I find this interesting because I don't fully understand how tech became so opposed to unions. Many in our industry are quite jaded about the poor behavior of large corporations. Perhaps there are also reasons to be distrustful of unions. But mostly we accept working with or doing business with the former, and entirely eschewing the latter.
Why have we decided that untrustworthy, sometimes poorly managed organizations are acceptable when operating in the interests of shareholders, but not when operating in the interests of workers? (Note: I have never been part of a union, so this question is asked from position of ignorance.)
Unions are just another idea that sounds great on paper, only if you don't consider second and third order effects. They don't serve the workers, they serve themselves (like pretty much any organization).
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.
Given all that I personally think the downsides of unions in tech would be much higher than the upsides. I would rather see more laws universally protecting intellectual workers like e.g. non-enforcability of non-compete clauses and alikes.
My experience with unions. Monitor breaks at CES. Go get another, try to carry to booth. Get stopped because "only union people are allowed to carry equipment inside the convention center". Try to plug in some equipment. Get stopped because "only union electricians are allowed to plug in equipment in the convention center"
I know others who have add similar experiences in the aerospace industry where responsibilities were divided up and person A is not allowed do any work outside of their designated job.
For example, your job is to write UX features, some else's job is to unit tests. You're not allowed to write unit tests.
I think a lot of it is that in-demand, well paid workers don't have patience for the BS work rules that unions are notorious for. It might be unfair characterization, but "you can't change/test that code, that's role X", and other such bureaucracy can be really draining.
- The typical 'pains' felt in the lopsided power relation between employer and employee were and often still are cushioned by the adequate compensation in a market where the sought after skills were in short supply
- Tech attracts an atypical more autism spectrum biased employee pool. This correlates with meritocratic believes.
- Tech culture is one that has always idolized 'passion', so objecting to bad working conditions and habits was not just seen as rocking the boat, but a character flaw of those that lacked passion.
- Tech workers very often see their employee status as temporary, just putting some bread on the table while they will create their own SaaS business 'real soon now' and be on the other side of the relation
- Tech has a habit of inducing very young workers, and churning through them. This is no just HR strategy but group enforced by incorporating youth (and single/ non-family) oriented spaces symbolically in the workplace (Foosball tables, slides ...)
Note that on the Employer side of the spectrum tech companies have no qualms about joining their collective bargaining and lobbying associations
I've always done well by being judged and rewarded as an individual. I've been on teams with people who were lazy or entitled or just bad at their job and didn't care enough to change. I don't want negotiate as a block with those people because if get less of I did. And frankly, I'd rather not work with them at all, because they're just a pain in the arse to deal with.
I think unions make sense when every worker is basically the same (on a production line for instance). That's because you don't have any leverage otherwise.
Right now, my leverage is "give me my bonus or I'll go elsewhere and the only other guy on this team can't code or troubleshoot for shit and takes every nfl game day off sick". At best, a union would make me share my bonus with him. At worst it would insist he got a bigger one as he's been in this role for years (hint, that's a BAD thing) and I'm newer.
Especially the video game industry should take a good long look at how Hollywood uses guilds to create saner work conditions for its various production crew. It's a very different thing to work at a 'stable' company with sustained engineering and maintenance, and then getting hired for part of a project at a one-big-project-ever-two-years production company, that might not exist a couple years from now. The sooner the games industry realizes they are actually in the latter category and organize accordingly, the better. Then maybe we can stop having these horror stories of mass layoffs when production ends, that comes from thinking you are in the former category.
If you include IT workers and programmers in certain non-technology companies, I think their position could be improved by unionization.
If you include engineers working for technology companies, unionization is less needed. This group has good working conditions on the whole. Personally when I have been frustrated with corporate work-life, it is usually for reasons that unionization would make worse (office politics, byzantine procedures, unproductive coworkers).
Using the second, narrower definition above, tech workers are paid well and we get to sit in comfortable chairs in air-conditioned offices all day long. I mean, if you work for a startup company it will probably lose money and yet you are paid, sometimes handsomely. It's not as if management is exploiting you if you keep getting paid while the startup is steadily going bankrupt.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I have felt fairly treated by management. If management is not trying to fleece workers, why add the process of a union?
Unions seem to be great for generally interchangeable workers. Where there's room for personal achievement (or non-achievement), I cannot imagine any good use for them.
E.g. I'd like to do more work and be paid more and rewarded more, with none of the union pay grades BS. I'd like people to be fired based on incompetence, not seniority.
The only situations when I can imagine my outlook changing is if I become incompetent at my job, or lazy and useless (e.g. I've coasted at a job that I disliked for 6 months or so once, and then left; I imagine for some people it might be cool to coast for 6 years instead under union protections)
It doesn't replace one untrustworthy, poorly managed organization with another. It just means involving a second untrustworthy, poorly managed organization with its own goals in my contract negotiations.
Some might say that unions are better, but that has not been true historically in the US - they have a long history of corruption, power-grabbing, leadership with incentives that aren't aligned with the best interests of their union members, extreme resistance to change that would fix problems, centralizing so that your workplace's specific concerns are irrelevant to the union (since your workplace makes up such a small percentage of the union), protecting crappy employees based solely on seniority, and generally stagnating the company (sometimes making it less competitive).
When I think of strong unions in the US, I think of police, teachers, federal employees, and professional sports. Not exactly examples of unions as positive forces.
Europe has a totally different union model that is interesting and seems to work better, but it isn't really an option in the US.
> I don't fully understand how tech became so opposed to unions
I suspect it's due to the fact that while unions help the whole, they can remove the individual leverage during negotiations for salary and working conditions that many, especially seniors, want to preserve. Unions are often seen as a step towards developer commoditization which, like hour tracking, puzzle-based interviews, and other practices that de-individualize devs, is frowned upon by many. Some people just don't want to have to bargain collectively.
Granted, while some unions allow all sorts of single-employee exceptions, one can bet a company would choose to treat the goose and the gander the same when given guidelines on what the lowest common denominator is.
> Many in our industry are quite jaded about the poor behavior of large corporations
Yeah, but not _their_ organization, or they'd go elsewhere (jobs are not currently very constrained).
Do you know any union worker making $350k? or $500k? With unions, you ain't gonna get that. As much as I like unions for somethings, I'm not a fan. I'm in Detroit area. I have heard horror stories of many people who work in the car industry and do crazy things and can't easily get fired because of unions. Once I was downtown a few years ago, and they were shooting a movie and they needed to reshoot a scene, but a semi truck was parked on the street, they had to hold off the scene till the next day because they couldn't just move the truck. There was a specific job role that could drive the truck according to the union rules and the drivers were done working for the day.
Imagine union pegging a developer to only working on backend code, or middleware or frontend or only on a specific language.
For me it's that it's forced. I don't like anything being forced upon me. If I could both keep my job and not be in the union, I'm fine with you unionizing.
I just don't want to be forced to be a member or forced to give a chunk of my paycheck.
Highly-paid professionals tend to assume that if they don't like their current job, their skills would be in demand enough that they can easily find another job. This assumes that current tech industry labor conditions will continue indefinitely, which seems unsustainable.
There's also a strong libertarian or at least individualist strain of thought in both Silicon Valley culture and in engineering which presumes that those high salaries are because of one's inherent 10x rockstar ninja abilities, and not because of market conditions. Also often a trend towards apoliticism, wanting to just be left alone to code and not engage in the dirty tribalist business of politicking.
Finally, there's a widespread conception that "unions have failed, unions just can't work." This despite that labor unions did work in the past, do continue to work outside of the U.S., and somehow an industry focused on disruption and innovation is unable to improve on unions.
I've been working with a tech union for 15 years, and it's been horrible. I could sit here for hours listing out all the ridiculousness...but a small taste, grievance for being woken up from slumber too abruptly. Whats that? I'm playing star ocean and I cant talk right now middle of boss fightz. How do public companies deal with unions when the workforce gets to where it no longer really needs to accomplish things? Maybe I've just been involved with bad union experiences..
We dont need a union, we need a stronger professional organization with appropriate licensing/apprenticeship, akin to other engineers, doctors, accountants, lawyers ect.
Personally, I don't want unions because my job is awesome as it is - absurd salary, great benefits, interesting problems, etc. I don't really see what a union could give me, I don't need more money and I work reasonable hours. Also I've seen how unions can completely paralyze the hiring and firing process (ex. Ontario teachers union and their horrible standardized job interviews).
I'm in a mandatory union in my country. But I'm a software engineer and it's an "office worker" union, so needless to say they take on a lot of stuff that's totally irrelevant to me. But because I'm required to be in the union, I get "represented" anyway and "get" to go on strike and take a substantial pay cut to "support my peers", none of whom I'll work with or have similar life situations to mine.
To be clear, though, I have no issue if some people think they can improve their bargaining position by being in a union. That should be what a union is, after all. Where I do object to unions is when they come to dominate their field and turn actively hostile to outsiders who don't play their game or, as in my case, arrange things so that people who don't care to be represented by them have to be regardless in order to work in their area.
I am jaded by large/exploitative corporations, but my way of dealing with that is to not work for large/exploitative corporations.
Several have mentioned that contemporary tech workers (mostly?) are privileged and have leverage in negotiations that allows them to individually gain what others in other industry can only get through unions. Part of that leverage comes from having lots of options. And why is there lots of options? Because "anyone" can start a tech company. The main mean of production of a tech outfit is the tech workers themselves.
Companies don't own the workers.
A steelworker can only do what they are skillfully specialized to do by using capital goods own by the company. Hence they can't negotiate with their feet (leaving) while a tech worker can.
Tech workers can work (remotely) for virtually any company in the world.
A farm worker can't.
All this may change in the future, but with some privileged tech workers (I'm not one of them) being able to retire in their 30s and 40s now I don't see why as a whole the industry is incentivized to unionize.
Unions are particularly effective when labor is commoditized and fungible. Less so when labor is not exchangeable (suppose it hinges on the question of if a guild more like a union or a cartel?). Programmers like to think they are unique and irreplaceable. Some of them are. Others, probably not so much.
I just don't see the value of unions in tech right now. I make decent money. My hours are consistent at 40 per week. If the employer employee relationship sours, there are 100s of other companies, and it's easy to switch jobs compared to other industries.
Mainly from bad experiences with unions not in tech. It’s funny when people say, no no no the old unions are bad but the new ones will be better. Are you sure?
At the end of the day, if you need to go against the decision of a union vote you are completely screwed and out of your own agency.
Because in tech its easy to just move jobs or negotiate on your own. Unions would just have government in you businesses, and make it harder for workers. Not to mention programmers are cheap and wont pay the union fees. I know I wouldn't I'd just avoid unionized companies.
The ethos of SV and the original libertarian thought that pervaded early firms also opposed unions. The early success of the firms, especially in days when growing fast in unchartered waters was all that mattered, it was a great refutation of the idea that you needed unions to take care of workers, and appeared to support the ideals of early founders.
The ideal has not weathered well - it works if you are on the cutting edge, where the degree of constraints are much lower.
But for the rest of the bell curve, some form of collective bargaining seems to be useful.
Maybe part of the reason is that, at the bleeding edge frontier, people who can work there are few and far between. This gives them market power and so can command/negotiate price.
Anyway, as long as everyone thinks of tech as the bleeding edge, its hard to make the case for unions.
Plus: America has a history of unions being a politicized topic, so it tends to result in strong views.
> Why have we decided that untrustworthy, sometimes poorly managed organizations are acceptable when operating in the interests of shareholders, but not when operating in the interests of workers?
The thing is, acting in the interests of shareholders is often acting in the interests of workers as well. Many workers are compensated using stock (RSUs/options/etc) which makes them shareholders. Even if that weren't true, for publicly-traded companies, employees are free to invest their compensation into company stock if they so choose and can then both vote on shareholder resolutions and share in the company's success (or failure). And even if that weren't the case, acting in the interest of shareholders helps sustain jobs and create space for raises by attracting investment.
With unions, there are a few major issues I see, at least in the US implementation of unions:
- First, they often institute parallel management systems and sets of rules that govern the business. It can make work more complex/rigid. These rules also often tend to favor employee traits like tenure. Over time they turn into something of a pyramid scheme, with the newer employees indirectly subsidizing more senior employees.
- They can create unnecessarily inefficient labor. For instance, I've heard stories from friends in manufacturing about how only certain employees are allowed to perform certain mundane tasks under the guise of 'safety', even though anyone could do it. It can be infuriating to hold work or delay customers due to rules like this.
- Unions erode individualism and localized control in favor of institutional control. Unions can become a conduit for implementing political stances as a result. For example, the NEA (largest teachers union in America) has taken a public stance on supporting critical race theory, including introducing factually incorrect/biased material like the NYT's "1619 project" into classrooms (https://neaedjustice.org/the-1619-project-resource-page/). [Note I am not looking to debate this point here, but am just offering it as an example of activism using a union as a way to route political stances broadly, instead of allowing independent localized control]
- Unions erode competition in the market. This is especially problematic for public sector unions, where taxpayers have no choice but to fund a particular public organization. In general, I do not favor unions having exclusive rights to labor at a company. If there were multiple unions competing alongside non-union workers, that would be a more balanced/healthier situation.
Ultimately I am not sure why unions have special provisions under the law. Workers seeking unionization are all free to form their own company renting out their labor services to customers. They get to act as a group, and negotiate as a group, but are still subject to choice and competition. Under this model, for those who don't agree with a union for whatever reason, they have the freedom to sell their labor as individuals or as a company. This seems like a much better situation than having large number of workers subject to tyranny of the majority within the bounds of an exclusive union contract.
The real explanation is decades of widely prevalent anti-union propaganda. People hear something enough times and they tend to believe it. Walmart workers don't have unions either, for the same reasons, but I'm sure people here are cringing at being compared to Walmart workers.
I always find it hilarious that tech people think that a tech union would be like the teamsters or autoworkers union rather than the entertainment industry unions given that the latter already have provision for people with widely varying skills and compensation.
It doesn’t help that tech salaries outside the US are so low. I don’t know if that’s union related but relatively high salaries lead to higher contentment.
> more than 145,000 members who work as scientists, engineers, tech experts and in other specialist roles.
I see it simply as something of an "insurance policy" in case bad stuff happens - I feel this is especially useful to have this as backup as Brexit and the fall-out from COVID are on the horizon...
"One of the few" or "the only". Using "one of the only" just fudges the point you're trying to make. Is it the only one, or is it one of only a few (and then list the other ones, too).
So long as the software industry is expanding, the salaries are growing and software engineers have freedom to jump ships, I don't see unions coming. The recipe to make a union is to lock thousands of grumpy software engineers in a bureaucratic company with stagnant wages.
What’s the benefit of unions? Because from the outside looking at Teachers unions in America I see that only hurts education and benefits Teachers. It doesn’t help make education better. So it seems like unions protect the employee but damage everything else.
(Serious question I’m super curious why tech unions are a good thing cos I have 0 idea)
Others have pointed out that tech workers are much more unionized elsewhere (other than US).
There are probably multiple factors as to why there are few unions in US (ie. Comp in US is insanely high, tons of competition for workers, etc).
But I'd argued that the main reason is: insane growth of US tech sector in past decades as compared to elsewhere in the world. This enables both higher comparative wages and competition for labour.
Also consider that almost anyone can start a tech business (workers are the capital resources of a tech outfit - not machinery) leading to more dynamic labour market.
But, I'm not sure this will continue to be true after backlash we are seeing against USA tech sector. Maybe that's why the conversation around unions is starting now.
So are tech workers treated better at kick starter than they are at, say, google or amazon, or even treated better than they were at Kickstarter pre-union? The only thing in the article I could really find was:
> Employees who are still with the company say that because of the union, management has been more receptive to worker grievances, especially now during the pandemic. Employees were able to ensure that staff who got laid off received severance packages and are currently in the process of hammering out a collective bargaining agreement.
But it isn't clear to me that employees who were laid off wouldn't receive severance packages if it wasn't for the union.
Next step - day off after every night of oncall shift - even if no interruption during night the stress and being with laptop 24/7 and attentive is enough to deserve it.
Funny thing about unions is that they are common when the employer is the state: police, teachers etc. so you have a union which is formed to represent employee rights against a bigger union of the people which includes the same employees as citizens.
[+] [-] abeppu|5 years ago|reply
Why have we decided that untrustworthy, sometimes poorly managed organizations are acceptable when operating in the interests of shareholders, but not when operating in the interests of workers? (Note: I have never been part of a union, so this question is asked from position of ignorance.)
[+] [-] dpc_pw|5 years ago|reply
Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power, like workers in other industries.
Many software companies offer equity, which makes employers the shareholders. What's good for shareholders is also good for a lot of tech employees.
Also, barriers to entry in software are almost 0. If you can't get someone to treat you well, you can have your own software company paying your bills in 6 months, or VCs funding your startup.
Given all that I personally think the downsides of unions in tech would be much higher than the upsides. I would rather see more laws universally protecting intellectual workers like e.g. non-enforcability of non-compete clauses and alikes.
[+] [-] greggman3|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5a_00YVVkQ&feature=youtu.be...
My experience with unions. Monitor breaks at CES. Go get another, try to carry to booth. Get stopped because "only union people are allowed to carry equipment inside the convention center". Try to plug in some equipment. Get stopped because "only union electricians are allowed to plug in equipment in the convention center"
I know others who have add similar experiences in the aerospace industry where responsibilities were divided up and person A is not allowed do any work outside of their designated job.
For example, your job is to write UX features, some else's job is to unit tests. You're not allowed to write unit tests.
Why I would I want that?
[+] [-] gedy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterStuer|5 years ago|reply
- The typical 'pains' felt in the lopsided power relation between employer and employee were and often still are cushioned by the adequate compensation in a market where the sought after skills were in short supply
- Tech attracts an atypical more autism spectrum biased employee pool. This correlates with meritocratic believes.
- Tech culture is one that has always idolized 'passion', so objecting to bad working conditions and habits was not just seen as rocking the boat, but a character flaw of those that lacked passion.
- Tech workers very often see their employee status as temporary, just putting some bread on the table while they will create their own SaaS business 'real soon now' and be on the other side of the relation
- Tech has a habit of inducing very young workers, and churning through them. This is no just HR strategy but group enforced by incorporating youth (and single/ non-family) oriented spaces symbolically in the workplace (Foosball tables, slides ...)
Note that on the Employer side of the spectrum tech companies have no qualms about joining their collective bargaining and lobbying associations
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
I think unions make sense when every worker is basically the same (on a production line for instance). That's because you don't have any leverage otherwise.
Right now, my leverage is "give me my bonus or I'll go elsewhere and the only other guy on this team can't code or troubleshoot for shit and takes every nfl game day off sick". At best, a union would make me share my bonus with him. At worst it would insist he got a bigger one as he's been in this role for years (hint, that's a BAD thing) and I'm newer.
[+] [-] m12k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackcosgrove|5 years ago|reply
If you include IT workers and programmers in certain non-technology companies, I think their position could be improved by unionization.
If you include engineers working for technology companies, unionization is less needed. This group has good working conditions on the whole. Personally when I have been frustrated with corporate work-life, it is usually for reasons that unionization would make worse (office politics, byzantine procedures, unproductive coworkers).
Using the second, narrower definition above, tech workers are paid well and we get to sit in comfortable chairs in air-conditioned offices all day long. I mean, if you work for a startup company it will probably lose money and yet you are paid, sometimes handsomely. It's not as if management is exploiting you if you keep getting paid while the startup is steadily going bankrupt.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I have felt fairly treated by management. If management is not trying to fleece workers, why add the process of a union?
[+] [-] sershe|5 years ago|reply
E.g. I'd like to do more work and be paid more and rewarded more, with none of the union pay grades BS. I'd like people to be fired based on incompetence, not seniority.
The only situations when I can imagine my outlook changing is if I become incompetent at my job, or lazy and useless (e.g. I've coasted at a job that I disliked for 6 months or so once, and then left; I imagine for some people it might be cool to coast for 6 years instead under union protections)
[+] [-] solidasparagus|5 years ago|reply
Some might say that unions are better, but that has not been true historically in the US - they have a long history of corruption, power-grabbing, leadership with incentives that aren't aligned with the best interests of their union members, extreme resistance to change that would fix problems, centralizing so that your workplace's specific concerns are irrelevant to the union (since your workplace makes up such a small percentage of the union), protecting crappy employees based solely on seniority, and generally stagnating the company (sometimes making it less competitive).
When I think of strong unions in the US, I think of police, teachers, federal employees, and professional sports. Not exactly examples of unions as positive forces.
Europe has a totally different union model that is interesting and seems to work better, but it isn't really an option in the US.
[+] [-] kodablah|5 years ago|reply
I suspect it's due to the fact that while unions help the whole, they can remove the individual leverage during negotiations for salary and working conditions that many, especially seniors, want to preserve. Unions are often seen as a step towards developer commoditization which, like hour tracking, puzzle-based interviews, and other practices that de-individualize devs, is frowned upon by many. Some people just don't want to have to bargain collectively.
Granted, while some unions allow all sorts of single-employee exceptions, one can bet a company would choose to treat the goose and the gander the same when given guidelines on what the lowest common denominator is.
> Many in our industry are quite jaded about the poor behavior of large corporations
Yeah, but not _their_ organization, or they'd go elsewhere (jobs are not currently very constrained).
[+] [-] segmondy|5 years ago|reply
Imagine union pegging a developer to only working on backend code, or middleware or frontend or only on a specific language.
[+] [-] donatj|5 years ago|reply
I just don't want to be forced to be a member or forced to give a chunk of my paycheck.
[+] [-] newfangle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|5 years ago|reply
There's also a strong libertarian or at least individualist strain of thought in both Silicon Valley culture and in engineering which presumes that those high salaries are because of one's inherent 10x rockstar ninja abilities, and not because of market conditions. Also often a trend towards apoliticism, wanting to just be left alone to code and not engage in the dirty tribalist business of politicking.
Finally, there's a widespread conception that "unions have failed, unions just can't work." This despite that labor unions did work in the past, do continue to work outside of the U.S., and somehow an industry focused on disruption and innovation is unable to improve on unions.
[+] [-] moocowtruck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scsilver|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhostVII|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigochill|5 years ago|reply
To be clear, though, I have no issue if some people think they can improve their bargaining position by being in a union. That should be what a union is, after all. Where I do object to unions is when they come to dominate their field and turn actively hostile to outsiders who don't play their game or, as in my case, arrange things so that people who don't care to be represented by them have to be regardless in order to work in their area.
I am jaded by large/exploitative corporations, but my way of dealing with that is to not work for large/exploitative corporations.
[+] [-] 627467|5 years ago|reply
Companies don't own the workers.
A steelworker can only do what they are skillfully specialized to do by using capital goods own by the company. Hence they can't negotiate with their feet (leaving) while a tech worker can.
Tech workers can work (remotely) for virtually any company in the world.
A farm worker can't.
All this may change in the future, but with some privileged tech workers (I'm not one of them) being able to retire in their 30s and 40s now I don't see why as a whole the industry is incentivized to unionize.
[+] [-] dnautics|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fsociety|5 years ago|reply
At the end of the day, if you need to go against the decision of a union vote you are completely screwed and out of your own agency.
That’s not a situation I want to find myself in.
[+] [-] DeonPenny|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intended|5 years ago|reply
The ideal has not weathered well - it works if you are on the cutting edge, where the degree of constraints are much lower.
But for the rest of the bell curve, some form of collective bargaining seems to be useful.
Maybe part of the reason is that, at the bleeding edge frontier, people who can work there are few and far between. This gives them market power and so can command/negotiate price.
Anyway, as long as everyone thinks of tech as the bleeding edge, its hard to make the case for unions.
Plus: America has a history of unions being a politicized topic, so it tends to result in strong views.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
The thing is, acting in the interests of shareholders is often acting in the interests of workers as well. Many workers are compensated using stock (RSUs/options/etc) which makes them shareholders. Even if that weren't true, for publicly-traded companies, employees are free to invest their compensation into company stock if they so choose and can then both vote on shareholder resolutions and share in the company's success (or failure). And even if that weren't the case, acting in the interest of shareholders helps sustain jobs and create space for raises by attracting investment.
With unions, there are a few major issues I see, at least in the US implementation of unions:
- First, they often institute parallel management systems and sets of rules that govern the business. It can make work more complex/rigid. These rules also often tend to favor employee traits like tenure. Over time they turn into something of a pyramid scheme, with the newer employees indirectly subsidizing more senior employees.
- They can create unnecessarily inefficient labor. For instance, I've heard stories from friends in manufacturing about how only certain employees are allowed to perform certain mundane tasks under the guise of 'safety', even though anyone could do it. It can be infuriating to hold work or delay customers due to rules like this.
- Unions erode individualism and localized control in favor of institutional control. Unions can become a conduit for implementing political stances as a result. For example, the NEA (largest teachers union in America) has taken a public stance on supporting critical race theory, including introducing factually incorrect/biased material like the NYT's "1619 project" into classrooms (https://neaedjustice.org/the-1619-project-resource-page/). [Note I am not looking to debate this point here, but am just offering it as an example of activism using a union as a way to route political stances broadly, instead of allowing independent localized control]
- Unions erode competition in the market. This is especially problematic for public sector unions, where taxpayers have no choice but to fund a particular public organization. In general, I do not favor unions having exclusive rights to labor at a company. If there were multiple unions competing alongside non-union workers, that would be a more balanced/healthier situation.
Ultimately I am not sure why unions have special provisions under the law. Workers seeking unionization are all free to form their own company renting out their labor services to customers. They get to act as a group, and negotiate as a group, but are still subject to choice and competition. Under this model, for those who don't agree with a union for whatever reason, they have the freedom to sell their labor as individuals or as a company. This seems like a much better situation than having large number of workers subject to tyranny of the majority within the bounds of an exclusive union contract.
[+] [-] newen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanxiyn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeyes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chillacy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlondon|5 years ago|reply
https://prospect.org.uk/about/who-are-prospect/
> more than 145,000 members who work as scientists, engineers, tech experts and in other specialist roles.
I see it simply as something of an "insurance policy" in case bad stuff happens - I feel this is especially useful to have this as backup as Brexit and the fall-out from COVID are on the horizon...
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ry454|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philliphaydon|5 years ago|reply
(Serious question I’m super curious why tech unions are a good thing cos I have 0 idea)
[+] [-] 627467|5 years ago|reply
There are probably multiple factors as to why there are few unions in US (ie. Comp in US is insanely high, tons of competition for workers, etc).
But I'd argued that the main reason is: insane growth of US tech sector in past decades as compared to elsewhere in the world. This enables both higher comparative wages and competition for labour.
Also consider that almost anyone can start a tech business (workers are the capital resources of a tech outfit - not machinery) leading to more dynamic labour market.
But, I'm not sure this will continue to be true after backlash we are seeing against USA tech sector. Maybe that's why the conversation around unions is starting now.
[+] [-] oh_sigh|5 years ago|reply
> Employees who are still with the company say that because of the union, management has been more receptive to worker grievances, especially now during the pandemic. Employees were able to ensure that staff who got laid off received severance packages and are currently in the process of hammering out a collective bargaining agreement.
But it isn't clear to me that employees who were laid off wouldn't receive severance packages if it wasn't for the union.
[+] [-] ry454|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomerbd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naveen99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigatexal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] M2Ys4U|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abeppu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] seany|5 years ago|reply