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Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

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Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#491

Post by MiroF »

totaldude87 wrote: post #443
elicash wrote: post #379

1. Why do tech workers need a union? If you want to improve your workplace, you have additional leverage to fight for changes if you're in a union. There's often very little you can do alone. This might be things like pay, or it might be something else entirely. 2. But aren't tech workers elite coddled rich kids who are lucky to make what they receive? I mean, no. But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from j…

I think the tech people/artists working on gaming industry , Uber's male chauvinistic culture and the problems associated with that can be a typical examples of "why tech needs to unionize". So far , the medium.com has been the "systematic problems reporting tool" for tech and that just generates the views and small changes.. In the past decade, i hate to see that the word "unionizing" in itself has become a bad word…

I doubt the word "unionizing" was ever something management wanted to hear

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#492

Post by save_ferris »

carapace wrote: post #407
elicash wrote: post #379

1. Why do tech workers need a union? If you want to improve your workplace, you have additional leverage to fight for changes if you're in a union. There's often very little you can do alone. This might be things like pay, or it might be something else entirely. 2. But aren't tech workers elite coddled rich kids who are lucky to make what they receive? I mean, no. But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from j…

> 1. Why do tech workers need a union? I don't know if a union is the answer, but tech workers aren't immune to management hi-jinks: "Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees" https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

It’s not just wage-fixing, tech companies wield an absurd amount of power in other aspects of people’s lives.

I was once let go due for “performance” reasons that involved major company politics behind the scenes. I’d just gotten my annual review from my boss emailed to my work email about a week before my termination, which showed stellar performance across the board.

When I looked into filing for unemployment, I discovered that I needed to dispute the reason for my dismissal since I was let go for cause, which required me to submit evidence. Who doesn’t have access to work emails? Fired people don’t.

My employment agreement stipulated that the employer maintained all rights to my emails, so I was completely SOL.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#493

Post by wilg »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #387
fennecfoxen wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also worth noting that NY is not a right to work state. This means that the 37 people who voted against the union have no right to not-pay-dues to the union. If the workers change their mind then, in theory, they will have the opportunity to vote to decertify the union, later in their employment (a minimum of 3 years). Approximately 0 unions a year are decertified this way in the US.

It's not really that big of a problem. In an ideal situation, sure, the union could represent union members and the non-union member would be banned from receiving any benefits bargained for by the union. Unfortunately, if the union has to represent everyone then everyone should pay, which isn't much different than if the <1% in leadership positions at a company makes a dumb decision costing the company money and peo…

Do unions have to represent everyone? Seems like its collective bargaining either way?

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#494

Post by jkingsbery »

cortesoft wrote: post #438
mdonahoe wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Athletes unionize" is one of the better arguments I've heard for why devs should. I'm curious to learn more about the origins of the players' union.

Part of the reason athletes unionize, though, is because they play for monopoly leagues; there are no competitors for the top leagues in most American sports, so it isn't like you can just leave and play in the other NBA if you don't like their practices.

The league monopoly power is probably the primary reason that it happened - before free agency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_agent#Major_League_Baseba... ) became a thing, a team would own you for life (or until you were traded), so you had no recourse - you couldn't even leave for another team in the same league after your contract was up! White collar employees generally don't work on a contract like that - as at will employees, we can generally leave our work environment with only a couple days notice and have employment elsewhere. The impact of someone like Charles Comiskey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Comiskey ) is limited in the white collar world.

Besides that though there are a few other things that don't come up in white collar environments. One is career tenure. I think NFL is the shortest average career length for North American sports at something like 2-3 years. In MLB non-elite players who are 30+ are now becoming less likely to get picked up by teams after hitting free agency, meaning the median career for a successful career is something more like 6-7. Athletes in such a situation don't have any leverage to sit out a whole year, which can represent 14%-50% of their lifetime earnings in the primary thing they spent their youth training on. Athletes also have to worry about physical injury that don't exist in white collar environments, which has led, for example, to changing touchback rules in football and adding a 26th man to the roster in baseball this season.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#495

Post by mdszy »

chrisco255 wrote: post #480
mdszy wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the company can walk away too, they just don't get to take the workers with them. A corporation is not entitled to anyone's labor.

Neither is a union entitled to my labor. I would purposely avoid unions to maintain my agency as an individual and to work at more agile and flexible institutions.

The union isn't benefiting from your labor, this makes no sense.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#497

Post by MiroF »

ticmasta wrote: post #460
mdonahoe wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Athletes unionize" is one of the better arguments I've heard for why devs should. I'm curious to learn more about the origins of the players' union.

They don't unionize though, they have a player's union. This is not the same thing. There is no collective bargaining process in professional sports that matches the typical public sector and athletes are not salaried employees. Nothing stops the top performers from negotiating a more lucrative contract. They also make a huge portion of their earnings via 3rd party engagements which a FT salaried employee cannot do.…

Sports does have a collective bargaining process and NFL players are part of the AFL-CIO. There have been two NFL strikes in recent memory.

I'm flagging the above comment as it is misinformation.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#498

Post by baron816 »

elicash wrote: post #472
baron816 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Professional sports leagues are both monopolies and monopsonies (meaning they’re the only ones hiring those specialized athletes). So the market dynamics are very different from that of tech. If you’re a NFL linebacker, you don’t really have an option to switch leagues if you’re unhappy with how it’s run. If you’re a software engineer, you can switch companies very easily.

I brought up professional sports unions in the context of having a highly competitive group of workers who make large salaries, and that a union can still be useful in that environment as far as negotiations. That professional sports are monopolies and monopsonies isn't particularly relevant to this point. The fact that tech workers can find a job elsewhere is even more motiviation to unionize because you have even m…

> That professional sports are monopolies and monopsonies isn't particularly relevant to this point.

What are you talking about. That’s entirely relevant. What’s not relevant is that the workers are rich. Market dynamics are the entirety of what determines your compensation and working conditions. Being able to leave for a competitor is pretty all the leverage you’re ever going to have.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#499

Post by [deleted] »

paulddraper wrote: post #489
yibg wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy? I mean we’d like to think that the good ideas win and impact and outcome matters. We hold up the 10x engineers and those that make an outsized contribution to the industry / company / product right? Shouldn’t they get higher compensation compared to the rest of the work force? How do we square that with collective b…

Unions can negotiate things other than salary, like health benefits, paid leave, policy issues, etc. (Though in practice you're correct: unions rarely exist for jobs with more individualized pay.)

[deleted]

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#500

Post by authoritarian »

thu2111 wrote: post #468
jimbokun wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not a monopoly, but Apple, Google, and several other major Silicon Valley corporations did collude to keep developer salaries low.

That was discovered and busted by the government. It appears unions aren't necessary to end wage fixing cartels. And especially, note that unions are wage fixing cartels!

I have near 0 trust in the major tech companies (Facebook/Google/Apple/etc.) but amazingly I trust the US government even less. I have absolutely no faith that the US government discovered and solved the salary issues in those companies in any meaningful way
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