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Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

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Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#151

Post by pyreticRitual »

chii wrote: post #88
ownagefool wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a decent take. But taking a view on markets outside of the US and SV/bigtech in particular, those 10x devs aren't usually getting the 2-3x as much, and taking a view of industry in total, profits are runaway but wages are flat and falling, especially when considering inflation. Capital is winning. Perhaps unions are required. But I'm not a union member and likely never will be.

> Capital is winning. and a reactionary union isn't really the way to fix "capital winning". Because the idea that capital "wins" is flawed imho. It's not that capital is winning, it's that capital is the part of the equation which has bargaining power. The reason for that is hard to say, but i am guessing that most workers are not really unique or special enough to warrant having them the same bargaining power as ca…

Capital will always have information asymmetry.

There’s also the fact that the worst case scenario for a capitalist is that they become an employee. The worst case for an employee is they end up homeless.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#152

Post by lotsofpulp »

throw0101c wrote: post #82
lapcat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I'm thinking about low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years. Unions create salary progression, and benefits for seniority where there is otherwise no reason for them to exist. When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power. No, thi…

> Note that all professional sports have unions for athletes. Except tennis, where players are basically independent contractors—and not coïncidentally they have the lowest average earnings of any major sport: * https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/9/12/23870760/tennis-wages-s...

I would not expect a union for tennis players. Why would they even have an employer? They play by themselves, for themselves. I have never heard of a tennis player “owner”, other than obviously the tennis player themself.

And the coincidence that they earn less might have something to do with how nobody can name anyone outside of the top handful of players.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#153

Post by baron816 »

dfxm12 wrote: post #134
zaphar wrote: post #107

I don't know whether we deserve a union or not. I do know that I emphatically do not want or need one. I make the amount of money I need. I have my pick of jobs if I feel undervalued by the place I work. Under no circumstances do I want to be forced to pay dues into a union that is unlikely to represent me in the company or politically. Since I have no need or desire there is no reason for me to consider the question…

But you already enjoy many benefits already brought about by unions that you did not pay dues for, like weekends off, ending child labor, 40 hr work week, 8 hr work day, benefits around health care, unemployment and more.

Unions have also perpetuated racism, sexism, xenophobia, organized crime, government corruption, etc. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops. America abandoned unions for a reason.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#154

Post by jhgfjhgfjhfgjhg »

randy5235 wrote: post #145
zaphar wrote: post #107

I don't know whether we deserve a union or not. I do know that I emphatically do not want or need one. I make the amount of money I need. I have my pick of jobs if I feel undervalued by the place I work. Under no circumstances do I want to be forced to pay dues into a union that is unlikely to represent me in the company or politically. Since I have no need or desire there is no reason for me to consider the question…

What makes you feel that a union wouldn’t represent your interests? Do you really believe that corporations will continue paying us well any longer than they absolutely have to? As soon as an ai or low code split comes along that can replace junior and mid level engineers, those jobs will get harder and harder to find. The rest of us will have to shoulder the responsibility of “cleaning” after those solutions and the…

It wouldn't represent my interest because an older programmer who puts in a few hours of work a week would be paid more than me.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#155

Post by the-smug-one »

piva00 wrote: post #14
aknfxb3m wrote: post #4

In my country we had mandated unions for tech workers in various states. I paid the compulsory annual fee plus an additional fee that I didn't understand and can't properly explain what it was for. Not once in 23 years in IT have they done anything for me. Not a single time. Every time we pushed for raises and someone contacted the union, nothing came back. When the company was not updating our salaries against infla…

From what you described it sounds very, very similar to my experience with unions in Brazil. The ones for IT specifically, they all suck and that system is definitely not how unions should work... For some reason I always felt those IT unions in Brazil were not actually run by any worker but by cadres from the employers. On the other hand, unions here in Sweden are definitely worth being part of, they have your back…

>I always felt those IT unions in Brazil were not actually run by any worker but by cadres from the employers.

That's a yellow union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_union

These are, for some reason, popular in Denmark.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#156

Post by lr4444lr »

hospitalJail wrote: post #97

The Physicians have a cartel, Pharmacists have a cartel, why can't we create our own cartel? The only way this would work, is if we entrench ourselves into US politics and spend hundreds of millions of dollars of bribery/lobbying money. Sure its definitely going to be bad for the rest of US citizens, but if the medical field is going to extort us, why can't we join in?

100% agree.

I think it is because we can't get out act together to create a professional organization to gatekeeps credentialing, so that we can "police our own". Hence, the whole tech interview drama, because there is no uniform metric of quality, because anyone can call himself an "engineer".

I think if we fix that problem, we'll get most of the benefits of unionization downstream.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#157

Post by abigail95 »

randy5235 wrote: post #145
zaphar wrote: post #107

I don't know whether we deserve a union or not. I do know that I emphatically do not want or need one. I make the amount of money I need. I have my pick of jobs if I feel undervalued by the place I work. Under no circumstances do I want to be forced to pay dues into a union that is unlikely to represent me in the company or politically. Since I have no need or desire there is no reason for me to consider the question…

What makes you feel that a union wouldn’t represent your interests? Do you really believe that corporations will continue paying us well any longer than they absolutely have to? As soon as an ai or low code split comes along that can replace junior and mid level engineers, those jobs will get harder and harder to find. The rest of us will have to shoulder the responsibility of “cleaning” after those solutions and the…

You have very very heavy lifting to do if you're trying to prove a productivity improvement leads to a worse outcome.

Farming automation and the green revolution didn't make us all unemployed - it meant 90% of us could do something else instead of farming.

We used the productivity to just invent new forms of work that weren't possible and aren't possible in a lower productivity economy.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#158

Post by dfxm12 »

alphazard wrote: post #22

Don't unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I'm thinking about low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years. Unions create salary progression, and benefits for seniority where there is otherwise no reason for them to exist. When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power. Now compa…

It makes sense to negotiate as a block when management has more power than you. Now more than ever, tech companies have more cash, more lobbying and more power. They use this to play games with employees, like attrition through a return to office program so that they can skirt around the WARN Act wrt layoff requirements.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#159

Post by acdha »

infecto wrote: post #8
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #5

Tech workers are usually so buried, heads hunched over the keyboard, focused on the latest project, that they aren't even aware they are being used. They straiten their back one day, look around, and realize they've been working for 20 years and getting nowhere. They got good enough raises, but forgot inflation, and it was really nothing.

In what country? Software engineers have some incredible pay for pretty low effort in the last 15years. Even before that it was a pretty decent living for most of the time pretty non-unique software. We are talking about them as an exploited working class, wild to me.

Very few tech workers get incredible pay – most people do not work for a FAANG, and far from all of the ones who do are getting paid lavishly, especially after you account for hours & cost of living (note the downward pressure against wages for anyone not in SF). Not bad pay by any means but people still have to go to work every day and are living in upper middle class but not upper class houses, etc.

This is especially true relative to the business revenues generated. A union helps workers get more of the value they’re creating and also helps avoid things like companies using layoffs as a tactic to keep employees from negotiating aggressively.

It also helps with less visible things like age discrimination – very few people are going to retire by 45 no matter what they tell themselves at 25 – and non-cash benefits like parental leave or not being discriminated against for politics or not fitting in with some group. I’ve heard a lot of bad things about unions, and seen some firsthand (the Teamsters are self-destructive), but everywhere I’ve worked the union was a net win for workers and literally every one of the times someone publicly blamed the union for poor performing workers it was an attempt to shift blame from management failures.

Re: Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

#160

Post by marcinzm »

the-smug-one wrote: post #130
marcinzm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still won just not as much as now.

I agree, us non-capitalists took more of the cake back then.

Unions in tech won't recreate the 1950s. The reason capital always wins is because it can be moved around more easily than specialized workers can change their skill set. If you extract more of the pie in one area then capital (and thus growth) will just move to a different areas. Could be different industries or companies in different countries. They still win while your occupation and growth in earnings stagnates.
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