> We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is to organize your coworkers. You have much more bargaining power about your work conditions as an organized union. The history of unionization stems primarily from workers demanding safe working environments.
You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you.
The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
The company doesn't want to give anyone a raise. They are not happy to give anyone a raise. Companies do not willingly increase their costs, full stop.
You could maybe make an argument that companies may increase wages for high performers for retention reasons, because needing to replace valuable employees is a large, if somewhat intangible cost, but that's pretty iffy. Companies are made up of and managed by humans, who are notoriously short-sighted and willing to discount potential risks when there are financial incentives to do so.
50% of the time Joe Useless makes more than you do already, because they joined later and market rate for the position shifted upward. You'll still need to fight tooth and nail, alone, individually, to reach parity, even if you're a top performer. Your manager isn't usually going to say "hmm, we're paying Joe Useless 1.2X, while we're paying Sally Superlative 1.0X--we really should pay Sally 2.0X! Your manager will be overruled by the CFO if they do suggest this anyway. Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
Ultimately, I'd prefer a system where Joe Useless and I fight for equal wage increases collectively, because the balance of power is such that we're more likely to get them than each of us going it alone. Joe Useless is gonna be there anyway unless the company decides they're so useless as to fire them. So long as Joe Useless is there in the same role as I am, I don't care if they get equal pay, especially not if they're helping in the fight for increases in our equal pay.
> Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
In that case, instead of banding together with Joe Useless to strong-arm the company into setting money on fire (from management's perspective), you're better off changing companies as frequently as the market will tolerate.
False dichotomy. You can do both, and an industry-wide effort to exercise our collective power would likely increase the salaries obtained via either route.
The problem is that you are more likely to get a wage increase. Not a wage increase that moves the needle for you individually.
I love seeing the “union fought for years, after many strikes employees ‘win’ and get a 5% wage increase over the next 4 years” news articles, but they never strike me as something that I’d want to apply to me.
Certainly my company is increasing wages for high performers. They may not be happy to do so, but they’ll do it to retain talent they desperately need.
I imagine this would be different if the sector I was in was different, but right now, for software development, it doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s too much variation in skill levels to collectively bargain for anything.
> You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you.
What if you're the Joe Useless on your team and you don't know it? A lot of people here seem to think they're the 10X dude but what if they're the 0.1X dude lol. What if you're really the 10X dude but your manager thinks you're the 0.1X dude because they don't like you as a person?
Those systems have good and bad sides to them, but I do think the good outweighs the bad.
I think the 0.1X guys (though I wouldn't use that term) tend to not be here as work is just work for them, not a hobby they are absorbed in at all hours.
Not saying that's healthy but I'm sure being on HN has a strong selection bias on 10X people :)
I've worked with many people with varying degrees of competence and I find that the "go out and satisfy your curiosity" is strictly an above average thing.
The average people tend to rely more on courses and certificates, anything approved by the vendor. And they tend to align with the vendor's gospel. If something is not in the training or documentation it doesn't exist. They are the kind of people that will just open a ticket when something doesn't work and go through the hoops for months :)
The really good ones don't really care about such things and just dive into a problem until they thoroughly understand it using any trip of resources necessary (ideally peer to peer info because official info, from the vendor tends to be politically/marketing biased). I would definitely put HN in the latter category.
But I don't think they are useless. The former are really good in operational roles and the latter more in design and architectural ones.
Those that want to rewrite everything in the cool tech of the day, or want to TDD everything or write Electron applications work maybe not at 0.1x but certainly 0.5x of the ability of a normal programmer.
> The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
Then don't organize the union to work like that. A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
> A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
Are you a member of any union? the #1 thing they do is secure a collective bargaining agreement which precisely spells out the pay structure for everyone covered.
You have options choose a pay structure as a union. There is not a single pay structure to which all unions must adhere.
The suggestion is that Joe and Sally must be paid the same even though Joe is "useless". That is not the case. When creating a union, you can choose a different pay structure. The Screen Actors Guild, for instance, has very wide variation in how much members are paid.
The free-rider problem applies to basically any system with cohorts. It's part of the incentive structure, for sure, but it's not the only part. As long as you accept utility in collective systems (ie if you're anything but a pure anarcho-capitalist), you recognize that in some cases (such as public roads) the value outweigh the costs of the free-rider problems. Once you're past that point, it should be all about tradeoffs and execution. Yet, in the US at least, a strict set of specific issues – like organizing employees and health insurance – brings out the free-rider issue every time, conveniently deadlocking the conversation before it even begins.
I have noticed in the US more than anywhere else I've lived, the most important thing to everyone seems to be that no one gets anything unfairly. I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.
It’s a perennial wedge issue in American politics. These wedge issues ultimately benefit the two party system at the expense of the governed, as the underlying issues are never resolved, just papered over for a term or so.
It's a strange attitude, to be sure. In my experience, many Americans have the view of "if it's not perfect, it's not worth doing" when it comes to large-scale social or legal concepts. It's like they don't accept that there's going to be inefficiencies in any large organization.
And, yes, so many rail against something like single-payer healthcare because it would be "unfair" for them to pay for someone else's care, when they already are doing the exact same thing as part of private healthcare! Not to mention it would be cheaper, but paying $5,000 for single payer is seen as evil when people are paying $10,000 for private healthcare! (both figures are simply illustrative and not intended to be factual examples, before anyone rips my head off)
The private healthcare insurance industry is a private coverage holders’ Potemkin village prisoners’ dilemma, holding uninsured potential free riders hostage to prevent a sunk cost fallacy from becoming a self fulfilling prophesy of the insureds’ own design.
> I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
It's a big generalization to say that, because one side of an ideological divide behaves one way, the other side must, too! I think rather the Democrats (we don't really have a Liberal party) are a party that takes some tentative steps in the direction that it's better for everyone to have something, even if there are some people who don't deserve it; that is, that the malady you diagnose is a Republican, not an American, preoccupation.
Of course you can look back in history and find instances where Democrats have embraced such positions, too, and you can find plenty of odious things even in today's Democratic platform, but I think that today's Democratic party is consciously, if very slowly, trying to distance itself from exactly the mindset that you describe. But maybe I'm blinding myself to this behaviour in an attempt to justify my adherence to the lesser of two evils. Do you have examples?
I'm not saying that everyone must behave the same way, I'm saying that capital L Liberals here are not really that different from capital C Conservatives in any way except degree. Both would rank as lowercase c conservative compared to most of the rest of the West and both have this mindset that I have only really noticed in America.
I specifically am not using Republican and Democrat because the parties are not really important to the point. Libertarians and Greens also have this "imperfection is worse than nothing" mindset.
An example where Liberals needed to relax and not let perfect be the enemy of the good was the 2016 presidential election (and almost 2020 as well). The number of people who said things like, "I know Trump might win if I don't vote for Hillary, but too bad!" was so high that it actually happened.
That's true. The point I was trying to make is that everyone-but-ancaps implicitly support at least one collective system. I just picked that one because it's rare.
This is strangely individualist; maybe the company or your team would fall apart without him and he's doing something you don't personally know how to measure.
Or just to do what he did. Ian Goodfellow and probably all his team will have no problem finding another job in the condition they want. Apple don't have any monopole on AI jobs.
Your biggest power, the option of resigning to work somewhere else, is still with you. You just get backup from the union for when you don't want to exercise that power.
Well, since the original question before we got distracted was about flexibility in how you work, you definitely give that up as part of a union. Your collective agreement will spell out how, when and where you work, how much you get paid and also compel you do to things in support of the union, even if you don't agree with them. Those are all pretty big individual powers.
Since we're on the topic of remote, why do you think the union agreement would not state location of work being 'member's preference' rather than a specific location?
The problem with this question is there are people, like me, for whom the answer is "a lot". I have repeatedly gotten my employer to do things for me that they would not have done on their own. They need me more than I need them, and we both know it.
This is also by the way the main dissenting opinion in the recent Amazon union vote. There were several people who were interviewed by the economist as voting no, who said that they'd never had a bad interaction with HR and had gotten everything that they asked for.
This is not the one-sided issue that pro-union activists act like it is, and that level of ignorance is what is holding them back.
Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer. I'm worth more than the average employee at my company, so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer.
On the other hand, if a union imposes some broad agreement on the company under threat of strikes, I can't convince my company to break that agreement on my own because I'm not more valuable than the entire rest of the company combined.
A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
This feels a little contrived. I work for an organisation with trade union representation and yes there is an agreed pay structure in place. This doesn't prevent management identifying particularly critical people and those people being rewarded/incentivised outside the norms of the pay scales (I am one of these people). Sometimes specific cases are discussed in the management/union meetings but not often and even then it's just a matter of management saying "Yeah that guy is the world's greatest widget engineer if he leaves we're screwed so we created a new job to keep him here".
It doesn't really go beyond that unless it's perceived that management are routinely violating the spirit of agreements and/or when the relationship between the union and management has already completely broken down.
The trading with a grocery store is heavily regulated as well. They have requirements for storage and handling, their scales have to be calibrated, and there can be very strict fines for things like screwing around with sale prices.
The behaviour, motivation, and goals of individuals (including your boss and CEO) working for a business very rarely has anything to do with the goals of the business itself. There is a lot of pretend going on, but that is mostly just surface BS. Why do you think CEO’s spend billions buying back shares instead of using that money to invest in new products and other innovations that will make the business more successful long term? Could it perhaps be (gasp! horror!) that they care more about personal enrichment than making the business successful long term?
> Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways
I'm sad that you think this, and would urge you to analyze your situation to see if it's really true. My one piece of advice is that companies seek to minimize cost centers, but invest in profit centers. Get out of the former and in to the latter.
Cost centers: anything that improves your experience as an employee.
It’s smart to move out of it, but the fact that you have to in order to progress is a clear indicator why companies will perpetually undervalue talent - even in competitive markets.
> but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways.
This really isn’t true. What you’re describing isn’t even a zero sum game it’s negative sum, where hurting the other party is among your goals in itself. The company is interested in using you to make money and for many purposes happy, satisfied employees who are growing in productivity are good. All of those are also things the employees usually want.
Are employee and company interests fully aligned? Absolutely not, but if your employer’s interests are almost completely opposed to yours get out.
The completely different industry structure. The film and theater industries work on time limited projects with a defined beginning, end and deliverable and most teams break up at the end of each project. Under those circumstances all a union can do to protect members is dualise, making lives better for insiders and harder for outsiders by restricting entry.
Long lasting organizations that have multiple overlapping projects with unions end up with compressed wage structures because the union campaigns for the median worker and the structure does not militate against that.
> Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer.
Say, I am not.
> so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer
I cannot, see above. Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
Well, based on the fact that I'm part of the majority i.e. not as valuable as you, it works very well for us (who are not the World's Greatest Widget Engineer).
> Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
No, I do not believe you are entitled to a wealth transfer from people who are better at your job than you are. (Or, to put it another way, you're certainly free to do a little collective bargaining if you'd like, but the World's Greatest Widget Engineer has no reason to join your union.)
I think a lot of devs are led to believe they're the World's Greatest Widget Engineer but what they've really fallen for is the "Hank Hill Special Deal" lol.
Why hasn't he been promoted to management? Most companies don't have a career track for the single most productive IC ever, and he's probably capable of improving other people's work anyway if he managed them.
Because being an effective individual contributor and being an effective manager require different skills? Because the goal of a software company is at least nominally to produce software, and paying people who are good at producing software to produce software is how you produce software?
Even if you did promote your best engineer, that just means that a different employee at your company is now your best engineer and the same dynamics apply. (Until, of course, you promote everyone competent to management, and then your organization is doomed to slowly suffocate itself. Then it's beyond saving, union or no union.)
Thats ok - they are one in a million anyway. We are talking about people in general, not exceptional diamonds (they clearly can take care of themselves).
If you can become an enemy of the union simply by being good at your individual-contributor job, maybe that's why unions haven't really taken off in software engineering.
I'd venture a guess that the variance in quality between a set of "professional" electricians and another set of "professional" developers is different by an order of magnitude.
Said another way, I can go down to the union hall and pick an electrician randomly and have a great deal more confidence in that person's ability than I could choosing a random developer off of LinkedIn to write my application.
I think certifications have something to do with this, but it's also the complete lack of understanding of what makes someone a good developer by management... this is entirely the fault of management and I don't blame a developer for trying to "fake it til you make it."
As a person not necessarily opposed to labor unions, I'm curious as to how the previous post was hyperbolic? Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal, so let's not act like union folks are all saints.
>Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal
What do you base this on? Movies?
Telling someone to strap on a helmet isn't a threat of violence to a reasonable person. Putting a stuffed rat on a ledge near someone's bed is also not a threat of violence. If it had a noose or something, you'd have a better argument.
Here's actual violence done against picketers and looked the other way by police in Alabama:
But cross a picket-line or hire on as a scab during a strike in a small town and you'd best watch your back... hence the motivation for the "wear a helmet" comment. My hometown was founded on steel and railroads and I knew of more than one person growing up that got jumped for not toeing the line and playing ball with the union.
I see what you are saying. Yes, violence begets violence, certainly. I would also argue that while not defending the morality, the violence against scabs are done by rogue individuals while violence against picketers are coordinated by using companies known for strikebreaking. The company typically yields a much stronger threat of violence than any individual union individual can, and has more sympathy of the "law."
The history of it is quite fascinating. Here's an example.
I'm in Montana these days and just finished a book by Michael Punke about the Butte Mining Disaster. It does a fairly good job of pointing out how basically we're all assholes when you get down to it.
Yes, you would be compelled to support union actions, such as job action in support of collective goals you don't agree with, and get to pay for the right to do so as well. You would not be allowed to negotiate individual concessions for work or skill beyond the norm. Everyone is even more focused on "fair outcomes" (read: the same) than in any non-union environment.
We're not interchangeable cogs in some manufacturing machine; we're extremely skilled experts in the biggest seller's market of our careers. Why anyone would want to unionize right now is beyond me.
According to a family friend who worked for the UAW (the huge American auto workers union) the answer to this is yes. I suspect the answer is actually "it depends", but I don't know of any documented examples of unions whose members are allowed to make a separate peace. There are people in the comments who it sounds like have done so, perhaps they can weigh in on the mechanism.
It’s a such a coincidence that those are the same talking points the employees were forced to here during the many mandatory meeting. Also interesting that the NLRB found those forced meetings illegal.
Every year, Australian employees are entitled to 4 weeks of paid annual leave, two weeks of paid sick leave, 6 months of paid long service leave after 10 years of employment, about 10% of their salary paid into their retirement investments (superannuation).
Unions even up the negotiation power imbalance between employers and workers. Union power has been severely curtailed over the last few decades and as a consequence workers have seen stagnant wages, rising inequality of compensation and the rise of insecure work.
There's plenty of evidence to support the assertion that collective bargaining leads to better outcomes for workers. A rising tide lifts all boats.
> Those laws were a consequence of industrial action by unions.
You didn’t read my message, because this is what I already said. Unions helped push it into law. The unions are all but dead in the US, but weekends are still here because it is a law. What value do the unions provide now?
They have weekends in China and it’s not because of any labor movement. Working conditions and compensation increase because of supply and demand dynamics, which unions are a part of but not necessary for. For another example of countries that do not tolerate independent labor movements where economic growth led to better working conditions see Vietnam.
I have lived in China for the past 11 years. Middle income countries like China (average income per capita same as Thailand) often have people working more than five days a week. That’s a choice. Taking convenience stores as an example FamilyMart has six day weeks with 16 hour shifts. Lawson’s and 7-11, I think have five day work weeks with nine hour shifts. FamilyMart workers make as much as university graduates starting in decent companies.
There are similar splits in professional level work. There are jobs available where you ~never work six days a week and others where it’s routine. Trust me when I say no one at Nike or Booking in Shanghai is working 996.
My logic does not suggest the lack of unions and organized labor causes six day weeks. Six or seven day working weeks are the natural condition. Economic growth allows for different consumption leisure trade offs. Unions can only very indirectly effect economic growth. They matter much less than the ability to quit your job and find a new one easily. Firms desperate for workers are what make working conditions better, much more than unions.
Why? A totalitarian/authoritarian government that bans strikes where all worker’s organizations work hand in glove with the government and management describes fascist and communist approaches to unions perfectly. The historical roots of the ruling party are hardly relevant.
What power? You as an individual employee have absolutely no power to change Apple's behavior. Case in point the director of this story quitting because they couldn't convince Apple to change.
As the other comment mentioned the biggest individual power you have is quitting and a union doesn't prevent that.
Your lawyer is your agent. A lawyer representing a group of which you are a part is representing the group, and your interests and the groups can diverge.
Until you want something different from those who wield power in the union. At least I can quit my job and work for a different company. In heavily unionized industries, you can't escape.
Having seen how several family members fared in union jobs (several different unions), I swore I'd never belong to a union or work any job that required me to be part of one.
They all had such an adversarial relationship with work. It's always us against them mentality. They could never see anyone in management as a human. I can't imagine living like that.
As far as I can tell, the unions didn't ever solve any of their biggest gripes, took money out of their paychecks for lots of non-work related political activities, and didn't come through when they really needed to on things like pensions or healthcare.
I have the same feeling having seen family members in unions. My mother is a really hard worker, and plays by the rules, and that means nothing in her union while her colleagues abuse sick policies, push more work into her and so on. All what matters there is tenure, not the quality of employee you are. My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
>All what matters there is tenure, not the quality of employee you are.
From what I understand is this is done because it's the fairest way. Unions, like anything, can be corrupted. It would be funny if the union rep's nephew always got promotions over other people. This is an attempt to prevent that. In other words, it's the least-worst way of doing it.
>My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
Possibly. In my experience, it's usually in the form of a $5 Starbucks gift card every year. It really depends on the position and the company. I've seen a lot of hard ass workers get treated like shit.
Since we’re doing anecdotes, a member of my family is an airline pilot and a member of the pilots union. It has been extremely effective in negotiating better working conditions and higher pay for my family member. Keep in mind that, absent union representation, being a pilot can be absolutely punishing, to the point of being dangerous.
Also, the company is able to maintain very high standards for the quality and skill of the pilots. There are not “useless Joe’s”, as evidenced by the fact that the planes don’t crash.
This family member is a diehard conservative politically but openly espouses the value of the union for representing his interests against the company.
is it possible that adversarial relationship might exist even without a union but it would just be hidden?
personally, i think i would prefer a co-ownership (coop) scheme than union, since that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers... idk just a thought
> is it possible that adversarial relationship might exist even without a union but it would just be hidden?
It wouldn't happen in other countries because the US has a uniquely adversarial union structure, where Europe uses codetermination (ICs with board seats) and sectoral bargaining (don't have to convert one company at a time).
> that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers
This is only true if everyone has exactly the same responsibilities, hours, working conditions and pay. All differences lead to divergences of interest.
well, there will always be a divergence (no two people have the exact same needs or wants) but i would argue being co-owner with others helps as a forcing function to help converge interests (you wouldn't be happy with a co-worker slacking off since they're also wasting your money/time not just 'the companys')
and there are many successful co-ops where people have different responsibilities, hours and pay, i don't think that is a requirement for co-ownership (though the variance is definitely less than traditional top-down orgs thats for sure)
I now try to convince anyone who cold-calls me to join a trade union.
The employer can’t be all that good if they’re ignoring the do-not-call registry. And I think it slightly increases the chances of bad actors ceasing cold-calling.
The NLRA says "Nothing herein shall prohibit any individual employed as a supervisor from becoming or remaining a member of a labor organization, but no employer subject to this Act [subchapter] shall be compelled to deem individuals defined herein as supervisors as employees for the purpose of any law, either national or local, relating to collective bargaining."
...which effectively states that if a supervisor joins a union it's a no-op. The employer is not required to acknowledge their membership. In practice, unions specifically exclude managers for a bunch of obvious reasons related to their ability to bargain effectively on behalf of their members.
Your manager likely joined a union-ish entity open to supervisors. IIUC such entities are not protected by the NLRA and as such have few of the legal powers and protections that make a union a union. They’re basically affinity groups.
This means that manager unions do not gain the traditional protections from the law that other unions do. But - if a manager union and employer come to some agreement despite this fact, it has legal weight and the union can sue if the employer breaks the contract (and vice versa).
Managers, at least at the higher level like being discussed here, arguably do not need as many protections in order to be able to collectively bargain: Apple is likely to be much more concerned (and thus much more willing to negotiate) about 20 "Director of X" employees leaving than 20 engineers.
Besides SAG-AFTRA, lawyers and doctors also have unions and it's essentially the only reason they're highly respected, since they've psyched everyone into thinking they're rare and valuable by making themselves rare.
Nonsense, the screen actors and writers guilds are formal unions and their members include all of the top Hollywood stars that pull down 7 figure+ paychecks from films.
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is to organize your coworkers. You have much more bargaining power about your work conditions as an organized union. The history of unionization stems primarily from workers demanding safe working environments.