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It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

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Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#141

Post by logicchains »

chrismealy wrote: post #24
danblick wrote: post #9

Software developers are already highly paid with lots of perks. Do they need unions?

Yes, not for themselves but for society. If you like the way Germany, The Netherlands, and the Nordics do things, you should know that these countries have very high levels of union membership, up to 80%. Their broad labor movements created the societies they have today. Unions in America never had that much strength and never accomplished as much.

Yet pay for software developers in those companies is so much less than for those in America.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#142

Post by grecy »

burntrelish1273 wrote: post #28

Richard Wolff has also been evangelizing co-ops and worker-owned businesses for some time. http://www.rdwolff.com/faq_worker_coops_wdes https://youtu.be/urCy3UOGgx8

I don't understand why there are not more co-ops in this world.

In Canada, Mountain Equipment Co-Op (MEC) is the all-in-one kick-ass outdoor store (like REI). It is a co-op, so you pay $5 for a lifetime membership.

The place does not make a profit. All expenses are paid, all employees earn their living. At the end of the year, if they accidentally made a profit, they simply return the extra money to all the members of the co-op as a percentage of whatever that person spent for the year, thus they make no profit.

This, to me, is brilliant. Customers get what they want, employees get paid. Win. Win.

Why do we need stores that make profit?

Why do we need banks that make ever-increasing billions in profit?

I imagine a world where banks, Apple, Ford, etc. all worked like this. I want to live in that world.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#143

Post by hueving »

jldugger wrote: post #84
hueving wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are people getting the notion that engineers should be paid whatever the current profit per engineer is? Engineers are not shareholders. You can't have it both ways where employees get to take all of the upside of a business without all of the risks of being an investor. When IBM has a bad year, would you be okay with clawing back all of the salary paid out that year?

Leaving aside the fact that many engineers are sharedholders, or bonus structures based on company performance, it's more a metric of the ceiling these companies have for increased wages. Obviously there's a risk premium that shareholders should be compensated for, but at the same time, Google has more or less explicitly structured themselves around their reliable profit stream with no obvious place to reinvest the p…

>The economic principle of wages tied to productivity

That's not an economic principle. There are no economic theories that make sense to support it. Why would anyone engage in a transaction where they give away all of the money they would gain as a profit?

Labor is a market good like any other. Companies don't pay more than the market rate for bolts just because they are doing well. It's silly to think employees are any different.

>but it's fairly apparent that, absent an illegal covenant preventing it, there would have been more upward pressure on wages in SV

The upward pressure exists when companies can't hire at the rate they want to pay and still have more to compensate. Even if companies have a wide gap where they could compensate more, the upward pressure will not exist if there are enough qualified employees to fill the positions at a lower wage.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#144

Post by hueving »

maxxxxx wrote: post #55
hueving wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are people getting the notion that engineers should be paid whatever the current profit per engineer is? Engineers are not shareholders. You can't have it both ways where employees get to take all of the upside of a business without all of the risks of being an investor. When IBM has a bad year, would you be okay with clawing back all of the salary paid out that year?

Employees take on a lot of risk. They risk being laid off and they have to put all their eggs in one basket. They also risk damage to their career if their company assigns to them work that doesn't look good on resume. In my view investors have less risk.

>Employees take on a lot of risk. They risk being laid off and they have to put all their eggs in one basket.

That's not a lot of risk. If they get laid off, they don't lose an initial investment like the shareholders do. If I get laid off today, I will just go find another job. I don't lose my previous wages.

>They also risk damage to their career if their company assigns to them work that doesn't look good on resume.

Doing something shitty is entirely the employees choice. If they aren't happy with the compensation they get for doing that thing, then they should move to a different company.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#145

Post by hueving »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #68
hueving wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are people getting the notion that engineers should be paid whatever the current profit per engineer is? Engineers are not shareholders. You can't have it both ways where employees get to take all of the upside of a business without all of the risks of being an investor. When IBM has a bad year, would you be okay with clawing back all of the salary paid out that year?

Most investors have the privilege to take risks because they have pre-existing wealth; but yeah their investments carry risk. Workers also carry risk; they invest resources to establish and maintain their employment with a company.

>Workers also carry risk; they invest resources to establish and maintain their employment with a company.

What are they investing that they aren't being compensated for in their salary/bonuses?

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#146

Post by tonyedgecombe »

mirimir wrote: post #48
ryandrake wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is from a while ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were still true: 19% of Americans think they are in the top 1% and 20% more expect to be one day [1]. So a full 39% of Americans either suck at math or actually believe that by rewarding wealthy capitalists they are actually rewarding themselves! 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hop...

That is funny :) Maybe ~20% of Americans are well-enough off that they feel wealthy. But they have no clue what real wealth is. And indeed, in day-to-day life, it's pretty much invisible. Edit: Gotta quote this: > All of this adds up to a terrain incredibly inhospitable to class-based politics. Every few years a group of millionaire Democratic presidential aspirants pretends to be the people's warriors against the ov…

>>Maybe ~20% of Americans are well-enough off that they feel wealthy. But they have no clue what real wealth is. And indeed, in day-to-day life, it's pretty much invisible.

I suppose you could be in the 1% in your community and not nationally.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#147

Post by [deleted] »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #146
mirimir wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is funny :) Maybe ~20% of Americans are well-enough off that they feel wealthy. But they have no clue what real wealth is. And indeed, in day-to-day life, it's pretty much invisible. Edit: Gotta quote this: > All of this adds up to a terrain incredibly inhospitable to class-based politics. Every few years a group of millionaire Democratic presidential aspirants pretends to be the people's warriors against the ov…

>>Maybe ~20% of Americans are well-enough off that they feel wealthy. But they have no clue what real wealth is. And indeed, in day-to-day life, it's pretty much invisible. I suppose you could be in the 1% in your community and not nationally.

[deleted]

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#148

Post by tboyd47 »

pdkl95 wrote: post #97
danblick wrote: post #9

Software developers are already highly paid with lots of perks. Do they need unions?

Unions are useful for more than just better pay. If that's a concern, charter some new type of union-like organization that doesn't touch salary/wages. One of the most important reasons for unions is to fight back against abusive employment practices that are unrelated to employee compensation. While software development doesn't have anywhere close to the problems mining or factory jobs, we it might be a good idea to…

I was just having this conversation on HN about a week ago.

I think a union for web developers would be a fantastic idea. Like you said, not necessarily for negotiating pay, but that could be part of it. It would be nice if a developer could rise from being paid close to minimum wage to an average software engineer's salary without having to switch jobs 6 times.

As an industry we need to address the problem of endemic project failure. Companies who aren't in the software industry generally don't understand how to produce software. Usually it falls on individual developers to teach the rest of the organization how to do things like write stories, build a deployment pipeline, etc. How to trust programmers to do things at their own pace and not resort to cracking the whip all the time. Anyone who's done this knows it's an uphill battle. Usually programmers just choose to leave a dysfunctional org rather than stick around and get punished for trying to do their job. Then you have dying projects full of code no one understands or wants to understand.

It would be great if we could come together to take control of our industry and really turn it into a profession. If it's what people want, we could try to engineer a profession where it's reasonable for a developer to expect to hold the same job (or at least work on the same codebase - even as a contractor) for at least 5 years without a major upheaval. Or one where you can expect to use at least some of what you learn in university / boot camp on the job. Or one where workers are expected to have different output levels and they don't fear being let go for not being a natural fast learner like John. Things we don't have that other professions take for granted. All these things aren't going to happen in the current dev culture, but would in fact be beneficial developments not just for employees but for employers as well.

If we don't do this type of thing ourselves, companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook will remake the industry in their image as they have done and are doing. This will result in a great worker pool ready for them to draw from, and a broken industry for everyone else.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#149

Post by snarfy »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #92
Animats wrote: post #49

Union, Yes. The US has weak unions because labor law enforcement is so weak. No administration has done much about that in decades. 11% of US employees belong to a union. 32% in Canada. Read "Confessions of a Union Buster" for background. In theory, whether to organize a union in the US is entirely up to the workers. The employer has no say in the matter. Few people even know that. Employers try hard to maintain that…

Unions are implemented differently in the US and elsewhere. IMHO the case law around unions in the US sets up a perverse incentive structure that results in an antagonistic relationship between capital and labor, ex: Supreme Court ruling requires that unions protect all of their members from firing, even the obviously terrible ones, this has resulted in huge inefficiencies for workers AND capital alike. Other countri…

> Supreme Court ruling requires that unions protect all of their members from firing, even the obviously terrible ones, this has resulted in huge inefficiencies for workers AND capital alike.

This is one of the reasons I never liked unions - they protect the low performers and smooth out the pay scale regardless of performance. I believe in them now though. They are a sorely needed check between capital and labor. The concentration of capital has gotten out of control. Unions force some of the distribution back to the workers.

Re: It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

#150

Post by clarkevans »

grecy wrote: post #142
burntrelish1273 wrote: post #28

Richard Wolff has also been evangelizing co-ops and worker-owned businesses for some time. http://www.rdwolff.com/faq_worker_coops_wdes https://youtu.be/urCy3UOGgx8

I don't understand why there are not more co-ops in this world. In Canada, Mountain Equipment Co-Op (MEC) is the all-in-one kick-ass outdoor store (like REI). It is a co-op, so you pay $5 for a lifetime membership. The place does not make a profit. All expenses are paid, all employees earn their living. At the end of the year, if they accidentally made a profit, they simply return the extra money to all the members o…

There are many cooperatives that you don't know about. For example, State Farm is a "mutual insurance" cooperative, so are many mid-western Blue Cross & Blue Shield (Anthem is private). Credit unions are cooperatives. Here's the problem: people don't choose cooperatives over non-cooperatives, and, even if they did, they do not participate in the governance of these cooperatives.

I think there is huge technology opportunity here: (a) increasing usage of cooperative services, and (b) giving consumers/producers "users" of the cooperative a real say in these organizations.

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