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If there is one thing I've learned from two decades of reading about labor history, it's: Every gain labor has ever made has been taken. Every gain the working class (i.e. the overwhelming majority of people) has achieved has come from organizing their majority of low-power workers and then standing strongly against the empowered minority at the top. Good for these people. They are essentially moving our society forw…
Towards?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The downvotes speak volumes of the cognitive dissonance. Everone is fully in control of their destiny through their rugged individualism and bootstraps until they're laid off and packing up to head back home from SFBA because they have no worker protections. I suppose everyone has to learn the hard way (again) during the next downturn.
Have you ever thought that programmer pay is as high as it is because of the lack of those protections? It's pretty well established that programmer interviewing is hard for businesses and when they get it wrong everybody needs to be able to part ways. The speed at which this field moved is almost entirely due to the lack of encumbrances. That includes having to pay a state licensing group to say you are professional…
It's not. Union members earn more than their non-union counterparts in nearly all instances. Source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf
But I'd go further and say what constitutes "high" is subjective.
If you look at it in terms of median household/income distribution then yes, you could certainly make the case it's high.
But, when you consider the amount of value a developer creates compared to their salary, their pay may seem quite low. Facebook, for example, returns $188,000 profit per employee (https://www.recode.net/2017/8/4/16090758/facebook-google-pro...).
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A union is whatever the members want it to be. Just because traditional unions operate a certain way does not mean a union for tech workers has to operate the same way.
How would a union help me at all?
People get hung up on this because most developers feel like their profession is well-compensated. And, they are. But so are doctors and lawyers, who also belong to professional associations.
There's much more to bargain for than just wages.
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I would hope not. I see tech-workers as professionals not as laborers. I think the great battle to be fought by tech workers is to stop having them treated as common laborers that perform some kind of rote process. Some times we call software development engineering, and if thats the case I would press anyone to show me an engineering discipline that parallels software engineering in terms of working conditions and r…
Most professionals also belong to labor unions. They're just not called that; they're called professional associations.
Appears to be free and non coercive negotiation until you get to the actual coersion: "In San Francisco the coalition persuaded the city transit authority to make it easier to deny permits to companies facing labor strife." If your negotiations rely on the monopoly that the state provides, is it really a negotiation?
I think any relevant theory of negotiation will include government mediated points of leverage.
If there is one thing I've learned from two decades of reading about labor history, it's: Every gain labor has ever made has been taken. Every gain the working class (i.e. the overwhelming majority of people) has achieved has come from organizing their majority of low-power workers and then standing strongly against the empowered minority at the top. Good for these people. They are essentially moving our society forw…
Since the capital and ownership sectors of our economy are all trained to operate businesses rationally and to not leave value on the table, it seems pretty clear that anything that labor doesn't take will be traded away. To me, in that light, neither the "depredations" of owners and investors nor the "coercion" of labor unions is really a problem; it's just the natural give and take of the market at work. The real p…
If you want unions to exist. Support protectionism and strong borders. Otherwise enjoy your cheap servants and goods and keep kvetching about socialism while you sip champagne and call people racist from time to time.
Appears to be free and non coercive negotiation until you get to the actual coersion: "In San Francisco the coalition persuaded the city transit authority to make it easier to deny permits to companies facing labor strife." If your negotiations rely on the monopoly that the state provides, is it really a negotiation?
> If your negotiations rely on the monopoly that the state provides, is it really a negotiation? Patents, copyright, law enforcement. All provided by the state and used by tech giants in their interactions with others who use tech they've produced.
If there is one thing I've learned from two decades of reading about labor history, it's: Every gain labor has ever made has been taken. Every gain the working class (i.e. the overwhelming majority of people) has achieved has come from organizing their majority of low-power workers and then standing strongly against the empowered minority at the top. Good for these people. They are essentially moving our society forw…
Unfortunately, anyone willing to treat employees horribly, operates cheaper. If using trafficked chinese women were legal, the owner willing to be a psychopath will put his competition under. Capitalism is an inherently unstable system and only works with good regulation. I think a capitalist system only works as well as its regulation.
However, I think it is important for regulations to generally (not always) be structured on a sliding scale that is directly related to company size, i.e. the bigger the business, the more regulations it becomes subject to. Otherwise, regulations become a cudgel with which small businesses are beaten down because only the big established players can afford to comply. In today's age of regulatory capture in the USA, we are seeing this play out. Industries have been consolidating, and the productivity gains therefrom are not being passed onto the consumer via price cuts.