective organization with all its resources to bear. Why should you have to negotiate with them as a one atomic individual person, when you and your coworkers can instead get together and negotiate from a much stronger position?
If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service (I'm thinking healthcare), then you're saying you have a right to the people who produce the product or service, which is slavery. The government can't guarantee your "right" if there's no people to produce it, unless the government forces it (slavery), or just throws random workers into the position (low quality).
Socialism aside, the unionization of tech workers is extremely important. Failing this, they will be exploited at every damn job. Unions exist in local governments, so why not at private firms too. It's time to organize. A lot of CEOs and CTOs will hate this idea, of course, and will do anything to make you believe otherwise.
I'm 46 years old. I can't think of one example where I was exploited as a tech worker. I'm from a union town, grew up in a union family. I support unions. The UAW was very important to the country and the middle class. I'm just not sure where the need is in tech. I think it might hurt us, if anything. Tech workers are not fungible. We do have quite a bit of leverage. Your average factory floor worker is fungible and has almost zero leverage.
This exploitation seems to take many forms. Being paid a multiple of the median income, working indoors under climate-controlled conditions, and (at least in my case) being paid to do that which I’d do for free anyway.
My grandfathers mined coal and milled steel. They needed unions. I don’t see any benefit to unions for me.
Look at airlines and auto companies for the danger of extreme unionization. You can kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Unions generally only work in monopolies (think old school telecom) where there is a surplus that is protected from competition. In this case it’s just about dividing a fixed pie.
The best thing for workers is to have many companies competing for their talents. That’s why counterintuitive things like lower corporate taxes can sometimes benefit workers. Same with reducing barriers to market entry.
Unionization is also extremely important to protect the non-tech workers at tech companies who do not have the same leverage as the salaried engineers.
Could you please pause and review the guidelines? We're here for thoughtful, informative discussion, and another turn on the socialism-is-cancer not-so-merry-go-round is not that.
I've noticed this trend here on HN beyond workers organizing for their own benefit. The idea of regulating the internet, for almost any reason was abhorrent to the tech community a decade ago.
Now, most people seem to think the likes of Uber and AirBnB need to be regulated. A majority of comments here about GDPR seem to support it, and I regularly see calls for more regulation of the sort. I'm not sure if the same group of people have changed their views, or if a wider range of people have brought new perspectives to the community.
There are numerous notable caes of changed views. Kara Swisher, Roger McNamee, BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie, Tim Wu, Tristan Harris, the entire Wired editorial slant.
I think there was a sort of techno-utopianism in the aughts that the hip new startups will solve all the world's problems. People will be educated and not fall for disinformation with wikipedia and google at their fingertips. People will discover the wonders of democracy and free speech with facebook and rise against oppressive governments. These were obviously overly optimistic projections.
Also, the rise of outrage porn makes it much easier for people to come to the conclusion that "the system" is horribly broken and needs to be changed (for almost any "system" that we speak of, government or capitalism, or youtube, literally anything)
[+] [-] glvn|7 years ago|reply
As a recent graduate (last 5 years), I can't agree with most works desire to unionize for one reason: demand for your skills.
When I was looking for my second tech job, I turned on that switch in my LinkedIn that lets recruiters contact me. I was immediately inundated with 10-20 messages a day from recruiters asking if I could speak with them about <Role with my expertice>. For me this was the most insane luxury in the workplace, instead of having to go out and look for jobs, those jobs were coming to me and knocking on my door.
What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize? Don't like where you work? Flip a switch and suddenly you have 10-20 offers a day from other companies looking to hire someone with your skillset. Yes, you have to spend time combing through the messages, on the phone with recruiters and going to interviews but at the end of the day with that level of attention to your skillset, you can basically decide where you want to work. Company A seems great but the culture is toxic, ok great let's see what company B has to offer. Company B has a good culture but their data collection practices you don't agree with, ok let's see what company C has to offer. Company C has a great culture and doesn't do the things you consider unethical with data collection, bam we have a winner.
Also on the topic of general democracy in the workplace regarding decisions. As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them. Don't like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more/total control over decision making? Start your own company.
[+] [-] spamizbad|7 years ago|reply
But more importantly, these are the "halcyon" days of finding tech work, and they are fleeting. There is absolutely no guarantee the job market will look this promising in a few years. Things seemed to be on an endless upward trajectory in the 90s and then it all came crashing down.
If you're gambling on the fact that tech work will always be in extremely high demand, then you have a combination of risk appetite and optimism that makes for a founder.
As someone who worked through the period of the tech industry during the dotcom fallout, lots of stuff people take for granted today was non-existent: You had much less autonomy over the technical aspects of the objectives you were trying to achieve. Mandated tools, crappy underpowered computers, bureaucracy, over project dependencies, process-heavy SDLCs weren't just the norm, but widely viewed as the proper way to build software. It was all a reaction to what was seen as the "inmates running the asylum" during the dotcom boom. It basically took a bunch of promising startups in the mid-aughts to start cleaning people's clocks and become juggernauts to get the broader industry to reverse course. It also became a lot cheaper to do a tech startup.
Basically, understand that a lot of what is enjoyable today about working in tech is a side-effect of supply-and-demand; they HAVE to avoid developer-hostile actions because we're difficult to hire and expensive to employ. Once that's no longer the case, the screws are going to tighten. Just look at China's 9-9-6 work policies and companies using chat tools to spy on their employees to keep them working as a point of reference.
> As an engineer you don't make those decisions, you just implement them.
I'd like to think we have enough integrity as a profession to fall back on an Eichmann-adjacent justification.
[+] [-] durnygbur|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adreamingsoul|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: changed "ringer" to "wringer".
[+] [-] linuxftw|7 years ago|reply
These things are not diametrically opposed.
A union doesn't imply anything other than collective bargaining. Maybe having a union would prevent things like Disney firing a bunch of full time employees after they retrain contractor replacements. This type of nonsense is driving down wages for the entire middle class of workers.
[+] [-] itronitron|7 years ago|reply
I feel that is a very myopic attitude. Engineers and tech workers generally are in the best position to present options that can inform business decisions. In order to identify a good option it helps to have a lot of options. Disregarding the positive input that any employee can have on how a company operates is incredibly stupid.
[+] [-] snarf21|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matis140|7 years ago|reply
1. assessment training and rank. my sister is in a union and has been train and qualified for specific kinds of work. she does this work for many clients and the chance that they are getting the skills they need and she has those skills are very high. she can also call in others from the union if needed and the union handles negotiations of changed whatever.
2. unions handles her seniority. she can work for several different companies a year, but time off and other benefits come from time in union not those companies.
There is a lot of other things about her union I do not like, but my biggest problems in tech are finding or developing the right talent (including my own) and constant loss of seniority (pto, retirement, and other benefits). I lost a lot of both early in my career because I didn't negotiate well.
If a union existed that helped protect my interests, develop my talents, and match my skills with work I would join it. If they were good at training/vetting their members (apprentice, journeyman, whatever) in whatever skill set they learned that would benefit both employee and employer. Might help with imposter syndrome. Might help both sides with many issues if done right.
[+] [-] gorpomon|7 years ago|reply
Don't you want more out of the roles in your career? I want to work at a place that wants my best self, ideas, opinions and all. I don't want my only career options to be a paid typist or an entrepreneur.
[+] [-] newen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brain_Thief|7 years ago|reply
As tech workers, we are uniquely positioned within society: we have privileged knowledge of how the most powerful systems and products of the age function and we are incredibly close to the control surfaces of the major pillars of the economy. We are in demand, paid well, and generally well-educated. We have the ability to make a difference in the world in ways that very few people do. This is why organization is important.
[+] [-] frgtpsswrdlame|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milquetoastaf|7 years ago|reply
They're in a union
[+] [-] option|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorpomon|7 years ago|reply
I don't always want to cut and run. I want to invest in a workplace and have a meaningful say about my circumstances there and the work we do. I don't want to quit or have to suck it up and deal. I don't want to have to go into management and then have dueling loyalties (what comes first, ethics or keeping my team employed?) If I work at a big company like Amazon, I want a say in what our tech does and who uses it. Even if I cut and run from them, I'm not going to catch up to Amazon anytime soon. In a place like that positive change could much more easily come from within than from competition.
[+] [-] turkeysandwich|7 years ago|reply
When I hire people, I'm not giving away my business, in the same way that if I give a friend a ride, I'm not giving away my car. If they don't like where I'm driving, their only option is to find another ride.
That's the key difference between starting a business vs getting a job: all the decision making is yours.
And this applies at any scale, even Amazon scale. If you have plans and you start a business to execute them, you can execute them even better at a large scale. Getting Amazon big and maintaining control is the reason you start a business.
It'd be insulting if my hires started wanting to take away control. When you hire someone, it's with the implicit understanding that they respect that the business is not theirs. They don't own any of it. (Unless they want to buy in.)
Violating that understanding is disrespectful. Like your neighbor letting their dog shit on your lawn and not picking it up, because they think "well, he's just going to walk his dog in twenty minutes, he can do them both at the same time."
I don't like working (whether for my business or for someone else's business) with disrespectful people. There's a lack of trust.
[+] [-] dawhizkid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donaldknuth123|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] return0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helen___keller|7 years ago|reply
By luck, the explosive growth of software in the states and relative scarcity of developers has resulted in a lot of wealth and luxury for engineers. There's no reason to believe this trend will continue indefinitely.
On the other side of the spectrum, another country that has explosive software growth but a large supply of engineers and STEM workers is China. China's 996 work policy has been getting a lot of attention lately and I think it should highlight the risk we face in a matter of maybe a generation or two if the software industry does eventually cool down.
[+] [-] idlewords|7 years ago|reply
What I am waiting to see is a significant demand being met by any major tech employer. The end of forced arbitration at Google was a promising development, but the failure of the Google walkout organizers to get their key demand—an employee representative on the board—doesn't bode well.
I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone's capacity. I wish the current crop of organizers the best of luck in trying to make it happen.
[+] [-] helen___keller|7 years ago|reply
I agree strongly. My generation (millennials) often look with disdain at how easy the baby boomers had it, often paying off their college tuition by taking on just a summer job.
I think my future children (or maybe their children) will look with disdain at how easy software engineers had it. Imagine that you get a degree and train for a job, without a particular position of power, and just like that you have leverage and a growing salary that you can increase 30% every time you switch jobs! Just from the scarcity of your skills!
[+] [-] malvosenior|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MangezBien|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorpomon|7 years ago|reply
For a tech worker, a union is largely about providing a worker-focused counterbalance to your companies decisions. Who buys the tech we make? What tech do we make? Do we allow ourselves to make tech that evades, impedes or outright destroys a person's rights?
I don't want tech employees to quit those facial recognition companies. I want a large group of employees with a seat at the table saying that their work should be used ethically. Those companies can always find employees who for a variety of reasons will do the work. My hope is that there is a group of employees there who want to do the work and for the right reasons. More power to them.
[+] [-] veryworried|7 years ago|reply
I find the people who are clamoring for unions in tech are among the least talented and skilled of employees, and they should probably find a new industry entirely instead of trying to change the one they’re in to be more hospitable to the lowest common denominators. Perhaps we can help the process along by putting these people on hiring blacklists and ensuring they never work in this town again.
[+] [-] linuxftw|7 years ago|reply
That's one perspective, sure. Here's another perspective: There's nothing stopping a company from firing it's junior and 'least talented and skilled' employees in favor of contractors or outsourcing.
[+] [-] cworth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whytaka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbax|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mises|7 years ago|reply
Or, they can always move companies. This is always an option.
Also, socialism is an awful idea. I can't believe people actually support it. I have a massive moral objection to its core tenets: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?
[+] [-] kyllo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgzl|7 years ago|reply
Edit: Nobody.
If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service (I'm thinking healthcare), then you're saying you have a right to the people who produce the product or service, which is slavery. The government can't guarantee your "right" if there's no people to produce it, unless the government forces it (slavery), or just throws random workers into the position (low quality).
[+] [-] ycHatesFreeSpch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GaltMidas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|7 years ago|reply
My grandfathers mined coal and milled steel. They needed unions. I don’t see any benefit to unions for me.
[+] [-] mathattack|7 years ago|reply
The best thing for workers is to have many companies competing for their talents. That’s why counterintuitive things like lower corporate taxes can sometimes benefit workers. Same with reducing barriers to market entry.
[+] [-] mattcburns|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maccio92|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sctb|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] Zak|7 years ago|reply
Now, most people seem to think the likes of Uber and AirBnB need to be regulated. A majority of comments here about GDPR seem to support it, and I regularly see calls for more regulation of the sort. I'm not sure if the same group of people have changed their views, or if a wider range of people have brought new perspectives to the community.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|7 years ago|reply
Wind's done shifted.
[+] [-] helen___keller|7 years ago|reply
Also, the rise of outrage porn makes it much easier for people to come to the conclusion that "the system" is horribly broken and needs to be changed (for almost any "system" that we speak of, government or capitalism, or youtube, literally anything)
[+] [-] okmokmz|7 years ago|reply