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How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

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Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#331

Post by skitout »

mcv wrote: post #321
dexen wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And you are talking about "old" institutions ; new unions, for "new" kind of companies would not look the same. European here, let's talk personal experience. The americans have a very unhealthy situation wrt unions, and i'm not surprised people with do-it-yourself and can-do attitudes common in tech are soured up to them. And my impressions are relative to polish culture, where unions are traditionally quite strong…

This is the weird thing. Americans love to complain about how stupid their unions are, and according to some anecdotes, some American unions are indeed pretty stupid. But these are the unions created by Americans. I don't quite understand the underlying cultural issue that leads Americans to create unions they hate. It's got to be something cultural. Or is it something in US law? It seems so easy to fix, but somehow…

I don't know USA very well, so that is just a feeling.

- a lot of what the union do/did have to be understand in the context of important fight between the unionized worker and the companies that want to undercut union influence (and often undercut workers right)

- a lot of thing union do / used to do, make sense in the past, but are less relevant now.

- Human is quite good to do stupid things, to create some bureaucracy / rules... That applied to companies (Bullshit Job being one manifestation of it), but also to union

- We tend to notice more the bad things than the good things...

- Humans tends to love power and hate change... that includes human running unions

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#332

Post by username90 »

skitout wrote: post #324
username90 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kickstarter is such a union. Many of the union members didn't want it. I'd bet even most of the software engineers didn't want it, but were forced to since they were bundled up with a lot of unrelated professions. > In the end, employees voted 46-to-37 in favor of unionizing > As of February 2020, the union was made up of 85 engineers, directors, analysts, designers, coordinators, and customer support specialists htt…

The union "represented about 60 percent of the company’s 140 employees prior to the layoffs". From the article you mentioned. If 40% of the workers are not part of the union, seems that you are free to be part or not of the union. And that the union makes sense to the worker, as more than half of the workforce choose to join.

The union doesn't include every employee group at kickstarter. For example no managers or supervisors are included. Also the fact that they have to even vote is evidence that they want to force people to join, or at least force them to pay union dues. Otherwise why not create a union without a vote instead?

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#333

Post by username90 »

mcv wrote: post #330
username90 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US unions are usually per company and forces everyone working in a specific area in that company to join or quit, meaning that anyone performing a specific job function needs to join said union. This leads to the "You can't plug a computer into a socket if you aren't in the electrician union" problem, the reason they say that is they think the company could oust the union by hiring people to do that work without prop…

About that political power, in some European countries, and maybe most famously in Netherland, a lot of big labour-related economic decisions are made in a committee with representatives of the government, representatives of employer organisations, and representatives of the major unions. They discuss and agree on salary structures, pay increases, labour conditions, and I think they can even make suggestions for chan…

Yeah, I think strong worker representation in governments is very important for a capitalist democracy to work well. USA doesn't have that for some reason, basically all their politicians comes from a 1% or at least 10% home. Could be due to these strange union practices they have.

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#334

Post by smithcoin »

bsenftner wrote: post #307
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but you are just generalizing No he's not. Every unionized workplace I have been in from educational institutions to government departments to defense contractors is like this to a pretty large extent. >But the German example Yes, I know that European unions are different and not nearly as asinine as American ones but I have yet to hear anyone say that tech will get European style unions let alone a good argument f…

American style capitalism has polluted the mental models of anyone raised in the States to disregard European management styles and by extension the successful European work life balance, to the US citizens' significant determent. The work-life balance in Europe is more of a life worth living, while the life styles in the United States require double incomes to participate, are so heavily marketed it rendered everyth…

I’m sorry you feel that way.

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#335

Post by m12k »

x87678r wrote: post #308
m12k wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially the video game industry should take a good long look at how Hollywood uses guilds to create saner work conditions for its various production crew. It's a very different thing to work at a 'stable' company with sustained engineering and maintenance, and then getting hired for part of a project at a one-big-project-ever-two-years production company, that might not exist a couple years from now. The sooner th…

Hollywood unions are one of the main reasons most movies are not made in LA any more.

Sure, and tax havens are the most popular place to have the top of your corporation's ownership hierarchy. Doesn't mean it's good for society at large or the people working there.

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#336

Post by fsociety »

abeppu wrote: post #3

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…

Mainly from bad experiences with unions not in tech. It’s funny when people say, no no no the old unions are bad but the new ones will be better. Are you sure?

At the end of the day, if you need to go against the decision of a union vote you are completely screwed and out of your own agency.

That’s not a situation I want to find myself in.

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#337

Post by skitout »

username90 wrote: post #332
skitout wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The union "represented about 60 percent of the company’s 140 employees prior to the layoffs". From the article you mentioned. If 40% of the workers are not part of the union, seems that you are free to be part or not of the union. And that the union makes sense to the worker, as more than half of the workforce choose to join.

The union doesn't include every employee group at kickstarter. For example no managers or supervisors are included. Also the fact that they have to even vote is evidence that they want to force people to join, or at least force them to pay union dues. Otherwise why not create a union without a vote instead?

So far I seen no indication (and you provided none) that people are forced to join the union, and seen indication that people can "freely" chose to join or not. And that most people "freely" chose to join the union - while some could be part of the union and chose not to be. What is you point ?

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#338

Post by intended »

abeppu wrote: post #3

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…

The ethos of SV and the original libertarian thought that pervaded early firms also opposed unions. The early success of the firms, especially in days when growing fast in unchartered waters was all that mattered, it was a great refutation of the idea that you needed unions to take care of workers, and appeared to support the ideals of early founders.

The ideal has not weathered well - it works if you are on the cutting edge, where the degree of constraints are much lower.

But for the rest of the bell curve, some form of collective bargaining seems to be useful.

Maybe part of the reason is that, at the bleeding edge frontier, people who can work there are few and far between. This gives them market power and so can command/negotiate price.

Anyway, as long as everyone thinks of tech as the bleeding edge, its hard to make the case for unions.

Plus: America has a history of unions being a politicized topic, so it tends to result in strong views.

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#339

Post by intended »

mcv wrote: post #321
dexen wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And you are talking about "old" institutions ; new unions, for "new" kind of companies would not look the same. European here, let's talk personal experience. The americans have a very unhealthy situation wrt unions, and i'm not surprised people with do-it-yourself and can-do attitudes common in tech are soured up to them. And my impressions are relative to polish culture, where unions are traditionally quite strong…

This is the weird thing. Americans love to complain about how stupid their unions are, and according to some anecdotes, some American unions are indeed pretty stupid. But these are the unions created by Americans. I don't quite understand the underlying cultural issue that leads Americans to create unions they hate. It's got to be something cultural. Or is it something in US law? It seems so easy to fix, but somehow…

Hostile environments end up creating extensive legal documentation to protect parties?

Re: How tech workers at Kickstarter formed one of the only unions in the industry

#340

Post by segmondy »

abeppu wrote: post #3

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…

Do you know any union worker making $350k? or $500k? With unions, you ain't gonna get that. As much as I like unions for somethings, I'm not a fan. I'm in Detroit area. I have heard horror stories of many people who work in the car industry and do crazy things and can't easily get fired because of unions. Once I was downtown a few years ago, and they were shooting a movie and they needed to reshoot a scene, but a semi truck was parked on the street, they had to hold off the scene till the next day because they couldn't just move the truck. There was a specific job role that could drive the truck according to the union rules and the drivers were done working for the day.

Imagine union pegging a developer to only working on backend code, or middleware or frontend or only on a specific language.

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