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Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

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Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#641

Post by intended »

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…

You just described a body shop.

Heck this is what is done in India and other countries as well, to get around worker protection rules.

Keep several rota of workers, employ them at firm X. When the 9.999 years of work are up, “switch” the workers to a new firm.

Thus dodging the legal test which states that any worker who has worked at a role for more than 10 years at a single company, is a de facto employee and should be given pension and other recognitions.

Your design degenerates to this situation. The same way Uber degenerated from ride sharing and using surplus resources to people barely squeezing by.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#642

Post by solidasparagus »

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…

There was an article that I can't find right now about European union practices. Create a union for an entire industry and then leverage union scale to push for government regulation that impacts the entire industry. I'm sure it would be imperfect, but you have to do a solution like that because if you don't, companies will see unions as a competitive disadvantage and prevent them.

The biggest problem is that I and many others see unions as short-sightedly protecting workers while their companies and industries die around them. The last real bastion of union workers in the US is the government and no one is calling their employment model effective.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#643

Post by solidasparagus »

naravara wrote: post #209
rb808 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but presumably with a union you can also take it easy, not worry about getting laid off and spend time on personal projects.

What about unions do you think magically makes it impossible to fire someone who isn't doing the required work? The only thing that changes is you have to actually do the requisite paperwork and monitoring to validate that you're firing them with cause instead of for arbitrary reasons and pretending it's with cause. The "we can't fire someone who is honestly slacking" is just as much a consequence of bad bookkeeping…

It is exceptionally hard to measure work done by knowledge workers. Which makes is extremely hard to get enough hard documentation to fire them. In the vast majority of cases, you slowly realize they are no good and then you have to sink a bunch of time into organizing their work in a way that makes their underperformance measurable.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#644

Post by solidasparagus »

crumpets wrote: post #181
segmondy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a popular opinion, but these are usually non CS types that have flooded the fields later due to money. Not very skilled, but very entitled. The sense of entitlement is very ridiculous these days. I see folks outside the Bay asking why shouldn't they get paid the same as Bay area folks, when they want to remote from somewhere that has 1/3rd the cost of living. Or people outside the country with 1/10th the cost of…

>I see folks outside the Bay asking why shouldn't they get paid the same as Bay area folks Pay has nothing to do with cost of living. That's a lie told by companies as a negotiating tactic. You don't magically make the company more money by being in the bay area.

Pay has a ton to do with the cost of living, because salary is the lowest amount you can offer while still enticing people to work for you - I'm not saying penny pinch every dollar, but business is not charity. You don't magically make the company more money by being in the bay area, but hiring in the bay area gives the company an advantage (or else they wouldn't do it) and they are willing to pay extra for that advantage.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#645

Post by solidasparagus »

root_axis wrote: post #472
sgregnt wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find a different work place.

That's pretty good advice for a flippant one-liner, but the overworking of engineers is pretty common across the industry.

Software engineering talent is in extremely high demand and the supply is limited. You can find a job that pays well and provides excellent work-life balance. A good engineer that enforces very strong work-life boundaries is a still better than no engineer and that's the decision many companies are faced with. But you won't be paid or professionally respected quite as much as those that put in the hours - which seems like a perfectly fair trade off.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#646

Post by solidasparagus »

hannasanarion wrote: post #465
alasdair_ wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every workplace is adversarial, it's you versus the C-suite who profit from the surplus value created by your labor. A union just evens out the bargaining power between you and them. I guess it depends on the equity split. Very early engineers with, say 0.1% vested of a unicorn still feel like owners to me, in addition to being workers.

So you're saying that workers are better off when they are also owners? Interesting idea.

Every software company I've heard of in the US offers equity...

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#647

Post by solidasparagus »

speedplane wrote: post #638
citilife wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part I seem to be missing, is that most of the people working at Kickstarter are the top 2-5% of the U.S.. Their business caters to many people who want to start projects, who aren't living pay-check-to-pay-check anyway. I don't really understand the purpose of the unionization effort, beyond the facade of just wanting to in some way "fit in" with a social movement.

> I don't really understand the purpose of the unionization effort, beyond the facade of just wanting to in some way "fit in" with a social movement. It's pretty naive to think unionization is just a social fad. It's a path towards job security, safety, good pay, and control over the direction of your own labor. Trendiness is pretty low on the totem pole.

Collective control over the collective direction of the collective labor. Unions, at least in practice, are only good for the majority of the laborers and definitely not good for independent control over your own work.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#648

Post by solidasparagus »

magissima wrote: post #87
fareesh wrote: post #67

> America’s political climate is changing; among other things, the 2016 presidential election brought up the issue of wealth inequality in this country and made people consider more closely the structural forces that define class here. What is a structural force that defines class in America?

Inherited wealth, disparities in access to education, racism, and a weak labor movement are a few of the many forces that impede upward social mobility.

Inherited wealth is part of the American dream. Everyone wants to pass on enough wealth to provide for their children - even if their children turn out to be morons. I agree that at a certain amount of wealth, inheritance seems problematic. When those morons inherit enough to shape the world instead of just living comfortably.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#649

Post by plainOldText »

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…

Indeed, but in the private industry there is also a different pattern in compensation, as in addition to a base salary, private employers offer bonuses and stock awards, situation which is not accounted for in the study, as far as I can tell [1]. Do unions also negotiate bonuses and stock awards? I'm unfamiliar to how they operate.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ncbr0002.pdf

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#650

Post by solidasparagus »

eqdw wrote: post #115
apl002 wrote: post #19

what are the pros/cons of unionizing? I dont know jack about this

As I understand it, when a company unionizes, there are three main ways that you as an employee are impacted: 1. You are required to pay a certain amount (either percentage or flat fee, I'm not sure) of your paycheque into a new political organization, the union 2. You are entitled to periodically vote on the who to elect to leadership of the union 3. The leadership of the union represents the entirety of the staff a…

Pretty much nailed it on the head here. The biggest issue with unions in tech is that life is pretty good - it's a workers market right now. Why would I give up my strong negotiating position (albeit as a pampered company pawn) to be a union pawn where my negotiating power as an individual is very limited?

The one thing you didn't touch on too much is the efficiency of decision making by hierarchical management vs the efficiency of decision making by committee. This is already sometimes painful with processes like Scrum and unions would probably make it worse. The process of negotiating, suing and setting binding legal precedent is so tedious - it can seriously damage companies' ability to move quickly.

Plus unions are pretty dated. I have very little confidence that legal precedent around unions would work well in the modern global world.

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