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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

#101

Post by jart »

aspenmayer wrote: post #88
jart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if it's through industrial unionism like the wobblies. Craft unionism isn't scalable.

Can you explain the difference to me? I’m interested how small/independent businesses can unionize. I’d like to know more.

The goal of industrial unionism is to organize the entire working class so that everyone gets better treatment. It's a recognition that the goal of unionism should not be only for SWEs to enrich themselves, but rather most importantly show solidarity with all workers who are struggling.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#102

Post by tehjoker »

aspenmayer wrote: post #88
jart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if it's through industrial unionism like the wobblies. Craft unionism isn't scalable.

Can you explain the difference to me? I’m interested how small/independent businesses can unionize. I’d like to know more.

Industrial unions are sector-wide and don't require organizing every single business. Here's a brief summary.

http://stephenkoppekin.net/craft-unions-vs-industrial-unions...

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#103

Post by approxim8ion »

morgante wrote: post #76
afavour wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? If there’s no union you’re forced to accept whatever contract the company boss decides upon. At least in the union situation you’ve had an advocate in negotiating the contract. In either situation if you don’t like the end result you can just quit.

Yes, I always have the option to quit. Which I had in the first place. It's just as possible (in fact, probable) that the union negotiates a worse contract than what I could have gotten myself and I'd be forced to quit a job I liked. That's a strictly worse outcome. > At least in the union situation you’ve had an advocate in negotiating the contract. They're not an advocate for me. They're an advocate for the union .…

At the end of the day these arguments always come down to people thinking they're superior than the peasants who "need unions", possibly because they can't imagine organizations where people work for the welfare of people other than themselves.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#104

Post by colechristensen »

woodruffw wrote: post #46
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?

At the bare minimum: unions increase job security and provide a formal disinterested (or even positively interested) recourse mechanism against your employer. They also decrease your employer's ability to leverage the collective pressure of other employees against you.

When the recourse is that you can easily pick up a new job, usually with a raise, the union doesn’t have a lot to offer.

I’m also happy to be able to negotiate myself.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#105

Post by ActorNightly »

throwaway73838 wrote: post #53

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.

Not really true.

For industries where you need x human labor to do x amount of defined work, unions definitely help employees. Companies have an incentive to extract as much labor while keeping wages the same or lowering, leveraging peoples need for a job. Also for a lot of positions in those industries, the pay is low enough to put significant friction for employees into doing things like switching jobs, especially when employees start getting specialized and becoming limited to a certain industry, where all the companies are incentivized to do the same thing.

However, for industries where you want to select for the best and brightest to advance tech, unions are a bad thing, because they effectively remove the capability of the companies to do this.

You could make an argument that both of those cases should be governed by a common principle, and that technology development is generally better for society, so unions are generally a bad thing, but that is a pretty complex issue.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#106

Post by ralfd »

vmception wrote: post #47
CSMastermind wrote: post #7

I'm surprised they weren't already in one. I worked at a competitor (the Wall St. Journal) years ago and all software engineers there had to be part of the union. Unions in the news industry are extremely common and powerful. My subjective experience with it was that union membership was mostly inconsequential for developers. The market for programmers is so strong that people would just leave if they weren't treated…

Yes but it is time to revisit that logic. Software engineers are well compensated relative to the rest of the population but that should not be a factor at all. Its all about value delivered relative to that organization, in aggregate. Wages have stagnated for 30 years. There is a lot of catching up to do: Until a single earner can afford a family home outright, in 5 years of compensation, down the street from where…

Houses are positional goods. If you earn five times as much, your colleagues will too, and there will be a bidding war until the price matches your earning power again. See also: The absurd real estate prices in the Bay area.

Elizabeth Warren made that argument in her book "The Two-Income Trap". The economic gains from switching from the traditional bread-winner/house-wife household to double-income-households were eaten up to buy the "family home down the street where the best school is".

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-in...

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#107

Post by onion2k »

morgante wrote: post #81
Spooky23 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This of course isn’t a problem for HN posters, who are all 10x engineers or w/e. Overall though, not having a contract, recourse and representation in a large company is a pretty big risk factor unless you just toil away in silence.

> Overall though, not having a contract, recourse and representation in a large company is a pretty big risk factor unless you just toil away in silence. Why? I have an in-demand set of skills and could easily find a new job if I wanted to. I'd much rather negotiate directly with my employer than have a union intermediating that relationship. If anything, it feels far riskier to have a politically-motivated union bos…

I have an in-demand set of skills and could easily find a new job if I wanted to.

Let's imagine someone makes an AI project that can turn requirements into code, and it actually works. Copilot has shown it's not impossible to generate working code with some machine learning but it's definitely a hard problem. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of founders working on this problem right now and maybe one will get lucky.

How long do you think you will be in demand for? Years? Months? Less? Perhaps you'll be fine because you actually define the requirements. Or you're in a job where the AI can't replace you. It would replace a lot of people working in the simple CRUD app end of the dev industry though, and that means pressure to keep wages up would fall away fast if there are more devs than dev jobs. You wouldn't get a raise if there are 20 devs who'd jump in to your role for less money if you left. You couldn't negotiate better terms. If you left you'd be competing with lots of others which puts more downward pressure on your salary.

That's one vaguely plausible scenario of how things might change in the next 10 years. There are many more. Right now devs are very well paid but we should all recognize that for what it is - an opportunity for industry disruption. Our salaries are (partly) lost profit. Companies don't want to pay us as much as they do; they pay market rates because they have to. If a company can reduce that cost by lowering wages or lowering headcount every tech employer is going to jump on the opportunity. Founders out there know this is a pain point, and they're working on solving it.

Maybe having a union for devs would actually be useful if that ever happens.

(FWIW technological change reducing manpower requirements has been a massive driving force behind unionization in many other industries. The scenario is sound even if the "AI writes your code now" bit is a little fantastical.)

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#108

Post by toomanybeersies »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #96
ethbr0 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As parent said, in good times (demand >> supply), the difference between individual optimal and union optimal is relatively small. Or negative! In bad times (demand Ergo, you're not going to see a lot of union benefits in good times.

People don't pay a monthly subscription for a lawyer their not likely to use even though a lawsuit or criminal charge is one bad day away. You're view of supply and demand matches that of a paranoid actor rather than a rational one. If ever the market were to contract, there are alternative solutions like savings, downsizing, or looking for another job. It's not as though one company has a monopoly on all the job opp…

> People don't pay a monthly subscription for a lawyer

That's a pretty poor analogy. Some people do keep lawyers on retainer. Also, if you don't have legal representation at the point in time you're sued/charged, you're not required to represent yourself, and can still hire a lawyer.

Unions are probably closer to insurance. You can't buy insurance after you crash your car and expect them to pay out, neither can you join a union after you've been given the sack and expect representation.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#109

Post by eru »

woodruffw wrote: post #46
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?

At the bare minimum: unions increase job security and provide a formal disinterested (or even positively interested) recourse mechanism against your employer. They also decrease your employer's ability to leverage the collective pressure of other employees against you.

To be honest, I don't actually want to work at a place that has better job security.

Obviously, I wouldn't mind better job security for just myself; but if the downside is that my employer can't get rid of the dead wood, I'd rather work elsewhere.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#110

Post by limelight »

onion2k wrote: post #107
morgante wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall though, not having a contract, recourse and representation in a large company is a pretty big risk factor unless you just toil away in silence. Why? I have an in-demand set of skills and could easily find a new job if I wanted to. I'd much rather negotiate directly with my employer than have a union intermediating that relationship. If anything, it feels far riskier to have a politically-motivated union bos…

I have an in-demand set of skills and could easily find a new job if I wanted to. Let's imagine someone makes an AI project that can turn requirements into code, and it actually works. Copilot has shown it's not impossible to generate working code with some machine learning but it's definitely a hard problem. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of founders working on this problem right now and maybe one will ge…

If an AI can do my job, an AI should be allowed to do my job. I don't want a union to "protect" me doing a job which can be automated. That's a waste of human talent and potential.

It is terrible to hold back progress just to provide "make-work" jobs protected by unions. Should we still employ elevator operators?

In a scenario where my job is obsolete, a union would simply delay the inevitable. It might keep the company from replacing me with an AI, but the company would therefore eventually fail to competitors who could. In the meantime, the union would make people miserable and delay progress.

For what it's worth, I completely agree that developer jobs are on their way towards automation. Instead of trying to fight that trend with unionization, I focus on being part of it (building automation tools) and building a capital base.

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