Kickstarter also voted itself to become a Public Benefits Corporation [1] so you would hope they were already out in front of ensuring contributor rights are fairly represented in concert with other stakeholders.
Also a large chunk of the employees who didn't want to unionize (25-35% of their peak headcount) left the company over some of the tactics employed in the contested fight over unionizing the company.
Definitely wouldn't want to be part of a union. I represent myself, thanks.
Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective, but industry wide unions are effectively a monopoly on labor supply and bad for society. Look no further than the MTA in NYC.
Terrible cost overruns and bad governance of the subway system, for what? So employees can clock extra hours and get egregiously overpaid? No thanks.
Competitive markets produce societally best outcomes, as is proven time and time again throughout history. Competition applies to labor too, by the way
Corporations bargain collectively by default; each is a large unit, with a lot of resources, composed of many people.
Unions allow individuals to bargain collectively, to match corporations in terms of leverage, because few individuals are valuable enough to even come close.
The MTA is run by New York State, and therefore at the whim of Albany cronyism [1]. This is why it’s so dysfunctional. I wouldn’t necessarily blame the transit unions.
Edit: also, there’s a history of multiple private subway companies in NYC, it didn’t work out.
I think unions are great for unskilled labor: When the employer sees employees 100% as a collective, then it makes sense that employees bargain as a collective too.
But it goes off the rails when there’s a big difference in productivity between employees, and it gets even worse when managers are allowed to unionize and use strict labor laws to protect them while they play corporate politics.
Source: I’m Swedish and have seen it myself from most angles.
> Competitive markets produce societally best outcomes
Define "societally best outcomes". By using the word "societally", you are saying it's not he best outcome for the business, nor is it the best outcome for the employees, nor the best outcome for the customers, but the best outcome for the society at large. Your MTA example shows that a union is great for workers. Please explain.
Considering unions are used successfully in many industries and are supported by both major parties in the US, you'll have a difficult time explaining how they are all wrong.
> Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective,
Isn't this the KickStarter union?
Also, what's a "Smaller and wide union"?
Finally, if unions are so bad, why do many of the largest companies in the world continue to hire from unions?
Are you still a consultant as stated in your bio? Wouldn’t mass unionization give you even more of a leg up assuming employers rely on 3rd parties more to avoid the headache?
I personally think current market rates for contractors, esp the staff Aug kind, are still lower than they should be, all things considered
Good for them! It'd be nice to see a software engineering guild emerge in the coming years. Think about the benefits we could accrue; I for one would strongly prefer a real pension to a 401K.
I don't understand unions for tech workers. We're not living in shacks rented to us by the company and can't afford a bus ticket to a new city or school to start a new life.
We're making six figures here. Want more pay? Sit on your butt and do leetcode or practice interviews and network with other rich programmers. Move to a tropical island and work remote. Heck, you don't even need to go to college and just about anything you want to learn is a $9.99 class away or free on in video format.
Just because conditions are good, doesn't mean they couldn't be better, or that they will always remain good. Demands like unionization are made most effectively when the demanding party has high leverage. Unionization is a preventative measure against a future potential backslide in conditions.
Not every worker can or wants to work for a FAANG, whether because of skill, time available to study, logistics like location, moral reasons, or anything else. We all deserve good working conditions now and in the future.
Tech workers are absolutely spoiled compared to most other laborers. We also have higher leverage and thus a better chance at unionization compared to many others. Others having it worse should not prevent us from raising our own conditions, and actually helps improve conditions of other classes of laborers by making it more likely they'll unionize themselves or causing employers to improve conditions as a preventative measure.
Tech is not a monolith and there are certainly people employed by Tech companies who are engaged in technology oriented jobs who will benefit from unionization.
The skills tech workers contribute are undervalued; I'd make the case that we tech workers are underpaid given the contributions we make to the tech companies we work at.
Do you feel like you already make a lot of money, and you don't need more? If so, there are two actions you could take. You tell me which results in greater good in the world:
1. Don't push or struggle for better pay. Be happy with what you have, and let upper management and stockholder dividends soak up the extra. I'm sure they'll spend it making the world a better place.
2. Organize, push, and struggle to improve your pay. Since you're already happy with the pay level you get, donate all surplus to the charity of your choice. Put your niece through college. Save some of it, then retire earlier and spend more time with your family.
My sense is that in addition to a fair number of people having experienced a failed or at least disappointing kickstarter, it was probably something of a fad for a lot of people.
If you hate where you work this much, improve yourself and work somewhere else.
Replacing at-will with "just cause", progressive disciplining, with criteria for performance improvement plans.
If you're three years into a career in tech (technical or not) and you haven't figured out that being PIP'd or indirectly told you're fucking up - making this language "nicer" isn't going to help anyone.
Adults don't give feedback in a transparent way and this is because they don't want to look discriminatory. Modern employment and HR policies have done great things, but they've made the waters for this kind of communication even more opaque and pushed incentives that way as well.
Being unable to effectively communicate in a competitive professional environment as an adult and unionizing to solve this problem is at best juvenile, even worse when you think about long-tail consequences in terms of babying future hires.
As someone who previously worked at Amazon and found it shitty, Amazon is a stupid point of comparison for unionizing in tech because it's a shit-show run like a hedge fund. However, as a heuristic, people who've spent more than two years at any kind of Amazon should be avoided IMO.
There are also those who simply want their company to honor it's word. The only reason I support unions in tech is that I'm tired of my company violating their own policies to screw over specific individuals (including me).
I would switch if I thought other places wouldn't lie. But it seems to me that all companies do.
You wouldn't buy a house or a new car without a contract. It seems stupid to me to enter a job without a real contract (as opposed the the ones we see now that are basically "we the company make the rules and can change them with or without notice anytime").
Organizing means you want more power, more control.
Also, there are many dimensions to liking or disliking your workplace. You may love the product your working on. You may really like your colleagues. You may also love the office environment. However, you may dislike the amount of vacation days, the lack of ability to work part time or the lack of paternal leave.
Workplaces have literally hundreds of properties, each of which you may like or dislike. So organizing to tweak those you dislike (while, on balance, you actually still like most properties) is very normal.
Why is "nicer" in quotes? Who are you quoting, or even paraphrasing?
Objective criteria for PIPs has nothing to do with niceness. Are you aware that this is a standard part of union contracts in general... like one of the first things usually negotiated?
> Adults don't give feedback in a transparent way and this is because they don't want to look discriminatory. Modern employment and HR policies have done great things, but they've made the waters for this kind of communication even more opaque and pushed incentives that way as well.
If I'm understanding your comment correctly, you're against opaque communications? Then, establishing these criteria in a contract is as transparent as you can get.
No, and even worse, it is mandatory for the union to negotiate for employees who don't join. That's one of the many ways in which unions are sabotaged in the US. If unions could negotiate for exclusive benefits for their own members, they wouldn't have any trouble recruiting. Instead Taft-Hartley made it illegal for them to manage insurance/pensions that the employer contributes to.
Unions are weak because the deck was stacked, the same way it is in every kleptocracy.
Depends on the contract, but when I worked for Kroger years ago, if I opted out of the union, I got like 2 more $ an hour but at the cost of some other benefits. I was 15 so of course I opted out for that extra cash.
In Canada, it is not. If you don’t join the union, you may still benefit from the union’s bargaining power so you will pay some dues to the union. I would presume this varies per region.
I doubt that would be legal. The unions in Sweden tried it, but it was against rights enshrined in the constitution (freedom of association), so didn’t fly even here.
Or course not. You can work somewhere else if you don’t want collective representation. Can’t have your cake and eat it too, getting benefits of a union without joining it is freeloading.
Love that someone in tech is finally getting unions in tech, don't love that it was kickstarter though. Their corporate culture is very toxic and I don't see them sticking around long term. It might be just me but my impression of kickstarter is that they are some of the worst offenders of 'maximum virtue signaling, minimum virtue'. That makes me inherently skeptical of a move like this.
> Their corporate culture is very toxic and I don't see them sticking around long term.
I think they changed CEO recently, no? It seems like the ex-CEO, one of the founder, wasn't "a good cultural fit" after all. They had a round of layoffs a few years ago where some activist employees were weeded out, seems like it didn't work.
Now we just need general purpose software engineering certifications with teeth so we can move away from this leetcode death spiral in interviewing, and mature as an industry
Really digging unions in tech. I for one would love to slack off for a few years as a semi-sabbatical/early-semi-retirement before I leave a job. Or at least to dial down my contributions without fear of being paid less :)
Just kidding, I think unions are pure evil, and the above is not even the worst one of the many reasons.
This is fantastic. Kudos to them. Copying some things they won, for the non-clickers:
- Minimum 3% annual CoL raises
- Profit-sharing bonuses
- Putting their current benefits in the contract, so management will have to re-negotiate if they want to make them worse.
- Replacing at-will with "just cause", progressive disciplining, with criteria for performance improvement plans.
Looking forward to more details & seeing how this plays out, especially as the market collapses (probably will end up looking like amazing timing on their part, btw).
Interestingly, for the people that like to paint unions as wokies, the progressive discipline item (if implemented well) actually _curbs_ 'cancel culture'. Because at-will employment is basically the enforcement mechanism for cancel culture.
Kickstarter may survive since they enjoy near monopoly status, but otherwise how can they compete given that high performers in tech are allergic to unions?
Every major sport in the US has a union so I do not think that unions are antithetical to high performance. Certain kinds of contracts obviously are not great but you don’t have to adopt ‘same job, same pay’ contracts, you can adopt ‘min pay, min benefits’ or ‘min pay, same benefits’ type arrangements. The possibilities are endless. Further, a union contract is just one kind of contract and, as long as they aren’t contradictory, employers and employees can have more than one contract.
This idea that unions MUST be antithetical to the company or performance is silly. We have counterexamples on TV almost every day. Further, the idea that job insecurity is the best way to motivate people to perform also seems silly.
Newsflash: A union can negotiate whatever contract they want. The Kickstarter union isn't associated with something like the UAW that pushes for things like making firing bad performers impossible.
If you read the highlights, they're just asking for documentation on termination and disciplining. Not at all unreasonable.
While I disagree with the idea that high performers are "allergic" to unions, Kickstarter seems like a project that is pretty much done and is in maintenance mode. Developers are going to be seen as a lot more fungible than at a tech-focused company with hard problems that need to be solved, or lofty ambitions that require a lot of innovation. It doesn't seem like they need high performing individual contributors, they just need competent developers who are able to keep things running, fix bugs and make minor enhancements.
>but otherwise how can they compete given that high performers in tech are allergic to unions
If you're talking about keeping 'high performers' in sales, that's what commission is for.
If you're talking about keeping 'high performers' in engineering, ... well, do you even need high performers? Due to the nature of their business, there are no challenging technical feats to accomplish. You really just need solid engineers to push the product and maintain the infrastructure.
> Kickstarter may survive since they enjoy near monopoly status, but otherwise how can they compete given that high performers in tech are allergic to unions?
"high performers" aren't going to be satisfied by Kickstarter's compensation at first place thus won't apply there.
Also good luck arguing to your boss you are a "high performer" in a company that has "progressive performance evaluation", by what measure?
High performers in tech do not have a problem with the heirs who own a majority of their corporation's stock telling them what to do, but are allergic to the people alongside them doing the work and creating the wealth from having input.
I wouldn't call it socialism, I'd call it entitlement and a misplaced notion of digital agency.
They've been raised by iPads and for reasons we'll soon discover have a disproportionate amount of trust in various "platforms" like TikTok etc.
Adults realize platforms in all forms are a farce and feign agency to attract more users. Some people do leverage things like TikTok to market services and see value add - the issue is when children with half-baked ideas of how society work equate this value add to all matter of things. Including degenerate behavior. The ball keeps rolling from here...
At first I thought those were people fighting for better working conditions. After reading the comments I've realized that most are activists trying to enforce cancel culture within the company.
jimmySixDOF|3 years ago
[1] https://medium.com/kickstarter/kickstarter-is-a-pbc-heres-wh...
busterarm|3 years ago
pastor_bob|3 years ago
adam_arthur|3 years ago
Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective, but industry wide unions are effectively a monopoly on labor supply and bad for society. Look no further than the MTA in NYC.
Terrible cost overruns and bad governance of the subway system, for what? So employees can clock extra hours and get egregiously overpaid? No thanks.
Competitive markets produce societally best outcomes, as is proven time and time again throughout history. Competition applies to labor too, by the way
TulliusCicero|3 years ago
Yes, which is why unions are great.
Corporations bargain collectively by default; each is a large unit, with a lot of resources, composed of many people.
Unions allow individuals to bargain collectively, to match corporations in terms of leverage, because few individuals are valuable enough to even come close.
deep_merge|3 years ago
Edit: also, there’s a history of multiple private subway companies in NYC, it didn’t work out.
1. https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2021/01/how-the-mta-...
bjornsing|3 years ago
But it goes off the rails when there’s a big difference in productivity between employees, and it gets even worse when managers are allowed to unionize and use strict labor laws to protect them while they play corporate politics.
Source: I’m Swedish and have seen it myself from most angles.
jasonlotito|3 years ago
Define "societally best outcomes". By using the word "societally", you are saying it's not he best outcome for the business, nor is it the best outcome for the employees, nor the best outcome for the customers, but the best outcome for the society at large. Your MTA example shows that a union is great for workers. Please explain.
Considering unions are used successfully in many industries and are supported by both major parties in the US, you'll have a difficult time explaining how they are all wrong.
> Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective,
Isn't this the KickStarter union?
Also, what's a "Smaller and wide union"?
Finally, if unions are so bad, why do many of the largest companies in the world continue to hire from unions?
granshaw|3 years ago
I personally think current market rates for contractors, esp the staff Aug kind, are still lower than they should be, all things considered
giantg2|3 years ago
My100thaccount|3 years ago
[deleted]
kieselguhr_kid|3 years ago
bjornsing|3 years ago
(It’s like $20k per year, and you’ll pay taxes on that when the day comes. You may have to move to Sweden to survive on it.)
Xeoncross|3 years ago
We're making six figures here. Want more pay? Sit on your butt and do leetcode or practice interviews and network with other rich programmers. Move to a tropical island and work remote. Heck, you don't even need to go to college and just about anything you want to learn is a $9.99 class away or free on in video format.
claytonjy|3 years ago
Not every worker can or wants to work for a FAANG, whether because of skill, time available to study, logistics like location, moral reasons, or anything else. We all deserve good working conditions now and in the future.
Tech workers are absolutely spoiled compared to most other laborers. We also have higher leverage and thus a better chance at unionization compared to many others. Others having it worse should not prevent us from raising our own conditions, and actually helps improve conditions of other classes of laborers by making it more likely they'll unionize themselves or causing employers to improve conditions as a preventative measure.
IE6|3 years ago
FinalBriefing|3 years ago
coryfklein|3 years ago
Do you feel like you already make a lot of money, and you don't need more? If so, there are two actions you could take. You tell me which results in greater good in the world:
1. Don't push or struggle for better pay. Be happy with what you have, and let upper management and stockholder dividends soak up the extra. I'm sure they'll spend it making the world a better place.
2. Organize, push, and struggle to improve your pay. Since you're already happy with the pay level you get, donate all surplus to the charity of your choice. Put your niece through college. Save some of it, then retire earlier and spend more time with your family.
goodpoint|3 years ago
Turns out there are other countries outside of the US. And even in US not all developers are overpaid.
Moreover, software developers are much much more likely to drop out of their career before pension and/or face burnout than other fields.
comrh|3 years ago
syspec|3 years ago
According to Wikipedia:
Net income: $1.3 million after tax (2019)[1]: 1
ghaff|3 years ago
bdcravens|3 years ago
71a54xd|3 years ago
If you hate where you work this much, improve yourself and work somewhere else.
If you're three years into a career in tech (technical or not) and you haven't figured out that being PIP'd or indirectly told you're fucking up - making this language "nicer" isn't going to help anyone.Adults don't give feedback in a transparent way and this is because they don't want to look discriminatory. Modern employment and HR policies have done great things, but they've made the waters for this kind of communication even more opaque and pushed incentives that way as well.
Being unable to effectively communicate in a competitive professional environment as an adult and unionizing to solve this problem is at best juvenile, even worse when you think about long-tail consequences in terms of babying future hires.
As someone who previously worked at Amazon and found it shitty, Amazon is a stupid point of comparison for unionizing in tech because it's a shit-show run like a hedge fund. However, as a heuristic, people who've spent more than two years at any kind of Amazon should be avoided IMO.
giantg2|3 years ago
I would switch if I thought other places wouldn't lie. But it seems to me that all companies do.
You wouldn't buy a house or a new car without a contract. It seems stupid to me to enter a job without a real contract (as opposed the the ones we see now that are basically "we the company make the rules and can change them with or without notice anytime").
arrrg|3 years ago
Organizing means you want more power, more control.
Also, there are many dimensions to liking or disliking your workplace. You may love the product your working on. You may really like your colleagues. You may also love the office environment. However, you may dislike the amount of vacation days, the lack of ability to work part time or the lack of paternal leave.
Workplaces have literally hundreds of properties, each of which you may like or dislike. So organizing to tweak those you dislike (while, on balance, you actually still like most properties) is very normal.
pessimizer|3 years ago
What is this a reference to? Do you think at-will employment has something to do with woke language or am I reading this wrong?
TulliusCicero|3 years ago
Perhaps it might be different in tech, where software engineers are usually already very well paid. Hard to say.
bestcoder69|3 years ago
Objective criteria for PIPs has nothing to do with niceness. Are you aware that this is a standard part of union contracts in general... like one of the first things usually negotiated?
> Adults don't give feedback in a transparent way and this is because they don't want to look discriminatory. Modern employment and HR policies have done great things, but they've made the waters for this kind of communication even more opaque and pushed incentives that way as well.
If I'm understanding your comment correctly, you're against opaque communications? Then, establishing these criteria in a contract is as transparent as you can get.
0des|3 years ago
pessimizer|3 years ago
Unions are weak because the deck was stacked, the same way it is in every kleptocracy.
xeromal|3 years ago
FrancoisBosun|3 years ago
bjornsing|3 years ago
toomuchtodo|3 years ago
jjcon|3 years ago
anamexis|3 years ago
pgwhalen|3 years ago
throw_m239339|3 years ago
I think they changed CEO recently, no? It seems like the ex-CEO, one of the founder, wasn't "a good cultural fit" after all. They had a round of layoffs a few years ago where some activist employees were weeded out, seems like it didn't work.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
t34egr|3 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
granshaw|3 years ago
vivekmgeorge|3 years ago
FuriouslyAdrift|3 years ago
sershe|3 years ago
Just kidding, I think unions are pure evil, and the above is not even the worst one of the many reasons.
bestcoder69|3 years ago
- Minimum 3% annual CoL raises
- Profit-sharing bonuses
- Putting their current benefits in the contract, so management will have to re-negotiate if they want to make them worse.
- Replacing at-will with "just cause", progressive disciplining, with criteria for performance improvement plans.
Looking forward to more details & seeing how this plays out, especially as the market collapses (probably will end up looking like amazing timing on their part, btw).
Interestingly, for the people that like to paint unions as wokies, the progressive discipline item (if implemented well) actually _curbs_ 'cancel culture'. Because at-will employment is basically the enforcement mechanism for cancel culture.
s1artibartfast|3 years ago
Weird that they call it a CoL raise. If it isn't tied to cost, it is just an minimum annual raise.
no_butterscotch|3 years ago
What does "progressive disciplining" mean? I like the idea of criteria for being pipped, though I wonder if Kickstarter had a pip culture like Amazon.
Kharvok|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
gorwell|3 years ago
dpierce9|3 years ago
This idea that unions MUST be antithetical to the company or performance is silly. We have counterexamples on TV almost every day. Further, the idea that job insecurity is the best way to motivate people to perform also seems silly.
pastor_bob|3 years ago
If you read the highlights, they're just asking for documentation on termination and disciplining. Not at all unreasonable.
mjr00|3 years ago
bigbillheck|3 years ago
You can prove anything from a false premise.
kirykl|3 years ago
macspoofing|3 years ago
If you're talking about keeping 'high performers' in sales, that's what commission is for.
If you're talking about keeping 'high performers' in engineering, ... well, do you even need high performers? Due to the nature of their business, there are no challenging technical feats to accomplish. You really just need solid engineers to push the product and maintain the infrastructure.
throw_m239339|3 years ago
"high performers" aren't going to be satisfied by Kickstarter's compensation at first place thus won't apply there.
Also good luck arguing to your boss you are a "high performer" in a company that has "progressive performance evaluation", by what measure?
This is a none issue.
unknown|3 years ago
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VictorPath|3 years ago
High performers in tech do not have a problem with the heirs who own a majority of their corporation's stock telling them what to do, but are allergic to the people alongside them doing the work and creating the wealth from having input.
t34egr|3 years ago
[deleted]
t34egr|3 years ago
[deleted]
71a54xd|3 years ago
They've been raised by iPads and for reasons we'll soon discover have a disproportionate amount of trust in various "platforms" like TikTok etc.
Adults realize platforms in all forms are a farce and feign agency to attract more users. Some people do leverage things like TikTok to market services and see value add - the issue is when children with half-baked ideas of how society work equate this value add to all matter of things. Including degenerate behavior. The ball keeps rolling from here...
oaththrowaway|3 years ago
What an ignorant comment
handsaway|3 years ago
[deleted]
DeathArrow|3 years ago