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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

#151

Post by snowwrestler »

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 .…

Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback of all time, with a professional agency to negotiate on his behalf, was in a union. Tom Cruise is in a union. Steven Spielberg is in a union.

There may be philosophical reasons to oppose a union, but contracting isn’t generally an issue. If you have more negotiating power than the union, you can just negotiate on top of the union contract, like sports and entertainment stars do.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#152

Post by scarface74 »

judge2020 wrote: post #69
Kalium wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I get the idea . We're just talking about a situation described by the commenter above where the union is already formed . It is apparently unable to provide any substantial benefit except the hope that it might be useful at a future date. This leads me to wonder if it's really doing anything of value for the workers it's supposed to be defending, supporting, and empowering. Like the insurance policy that you sus…

This is generally why Insurance is more regulated in certain industries, eg. Motor vehicle insurance can’t drop you because the get a claim about how you totaled someone else’s Lamborghini. Are there similar protections that regulate unions themselves?

Car insurance companies can very much drop you if they deem you to high of a risk.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#153

Post by morgante »

djrobstep wrote: post #149
limelight wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't consider shareholders good or bad, but neutral. The revenue you send them today is compensation for the capital they provided to get the business to where it is today (or, in many cases, liquidity for earlier employees who built the company). They provided meaningful value to secure that revenue stream. Meanwhile, the union provides no value to the business.

It does provide value to the business, but to the employees rather than the shareholders. The question is why should interactions with the shareholder reps be compulsory, but not the employee reps? Why is compulsion fine for one but not the other?

> It does provide value to the business, but to the employees rather than the shareholders.

At best, unions provide a redistributive function (transferring income from high-performing to low-performing employees). In practice, their net benefit to employees is negative.

> The question is why should interactions with the shareholder reps be compulsory, but not the employee reps? Why is compulsion fine for one but not the other?

The shareholders own the company. They bought it from the original founders and employees who built it. Without shareholders, there would be no company.

Unions are just mafia bosses who showed up later demanding to be paid. They were never involved in value creation.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#154

Post by scarface74 »

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.

Not really. I haven’t been “stressed” about losing my job in decades. I keep my skillset up, my resume in sync with the market, my network strong, and have a go to hell fund.

The only time it has ever taken me longer than a month to go from “I’m looking for a job” to “offer” is for my current job. That was only because I wasn’t really looking and was focused on this one job where the interview process took a month to schedule.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#155

Post by throwaway73838 »

ActorNightly wrote: post #105
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…

I would like to respond to you in depth, but I think a better option would be to recommend a good book on the subject. “Economics in one lesson” by H Hazlitt. First published in 1945, it explains, in clear terms, economic fallacies which existed at that time, and I’m sorry to say are still prevalent to this day, and possibly even more so. He explains the concepts better than I ever could. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#156

Post by yibg »

Spooky23 wrote: post #33
andrew_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never loved a job so much that I'd try to organize versus finding a better home for my trade. It's a concept that's completely foreign to me. In tech, we've never been in a market this vast and this thirsty for talent. Making a move has never been more possible or more lucrative. It just doesn't add up for me personally.

You’re living in a happy time. Ask a former high flying IBM engineer from what Binghamton or Poughkeepsie, NY was like circa 1992 when IBM detonated the mainframe business. Or anyone from DEC or HP. If you don’t think that will happen to the current cohort of tech giants, you’re engaging in magical thinking.

What would've been the benefit to employees with having a union in that case?

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#157

Post by lmm »

eru wrote: post #112
lmm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A union is like an insurance policy, or a lawyer on retainer, or a contract in writing. It doesn't do anything when times are good, that's not what it's for.

And like an insurance policy, it costs you. Not all insurance policies are good.

Oh absolutely. But the remedy for that is to be actively involved and hold them to account, not dismiss the whole thing as a scam.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#158

Post by scarface74 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #25
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…

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.

I definitely was not and am not a “10x engineer”. I spent most of my career until 2020 bopping around as an enterprise dev writing CRUD apps. It was never hard to get a job that paid twice the household income in the US - which is now $70K.

Just for complete transparency, I’m still an enterprise dev writing CRUD apps. I now use “boto3” and write a shit ton of yaml and I am a “consultant”.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#159

Post by renewiltord »

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…

You think this is the slam dunk argument for your position but I think it is actually against. If you can make it so I don’t have to do some aspect of a job, that is desirable. I didn’t mourn the disappearance of so many specialized roles as the cloud took them. I celebrated that.

There is an abstract goal of human potential I have. I don’t want you protecting my job and stealing the future from mankind. No. If you can do my job better with a machine, then so be it.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#160

Post by scarface74 »

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 do my job. Do you really think a union will save you? Another company - even one from outside the country - will have a cheaper product.
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