201–210 of 383 posts
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46 vs 37 is most colleagues. Nobody is forcing you to stay at a job where management makes decisions that you don't like, and similarly no one is forcing you to stay at a job where it's your coworkers making decisions you don't like. This is what democracy looks like.
Business isn't a democracy and it shouldn't be one.
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Are there a lot of labor unions in China?
The All-China Federation of Trade Unions is the largest trade union in the world, with 302 million members. Of course, some would say taking the ACFTU as representative of unions is like taking the East India Company as representative of multinational corporations...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-China_Federation_of_Trade_...
I find this interesting because I don't fully understand how tech became so opposed to unions. Many in our industry are quite jaded about the poor behavior of large corporations. Perhaps there are also reasons to be distrustful of unions. But mostly we accept working with or doing business with the former, and entirely eschewing the latter. Why have we decided that untrustworthy, sometimes poorly managed organization…
I think a lot of it is that in-demand, well paid workers don't have patience for the BS work rules that unions are notorious for. It might be unfair characterization, but "you can't change/test that code, that's role X", and other such bureaucracy can be really draining.
On the other hand I wonder if it might have inadvertent effects on other things, like maybe free software.
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> Tech workers are in so much demand that they don't really suffer such a disparity of negotiating power Nonsense. Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay all colluded with each other to keep tech worker compensation below its market rate[1]. Good luck negotiating a group health plan that an employer buys as a single employee. > Given all that I personally think the downsides of unions in tech…
How would a tech union help in that case?
Unions could also help in the world of game studios, to stop the deeply harmful practice of "crunch".
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The thing that you seem to be missing is that you need labor organization to achieve those things en masse. The current 40 hour workweek we enjoy and the weekends we have off are because of the organized labor movement in the US. If your choices are between working for one of several capital-owned tech conglomerates, or accepting their money for the runway to compete in the current business climate, can you really ca…
> The current 40 hour workweek we enjoy and the weekends we have off are because of the organized labor movement in the US. Arguably it was achieved first and foremost because increase in productivity caused by capital investments actually made it economically possible. I mean, I don't deny that 19th century capitalists required a little bit of a "push" for it to actually happen, but it's debatable if it was actually…
> I mean, I don't deny that 19th century capitalists required a little bit of a "push" for it to actually happen, but it's debatable if it was actually necessary and wouldn't just happen naturally.
Well, given that, with the subsequent increases in productivity since then, the work week could could easily be reduced by another day (32 hours work week), but no such change has yet happened naturally, I don't see why you would believe that it would have happened then either.
> I just don't think labor organizations help with anything. What helps is having more options (competition), better social mobility (access to education and knowledge) and general economic prosperity that allow entrepreneurship (taking risks). Labor unions typically work against all of it.
And yet, before mass labor organizations you had children being forced to work, and everyone working longer hours for 6 days a week, with no worker safety laws to speak of; and, with the hard struggles of labor unions (which included getting shot by US military forces!) you live in a world with worker safety regulations, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, etc.
Basically, I think your post shows exactly what class-consciousness does for you. Most working-class people can see very well how stacked the deck is against them, and have few illusions about how explicitly the current system is working to keep them down (their biggest illusion is that they can't do anything about it, or that it's foreign workers' fault - both of these the result of explicit propaganda/PR efforts). But if you manage to move into the capitalist class, your perspective often changes, as your seems to have, and you start believing the system as it is works well, and actually start to work for it - like you are here, trying to convince people that unions would be harmful for our own interests.
To be clear, I am in no way accusing you of not believing what you are saying! I am just pointing out that it is exactly an example of class-consciousness at work: since you are part of the capitalist class, you believe more in the good of the capitalist class as the one likely to bring the most benefit to everyone. Myself, part of the working class, believe that the good of the working class will bring more overall good in the world.
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Based on that data, most FAANG engineers are already paid more than the profit their employers make per-employee. Yes, a lot of engineers at FAANG make more than $400k total comp. People seem to have a hard time believing that, but it's true. And according to that chart, only two companies actually make that much profit per employee.
a lot of engineers at FAANG make more than $400k total comp This is the problem as I see it: $400k sounds like a good compensation, but we have no idea if that's as high as FAANGs would go. Maybe all those engineers could be on $800k if they'd negotiated better. We don't, and can't, know the answer to this problem. And frankly it doesn't matter if those engineers are happy with $400k, and FAANG companies happy paying…
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I think a lot of it is that in-demand, well paid workers don't have patience for the BS work rules that unions are notorious for. It might be unfair characterization, but "you can't change/test that code, that's role X", and other such bureaucracy can be really draining.
A union is just an organization which represents the interests of workers. If we don't want BS work rules, we don't have to have them. Instead, we could have things like: 1. abolition of non-compete agreements 2. ownership of code we write when we're not at work 3. standards for privacy and security enforced by working engineers and not by management Maybe your list is different than mine, but if you can think of any…
Are all states right-to-work?
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Unions are the antithesis of a meritocracy. Try promoting based on seniority over merit in a tech. business, and I doubt you'll stay competitive for very long. I don't know if kickstarter counts as a pure "tech company". They use technology, but they don't create it. Their customers are activists, so it's not surprising that their employees are, too.
If you think professional sports leagues and the movie business base opportunities and compensation on seniority I don't know what to tell you. Those fields are almost completely unionized. There's no obvious reason to think that the market for high skilled technical workers would be substantially different.
I find this interesting because I don't fully understand how tech became so opposed to unions. Many in our industry are quite jaded about the poor behavior of large corporations. Perhaps there are also reasons to be distrustful of unions. But mostly we accept working with or doing business with the former, and entirely eschewing the latter. Why have we decided that untrustworthy, sometimes poorly managed organization…
We dont need a union, we need a stronger professional organization with appropriate licensing/apprenticeship, akin to other engineers, doctors, accountants, lawyers ect.