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Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

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Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#681

Post by umvi »

zaksoup wrote: post #572
yibg wrote: post #559

I'm not against unions in general or in principle, but some implementations are not great. I suspect like some folks here, my personal (negative) interactions with unions have turned me off of unions in general. I worked at an unionized shop when I first graduated and while I recognize some of the positives the union brought, there were also many downsides. Some examples: - Nepotism. We had an open position we couldn…

> 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…

> Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages.

Couldn't this be because you raise the wages of all the underperformers and lower the wages of the top performers?

If you have a team where a few rockstars make $100K and the average and underperformers make $60K, the average pay could be said to increase if you simply make everyone's wage $72K. But that sucks for the top performers and really is only a good deal if you are at or below average.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#682

Post by moate »

walshemj wrote: post #274
bwestergard wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You mentioned that the letter to management listed your grievances. Some people find the idea of a tech workers union implausible, because they find it hard to believe that tech workers could have grievances in the first place. After all, software engineers are relatively well paid. What’s your perspective on that?" "People didn’t even want that much more time off, or that much more time not on call. They just wante…

The key is "relatively" In the uk its relatively well paid but much less than say a train driver is the average dev in London earns less than a train driver gets for a four day week an they have over time and a DB pension.

This is so important. Just because you're being paid well, doesn't mean you're being paid what you deserve. As stupid as it might sound, there are underpaid multi-millionaire pro athletes relative to the value they create for their company. I bring this up because the sports unions are a great example of what white collar unions could look like. Setting minimums, handling grievances, and specifying what things can and cannot be foisted on their members. These guys still sign their own contracts and superstar performers (the "rock star coders" of the sports world) are still able to get the money they feel they deserve by negotiating independently.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#683

Post by Veelox »

root_axis wrote: post #355
Veelox wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think spending years working hard to develop a skill set that is highly sought after counts as privilege...

I regard it as a privilege because most people outside of programming work a lot harder and get paid a lot less.

I think there is an important difference if we are talking about the distinction between programmers and nonprogrammers and between senior engineers and nonsenior engineers.

Yes, programmers have very good jobs compared to nonprogrammers. Part of that is smart career choice, part of it is interest/skill set. I would allow discussion of privilege to go without comment in that context.

When you say "This is senior engineer privilege speaking" I am much less sympathetic to thinking it is privilege. There are tons and tons of way to improve and command a premium of pay. Almost all of those have nothing to do attributes typically defined as privilege. So it bothers me when you try and attribute to privilege something that is mostly a result of hard work.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#684

Post by moate »

solidasparagus wrote: post #644
crumpets wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 adva…

>>salary is the lowest amount you can offer while still enticing people to work for you >> business is not charity

And this is why unions exist. Even if managers try to be nice, even if the company gives out buckets of benefits and pays a living wage, this is the adversarial thought that exists in business currently. Management wants to pay the lowest they can, because that helps the business the most. They want to spend the least amount possible because that's the correct business choice.

Management/Ownership and Employees are frequently at odds when it comes to their goals, and changing the math from "me vs the company" to "the union vs the company" is a huge boon for employees.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#685

Post by 49531 »

jiveturkey wrote: post #298
49531 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what would they think of unionizing the union Unions in the US are democratic institutions, so if there is a problem with your union you can change things.

lol. i guess you've never actually been in a union.

I've been in, am currently in, and have been involved in unionizing workplaces.

Companies are extremely motivated to undermine unions. Unions tend to get stale as they age and lose their militancy. That's why wildcat action is so common. It sucks but even a workplace with a stale union is better off than one without collective bargaining.

The hardest part of organizing, like so many things, is going from 0 to 1. Once you've got a union you have a lot more power. Thinking you don't is what the company wants you to think.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#686

Post by chimeracoder »

moate wrote: post #680
chimeracoder wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you qualify US style vs non-US style unions? The prevalence of business unionism here? The big difference, which nobody seems to have mentioned here, is that unions in the US are guaranteed exclusivity by law over representing people within a bargaining unit, as well as unilateral and retroactive control over defining the bargaining unit. In practice, this means that all employees at a given company are r…

Sure, but if you didn't force an exploitative monopoly by the existing unions, how would you build anti-union sentiment and drive union membership lower and lower year over year? /s The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing l…

> The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.

Exactly - it's a stable equilibrium, where unions and employers are actually content with the status quo and don't want to cede power, but ultimately it produces a clearly suboptimal result for workers.

Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to fix this, as you said, for political reasons.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#687

Post by 49531 »

danShumway wrote: post #570
49531 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what would they think of unionizing the union Unions in the US are democratic institutions, so if there is a problem with your union you can change things.

There are multiple democratic institutions I belong to where I don't generally feel like I have the power to change things. Democracy is great, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't magically mean that representation for your specific subgroup will exist. If you're part of a demographic with 10-15% representation in your union, is it really a crazy idea that your demographic might want to pool its votes together to ensu…

To be honest those principles shouldn't stop within the union. But that is really the challenge for every movement with similar goals. The maoist idea of "continuous revolution" tries to address this problem.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#688

Post by 49531 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #261
49531 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know unionizing isn't something people do lightheartedly. A lot of planning and working goes into it, planning and working done by the folks who want to unionize. The idea that you only get benefits if you don't agitate your boss too much sounds pretty sad. People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.

>People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially. Tell that to anyone whose workplace unionizes against their wishes and lives in a "closed shop" state. (Yes, closed shops are illegal, but agency fees lead to essentially the same thing). Being forced to pay a fee to a union that does not represent you and that you did not vote to join is absolute bullshit.

You can say that about any job, union or non union. You don't join a job not knowing it's a union job. But in a non union workplace, if you don't like how things are you can change them. Good luck doing that without a union.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#689

Post by 49531 »

crumpets wrote: post #527
49531 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know unionizing isn't something people do lightheartedly. A lot of planning and working goes into it, planning and working done by the folks who want to unionize. The idea that you only get benefits if you don't agitate your boss too much sounds pretty sad. People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.

>People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially. Of course they do. The difference is that they are tricked into thinking they won't be worse off by the union organizers pretending that it's unlikely everyone will completely lose their job.

So the logic goes, don't join a union or you'll lose you job?

How does that not sound coercive? A company saying "If you collectively bargain against us, we will punish you" sounds ok to you? You've been tricked out of collective bargaining by decades of anti-union propaganda, and now you're carrying water for capital.

Re: Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing

#690

Post by geofft »

soheil wrote: post #377
geofft wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leverage. As an individual, the response of the company is likely to be "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." If hundreds of people are saying the same thing, we're in a better negotiating position. It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism…

> "whatever, we can hire someone worse than you who won't make these demands." So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.

Capitalism is definitely working as intended; I'm not disputing that. But there are two catches:

1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that.

2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.

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