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New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

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Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#51

Post by woodruffw »

Kalium wrote: post #43
ceejayoz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forming the union when you have leverage helps later when you don't .

If a union formed when you have leverage doesn't deliver when you do , why would you expect it to deliver when you don't ?

If I understood the parent comment, there are two kinds of leverage being discussed here: there's the leverage that individual tech workers currently have (as high demand, high income laborers in a hot market) and then there's the leverage inherent to collective bargaining.

I believe the GP was saying that unions can deliver when circumstances give individuals large amounts of leverage, but they don't need to. But we all know that good times don't last forever, and unionization does provide sufficient leverage when individual leverage evaporates.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#52

Post by morgante »

kortilla wrote: post #29
CountSessine wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they can - unless you live in a jurisdiction with a so-called “right to work” statute. If you weren’t forced to join then, in theory, management could subvert and then break the union by hiring lots of new employees who are compensated to “opt-out”.

That’s absolutely insane that a union can prevent people from working for a company without paying for their “protection”.

Yep. That's why I will vigorously oppose any unionization drives. It's incredible that people would acquiesce to being forced to accept whatever contract some union boss negotiates.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#53

Post by throwaway73838 »

Problem is, unions are actually counter productive to any industry. They reduce available work and further incentivize off-shoring of jobs.

In the post WW2 period, the UK and German manufacturing industries lagged behind the US in both wages and productivity, largely due to the former being unionized and latter not.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#54

Post by Kalium »

woodruffw wrote: post #51
Kalium wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a union formed when you have leverage doesn't deliver when you do , why would you expect it to deliver when you don't ?

If I understood the parent comment, there are two kinds of leverage being discussed here: there's the leverage that individual tech workers currently have (as high demand, high income laborers in a hot market) and then there's the leverage inherent to collective bargaining. I believe the GP was saying that unions can deliver when circumstances give individuals large amounts of leverage, but they don't need to. But we…

I understood the point. My counterpoint is that if a union doesn't use the leverage of collective bargaining to deliver when it's in a good position to do so, it rather weakens the argument that the same union will decide to use its leverage when individual leverage evaporates.

Organizations run on precedent, policy, and consistency. Arguing for the potential for inconsistency seems to me to be a rather weak reed. Especially since the WSJ's been a union shop for 80-ish years.

More likely, IMO, is that the union as a whole did not care much about the developers and was more concerned with other parts of the membership. There's one union covering the whole shop, so this seems pretty likely.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#55

Post by wyager »

kortilla wrote: post #29
CountSessine wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they can - unless you live in a jurisdiction with a so-called “right to work” statute. If you weren’t forced to join then, in theory, management could subvert and then break the union by hiring lots of new employees who are compensated to “opt-out”.

That’s absolutely insane that a union can prevent people from working for a company without paying for their “protection”.

It's difficult to think of a more textbook example of racketeering.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#56

Post by mkr-hn »

andrew_ wrote: post #50
mkr-hn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it takes is a structural shift. Blockbuster had a 29-year run, most of which was after it wiped out the independent stores that predated it.

Do you have an example of industry-wide, pervasive structural shift? Sincere question, as Blockbuster is a good example, but relatively isolated. By the time Blockbuster was done, viable replacements had already arisen.

I think that's the point. Something will come along to replace it, and that thing does not historically pay better. "Your margin is my opportunity," as Lord Bezos said. It's already kind of happening. I could get $25 per extremely plain HTML page when I was a kid because that was a rare, in-demand skill. Now $20 buys 10 fancy Carrds. Every new framework or language or platform is chasing an efficiency or simplicity that opens it up to people who'll work for less or lets one person do the job of 10. There's always an initiating event, and then the prophecy of the tech adoption curve takes over.

Someone is gunning for the margins behind those salaries, but the people making those sums don't know it yet. If I knew where it was coming from, I would email them about a collaboration, not post it here.

edit to add: It can be a slow boil or a rapid shift. Google swept the search engine space in a few years, but Netflix and Blockbuster traded places over decades. Now Netflix is struggling as third-party content retreats into publisher silos.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#57

Post by wyager »

aaomidi wrote: post #45
Kalium wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also describes an environment where the union doesn't seem to be offering any significant benefits to developers. If unionizing doesn't improve your working conditions, what's the point of the union?

I'm pretty sure going from "we can terminate your employment without cause" to "okay these are the reasons we will terminate your employment" is a HUGE stress relief for people. Unions, even when they're not doing much, bring in stability.

Turning the decision to fire someone into a hyper-formalized procedure mostly seems to result in environments where terrible people never get fired, like the DMV.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#59

Post by djrobstep »

morgante wrote: post #52
kortilla wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s absolutely insane that a union can prevent people from working for a company without paying for their “protection”.

Yep. That's why I will vigorously oppose any unionization drives. It's incredible that people would acquiesce to being forced to accept whatever contract some union boss negotiates.

Why is it bad to be forced to generate revenue for the union as a condition of employment, but ok to be forced to generate revenue for the company as a condition of employment?

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#60

Post by freedomben »

goodluckchuck wrote: post #15

So will NYT be a union shop / the union will have a monopoly, have multiple unions, or have a mix of union and non-union work?

I can't speak for this situation, but before I moved to tech I worked in a heavily union industry, and all the union shops had in their bargaining contract that the employer could not hire anyone who wasn't in the union.

For people in the union it was great. For people not in the union, it sucked. And before somebody says, "well just join the union" (do you really think I'm that stupid not to have thought about that?) joining the union was really, really hard. You basically had to wait for somebody to either retire or die, because nobody ever left for other reasons, and because employees were super expensive and impossible to fire, union shops were extremely conservative with hiring. Union employees got paid double what non-union did and had 1/4 of the work to do, plus they slacked off like crazy and never got in trouble for it. The union was (or at least looked to us) like it was great for the employees. I'd hate to be the employer though.

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