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Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

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Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#601

Post by tdhoot »

thelasthuman wrote: post #577
jdavis703 wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sister worked at a charter school. Because of previous labor violations teachers were not allowed to show up before class started (they could only be there for the official class hours). They also were not allowed to stay late after class. My sister thought this was ridiculous, how was she supposed to setup her classroom and answer questions afterwards? Unfortunately her boss warned her that coming early and stayi…

You can go above and beyond during designated work hours. To allow work outside of these hours is a race to the bottom in a rat race to see who can no-life it the hardest for the least money. If you can't make yourself stand out with the same amount of hours as your coworkers, then maybe you should come to terms with the fact that you just aren't exceptional.

> If you can't make yourself stand out with the same amount of hours as your coworkers, then maybe you should come to terms with the fact that you just aren't exceptional.

Or perhaps different people prioritize different things and who are you to judge or say otherwise?

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#602

Post by kennywinker »

syshum wrote: post #515
megy wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't get good results through bad means. Like a 5 day work week from 6 days? Like 8 hour work days? Like safe conditions for workers. All things unions helped deliver.

That is largely revisionist history, most of those things where already happening naturally due to competition between employers. Unions may have accelerated it a few years but the idea that we as a society would have never gotten a 5 day work week or an 8 hour day with out the unions is just false

There is fierce competition for employees in tech, but the hours seem to be normalized at 50+...

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#603

Post by cableshaft »

hajile wrote: post #247
segmondy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech. Companies are going to embrace distributed teams/remote teams very fast and unionizing will just be a reason to close up shop in that location. That's what I imagine happening, predicting the future is hard tho.

A programmer walk-out is way worse. The Bus Factor is a real thing. Hire a new team to replace the old one on a complex project and it'll be months or years before they start doing anything productive. Making things worse, bit-rot is real and threatens existing software with failure if complaints aren't addressed.

If everyone in my department walked out and a new team had to be hired, they'd just be screwed. There's not enough documentation and the system is pretty complicated, with bits of it hiding everywhere and a bunch of ancient code that we never got around to refactoring (especially after they laid off half our department and another half quit afterwards, without replacement).

I'm sure whenever I get a new job and resign they're going to be like 'oh shit', because there's just not anyone left to replace what I do, really (I'm the last person in the department with a good amount of knowledge on their proprietary and stupid complicated phone systems, and they've kept me too swamped to be able to do any knowledge transfer worth a damn).

And in phone systems, there's always something going wrong or down, it seems like, often network related.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#604

Post by arcticbull »

tomohawk wrote: post #481
ace_of_spades wrote: post #401

To make this discussion maybe a little bit more solution oriented, what would be your solution to problems of labor mistreatment? Or do you suggest that nothing like that exists? I recently came across an interesting talk by Richard Wolff at Google [1] which suggests that a great solution would be the democratization of the work place in the form of worker coops. It’s actually a tried and true model that works well i…

Start a "consulting" business that provides really good pay and benefits to all of the workers. Be very selective about who you let in. You're now in the business of providing workers for companies that produce stuff. If they want access to your workers, they sign a contract with your company. If some workers don't like working for some particular company, transfer them to places where they like to work. You've now c…

This is actually called a PEO (professional employment organization) and is often used for small companies looking to hire workers in foreign countries. The PEO becomes the employer of record and the employee is assigned 100% of the time to the foreign company. It’s pretty neat.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#605

Post by archagon »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #164
praptak wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies in general are crappy at recognizing top contributors anyway. Tech companies are no exception.

This is a problem everywhere, but it is worse when you are stuck with unionized employees. Compare public school teachers to private school teachers. Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).

I’ve had excellent public school teachers, and have also heard horror stories about private school teachers from my friends.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#606

Post by zaksoup »

JamesBarney wrote: post #594
plainOldText wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a fact about unions: Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages. According to the paper you referenced, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in private industries and under the category "Management, professional, and related occupations" employees earned more actually – $35.70/h – compared to workers represented by unions, who earned an average of $32.95/h. I would assume the majority of softwar…

Here's the relevant paragraph. > In private industry, there is a different pattern among workers in this occupational group: those represented by unions earned an average of $32.95 per hour, while those not represented by unions earned $35.70 per hour. The wage advantage for nonunion workers in this occupational group reflects the concentration of union workers in certain relatively low-paying occupations in business…

Thank for pointing this out. The 18% figure is from the global average and that analysis of the private industry number certainly suggests that as unions become more prevalent in higher-paying occupations the trend there will reverse.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#607

Post by zaksoup »

plainOldText wrote: post #578
zaksoup wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nepotism. We had an open position we couldn't fill for over a year because one of the union leader's son was graduating soon and that position was reserved for him. I don't know of any industry where this doesn't happen. Certainly in tech there's plenty of anecdata about nepotism in hiring, no unions required. > General complacency. Raises and promotions for the most part weren't based on performance, but rather te…

> Here's a fact about unions: Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages. According to the paper you referenced, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in private industries and under the category "Management, professional, and related occupations" employees earned more actually – $35.70/h – compared to workers represented by unions, who earned an average of $32.95/h. I would assume the majority of softwar…

As other commenters have said, the paper continues on to include an analysis that suggests the descrepancy is not due to some unique characteristic of the private sector but rather the concentration of union jobs in relatively low paying occupations in private industry. This and other BLS published reports suggest, therefor, that unions like the kickstarter union will ultimately put upward pressure on wages in professional occupations.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#608

Post by LanceH »

criddell wrote: post #480
jononor wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Norway, each employee freely chooses their union. It is common in some industries that people belong to several different unions, and that some are not part of union. And usually they are based on particular profession, like engineering or economics. Unions then have more a passive role, offering services like free legal representation, better insurance deals, and training. Only some areas like teachers seem to ha…

Why does there have to be standard working terms? In the US professional baseball, hockey, and football have player unions and things like salary are negotiated per person.

Percentage of revenue going to the players has already been negotiated.

It should also be noted that the players union represents a tiny portion of the actual employees involved and they actively negotiate money away from other employees.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#609

Post by pseudalopex »

joeblau wrote: post #567
Toine wrote: post #565

I'm astonished by the reaction of some people here. They seem to live in a alternate reality where every CEO is kind, doesn't try to reduce labor costs at every opportunity, doesn't treat his employees like cattle, etc. 20th century unions had their issues of course, but using extreme cases of dysfunctional unions is not a argument to totally disregard unions as a concept.

It doesn't look like Kickstarter will have a CEO anymore either[1]. [1] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18273318/kickstarter-ceo-...

"Chen has picked a successor as interim CEO: Aziz Hasan, who currently heads Kickstarter’s design & product teams."

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#610

Post by sonnyblarney »

tomohawk wrote: post #481
ace_of_spades wrote: post #401

To make this discussion maybe a little bit more solution oriented, what would be your solution to problems of labor mistreatment? Or do you suggest that nothing like that exists? I recently came across an interesting talk by Richard Wolff at Google [1] which suggests that a great solution would be the democratization of the work place in the form of worker coops. It’s actually a tried and true model that works well i…

Start a "consulting" business that provides really good pay and benefits to all of the workers. Be very selective about who you let in. You're now in the business of providing workers for companies that produce stuff. If they want access to your workers, they sign a contract with your company. If some workers don't like working for some particular company, transfer them to places where they like to work. You've now c…

That's all fine and good, but now you have to find contracts and compete/bid competitively on RFP's for work.
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