Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 266 posts

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#181

Post by pfarnsworth »

ryandrake wrote: post #58
ng12 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Congratulations if you honestly can "quit and get a new job in a week". This is not true for the vast majority of tech professionals. Even if it were currently true in general, it will not be true during the next inevitable tech downturn (I've survived two of them in 20 years so far, knock on wood). Also, organizing is not just about protecting one's job. It's about collectively negotiating for stuff like pay, benefi…

If there's a tech downturn are you suggesting that we should still get privileges even when there aren't the jobs or demand to support it?

I believe that we are well paid because of the demand and the amount of money a good developer can make a company. If that equation changes, then why shouldn't developers get laid off or lose their jobs?

Currently, supply and demand is working very well for most of us, especially in SV. I would never trade my freedom for a union that, in all instances, become friction and the bureaucracy of the union benefits from my hard work.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#182

Post by none_to_remain »

ng12 wrote: post #12
e1ven wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've talked to people in the past who associate a union with factory work, and they don't feel like it applies to them. I sometimes point out that every movie star they've ever heard of is a member of a union. I think part of the problem comes from the decline in unions in the US over the last few decades. New industries aren't unionizing, and older unions are being undermined where possible.

The unions aren't for the A-list, they're for the struggling actors who would get paid minimum wage otherwise (or worse, you'd see a lot of "unpaid internships").

I don't know about SAG (movie/TV union) but I have known dozens of people in or trying to be in the NYC theater scene, and I never heard anyone say a good thing about Equity (theater union), only many complaints. Joining was an arcane process, but necessary to get roles. So one of the paths to joining was working for certain employers who had some arrangement with the union to grant membership after so many hours of work. What that meant for several of my friends is working for this now-defunct theme restaurant in Times Square with horrible & abusive management for the time required to get their Equity card.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#183

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

phil21 wrote: post #164
losteverything wrote: post #136

Imo union-ism is an attitide and coupled with experience is effective. Just because you are salaried and "professional" does not mean you collectively do not have extreme clout. Whatever the hot issues are - say hours worked in a 7 day period - and the desire is to place limits (say 4 twelve hour days amd 1 eight hour day) having a union attitude means your bargained (agreed upon) rules are enforceable. And you carry…

Dunno. Maybe. All a union did for me in my younger years was have me work my ass off so older union members could sit around doing literally nothing. In fact as far as I could tell their jobs were effectively finding ways to do nothing, and then when they got too good at that finding ways to keep others from doing anything. I would not be paid nearly what I am today had I been stuck in my first union job. Even if I h…

If you don’t mind revealing more about your past, I would be very interested in hearing more about the kind of work you were in, and the ways in which certain union members abused the system.

Too much political commentary about unions these days is from pundits looking in from the outside, and there is too much paid anti-unionism to get an accurate description of unions’ actual shortcomings without it being washed out by vague exaggerations.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#184

Post by bmelton »

stale2002 wrote: post #166
losteverything wrote: post #136

Imo union-ism is an attitide and coupled with experience is effective. Just because you are salaried and "professional" does not mean you collectively do not have extreme clout. Whatever the hot issues are - say hours worked in a 7 day period - and the desire is to place limits (say 4 twelve hour days amd 1 eight hour day) having a union attitude means your bargained (agreed upon) rules are enforceable. And you carry…

"Otherwise workers - even professionals- have no true security, no true predictable work conditions." How do you shore this up the the fact that many of us engineers have pretty freaking awesome, high paying jobs? Things have seemed to work out great for those of us who are willing and able to negotiate well for ourselves. Thats the problem I have with unions. I do not for a single second want someone else to be nego…

Every time there's an article about unionization (here, yes, but anywhere else too), there's someone in that article extolling the virtues of all unions, followed up by others denigrating the state of unions.

As a younger man, I've been a member of unions that were good, and unions that were bad, and while I don't remotely proclaim myself to be an expert on them, but I am experienced enough to have observed what I believe are patterns.

Ideally, unions aim to solve power imbalance between workers and employers, which it does by giving power to a presumably disadvantaged party. Where the employees are already in demand, or are highly skilled, what have you, employers already have to work hard to maintain the employee base it has because replacement employees are difficult to find.

Where the employees are less skilled, or more easily replaceable, unions can be super effective at raising workplace standards and wage negotiations.

That said, I'm wary of anyone who speaks in absolutes to either end. Some unions arrive at too much power, and can be self-defeating or exploitative. Some unions are corrupt. Some unions don't work very hard for their members. Some unions are horrible, and then turn it around, and vice versa. Unions can be effective at raising wage floors, but can also lower ceilings for workers who might be best off without them.

The assertion that any given union is de facto good or bad seems flawed to me, as I've seen both sides of that particular coin, and like all eco-systems, work very well when a particular set of conditions are met and a particular balance is struck.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#185

Post by geofft »

neuland wrote: post #152
geofft wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right that I think an employer should be able to choose who to hire or not hire. So, if an employer wants to be a union shop, that's fine. 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 fo…

> 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.

How does this work, though? Take the lunch-break example - it is economically irrational for a company that is giving a 1-hour lunch break to the vast majority of its employees to require a couple of employees to work through lunch, when you have no guarantee that you'll have a complete set of workers. It's easier to just put a "Closed for lunch" sign out front.

Or take health insurance, which is purchased in bulk. You can't give the vast majority of employees a better plan and keep the rest on the old plan. The old plan no longer is available to you with those enrollment numbers. You can either put them on a more expensive plan that resembles their old plan, or on the new plan, or on no plan at all.

And that's leaving aside the fact that the negotiating parameters change. If I want a 1-hour lunch break and none of my coworkers have it, that negotiation is hard. If I want a 1-hour lunch break and all of my coworkers have it, that's an entirely different conversation. If I want a better health plan than any of the ones my company offers, that's a huge uphill battle. If I want a better health plan than I'm on that all my coworkers are already on, I can probably just have that for the asking.

There is just no way that you can require that the non-members are not allowed to benefit from the union negotiations. It doesn't work like that.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#186

Post by pfarnsworth »

paul7986 wrote: post #100
ng12 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had this same stupid attitude... 6 months later and after 30 phone & or in person interviews I am still unemployed. I left my last job due to harassment thinking screw this I dont need it and can get a job wherever. Ooops there goes my $110k job/lifestyle!

/r/cscareerquestions

You can get your resume evaluated and you can ask questions about your performance, maybe there's something you can do to make yourself more attractive to employers.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#187

Post by mcguire »

santoriv wrote: post #81
maehwasu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not the fundamental constraint in work output differences. IQ/ability gaps matter way more than they do in programming than they do in construction work.

Let's not forget that there are unions for highly skilled labor as well. When I was a classical musician I belonged to a very robust and very helpful musician's union. Everyone I know _always_ had a preference for union gigs as they usually paid better and ensured that you didn't have to deal with all sorts of nonsense from your employer (like rehearsals running overtime, not getting paid in a timely manner, blind au…

Blind auditions are bad? I thought they would be preferred by the musicians.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#188

Post by chimeracoder »

dizzystar wrote: post #142
oh_sigh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you even work as an actor in Hollywood without being part of the SAG?

Yes, there are many non-union acting roles available. You aren't going to get rich from them.

> Yes, there are many non-union acting roles available. You aren't going to get rich from them.

You're not really going to get rich from any acting roles.

Even at the 99th percentile, most actors don't make a ton of money, and the employment is both sporadic and punitively taxed. So those who are rich are generally those who were independently wealthy to begin with.

For every actor you read about who's making multimillion dollar contracts year after year for franchise movies, there are literally thousands who are making a modest living at best, or barely scraping by at worst.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#189

Post by mcguire »

icelancer wrote: post #25
untog wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting that programmers (as a whole) seem resistant to it. It's often described as being unnecessary, but when you go one or two posts down HN you find people decrying long hours, open plan offices, weekend callouts, etc. etc. I suspect it's just that when the going is good, people don't really think they need a union. If the prophecies come true and AI starts writing code for us, you can bet people will s…

>> It is interesting that programmers (as a whole) seem resistant to it Software developers and people in IT are probably two orders of magnitude more likely to be libertarian / anarcho-capitalist and conservative in economic views than your average union worker in another field. That's definitely a large impact as well.

Unlike most Americans, software developers feel themselves to be temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

Re: Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave

#190

Post by santoriv »

mcguire wrote: post #187
santoriv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget that there are unions for highly skilled labor as well. When I was a classical musician I belonged to a very robust and very helpful musician's union. Everyone I know _always_ had a preference for union gigs as they usually paid better and ensured that you didn't have to deal with all sorts of nonsense from your employer (like rehearsals running overtime, not getting paid in a timely manner, blind au…

Blind auditions are bad? I thought they would be preferred by the musicians.

My mistake, I mis-edited that. Blind auditions are preferable. The musician's union helped ensure that auditions were blind.
Post reply on HN