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Even if Poland unions aren't fully there (no idea), I bet they are more effective and in use than on US.
Google will be surprised.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t want what, a leg to stand on? A seat at the table to bargain with your betters? How is some random data point about your wife’s experience evidence against collective bargaining? What do you see as the downside? “Gee, sure we have a say in our benefits and my salary is way higher, but there’s this one coworker who doesn’t pull their weight.” As opposed to life in a non-union shop, where it’s a workers paradise…
This is going to be controversial and slightly classist, but... There is work that is utility work and there is work that isn't. I don't mean skilled or unskilled. A common dunk on the distinction between the two is something like "I'd love to see the CEO of try a day on the line of and see if they still want to call it unskilled labour." No, where I differentiate is jobs where ANYONE can learn the skills, and others…
Ehhh, you can have this and have a union at the same time. And unproductive slacker orgs without unions definitely exist.
Pay/promo by seniority isn't some innate property of unions, it's a response to a lack of pay increases by management. If management keeps union members happy with their pay, the members have no reason to vote in leadership that asks for pay by seniority and have a lot of reasons to avoid it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like your wife doesn't like the collective she's a part of. Welcome to collective bargaining. You don't get to pick and choose who is allowed to vote in your local elections, and you don't get to pick and choose which of your coworkers are entitled to representation. If there are bad people in your employee collective, that is mostly a rebuke of the employer for hiring bad people. Or are you arguing that un…
When you have unions, the bad apples cannot be removed from the bunch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how did the bad employees get hired at your workplace and stay there before it unionized? Did the company hire 100% good apples before unionization and then suddenly change its mind and start hiring bad ones? Are you really going to assert that firing people is impossible in a union workplace? We both know that's not true.
It's damn near impossible, and they can get unfired. Also I do not work at a unionized employer, my wife does as a nurse at Stanford hospital.
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"union bureaucrats that don’t do anything except complicate everyone’s lives" is an interesting assertion to make in this case where the union hasn't even had an opportunity to do anything bad yet. Why does unionizing have to be treated as "hardball" if the union hasn't even made any demands yet? Does the status quo have to be "employees have to do what I want, no questions, even if it's illegal"? Lots of employer mi…
This is why you will never see a union in Silicon Valley software company. The benefits are great and unions are unnecessary. I’m sure there are other places where unions are absolutely a necessity but not in a software company in Silicon Valley.
This is less true than it used to be; the Valley has been feeling more progressive and less libertarian for a while. I'm not sure if it's because the field is growing up, so it attracts fewer disrupt-the-world types, shifting generational values, shifting cultural values, more influence from SF and the tech scene moved north, the pendulum swinging back as people see the consequences of tech, or something else.
That said, as long as it's a competitive job market in tech, I agree that seeing a union isn't likely because there isn't a clear benefit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last I checked doctors, who aren't unionized in the US and are more essential than nurses, are doing just fine.
Honest question: is nuance lost on HN? Is everything now just polarized viewpoint vs. outlier anecdote, over and over again? Do we only care about first-order ideas/effects and think that a once-off event discredits institutions that are centuries old?
Good luck, most European countries have unions, and for us the laws negotiated with them usually affect everyone on the building, not just the union people like on US. Even if Poland unions aren't fully there (no idea), I bet they are more effective and in use than on US. Google will be surprised.
These people aren’t Google employees nor are they software engineers. They work for HCL, which seems like a discount tech contracting firm.
Read the article, lol.
Good luck, most European countries have unions, and for us the laws negotiated with them usually affect everyone on the building, not just the union people like on US. Even if Poland unions aren't fully there (no idea), I bet they are more effective and in use than on US. Google will be surprised.
Google isn’t the employee here. HCL is.
> A year ago, 80 Google contractors employed by HCL America in Pittsburgh voted to unionize with US Steelworkers—a historic victory for white collar tech workers in the U.S. According to who? My wife is a nurse, in a union, and the stuff she tells me about some of her cohorts getting away with then leveraging the union to avoid being reprimanded/ let go is insane. Additionally there is no incentive to improve, your s…
I too, form my entire world view on anecdotal evidence.
I am not anti union (wouldn’t want to be part of one, but don’t ideologically oppose them), but this seems to be a consistent failure point for them, in the same way that Scrum often ends up generating hairball codebases.