New York Times tech workers vote to certify union • Hacker News Board

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#181

Post by rmbyrro » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:03 AM UTC

jcims wrote: post #141

qbasic_forever wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager it should be terrifying and strike fear into your heart at the thought that your entire team's last recourse is to just up and leave with no notice. With a union you can bargain, understand the problems, and resolve them.

I was a member of the Teamsters for about a year. That organization seems to thrive on creating a hostile relationship between management and staff. I’m a manager now, there’s absolutely no way I would want to invite that type of operating model into a current workplace. If the organization that I work for creates an environment that is not conducive to retaining employees then I’m just as likely to leave as my team.

Given how easier - relatively to manufacturing - it is to challenge established players in tech, this shows tech unions are pretty much doomed.

Companies adopting this model will collapse very quickly with the lck of good talent. Good people will work elsewhere and their employers will thrive.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#182

Post by Retric » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:04 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #109

woodruffw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unions don’t prevent getting rid of dead wood, people get fired from union jobs regularly. The point is they need an actual pretext to fire someone, and layoffs are more difficult.

It’s mostly protection vs the Amazon style fire people regularly so we can avoid paying unemployment insurance when we do seasonal layoffs etc.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#183

Post by djrobstep » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:06 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #153

djrobstep wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Without the employees, there would also be no company. You cannot work at the company without being forced to generate money for shareholders. You also cannot at the company without generating money for the union (if membership is compulsory). Once again, why is one bad and the other one good? Why is one a “mafia boss” and the other legitimate? It’s identical compulsion either way.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#184

Post by eru » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:06 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #169

eru wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competition is insurance against that, too. Alas, unions can have their own principal-agent problems and bureaucracy and hubris.

alas, competition can have its own problems too. In complicated situations it may be that you want more than one insurance against bad things happening.

I'm happy for people to join unions, if they want to.

I'd just be against being forced to join unions, or against giving unions any special legal privileges.

(Eg one such privilege would be not enforcing contract clauses about employees giving up their right to strike in exchange for some pre-agreed compensation.)

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#185

Post by eru » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:07 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #175

eru wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say it like that's a good thing in itself?

It is. Labor providers are organized and connected in all sort of structures, ranging from golf club memberships and industry associations over questionably-legal wage fixing deals to ~~outright bribing~~ donating to politicians. In contrast, just about 10% of US workers are unionized [1]. This disparity is the reason behind a large part of wage stagnation and other areas where employment conditions are far behind of…

Absolute wages are higher in the US than in Europe.

Wages have not stagnated in the US, either. What measures of inflation do you use to come to that conclusion? The labour share of GDP has been roughly stable over the last few decades.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#186

Post by rmbyrro » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:07 AM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #42

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?

Unions are insurance against capitalist hubris.

No, it's the same hubris: politics over personal human connection, concentration of power, collective mass over the individual, corruption on all levels.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#187

Post by rmbyrro » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:11 AM UTC

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…

One reason I generally dislike unions: you usually start imagining things about reality. And it almost always ends up bad.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#188

Post by altacc » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:26 AM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #10

Quoted post unavailable.

That's a very simplistic generalisation and totally inline with what anti-union employers would like you to think.

To rebuff with another generalisation: employers are antiemployee. Corporations/employers are pro-themselves and anti anything that reduces profits, including employees. A company cares nothing about it's employees as individuals, only as profit making entities. A union acts to redress that imbalance.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#189

Post by altacc » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:32 AM UTC

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…

Throughout history a form of control has been to make people feel that they're better off than some other group of people, and so have more power, privilege & life is as good as it is likely to get. However it also comes with the implicit warning that they could lose that specialness if the boat was rocked. There is always somebody better off and with more power dictating that hierarchy to bother groups and the only way to address that imbalance is by collaboration and for employees, unionisation is a way to do that.

Tech workers are very much in that hierarchy and think that they're better off than most other people, so don't need a union. As a unionised, European tech worker it is quite likely that I have far more protections from my employer's whims than those in largely non-unionised countries (automatic minimum pay rises, job security, holidays, working hours, etc...) and I very much prefer it this way.

Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

#190

Post by ejb999 » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

0xy wrote: post #133

woodruffw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The last thing I want is job security for incompetent coworkers. You see this playing out in teachers unions where they go to bat for sexual predator teachers.

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