151–160 of 266 posts
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The "here we are today, look how good we have it" narrative is complacent and dangerous. Eventually you will be disrupted.
And the point is unions didn't help to counter it.
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And if the poster you replied to quits from his employer, isn't he just doing that because he's a rational (by his own metric of rationality) actor in the market? Presumably there is at least one un-unionized employer where he could get a job.
I mean, in a sense yes, but also his "rational" explanation is that he doesn't think employers should do X, he thinks employers should just behave as the market demands which clearly cannot include doing X, so I'm pushing back on whether that's actually a rational decision.
But, unionization is not something an employer really has a choice in currently. If people vote to form a union, the employer must deal with the union representation (to my understanding).
What I'm saying is that an employer should be free to fire any employee (including for the explicit reason that they are a union member) and a group of employees should be able to strike and bargain as a unit if they like. But the union members shouldn't be able to force a non-member to strike or bargain with them.
Edit: and the non-member employee shouldn't get any of the pay rates, benefits, or work rules that the union negotiates for it's members.
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I thought union shops were illegal in the USA per the NLRA. As I understand it, they can force you to pay a portion of dues (only stuff related directly to bargaining with your specific employer), but that's about it.
> I thought union shops were illegal in the USA. As I understand it, they can force you to pay dues, but that's about it. No, closed shops are illegal, but union shops aren't. An employer can no longer agree only to hire people who are already members of a union (that's a closed shop, which used to be legal), but they can force you to join a union after you are hired. If that's the case, if the union terminates your…
If an employer chooses to require it's employees be members of a union, I think that's their right. But, I dislike (and think should not be legal) a group voting to unionize and then forcing their agreement onto other employees that don't want to be represented.
To my current understanding, there are 2 stumbling blocks to that way of doing things. 1) Employees can force an employer to deal with a union and 2) the union must cover everyone in the bargaining unit.
In my opinion, ideally both of those things would stop. A union can operate and negotiate on behalf of it's members. The union contract wouldn't cover non-members. And an employer can choose not to hire union workers.
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Except collective bargaining won't exist without that law. The free rider problem will destroy any possibility of collective bargaining. That's why I think it's disingenuous to say: If a group of people wish to collectively bargain with their employer, that's wonderful. But, they can leave me out of it, and I can do without whatever pay schedule and benefits they manage to extract from the employer. Well you can't re…
Not necessarily true. If enough people find the union valuable, believe in its aims, and want to participate in it, then the employer can't afford to lose or alienate the union employees, so the union has negotiating power (proportional to the employees that participate). If enough people don't find the union valuable, don't believe in its aims, and don't want to participate in it, then the union will correctly have…
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> Its amazing that none of the replies (so far) have pointed out something in the very article that spawned this thread, the status of women and minorities. It's not that surprising; Hacker News comments tend not to sympathize with victims of harassment, sexism, or racism when stories about those topics come up. So it's not surprising that it doesn't become the focus of the thread here, since it's not the lede in the…
Fair enough to your second point, though I honestly doubt its more or less common in working class unions vs white collars. Sexual harassment doesn't seem to be something that respects class lines as much as people would like it to. I'm still waiting on a "This is what a Trump Voter looks like" profile pieces that covers, say, an intellectual living and working in Cambridge MA, or an upper middle class manager from S…
Oh, I never said that it did. I'm referring to blue-collar jobs like Rust Belt manufacturing specifically because that's a historically heavily unionized industry where the workforce is disproportionately male and white.
I thought this was interesting because if knowledge workers like journalists can do so, why not programmers, or what ever term you'd prefer to be called?
Why do we need a union in a seller's market? If I'm unhappy with my job I can quit and get a new one in a week. It's not about being a knowledge worker. Screenwriters are unionized because there are many more people who want to write than there are gigs, therefore there's a high potential for abuse.
Because you will one day be 45 years old ...
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Why do we need a union in a seller's market? If I'm unhappy with my job I can quit and get a new one in a week. It's not about being a knowledge worker. Screenwriters are unionized because there are many more people who want to write than there are gigs, therefore there's a high potential for abuse.
Its amazing that none of the replies (so far) have pointed out something in the very article that spawned this thread, the status of women and minorities. Literally in the title its noted that the publisher is being put on leave, if you read the article it goes on to note that was because of sexual harrassment and his attitude toward gay men. These are bread and butter union issues.
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https://i.imgur.com/lziE8QA.jpg It's open, but we got it because we loved the building, and we have two conference rooms with doors for calls. (My "desk" is a big couch with a monitor arm mounted to the wall.)
I wish I could invest in whichever back doctor is closest to you
Needless to say my current job is heavy remote with flexible time in the office that I took over a higher paying position.
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Unions (aka parasites) have a rich history of running their hosts into the ground. Just look at Detroit pensions, or any of the hundreds of municipalities that got fucked by Police/Fire pensions in the subprime crisis (e.g. Vallejo), or the fact that there are bus/train drivers in SF that make $100k+/year. Unions are responsible for running things into the ground far more often than management is. (or they just creat…
Who are you going to persuade with rhetoric like that? I don't even disagree with the point you're making about public-sector unions, which I too have misgivings about, but I feel repulsed by the way you've chosen to make that point --- which has little to do with what I'm saying.
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Who are these "so many developers" you've referenced a dozen times? You've been spending too much time on internet forums listening to rants of the vocal minority. Truth is that most developers are happy and don't need a drastic change, and this can hardly be said about any other profession.
People disagree about open offices. Some people disagree about the option to work from home or hire remote. But it is hard to believe that ANY of us disagree about IP contracts or extended options execution windows. Are you a professional developer? Which of these issues do you think are non-issues?
It's not that people disagree about them, it's that many developers don't suffer from them.
I'm a professional developer and, for me personally, everything in your list is a non-issue. I left BigCo where they were an issue. But I sure can think of a host of issues that I would be concerned about were I part of an organization, one of which being someone else saying what are and aren't issues to me.
If a time comes where a good dev cannot choose where they work and basically negotiate their own terms (e.g. I'm not putting up with any of that stuff in your list and I don't have to in our current market), then unionization may be warranted. But as it stands now, I think many of the issues you listed are avoidable and good devs call their shots.
The HN complaints you hear are an echo chamber and shouldn't be a basis for your opinions on the industry as a whole.