Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions • Hacker News Board

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#211

Post by mikeash » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 11:42 PM UTC

Zarel wrote: post #199

mikeash wrote: post #196

I'm always amazed at the complete double standard between unions and companies. Look at the discussion here: lots of people arguing against unions, saying they're just plain bad, or they're good in some industries but not in tech, or we just don't need them, or whatever. And not to say that these arguments are wrong, but.... Hands up, how many of you think that it's a good idea to run a business with employees as a s…

I'm pretty confused by your argument here. When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing. When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing. Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to…

Why aren’t corporations analogous to unions? They’re an organization of people who work together as one. When was the last time you heard about a bidding war between two different managers in the same company trying to hire the same person? It doesn’t happen because the company organization doesn’t allow it to happen. This is exactly the flip side of two union members not undercutting each other on pay because the union organization stops it from happening.

You say that corporations aren’t created for collective negotiation. When was the last time you bought something from a corporation? Did you negotiate with individual members of that corporation on the price? Do you get individual cashiers to bid for your business? Of course not, because the organization they belong to insists on handling price negotiation in a consistent fashion across the company.

I suspect a lot of the negative attitude toward unions comes from an incorrect assumption that a union must be a monopoly (or perhaps monopsony is the right term). I think that’s why you immediately jumped to “cartel” for the analogous organization on the other side. There’s no reason a single union has to represent all workers in a field, any more than a single company has to be the only employer in a field.

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#212

Post by barry-cotter » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

asark wrote: post #157

ivl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gaming industry has an interesting problem: a lot of fresh college grads that want to work on games because they are passionate about games. In that case, I'm unsure of how unionizing would help much, as publishers could simply invest in games from non-union shops, and happily abandon the studios that are unionized.

How'd Hollywood do it? Film industry is full of unions, seems to do OK.

By making it extremely hard to get into a union and working for the benefit of members and punishing employers of non-members.

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#213

Post by saidajigumi » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 11:49 PM UTC

tylerhou wrote: post #206

Zarel wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confused by your argument here. When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing. When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing. Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to…

Employers often have much more power than employees. That is, if Google doesn't hire me, it doesn't lose out on much. For Google, maybe a small fraction of its capital isn't deployed, which is unfortunate but doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme of things. But if I don't have a job, then I will lose out on a lot -- I can't pay bills, I might lose my home. So I have a strong incentive to accept an offer from Google…

Funny enough, when I was in grad school, the graduate student employees formed a union. In a sort-of-parallel to your narrative, my department, Computer Science, had pretty good support for its grad employees. But many other departments were highly exploitative – splitting hiring lines that should have gone to a single student across three or four.. meaning that none of the recipients got a living wage but each still had a full workload. These departments were effectively trying to create an indentured servant class.

The union ended a whole list of bad practices virtually immediately. Even better, they negotiated us into the same benefits (healthcare, etc.) package that faculty received, which was a significant bump up even for students in the better departments like mine.

None of this would have been possible had the employees not been able to organize to realize their power.

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#214

Post by mikekchar » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 11:53 PM UTC

TomMckenny wrote: post #204

Zarel wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confused by your argument here. When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing. When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing. Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to…

I believe the following is being referred to: Inside a company, the management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees, including compensation. But employees talking together about maximizing their compensation is considered scandalous, harmful or even unethical. The practice is even given special names "organizing" and "unionizing" and is certainly considered unusual. Corporations…

I'm going to be controversial here. I don't think management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees. I mean, it happens occasionally, but it's not actually a normal conversation in a company.

Instead companies talk about how much they can afford to pay for salaries. Frequently they talk about increasing the cost of employees from the point of view of expanding. Should we hire more people? Will it improve the business? Should we increase salaries? Will it allow us to attract better employees?

When companies are talking about reducing or restricting the cost of employees, it's usually in the context of solving problems in the company. The company is losing in money in some areas. Should we lay off employees? Can we negotiate a pay freeze or a pay cut until the company can get in better shape? Will we lose too many employees if we do that? Will we lose our best employees if we do that?

The biggest problem I have with unions (being one of the few programmers who has actually worked as a programmer in a union) is that in my experience is the conversations almost never discuss the health of the company. They only discuss strategies for maximizing pay, benefits or ensuring that layoffs are impossible.

I honestly believe that the attitude of "They are doing it so we have to too!" is a thing that destroys companies. The Us vs. Them approach helps nobody. Yes, if you have no choice and the company you are working for has decided that they want "Us vs. Them" and you can't convince them to join you in making the company and it's employees successful, I can completely see the point of a union. For me, that's a last resort. I'll try everything I can to fix the problem a different way before I'll say, "We're going to organise so that we can effectively compete with you". This includes simply quitting my job and finding another one.

Or to be more clear: I greatly value working at a company where I wouldn't ever think of organising a union. I value working at a company where the company values me and sees it as a cooperative venture. I don't want to work for a company that views me as an adversary or as someone they need to manipulate. That's why I don't want a union. In my fairly long career I've worked for both kinds of companies, so I know both exist.

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#215

Post by barry-cotter » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 11:54 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #202

barry-cotter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By getting the highest quality people into the union, setting minimum rates for union talent, and throwing people out of the union who work for people who pay lower rates (to them or anyone else.) Dualisation, making a labour market with insiders and outsiders certainly helps those on the inside. But that comes at the expense of those on the outside. If this is the goal how would punishment of those hiring self tau…

> Dualisation, making a labour market with insiders and outsiders certainly helps those on the inside. But that comes at the expense of those on the outside. If this is the goal how would punishment of those hiring self taught developers and those who didn’t pay union dues be coordinated? Those on the outside should come inside. There's no reason why self-taught developers can't be on the inside, as long as they lear…

> Those on the outside should come inside. There's no reason why self-taught developers can't be on the inside, as long as they learn and adhere to professional standards (as agreed upon by the membership.)

If the members have enough market power to enforce union exclusivity they have no incentive to allow self-taught developers to join and every incentive to keep them out. A union is a labour cartel and economically it works the same as a capital cartel by capturing more of the productivity than they would under free competition by reducing supply of the input they control.

> and tbh, there's also nothing to lose by being in the union except what is probably a trivial amount of dues in return for group rate insurance, refresher training classes, and discount software licenses.

Because unions try to represent the average worker, in areas with low productivity differentials they generally aim for seniority based pay and last in first out firing. This is another instance of the general pattern of helping members at the expense of non-members. In areas with large productivity differentials line the SAG they set minimum wages while punishing employers of non-members.

Unions grab a bigger piece of the pie by taking it from someone else, either the employer or potential competitors and they often redistribute the pie from higher to lower productivity workers.

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#216

Post by bsmith » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 12:01 AM UTC

I acknowledge that there are definite issues at play with employment in the tech industry, but, come on; we are one of the most coddled and well-payed segments of the entire laboring economy. Maybe unions aren't being organized because we aren't forced to work graveyard shifts with few to no breaks for very little pay? I'm not sure the actual issues at hand in the tech industry are best addressed by unions (at least in the traditional sense).

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#217

Post by zaroth » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

TomMckenny wrote: post #204

Zarel wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confused by your argument here. When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing. When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing. Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to…

I believe the following is being referred to: Inside a company, the management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees, including compensation. But employees talking together about maximizing their compensation is considered scandalous, harmful or even unethical. The practice is even given special names "organizing" and "unionizing" and is certainly considered unusual. Corporations…

Everyone who works for a company is an employee of the company, with a wage (or an hourly rate), and potentially some equity as well. Every employee should be considering how to make the company more profitable, which could be by accelerating a development schedule, overdelivering in a new feature/performance, or hiring and retaining key talent.

The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market, and in a market as competitive as tech, this is particularly true. Management can decide what tier of employee they want to target when they set hiring budgets and salary ranges, they can decide how risk averse they want to be with losing top talent with retention bonuses and benefits, but they don’t get to directly “minimize the cost of employees” in that sense.

Only a set of companies colluding together can act to minimize the cost like that, for example what we saw in the past with anti-poaching agreements, which the big tech companies were sued for successfully.

The individual corporation vs union analogy is highly tortured. Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#218

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 12:05 AM UTC

tylerhou wrote: post #206

Zarel wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confused by your argument here. When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing. When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing. Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to…

Employers often have much more power than employees. That is, if Google doesn't hire me, it doesn't lose out on much. For Google, maybe a small fraction of its capital isn't deployed, which is unfortunate but doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme of things. But if I don't have a job, then I will lose out on a lot -- I can't pay bills, I might lose my home. So I have a strong incentive to accept an offer from Google…

> That is, if Google doesn't hire me, it doesn't lose out on much. For Google, maybe a small fraction of its capital isn't deployed, which is unfortunate but doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme of things. But if I don't have a job, then I will lose out on a lot -- I can't pay bills, I might lose my home. So I have a strong incentive to accept an offer from Google, and therefore Google has a lesser incentive to offer me better compensation.

You're comparing apples and oranges here, in that you're comparing Google not hiring a single employee to you not getting _any_ job. The analogue to you failing to get any job is Google failing to hire any employees, at which point it ceases to exist, which isn't the case for even the chronically unemployed. The comparison as you've constructed it proves the _opposite_ of your claimed point (though I should note that I think the whole construction is weak; I'm certainly not drawing the conclusion that workers have more power than Google)

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#219

Post by starik36 » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 12:12 AM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #156

ap3 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions & guilds also serve to keep other workers out There are laws that work has to be assigned to union shops, etc

That's not really a function of the union itself, that's a function of an abusable political system. The other side of the same coin is, for example, ISP local monopoly laws.

Nonetheless, this has been done in many places and it led to ridiculous results. For instance, if you have a booth at a convention center in Las Vegas somewhere, just try carrying your own box from your car to your booth. Just try! You will immediately get screamed at that it's a union job.

Re: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizing unions

#220

Post by bduerst » Tue, Jul 09, 2019, 12:13 AM UTC

Zarel wrote: post #199

mikeash wrote: post #196

I'm always amazed at the complete double standard between unions and companies. Look at the discussion here: lots of people arguing against unions, saying they're just plain bad, or they're good in some industries but not in tech, or we just don't need them, or whatever. And not to say that these arguments are wrong, but.... Hands up, how many of you think that it's a good idea to run a business with employees as a s…

I'm pretty confused by your argument here. When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing. When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing. Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to…

>negotiation

Cartels are not collective bargaining - they are collective price fixing by market suppliers. Employee unions negotiate with employers, while supplier cartels do not negotiate with market consumers. Not the same by a long shot.

Also, if you look at the history of corporations, they are originally created to give the capital contributors equal share in the control of the company. Hence the word shares.

For example, you could front your ship for a spice voyage to India, while other people front the crew and funds for supplies, and you would have a percent control of the endeavor equal to the value of your ship. Voting shares today are not much different, just scaled appropriately.