211–220 of 266 posts
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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.
It’s a good thing I’m talking to random people on the internet and not doing union negotiations.
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Consider a few ways engineers could have things Even Better: Less / No crunch time. Ethical support so you can refuse to do something shady. Support for union members getting equal pay and equal treatment, despite marginalized status. Job security for people over 50. Those are just off the top of my head. And yes, I get that not all of those things are delivered by all unions. But ultimately, there is a lot to be gai…
A professional association with ethics standards you could quote to say "no I won't build your creepy backdoor/logging/privacy-invading tracking feature, it's against the code" would be pretty sweet...
It's easy to see when designing reactors, or building bridges that your work and decisions can directly impact human welfare and correspondingly I have seen a very high standard of attention to detail, standards compliance and ethics in those fields. When designing software systems and applications it's harder for some to see, but the potential impact is still present.
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I will quit from any employer that forces all programmers to negotiate as a unit, because I believe that compensation should be based purely on your individual skills and the market. I also believe that forced collective bargaining is unconstitutional, because it requires people to associate with a group that they don't want to associate with. If a group of people wish to collectively bargain with their employer, tha…
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…
Except collective bargaining won't exist without that law.
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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…
> or the fact that there are bus/train drivers in SF that make $100k+/year. This is only maybe true in the sense that there probably are some senior-level transit operators who make that much, but the median BART train operator gets $30.58/hr. SF MTA bus drivers are somewhere around $23/hr. That hardly seems excessive or crazy to me.
Santa Clara County VTA benefits are even more generous. "Just down the road, Amalgamated Transit Union employees of the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority pay a flat $35 a month for health care and nothing toward their pension."[0]
[0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/BART-workers-pay-plus-...
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.
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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 c…
For health care, there exists individual plans. So, the employer can choose to offer that to non-members if they think it's worth it. The employer could also have a standard non-union benefit package if the company had enough non-union employees. Or, it could choose not to offer health insurance (or any other benefit it offered to the union).
I don't agree that seeing your union colleagues get a benefit means that an individual negotiator be more likely to get a benefit. This knowledge does reveal that the employer is willing to give that benefit to the union. But, the union has the weight of it's members to extract that benefit. The non-member has only their individual contribution. So it depends on the individual's value to the business versus the union members' value.
I suspect that there would still be a strong incentive to bargain collectively in jobs where an employee is easily replaced. These workers would see that they can get better compensation by banding together than going it alone.
Meanwhile, it would basically not be feasible to unionize in areas where there is a significant difference in the productivity of individual employees. Most programming falls into this category in my opinion.
More broadly, I think you've kinda missed my position a bit. I'm thinking about freedom of association as a negative right (as in "government can't force you to {x}"). So, if that right was interpreted the way I would like it to be, it doesn't really matter what the actual outcome is. It shouldn't be legal to force a non-member to associate with a union (unless the employer chooses to contract exclusively with that union).
Obviously, you're arguing that my interpretation is not desirable b/c it would cause a free-rider problem (which I don't think is as strong of a possibility as you do).
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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…
And will the teamsters union be able to save all those truck driving jobs? I doubt it, unless they do it through politics...
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…
One of the big misconceptions is that unions are just for workers. In my experience unions benefit the employers just as much as the workers by providing a formal process for raising and resolving grievances. This helps corporations by keeping things smooth and puts a check on low level management that benefits the organization over all.
Unions also bring a lot of BS. They are another hierarchy with their own bosses, and rules, etc. But you will not find any more generous group of people then in a union. When there is a collection for someone who has a sick kid or some other tragic life event the amount of money that gets collected in a single meeting is surprising. I have never seen that kind of generosity in any professional setting.
I have also seen unions vote repeatedly to take cuts in their own pay to help out their fellow members on the pension issue, even knowing that those people f--ked themselves up with their own stupid decisions, but the point of a union is that you take care of your own, and members are willing to take a very real and significant personal hit to do that.
One of the best things about unions is fixed contracts and pay scales. Haggling over money used to be considered disgraceful and beneath the dignity of respectable people. Unions are old school so they still stick to that code and younger people would do well to learn from them on that.
I don't really think that software engineers could benefit much from unionization. Seizing the means of production doesn't have much meaning when you are the means of production. People who already have all the power don't need a union. But understanding how unions work and the benefits that they provide for organizing labor, corporations, and society is definitely a good thing.
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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…
Indeed, and interviews are now a circus of multi-hour sudden death trivia sessions. I honestly don’t know how folks get hired quickly these days unless they have a big network that will let them bypass the bullshit.
That’s about the sum of it, yeah. At least for myself, every job I’ve had in the past 6 years has been through my network, and the interviews have been short and sweet formalities.