Kickstarter doubles down on its anti-union stance

Indeed. A successful US Programmers Guild would probably look more like the American Medical Association. It would restrict training places and increase entrance standards over time, doing everything in its power to prevent people who do the same job in other countries from having their qualifications recognized in the US. US physicians earn well over double the average of their UK counterparts, never mind Malaysian or Indian ones. If the AMA didn’t do its best to stop doctors from these countries practicing that kind of differential would be untenable.

You’d also probably get some kind of “not a programmer, honest” like nurses in the medical field. In the current climate you can move from being the one who knows pivot table to business intelligence to data analyst to data scientist but with licensing and “professional ethics” there’s always an attempt to maintain a bright line between professionals and “the help”, whether they be paralegals, nurses or draftsmen, compared to lawyers, doctors or engineers.

> the people who were MOST familiar with the contract, the rules, the exact things that I could ask them to do and the things they were allowed to refuse... were the worst teammates.

Apply this comment to workers and employers and it sound reasonable. Rephrase this comment to apply to civilians and police officers and it sounds horrible, even though in both cases we can argue that the goal is to not have adversarial, competitive relationships, and instead to trust each other.

I am somewhat skeptical about unions, and I don't think they're the silver bullet that people claim they are. I sympathize with people who worry about adding additional layers to management. There is no such thing as an incorruptible organization.

But, I'm opposed to any insinuation that knowing your rights and exercising them is something to be ashamed of, in any context.

> If someone asks you to do something, and your default answer is that it's not in your contract, you're not approaching things in the right way.

Again, this sounds reasonable. But it makes me feel really weird, and I think its the implication (intended or not) that being a good employee means not thinking about whether or not you're being taken advantage of. It is very difficult for me to imagine any employer I've ever worked for arguing the same thing in the opposite direction. Employers know their contracts, they hire entire legal teams who are entirely dedicated to knowing the contract. Shouldn't the employee also know the contract?

Mutual respect means not going out of your way to have power over another person; it means viewing them as an equal. If only one side of a business relationship is paying attention to and enforcing a contract, then that's not respectful; it's an unhealthy power dynamic.

I think that people need to think about the distinctions between a white-collar union and a blue-collar union.

A blue-collar union, like the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), can essentially treat each person as known amount of performance and bargain as such. There is relatively little difference between trained employees on a production line. So the UAW can bargain for things like promotion by seniority only, which provides a reasonable balance to keep managers from playing favorites. There's not a whole lot you can do to set yourself apart when you are stamping out door panels and robots do the welding for you, so promotion on merit isn't as important. Take a look at the tone of this UAW web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to avoid bad things: https://uaw.org/organize/no-union-no-rights/

For white-collar unions, such as the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), there often is a demonstrable difference in the quality of work that trained employees do, so they don't want to get rid of merit based consideration, but they do want to ensure that their employees are treated fairly. Take a look at the tone of this SPEEA web page and how it pitches union membership as a way to achieve more good things: http://www.speea.org/Join_Our_Union!/Benefits_of_SPEEA.html

The Kickstarter union shouldn't model themselves after the UAW, but more like SPEEA. I don't know what the employees are proposing, but I fear that a lot of people assume that the Kickstarter employees are trying to start a mafia within the organization that controls what all the employees can do. That's probably not the case, they should make sure that two people with the same merit are given the same fair shakes. They shouldn't be telling people to code fewer lines per day because they don't want to give the company free labor.

Things like requiring workers to support certain political candidates is what makes some people dislike unions. It's one thing for a union to endorse a candidate because they support policies favorable to union workers, it's another thing to coerce your employees to vote a certain way.

Things like striking even if you don't agree with them however, is a good part of the union and is how it gains its bargaining power. If people were free to just pick and choose the issues that they supported, then there wouldn't be a point of a union. Assuming the union is not corrupt, you should strike in solidarity with your other union members. If you show support for them today even if you don't necessarily agree, they might show support for you tomorrow even if they don't necessarily agree.

Open Collective is an alternative to 501(3)(c) for some orgs.

I wonder if an Open Collective -esque model could work for employees as an alternative to unions?

I applaud the benefits that early unions brought to workers, but what have they done lately(as in decades) I. Terms of creating/capturing value?

My experience with unions was an an employee of Amazon.com in the 90’s and witnessing the horrible things WashTech and it’s supporters did to my staff in a failed attempt to gain access to Amazon distribution centers.

It would be cool if there was a very light digital network model by which employees could collectively engage with company management/leadership.

As well as far less adversarial, more akin to collaborative labour/leadership relationship as found in Germany.

What about unions that are more like a trade guild, which sets standards for its members which make dealing with a union member more of a known quantity than hiring a random person off the street? I'm thinking of things like a union electrician or plumber.

This could serve to minimize the need for interview gimmicks, since the union itself would enforce standards through its own certification process.