The general resistance in this thread is something. Every day on here we all find issues with the industry as a whole, have complaints, identify negative patterns grounded in investment goals or profit. A huge majority of people on here agree: there are problems and things as a whole need to change. Its not "what use is a union to me ", it is that there is an ethical imperative to try and fight against the destructiv…
The unions in slovenia opose the reduction of income tax for workers (after years of saying that they want to tax the capital more and work less). So yeah... unions in some places are politics first, their own pockets above that, and workers fifth.
New York Times tech workers vote to certify union
331–335 of 335 posts
Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the alternative to 24hr on-call?
Services that don't have strict SLAs. Or follow-the-sun support teams.
Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Police Union and the Teacher's Union have certainly been reported to be responsible for making it hard to fire people.
Yet, both police and teachers do get fired. Some of this just comes down to both being local government jobs run by a multitude of independent systems some of which are going to be far below average. There are ~13,506 school districts in the US, so the bottom 5% consists of 675 different systems with a huge range of issues. The other issue is it can be hard to get replacements.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/investigations/...
A cop can be fired for sexually assaulting a teenager in his squad car, and end up getting rehired by the same department.
Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Services that don't have strict SLAs. Or follow-the-sun support teams.
No strict SLA is unrealistic for many businesses (imagine NYT going down for an entire weekend), but follow-the-sun could work if employees really want it.
Re: New York Times tech workers vote to certify union
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This is incorrect. A company is more than the employees. See holding companies or any of the many companies that have gone through mass layoffs/restructuring.
> You cannot work at the company without being forced to generate money for shareholders.
I’m not forced, the whole point of wanting to work for a company is to enter into a mutually beneficial agreement where you make them money and get money in return.
> You also cannot at the company without generating money for the union
This is a third party that has no business interfering with the agreement I’m trying to enter into with a company to sell it my labor.
> It’s identical compulsion either way.
I don’t think you know what “compulsion” means. One of the things is voluntary, one is not.