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Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

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Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#141
post #100

FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.

Unions are almost fundamentally against the practice of undercutting them with cheaper labour.

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Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#142
post #100

FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.

I think unions are great but they are deeply flawed, like any human organization, but for my family they really worked and both my parents had good jobs in unions. My dad's union both saved him from being fired and also tried to get him fired themselves (he pissed off an up and coming union leader who then proceeded to lie about him). They always seemed like an important counterweight more than actually a great organization (and you actually have a vote, unlike most companies).

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#143
post #100

FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.

"Unions" are a broad category of human organization, like "business." It makes little sense to favor or oppose "business" in general, and similarly for "unions." I encourage everyone to better understand the specific organizations they support or oppose, unions or otherwise.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#144
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, unions can be protectionist about their work force, but there are international worker unions; maybe this is a European thing. An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment. Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the c…

[flagged]

Loaded questions are a rhetorical device taught in high school persuasive writing courses as a tool to dominate a conversation. Its indicative of a bad-faith participant in a discussion.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#146
post #100

FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.

Of course they did. Unions are always going to be against immigrant labor.

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.

If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.

So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#147
post #123
post #100

FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.

Yes, unions can be protectionist about their work force, but there are international worker unions; maybe this is a European thing. An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment. Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the c…

The econ 101 observation feels like it falls apart under light scrutiny. The market sets a rate, but which rate is more "natural?" When individuals negotiate directly with employers, they tend to be at a disadvantage. An individual has less knowledge and bargaining power than an employer in almost all cases; so can we call the rate set by these negotiations to be the "natural" rate? Conversely, when bargaining collectively, employees are able to pool knowledge and resources to bargain more effectively, and they have more leverage as a group which allows them to negotiate on a more even field to the employer. I would consider this outcome to be more "natural," and would argue that it is not that collective bargaining results in higher wages than the market would set but that individual bargaining results in wages that are artificially lower than those of the market clearing rate.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#148
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time. Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent . Also t…

But how do you actually bootstrap that process? Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired. I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).

Btw what was the outcome of that? AFAICT the bandcamp union still exists and I don’t see any public news about the case from after December 2023, so wondering what happened

Edit: last news i see on their mastodon are from April 2024 and seems they negotiated some severance pay for the laid off workers and that it; so I guess the union busting was successful?

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#149
post #100

FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.

Similarly, I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of immigration.

I think you can have a nuanced view on immigration.

I'm fairly pro-immigration but I think the current immigration system in the US is highly exploitive to just about everyone. H1B, in particular, is pretty much entirely a system of putting immigrants in a bad situation that makes it hard for them to challenge their employers.

So much of the US immigration system is built on undercutting wages for native workers.

IMO, more than anything immigrants need a lot more protections particularly from deportation. If we want to punish someone for using undocumented immigrants it shouldn't be the immigrant, it should be the business owner that employed them. But also, if someone has been here for 10 years without causing problems there should be a fast path to citizenship.

I've know a family of undocumented workers that have been in the US for the last 30+ years. They don't have citizenship because it's too expensive and to complex for them to get through. Yet there they've been working on cattle farms, babysitting, paying taxes, and teaching me a bit of Spanish.

Re: Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union

#150
post #123
post #100

FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.

Yes, unions can be protectionist about their work force, but there are international worker unions; maybe this is a European thing. An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment. Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the c…

> An econ 101 observation

Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.

In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.

Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.

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