141–150 of 479 posts
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Spotify, SAP, Skype, Unity, Sitecore, OutSystems, Bayer, Pfizer, Nokia, Ericson, Vodafone.... Managed just fine.
A bunch of those started 150+ years ago, when European unions essentially didn't exist.
Spotify, SAP, Skype, Unity, Sitecore, OutSystems, Vodafone, ...
particularly this part: > Early on in my own career in the industry, I felt guilty about making a “good” salary. Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? Of course, I don’t — they deserve a lot more too. But if I was making less it would go straight into the pockets of investors, not other workers. Tech workers’ labor has made six of the world’s ten richest people, and today computing and the internet are an integral part of every industry. Although some workers are highly paid, the differential between investor profits and employee salary is as stark as in any other industry, because workers are not organized.
it's true that tech workers frequently make good money and we should be grateful for that, but when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce. It's how inequality is increased. It's no coincidence that the rise of the tech economy has coincided with American inequality rising sharply.
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> Is that a problem with income inequality, or a problem with political campaign financing rules? In the US those are intertwined: > The court held 5-4 that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citiz…
The New York Times is funded by the rich. Should their speech be restricted too?
I will never understand how some working class Americans can be against unions, maybe they just see themselves as embarrassed millionaires that would want to crush their workers to squeeze money out of them? It's probably my European brain, but I cannot understand how someone, say Jerry, 60 year old factory worker from idaho, can be against unions...
If this is your take, you're not being honest about the downsides of unions. Here is a list of reasons for not wanting a union[1]: - I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs. - I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are m…
I will never understand how some working class Americans can be against unions, maybe they just see themselves as embarrassed millionaires that would want to crush their workers to squeeze money out of them? It's probably my European brain, but I cannot understand how someone, say Jerry, 60 year old factory worker from idaho, can be against unions...
I've wondered if this is because unions in the U.S. are considerably different than unions in other places?
This was an interesting article [0] I bumped into titled "Europe could have the secret to saving America’s unions".
It said that in the U.S. unionization happens at the enterprise level, leaving unionized companies at a disadvantage relative to their competitors, so individual companies are very much incentivized to fight against unionization. In other countries when a certain amount of workers call for unionization negotiations happen between the union and a federation representing all employers in the sector, and the entire sector unionizes at once, not individual companies.
The article also talked about employees receiving benefits from their unions in some (fewer) countries, like unemployment insurance, instead of from the government. This incentives workers to join the union and pay union dues, instead of forcing them to do so. The idea was thrown out there that things like health care and retirement plans could also be included with union dues for people in gig-work jobs that would otherwise not receive these benefits.
I'd add that the article didn't address a concern many in the U.S. have about unions protecting under-performing workers, to the detriment of others. I've heard that this is different in other countries, at least to a point, but the article did not get into this. Also in the U.S. there have been a lot of corrupt unions, and public employee unions that receive (expensive) preferential treatment by law, I don't know if these problems exist in other countries.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/17/15290674/u...
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Do you think tech companies are more likely to come out of Europe or the US?
Moving goal posts, but yeah, Europe lacks a SV with venture capitalists raining money on every crazy idea, with Tony Stark like feudal lords pushing their minions to sleep in office with promises of free drinks and pizza, hoping to capitalize on the startup being sold. Thankfully.
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> > we should focus on increasing everyone's standard of living overall The most important quality of life metric is mental health. There is no way around the fact that mental health is heavily impacted by the fact that citizens feel worthless when they assess their social status vis-a-vis the top 1% And no amount of stuff will solve this problem because social status is a zero-sum game. It's one of those problems th…
i dont think people revolt because they feel bad when they compare themselves to the 1%. People revolt because they have nothing to lose. Their material conditions are the most important thing in this equation. I'm sure that a populace can tolerate inequality to a point (look at the inequality in the US and Europe, for example) but once a large enough slice of the population has nothing to lose then it's choppy boy t…
Revolts spark because people have nothing to lose
Mass depression, bad mental health on a country level and suicides happen when people feel worthless
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> So you need to be clear where your points come from They were responding to a post specifically asking about Americans' feelings toward unions. That made it pretty clear to me where his points were coming from. If they were responding from Finland I'd be a little confused why they were responding at all.
Because Finland is a great example of unions working for the benefit of employees? Why are we constrained to only discussing how (some, not all) unions are in the US?
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They think "oh no my lazy coworkers might get a bigger bonus!" rather than realising that their boss is the former lazy coworker. Basically the american idea that deserving people (aka myself) will magically prevail.
But that's the thing, meritocracy isn't a thing, and saying no to more protections (from unions or from pro-worker laws) just doesn't make sense. Granted there was some things I didn't know about how unions worked in the US, which I learned more about in this thread, but the same questions remain for pro worker and worker protection laws, why do Americans oppose them so much.
> meritocracy isn't a thing
So now that we've established that meritocracy is obviously a real thing, we have to ask what evidence you have that a meritocracy wouldn't exist in other fields, like programming for instance.
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Moving goal posts, but yeah, Europe lacks a SV with venture capitalists raining money on every crazy idea, with Tony Stark like feudal lords pushing their minions to sleep in office with promises of free drinks and pizza, hoping to capitalize on the startup being sold. Thankfully.
Not moving goalposts. Read my original post.