Here's a detailed look at how total compensation compares between the private sector and federal positions by education level: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235
The key takeaways:
- staffers with high school or some college make more, on average, working for federal gov't, primarily due to the benefits. But it's an exaggeration to describe the difference as "unparalleled"
- comp is roughly equivalent for holders of bachelor's
- comp for holders of professional degrees or doctorates (JD, MD, MBA, PhD) is significantly lower on average for federal jobs
Intersting, I didn't realize there's a relationship.
But Wikipedia says:
> Lexmark was formed on March 27, 1991, when investment firm Clayton & Dubilier completed a leveraged buyout of IBM Information Products Corporation, the printer, typewriter, and keyboard operations of IBM
Lexmark being IBM’s former printer division is well known. Former employees purchased the keyboard business from Lexmark and made Unicomp.
Meanwhile, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was IBM’s hard drive division and Lenovo was their PC division. IBM has sold off so many parts of itself over the years it is surprising there is much left.
Yep, I still have a couple or three Model M keyboards, and although all are IBM branded, if you disassemble them you'll find that, depending on the year, they were IBM or Lexmark manufactured.
Also, IBM laser printers from the 4019, 4029, 4039... series started to appear branded as Lexmark. At least if I remember correctly from when my father worked at a bank. Our equipment at home was a less fancy IBM Proprinter XL24. Noisy!
This was the pre-Gerstner era of the “Baby Blues”: Lexmark, AdStar, Pennant, Eduquest, Advantis/ISSC, and some others I’ve forgotten. In the end IBM spun off Lexmark, Federal Systems (to Loral), AdStar never spun out but was the division sold to Hitachi. Lexmark was “small” printers and keyboards, Pennant was the room sized beasts. Advantis became IBM Global Network, sold to AT&T in 2000.
They are unionized employees who have collectively decided to go on strike. They are likely not being paid anything at the moment. Their benefits may lapse if it's an extremely extended strike (although that would probably be unlikely).
This looks like a normal union activity: using the skills of their trade to get more attention from a wider public.
To be honest, I do have open questions about unionized approaches to labor in software-only technology businesses. But many sectors are already well established in having unionized labor. The US news media is one such sector. These are skilled professionals who are part of a union working for a large employer that negotiates contracts with a wide range of different unions. It's their right to decide to go on strike in order to secure a better contract.
(Not that not all unions are allowed to go on strike. An NYT reporter posted to BlueSky the other day that the reporter's union agreed to a contract that constrains the conditions under which they can actually strike.)
> our partnership with AWS is stronger than ever. We were even named AWS partner of the year.
This detail in the post made me chuckle. Oftentimes big vendors give out these kinds of marketing awards strategically.
One big firm I know makes it a point to have its CEO present on-stage awards at its annual user conference to customer that have indicated they might not review.
