221–230 of 450 posts
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Which is exactly why we have to make it easier for people to form and join unions everywhere.
To paint a wall in an individual office on Market St, San Francisco, with whiteboard paint, is upwards of $10000 in labor, because of union regulations. Unions are ripe to be used as instruments for abuse.
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You already broke the property rules if you went on my land without my permission. If I agree to let you on my land and then put a gun to your head, that is against the rules. > Property rights don't exist without some form of regulation. If by regulation you mean any law whatsoever, certainly. That's not what people usually mean by unregulated market. When people say "unregulated car market" they don't mean a market…
Where does your ownership of the land originate if not from someone at some point in history using the threat of violence to keep other people off of it? The concept of an unregulated market that includes land ownership is already nonsense because the system of land ownership is inherently non-voluntary. I never opted into the system where people can exclude me from certain parts of the earth; it was imposed on me wi…
It comes from exactly that, and the system in which that occurred was not a free market.
> it was imposed on me with the threat of violence.
Absolutely, _the system_ is imposed with the threat of violence. I said that transactions within the system must be voluntary.
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How would a union help me at all?
One way to look at Hacker News is as a part-time ranked inventory of labor grievances for tech workers. Open offices. Draconian IP clauses. Opportunities for developers to become founders. Work-life balance. Remote work. 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…
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> The real problem is the late 20th century stigma labor organization has acquired. I think the stigma is well-deserved. Indeed they are rife with corruption and often create very odd incentives. Unfortunately unions suffer the same fate as other "invisible" benefits: everyone takes them for granted and doesn't recognize their value. People focus on the drawbacks and it's much easier to convince them that we're all b…
Unfortunately unions suffer the same fate as other "invisible" benefits: everyone takes them for granted and doesn't recognize their value. Unions - the folks who brought you the weekend. (That's a button and bumper sticker.) Also the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week, which the US somehow lost.
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I think a tech union would significantly raise the wages of technical people. A past job, I automated away jobs at $0.10 on the dollar and made a healthy salary, but it obviously was 1/10th of what I was worth. I left that company and all those jobs are still automated away and the more the company grows, the more they save. Also a tech union could push for perks like developer offices, remote work, better work equip…
This isn't really a good thing. Unions do things like engage in age discrimination by favoring senior members over all else. They do things like throw up oppressive barriers to entry, and limited licenses, in order to F over everyone who is not already in the club. Unions are only a good idea for exceptional 1 size fits all situations. For example, there are only a couple major airlines in the industry, and if you ge…
I think you mean unions negotiate for relatively higher pay for people who have been with the company longer, or with more experience, but it would also negotiate higher pay for new hires relative to a non-union shop.
You're also thinking of manufacturing unions. I suspect a tech union would be a little different. Things like The Writer's Guild are also unions.
I'd certainly be willing to try it. I suspect pay would at least double. I mean right now you hear about high demand for tech people, but wages don't reflect that. Unions would help that problem. Unions would also prevent offshoring which drives down wages.
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Unfortunately unions suffer the same fate as other "invisible" benefits: everyone takes them for granted and doesn't recognize their value. Unions - the folks who brought you the weekend. (That's a button and bumper sticker.) Also the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week, which the US somehow lost.
unions certainly like to rest on those century-old laurels, but the acts themselves were performed by long-dead capable individuals. crediting unions in the abstract is progressive cargo-culting
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I have effectively no college, and went to work right after high school. Whatever labor organization tech workers come up with doesn't have to be the AFL-CIO and it doesn't have to be the AMA. It can just take the best attributes from all those organizations. Or it can start more modestly! Maybe tech workers will just come up with two or three things --- say, late exercise on options and better IP clauses --- and jus…
So that's a nice optimistic vision, and if I had any faith we could keep it to that, I'd be for it. My vision includes scope creep and lots of greedy ambitious good-at-politics less-good-at-actually-doing-work types grabbing the show once it's successful. Most organisations meaningfully described as unions has a non-trivial element of excluding people from the trade in one way or another. I will never be a part of an…
If a tech association just wants to get vesting schedules fixed, great, I ha e no problem with that.
But the moment someone even SUGGESTS putting up barriers to entry is the moment I oppose that organization with all of my might.
It is just too risky to allow an organization to get entrenched and ruin the tech industry for newbies.
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Organized labor has most of the same problems as organized ownership and capital. Ownership and capital has some unique problems. Labor has some other unique problems. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Unless you're arguing for the elimination of the market system, "this structure in a market economy is prone to corruption" isn't a dispositive argument, or really an argument at all.
No. The union leaders have zero interest in making any company succeed. They have a ton of interest in themselves succeeding. In fact unions work very hard against innovation and in keeping status quo.
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Well, a truly unregulated market approximates a war. Just look at the early history of trader/pirates. This doesn't mean capitalism is unstable; it's lowest energy state is the state of nature. Unrestricted warfare is bad for profits, as well as general wellbeing. The trick is to add regulation without adding unnecessary friction, and finding an approximate solution to the free rider problem.
An unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people. Each transaction must be voluntary. Capitalism is not the same as anarchy.
When your factory is producing noise pollution around it, is that a volutary transaction you have entered into with your neighbours? What about when it pollutes the air, or the water? What about transactions where both sides don't have perfect information? How can you voluntarily agree to a transaction in which you don't know what you're getting, but your counterparty does? What about the fact that most revealed preferences are largely fiction?
Voluntary transactions are pure fiction. Nothing actually operates on that principle. You can't construct a functioning society from them, without requiring an orgy of arbitrary logical and ethical gymnastics.
This is a bit misleading. Union power is putting pressure on service economy companies which in turn service tech companies. Tech workers are not unionizing -and I can't imagine they would, given their pay compared to other sectors. I could see an AMA type organization perhaps. On the other hand, unfortunately, companies no longer staff vertically. When they can outsource their non core competencies they do. They don…
I'd want my union to crush open plan workplaces, especially the ones that stick software development next to sales. Please put 4.5" of solid wall, and at least one closeable door, between me and all that incessant yapping on the raprod.
Also, it would be nice to ban cargo-culting. Like daily all-hands "stand-up meetings" that last 45 minutes. Don't let management make us take personality quizzes that pigeonhole us into cute alliterative categories.
And if I could manage my insurance and retirement plan through the union instead of my company, that would be great. I have to deal with new accounts and fill out new forms every time I switch companies, and also every time my company gets acquired or merged. And don't think I haven't noticed them gradually turning my healthcare insurance to garbage, and increasing my share of the premiums every time.
Currently, the only way for me to counter some moves is by job-hopping. That doesn't help if employers are all secretly running the same playbook.