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Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

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Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#531

Post by maxk42 »

domikazi wrote: post #478
preinheimer wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked (years ago) for the UFCW as a worker at a grocery store. All of the union that was exposed to me as a part timer was: - hours go out by seniority - raises happen at set intervals regardless of quality of work - that guy selling pot out of the backroom will be protected until they catch him stealing a rotisserie chicken - 0.x% of my paycheck goes to the union. - I got paid less, and received raises less often…

Yep. I had this same experience when I was working at a grocery store. I didn't want to join a union, because the idea of my 16 year old ass having to pay $20 dollars a paycheck to somebody for a job I was gonna have for 4 months during the summer sounded asinine. Well, the "union-boss" at my store informed me that if I didn't join then I wouldn't be put on the schedule or get any hours. So I joined just to get hours…

Remarkably similar experience. I worked as a bag boy at a grocery store many years ago. The guy who hired me told me he strongly encourages everyone to join the union and I didn't realize at the time it was an implicit threat. After four months I kept wondering why there were five bag boys on duty and I was the only one working and where they went. One of the store managers came over to me during one of my shifts to thank me for my hard work. I was literally just doing my job while the other kids weren't. Less than two weeks later I had no hours on the schedule. Assuming it was a mistake I asked the guy who scheduled the hours (Mr. "Strongly Encourage") and he said he'd look into it. It was the end of my week so I needed to know what time to show up on Monday and so I persisted and said I needed to know when my next shift was so I wouldn't be late. He kept feigning ignorance. After my third inquiry he turned and said "Look, someone else transferred in so they got the hours, okay?"

I might still be on the payroll with no hours scheduled at that company for all I know.

This was definitely a case where a union wasn't good for workers -- it was good for the lazy bums who didn't want to work.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#532

Post by commandlinefan »

nradov wrote: post #92
_sbrk wrote: post #68

I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern. Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45pm, everyone was back in there, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm. One day, I needed to connect two PCs together, which was approved by boss as they would be isolated from the network. So, being the diligent type, I went off and found some network cards and a ca…

A friend of mine worked as a developer at defense contractor with mostly union employees. One time they moved him to a different cubicle. Due to union work rules he literally had to wait two days for a union electrician to come by and plug his desktop computer into the wall socket. Just ridiculous.

> had to wait two days for a union electrician

Ok, fair enough. I once had a job where there was no union, but if I needed to get something deployed to production (or even test), I had to fill out a form, submit it to devops, have them tell me that I filled it out wrong, fill it out again, wait for them to prioritize it, stay on a call with them while they did it, have them tell me again that my form wasn’t specific enough, resubmit it again, wait again, and hopefully be permitted to let them complete the job that I was being held responsible for. I could have ssh’ed into the server, uploaded the binary and restarted the server at any point, but bureaucracy prevented me. This is, in fact, pretty standard. This has nothing to do with unionization, it has to do with liability and risk management.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#533

Post by hinkley »

commandlinefan wrote: post #450
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…

Actors are unionized (or “guildized”, which is basically the same thing), but their pay varies wildly and seems to be more or less relative to their objective value.

Keeping in mind that an actor's objective value to the movie studio is proportional to their subjective value to the audience.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#534

Post by Apocryphon »

commandlinefan wrote: post #521
_sbrk wrote: post #68

I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern. Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45pm, everyone was back in there, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm. One day, I needed to connect two PCs together, which was approved by boss as they would be isolated from the network. So, being the diligent type, I went off and found some network cards and a ca…

Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training.

Don't forget HR covering up harassment and discrimination until stories are leaked to the media!

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#535

Post by BurningFrog »

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 monopoly issue is also why most remaining unions are public employees working for some government monopoly.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#536

Post by ksr_throwaway »

thu2111 wrote: post #515
ksr_throwaway wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In tech, we can generally assume reasonable working conditions and pay, so Kickstarter unionizing screams “toxic management” for me, personally. I can confirm that "toxic management" is the only way to describe the situation when this union drive began. Source: I work at Kickstarter

Is the article's description of why the union was created accurate?

Yes it's accurate, though the "Always Punch Nazis" controversy was just the tip of the iceberg. Employees were being treated like enemies by some in upper management.

Edit: I've been rate limited by HN mods (thanks!), so not replying on this account anymore. All the best!

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#537

Post by xiler »

technotony wrote: post #226
geofft wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus and Guido a) do not control anyone's paycheck b) cannot control who decides they're interested in working on Linux and Python. The benevolent dictatorship model works great when people can vote with their feet (or their keyboards, as the case may be) whether they support the dictator in the first place. The contributors to Linux and Python have more influence over the projects than the dictators do - they conti…

You don't get to decide who leaves. If people don't like a companies dictator then they are free to go join another company. It's this competition in the free market for labor that helps prevent the abuses of tyranny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#538

Post by jkaplowitz »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #485
jkaplowitz wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphic designers work at most tech companies I've worked at, and I've never worked at a game studio. They definitely can be classified quite reasonably as tech employees. Also, here in Montreal, most people's list of well-known local tech employers would absolutely include at least one or two of the many game studios here.

Be honest here. What percentage of employees at Google/Apple/Microsoft do you think are "graphic designers", and what percentage are "software developers"? Your argument to create a union is that the 1% of employees need protection. Honestly I agree video game industries could use a union. But the presence of a graphics designer at Google does not mean every employee needs to unionize.

Google has more software developers, no doubt, but still far more graphic designers than you seem to expect.

No, every employee at Google does not need to unionize. CEO Sundar Pichai certainly doesn't. But lots of Googlers have long wanted a union for good reason, including software developers. I would have happily voted yes in a union election when I was there, despite being a software developer myself.

I know of plenty of examples of misbehaviour and other harmful actions by Google toward software development employees, a number of which have been publicly reported. And the situation seems to have gotten worse since I left.

To be clear, Google is far from unique in this regard, and it's still probably a better employer than many of its peer companies. That just underscores how severe and widespread the problem is.

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#539

Post by lbotos »

yibg wrote: post #469
commandlinefan wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actors are unionized (or “guildized”, which is basically the same thing), but their pay varies wildly and seems to be more or less relative to their objective value.

That’s a good example. I don’t know much about it, what benefits does the union in this case provide that isn’t achievable without one?

I actually think Healthcare. https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-and-aftra-health-plans-merge

Re: Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

#540

Post by [deleted] »

save_ferris wrote: post #492
carapace wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 di…

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