[susanasj]

I think this is a good article for tech workers to read to provide perspective on our place in the tech economy (particularly Americans): https://organizing.work/2020/12/there-is-something-missing-f...

particularly this part: > Early on in my own career in the industry, I felt guilty about making a “good” salary. Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? Of course, I don’t — they deserve a lot more too. But if I was making less it would go straight into the pockets of investors, not other workers. Tech workers’ labor has made six of the world’s ten richest people, and today computing and the internet are an integral part of every industry. Although some workers are highly paid, the differential between investor profits and employee salary is as stark as in any other industry, because workers are not organized.

it's true that tech workers frequently make good money and we should be grateful for that, but when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce. It's how inequality is increased. It's no coincidence that the rise of the tech economy has coincided with American inequality rising sharply.

[michaelchisari]

| Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse?

My tech salary, adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly what my RN mother was making when she was my age.

Maybe our salaries aren't that extraordinary, they're just the only ones that have kept up with inflation.

Don't feel guilty about a tech salary, feel angry others been left behind.

[subpixel]

Only a hundred years ago, a bunch of immigrants from places like Germany or Spain or Italy could arrive in New England (including New York City), perform manual labor, provide for their families on one income, and pool their additional money to _build whole buildings_ as social or fraternal clubs.

That really puts things into perspective for me.

[bobthepanda]

Not only inflation but with debt.

You can do extremely well with just a Bachelor’s in CS. Professions like nursing, medicine, law, even business have had their earning potential sapped by larger and larger costs of education. And degrees past Bachelor’s are less well supported by financial aid schemes.

[mkmk3]

Why is sibling black_'s comment dead when they just provided an anecdote backing the parent comment? Or is the 1% talk controversial here?

[black_13]

My salary now adjusted for inflation is exactly where i was in 1999. Having more money in the hands of those not in the 1% would make a better country. The 1% and above engage in deeply risky behavior.

[tbrownaw]

"deserve" doesn't exist. What does exist is "what price makes the market clear".

Assigned moral worth or whatever "deserve" is trying to get at has nothing to do with economics.

[7sidedmarble]

Why shouldn't we have ethical opinions about the economy?

[TaylorAlexander]

I phrase things like this: the lack of real labor power through unions or ideally worker cooperatives leads to bad deals for workers. It would be in the interest of workers to build collective power and demand better compensation or start their own cooperatives to guarantee higher pay and benefits.

This has to be said because collective action necessarily requires convincing a lot of people to do it. But either way this language avoids the claim of right and wrong and simply focuses on the fact that workers today get a bad deal due to poor bargaining power.

It’s also not just about markets. The federal government places severe restrictions on what organized labor can do to advocate for itself: Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 Aka “Taft-Hartley Act” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft–Hartley_Act

[slg]

This is only true if you think "economics" and "capitalism" are the same thing.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

One of the memes that you frequently see in the upper middle class left-leaning tech worker circles is that anything less than a worker co-op is ultimately an organizational structure that is inequitable and exploitative to its labor force, leading to negative externalities for society at large.

I'm 100% ignorant of the history of labor and of all philosophical dialectic around it, but I would love to form an opinion on this. Would someone mind steel manning both sides of that argument?

E.g. I have questions like, if I'm the founder of a company and I sell it 10 years later and make most of the upside, did I exploit my employees because they didn't make as much as I did in the end?

[runarberg]

This is a really good question, and there isn’t a clear answer. I’m only answering this from the left point of view though, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Traditional labor theory can make arguments for both, if you put in most of the work, then you deserve most of the benefits. However the case for equal pay is also solid, especially if the fruits of labor are abundant. How much does 5 million give you that 1 million doesn’t, and why shouldn’t you settle for 1 million if it means everyone would get more?

But from a leftist perspective there is a fault in the question (but it is still a good question). Namely that you sell the business. In an ideal left world, you wouldn’t do that. The business belongs to the workers. If the workers can all form a consensus that it is time to leave the business and sell it to another set of workers—those that leave will be bought out basically—then this is a valid scenario. However if under a new leadership, some workers are receiving more benefits then others, then that is exploitation. I would say actually that the new leadership is exploiting their previous workforce by spending the money the workers created by buying a new business without their consent.

So in short, you as the founder of the business that was bought, are enabling exploitation by selling it to a larger organization (unless you sell it to a worker owned and operated business).

[scarmig]

Argument for the meme:

Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance, in the USA the general strike was a powerful tool in the arsenal of workers' power and drove substantial wage gains, but disrupted capital too much and as such is banned by the NLRB. Since unions' scope is limited to accounting, law, and mediation, they become mostly administrative organizations staffed increasingly by members of the professional services class. These people can never provide leadership that primarily serves the working class, as their economic interests diverge and they can't do anything that would threaten their social good standing.

Argument against:

An economy dominated by worker co-ops is just wishful thinking. We have no idea how to get from point A to B, and no idea if it would even work. The limited evidence we have for that kind of economic structure comes from post WW2 Yugoslavia and suggests it wouldn't ("they just didn't do it right!" invites the question of how we do do it right). Conventional unions do shift some of the capital pie to workers, and we shouldn't let a very hypothetical best be the enemy of the concrete good. And even if worker co-ops are the ideal, any path that gets us there requires more worker power, so stronger unions would be a good first step to getting us to that point.

[susanasj]

I forgot I posted this comment so just seeing this but as an upper middle class lefty tech worker I'll offer an answer.

I think your question is a bit too focused on the individual and not the system. I think it's actually difficult for founders to share the upside "equitably", whatever that means. Like, are there any examples of it actually happening? I suspect that the acquiring company frequently dictates terms that won't allow you to make every employee a millionaire because then what incentive do they have to work anymore. I think once you get to the multi billion dollar level of wealth it's difficult to get objective advice - many of the people surrounding you are just trying to please you to continue getting their slice of the vast wealth that you control. So just as a human it's hard to navigate that I think (this is me being sympathetic to billionaires, which I'm generally not).

The much easier answer to me is just much higher taxes on wealth. Capitalism is not a system built to share resources equitably, but inequality can be tamed through taxes. If you as a founder see most of the upside, fine, but a lot of it will get redistributed to society through taxes, and theoretically your workers benefit from that. It also means it's not up to the whims of the individual people or companies involved in something like an acquisition to try to make it equitable.

(another way inequality in capitalism can be tamed is through unions, but I don't know if there are any examples of unions being involved in something like an acquisition or IPO in tech)

[berniedurfee]

Yes

[edent]

The traditional view is that "The workers control the means of production".

Suppose you built a successful small company but, suddenly, every employee quit at once. Could your business carry on the next day? Could it survive until you hired and trained replacements?

If the answer is "no" then you have made the case that employees both deserve to share in the business's success and will probably be incentivised by co-owning the company.

Does the janitor deserve as much of the profits as the CTO? Well, what premium do you put on your other employees not getting sick, or injuring themselves?

(Wasn't there a case where a Google chef made a fortune from stocks? Much to the chagrin of some?)

The opposite argument is that those who risk capital are the only ones who deserve the reward. Without investment, a company can't launch or grow. Workers are an operational cost - they are paid for labour and no more deserving of reward than the electricity company. Both provide a service but neither takes a risk.

[surement]

> Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse?

prices are largely based on supply and demand, not some vague notion of "deserve"

[jessehattabaugh]

> prices are largely based on supply and demand

Then we'd better unionize before AI starts doing all the easy stuff

[cycomanic]

If they would be based on supply and demand shouldn't nurses salaries gone through the roof recently? In every country I read the news shortage of nurses (and teachers to a lesser degree) is a huge topic and many places are badly understaffed. So why did their salaries not increase dramtically?

[berniedurfee]

Would the world be a better place if supply and demand weren’t the only factors in the compensation equation?

[quags]

For your three examples getting early into theses stocks, say stock compensation, or employee stock purchases would have produced outsized returns up until a few months ago. Much of the wealth is not from salary and simply stock compensation. Musk/bezos/zuck became billionaires on stock price alone. Early employees at these companies became millionaires many times over. But this is backwards looking and a survivor ship bias - for every one of these companies there companies who didn’t make it big , or value went to zero.

[Aunche]

>when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce

The workers that built the foundations of these companies received stock options or RSUs over a decade ago and reached FATFIRE territory as well. Had they unionized, the companies they worked for wouldn't be able to reinvest as much money into growth, which would be compounded by a lack of external investors. In that case, they would lose to an unionized competitor.

[RickJWagner]

Why pick on those 'oligarchs'?

How about the Media moguls? A pretty good argument can be made that media oligarchs produce less value, but they dominate financial and political circles.

[ncr100]

+1 Worker-Unions-conversation-point for using "oligarch" in a comment. /jk

The comment about "used to feel bad about making a lot of money" hits home for me, when I compare my wages to other family members who're struggling. Thanks for the perspective, it helps open me up a bit more about this.

Great information in the link, too - helps to consider whether and how a Union might be attractive, under various workplace circumstances.

[moneywoes]

My worry is bringing unions in the US tech industry will just accelerate off shoring especially with super fast growing companies like Deel

What are your thoughts?

[scruple]

Outsourcing technical work comes in waves. I've seen it up-close-and-personal 3 times. It's worked once and the magic that went into making it work (one of the founders moved back to his home country and started a consultancy that was contracted by the original business) in that specific instance isn't something that is easily replicated.

[devmor]

With the price of tech labor in places like Pakistan and India on the rise, that won't be sustainable for long.

[azemetre]

Well if there was an actual union in place there would be general strikes. A company that lost all IT/SWE staff for the period of the strike may be more open to negotiations.

[nec4b]

>> Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse?

You should ask your clients or employers.

[themitigating]

As opposed to John Deere or Exxon?

[whiddershins]

This is an intrinsically Marxist framing.

Even if inequality is rising, so is wealth overall. That’s what Marx misestimated, although it wasn’t his most grievous error.

Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago.

I am personally willing to accept the he existence of some billionaires if that’s the price we pay for all this wonderful ness.

[ClumsyPilot]

> Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago.

There is no material improvement in wealth over the past 20 years, but inequality has grown.

Wealth is produced by innovation, and greater concentratuon of wealth will lead to less innovation.

[ResearchCode]

Compare to 30 years ago instead. Wealth in terms of being able to buy property is decreasing in many countries, which can be more significant than any increased ability to buy consumer gadgets (that will spy on you). And the countries with less wealth inequality don't in principle have less wealthy common people.

[mcguire]

On one hand, as long as your political opinions align with those of the ultra-wealthy then the inequality shouldn't bother you.

On the other, high inequality is socially unstable because that is not generally the case.

[scarmig]

Marx didn't predict that capitalism wouldn't generate wealth. On the contrary, he believed it was the most economically revolutionary structure the world had yet devised and would create untold wealth. That's entirely consistent with the world we see.

To be very specific, where he fell short was predicting a secular decline in the rate of profit. This wasn't a crazy error--most early economists also believed it--but it was very wrong, and his analysis of the failure of capitalism rests on that false premise.