311–320 of 500 posts
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Great point. Guilds in general are a great way to reboot collective bargaining in the US. That thought occurred to me earlier this year and I completely forgot about it in this thread.
What's the difference between a union and a guild? Do Americans just have an aversion to the word union now?
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And yet guilds are traditionally vehicles for monopoly and control. All the things Americans complain about with regards to unions, are actually guild-like behaviour.
And in labour organisations "guild" has some unfortunate racist conations in the USA.
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Unions would be much more attractive if US were an open shop country. Instead, we’re closed shop, which means that, once a union is in place, you can’t choose to join a different union. This routinely leads to situations where corrupt unions abuse their own members. For an example of how this works in practice, look at the UAW’s conduct with UC’s grad students. Years ago, they negotiated salary caps for grad students…
Where did the closed shop restrictions come from, did it come from anti-union lobbying or some think tank somewhere? This smells completely like "the government is useless", then going in and defunding things that the government is responsible for.
I used to work at Facebook, and it was always interesting to me to see just how many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions. Whenever it would come up on the internal boards the arguments were usually along the lines of: * "People who don't deserve to be paid more will get more money under a union" * "I'll be paid less under a union" * "Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more b…
It's easy to say how good a union could be, but will it actually be that good? What kinds of things can go wrong? What weird laws are in place and how could that complicate things?
The bottom line is that if I am happy already, a union is more risk than reward.
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Well in the US we can only really vote on two opinions. The 'left' argues for unions based on the concept. The 'right' argues against them based on their execution. So we go round and round and round and round because neither is willing to consider or admit that we might be talking past each other. Makes for great web traffic though.
I don't understand how this is remotely relevant. The point is: many (most?) first-world countries have unions that work well overall. Same with police departments. What you're describing are putative reasons why the American execution is a failure.
Sure, I'll freely admit that unions have worked very well other places, but the US seems to blow it every darn time. Why would this time be different?
I used to work at Facebook, and it was always interesting to me to see just how many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions. Whenever it would come up on the internal boards the arguments were usually along the lines of: * "People who don't deserve to be paid more will get more money under a union" * "I'll be paid less under a union" * "Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more b…
I personally don't want an union in my work place. It's not because I've watched too many movies, but because I've worked at unionized environments before and they are absolutely terrible for me. All the usual symptoms often talked about were there.
Maybe there are good unionized workplaces out there (Hollywood has been frequently pointed to as an example), but I've never experienced them. Out of my interactions with unions, they've been 100% negative, hence my views on unions. Until some of these underlying issues are resolved, I think we'll always have this very mixed to negative view of unionizing.
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How do you reliably measure teacher quality?
The same way you measure anybody else: performance reviews, which are usually executed around here by an administrator or 2 coming to observe a class every semester. Coupled with standardized tests as a secondary measurement, it's pretty easy to tell who's good at their job.
Grade teachers on their students' test scores? Okay, now you have teachers spending inordinate amounts of time on overfitting the curriculum to the local standardized testing requirements and less time actually ensuring their students are educated.
Grade developers on their lines of code or number of features shipped? Be prepared for needlessly verbose code and buggy garbage shipped out to meet the metric.
Throw these objective criterion out the window in favor of a more judgment-based approach? Be prepared for lawsuits when the mistake is eventually made.
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>I mean if we take facebook as an example, you can't negotiate pay Stocks basically are pay, because anyone who doesn't immediately sell them as they vest is fiscally irresponsible. >Which is the same as what it would be if it was unionised Firstly, no. The scale is wide and you are placed somewhere between the low and high points of the scale for your level. Not every L5 engineer earns the same thing. Secondly, tota…
> Stocks basically are pay, because anyone who doesn't immediately sell them as they vest is fiscally irresponsible. citation needed
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This is the same argument I see americans make a lot. "Unions are bad!", no, the concept is fine, you have some bad ones. "Police are bad!", no, the concept is fine, yours are just untrained and overburdened. "Public transport is bad, I need a car!", no, the concept is fine, you just have bad public transport and that forms your opinion.
Not really your main point but there are quite a few US "metro areas" with fairly sparse layout/wide scope, so I think public transit actually is a harder problem in the US than it is in e.g. Europe. That said even the cities that don't have this excuse tend to have mediocre at best transit here (for example Boston).
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As a contrary opinion, I quite like workplace. I definitely feel that, for me, it provides a much more effective way of staying up to date on what's happening compared to mailing lists and such. I don't understand how one stream of notifications is different from email - at least with workplace there's some ranking going on.
With e-mail, you don't get an avalanche of "funny memes" pictures that some people tend to post to Workplace. (At least from my experience.)