141–150 of 153 posts
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I feel like people unionize when they're being taken advantage of and need to fight for better employment conditions....but developers have it pretty nice, all in all, most of us. I don't feel much incentive to unionize when I'm making $50/hr+ and have unlimited vacation.
How much of that is paid?
The original goal of a union was to protect people who had no other realistic employment oppotunities. If you lived in rural Pennsylvania digging in a coal mine, I totally get unionization. More power to you (/me beats his chest in solidarity).
But you're talking about the modern age for a group that has arguably more career mobility than any other career in the history of the world. If I don't like the conditions at a job, I'll pick up and leave. There are hundreds of jobs I can select from; the tech world is literally my oyster. If enough people leave, conditions will change, but frankly I won't care because I won't be there. Protection against mass layoffs? That sounds like you want to drag the company down. I'd rather see 50% of the people continue on with a job indefinitely than see 95% with a job for a few months until the company shuts its doors.
These factors makes unions uninteresting for me. But there are other factors that make me openly hostile to unions.
I think that collective bargaining in pay brings the average salary up, but I'm not an average engineer. I like to think I'm in at least the top 25% (I'd like to say I'm in the 5%, but I don't know if I am), and so my assumption is that unions will bring my salary down. Frankly I don't care about bringing low-end engineers' salaries up at the cost of mine. I assume that the company isn't totally irrational, and it is capable of deciding for itself how important employees are and compensate them accordingly.
Also, my experience with unions in the past had to do with my spouse working in education. The union there was not acting in teachers' best interest. They routinely brought in retirement savings pitches that advocated terrible choices for the teachers, any proposed change was immediately mired in committees where it would languish and die, and when you did have an issue the union was outright hostile (spouse was laid off over summer break for the crime of being pregnant, union abruptly stopped discussing the issue with us after a cutoff date until we'd paid the next year's dues, when we paid union said "thank you, we're not going to pursue this, the school's decision stands").
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I feel like people unionize when they're being taken advantage of and need to fight for better employment conditions....but developers have it pretty nice, all in all, most of us. I don't feel much incentive to unionize when I'm making $50/hr+ and have unlimited vacation.
> and have unlimited vacation. How much of that is paid?
they don't have to keep PTO hours on the books, and don't have to pay out for hours not taken when you leave either...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The threat is not "a better deal or we'll quit", that's a perfectly fair response to unacceptable conditions (and "other people will take this deal" is a perfectly fair counter). The threat is "it'd be a shame if something were to happen to your business, like a lawsuit or a fire". That's the difference between negotiation and extortion, and that's what's behind all the union/mafia links.
A collective labor action is literally "a better deal or we all quit." Why do you assume that unionized developers would resort to violence or baseless litigation? Medical doctors, university professors, and librarians are largely unionized. Do you believe the American Association of University Professors threatens colleges with arson when negotiations aren't going the way they want them to?
History?
> Medical doctors, university professors, and librarians are largely unionized.
Doctors aren't exactly a union - they're a licensing body. That distinction matters rather a lot for this discussion. (No licensing body has ever threatened, let alone carried out, violence to prevent outsiders from taking jobs, to the best of my knowledge, but unions have done so regularly. On the other hand, licensing bodies have the authority of the state behind them, so maybe it's just somebody else who does the violence...)
Next question: Why don't they want to? Because they detest bureaucracy, and they see unions as another bureaucracy that they would have to put up with, and they don't want the headaches. They get enough of pointy-haired bosses; they don't want another one, even if the new one is supposed to be on their side.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and have unlimited vacation. How much of that is paid?
unlimited vacation is starting to be more common... the company that is buying the place i currently work at is doing it as well.. they don't have to keep PTO hours on the books, and don't have to pay out for hours not taken when you leave either...
Generally unionization is fought fairly hard by companies for the simple reason that it restricts what they can do and takes some control out of the hands of management. In the Bay area in the late 80's there was mumbling about unions after the great semiconductor flame out. A lot of people were laid off without warning and since it was widespread the ability to walk across the street and get rehired was limited. Sin…
I think a key component to unions is a marked class dichotomy. Blue collar on one side, white on the other. This leads to strong "us vs them" tribal instincts to prevail. I don't think that dichotomy is as strong in tech industries, if it exists at all.
Very interesting observation. I had always seen the fight as between capital and labor. But then again, I'm an elitist white urbanite. The book Democracy at Work (linked upthread) attempts to find a third way. Worker owned democratically run organizations. My personal interest comes from when I used democratic decision making on my own teams, to great effect. Alas, we didn't control the capital, so our efforts had li…
Developers do unionize. Some developers. In some countries. [Bernie]Take for example Denmark[/Bernie]. In Denmark, PROSA is the union of IT professionals and lives up to several of your ideas of a new style of union. They have a strict definition (job titles, educational background) that excludes designers but includes front-end developers. But since IT workers, compared to so many other industries, are rather well o…
Two big reasons. #1 Abundant labor, meaning buyers market, so developers don't have leverage. This has a pretty good primer on the topic: Democracy At Work https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/... #2 I'm as pinko commie liberal socialist as they come, and I can't imagine how even the most well intentioned (least alt-factual neo-reactionary libertarian) group of developers can coordinate collect…
Wow you and I live in alternate universes. In my experience, and having been without work at various times, and freelancing... I believe developers are scarce. You need an aptitude and some (self?) training to take part and a lot of people can't be bothered. That being said, I see you describe yourself as a "pinko commie" and as a business owner who was at one time a union administrator in a past life I would never h…
Darn.