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Does anyone know why tech companies tend to be so hostile to unions? I'm not sure if its due to the large amount of venture capital invested or other reasons.
I think this is changing though. There’s a lot of people working in tech and with the kind of abuse that’s been reported (ahem, Amazon) we might see that change.
> Over the next few years, Mapbox tried to find success in a variety of industries: journalism, social media, travel, ect. We never hit numbers that were big enough for our investors. In the process, we abandoned our focus on Open Source and Open data. Then, as is the case with many mapping companies, Mapbox shifted focus to the auto industry. My fear of loss of control fully materialized at this point. I’m a lifelon…
Employees should never feel like the company is theirs. Unless you have a real seat at the table, you should assume you have no influence over the business. That's what being an employee is (with no actual shares). You give up the risk by being an employee, and your only negotiating power is leaving.
1. Do I recommend the company to my network? I can make it a lot cheaper or more expensive to hire.
2. How do I spend my time? All my technical choices will make certain changes easier down the line, and others harder. I work hard to understand the business context & help those choices serve our shared goals, but the emphasis there can be on "shared".
3. How much do I streamline my own work? I can work efficiently, or I can wait for that build to finish and that PR to be approved and merged before I move on to the next thing. This can be a particularly effective way to incentive investment in a platform team & build tools, if I'm not allowed to just fix them myself.
4. What do I collaborate on with my coworkers? We can pick priorities we care about, and negotiate together for specific improvements. I've gotten more vacation time, better computers, bigger screens, paid on-calls and time to fix bugs all just by talking with people about what's hard about our work.
5. Insisting on pushing improvements to open source software upstream if we are going to use the libraries at all. The company could decide it wants to write everything entirely in house, but as long as we are using open source software I personally only make changes to it that we are going to push back to the community.
And I am sure there are more: those are just the ones I've used recently.
It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without. A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benef…
So your hypothesis is that VCs put their class interests ahead of making money to such an extent that it is impossible to exercise our legal rights without putting the companies we work for in their political crosshairs? You may be right. It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers” is probably the point that was being made. It’s not drastic for a company to have lawyers; it shouldn’t be drastic for a union—or in this case, a union organizing effort—to have lawyers as well.
If you feel like you have lawyer-up just to go to work, that’s probably a signal you shouldn’t be working there.
Does anyone know why tech companies tend to be so hostile to unions? I'm not sure if its due to the large amount of venture capital invested or other reasons.
Tech companies can afford to be more vocal about it because a significant number - arguably, the majority - of their employees genuinely believe that they would do worse with unions (regardless of whether it's actually true).
I think at least in part this is because much of tech is in US, which has widespread "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome in general, but especially so in tech.
It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without. A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benef…
So your hypothesis is that VCs put their class interests ahead of making money to such an extent that it is impossible to exercise our legal rights without putting the companies we work for in their political crosshairs? You may be right. It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.
It's much simpler than this and it is about making money.
Whether unions impact the ultimate success (in terms of ability to build) of a company or not, they certainly shift the share of money that is going towards labor as opposed to owners who want a profit.
This lowers the expected return of company equity which means people will be willing to pay less and you will be able to raise less money while you are trying to scale up. A non-unionized competitor will be able to raise more money and if there are positive returns to scale, outscale & outcompete.
It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without. A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benef…
Alternately, long term it helps attract and retain excellent staff who care about the business and feel like they have a stake, and helps the business make better decisions because the decisionmaking process takes more information into account.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah definitely. My comment came from my understanding of what the author wanted the union to do rather than how unions could operate. As an aside, I’m slightly skeptical about unions in the US. The US’s economic model seems to be based around innovation and unions arguably make making decisions slower and more difficult. If you look at Germany’s economic model, one with very strong employee protection, it seems larg…
I agree, too strict labor regulations around e.g. firing/letting employess go certainly would hinder some of the innovation hapening in the US and especially tech. Though maybe there is a flavor of unions that recognizes this and pushes for other things e.g. proper treatment of contractors, or osme slight input in direction, etc? I think the US is screwed for unions mostly because to unionize you basically have to jo…
As it stands right now, the most vocal advocates I see for unionization can't seem to help but slather their speech with the collectivist twang that turns so many off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One way conceptualize many companies is that they're just the id of senior execs measuring their genitalia against one other, why shouldn't workers get to participate?
The workers can make their own company if the terms of their employment don’t make them happy.