Slashdot Mirror

" I'm sure there are a few unionized programmers out there ... uh... somewhere... but I've personally never met one, ever."

Hello. o/

Boeing engineers have a union. I think that includes software engineers.

If you live near Puget Sound you know about this union:

Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA)

http://www.speea.org/

I've got about 24,400 people that would take strong issue with that comment.

"We got to this point because of the hard work of the engineers and technical community who designed this aircraft and worked through all the initial issues," said Tom McCarty, president of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) IFPTE Local 2001. "It was the employees in the Puget Sound region and in Kansas, who made this possible." - SPEEA Executive Director Ray Goforth (at the 787 delivery to ANA)

BTW: I did watch the first flight come about 1000' over my house on Tulalip Bay. Talk about feeling pride for what the people in my community can build.

Not sure if trolling, or...
For a quick counterexample there's SPEEA. Aerospace engineering isn't always the most exciting thing in the world, but I wouldn't call it "unskilled".

Boeing engineers are unionized.

http://www.speea.org/

Quite the geekfest when they are out on strike.

Look at white colar unions to see what it would likely look like. For example SPEEA, or maybe SAG. The point is, in professional unions, pay is often still determined by your manager (+ a garunteed COLA) and layoffs don't necessarily hapen by seniority. In a union, you would be the membership, and the goal would be to collectively bargain what works best for the membership.

In all this discussion, no one has noted that there ARE a few unions representing High-Tech workers. In particular:

1. The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers,
http://www.washtech.org is the union for "PermaTemps" at Microsoft and other companies. They are mostly oriented towards workers in the Seattle, WA area. They were involved in a bitter fight to organize Amazon.

2. The Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, http://www.speea.org represents 24000 Aerospace Engineers at Boeing.
BTW, they are currently organizing Boeing workers in St. Louis.

1. Are ignorant of the laws
2. Are ignorant of the prevailing wages
3. Are afraid to speak up because they don't want to
   1. get fired and then sued by their previous employer for breaking the employment contract
   2. are afraid immigration problems
4. Come from a culture where it is expected/accepted that they will be exploited unfairly.

However, politically... those of us who actually work in the industry rather than own it (realizing that some folks do both), have very little influence. Politically, we are all over the map with a general spirit of libertarian ethics with a distrust of the megacorporation ingrained into our psyche by personal expierence and cyberpunk literature we have been gobbling for the last two decades.

And, if we formed our own party in the single member-district system of the U.S (sorry, I know the rest of the world is more democratic with parlimentary systems) such would be a third party which would never gain any influence outside of local elections in California and the Pacific North West. We also, as workers, don't have the money to buy...er...lobby politicans. Easy example... if you and AOL/Time-Warner lobby congress about MP3s, who do you think is going to win?

No, fellow workers... we get paid so much because we have power. Power, untapped and unrealized. Middle-management was gutted through downsizing and our network connections have given rise to more "just-in-time" capitalism. Our skills , if you believe the Software Labor Shortage Myth are in such short supply that we can not train and import workers fast enough. Imagine if we can collectively come to agreements in which we decide what things we will work for and will not. Not only can we have influence over technology, but a host of other things that need geeks to be accomplished.

Our power is in action, not the ballot box. We can vote with our feet. We can strike (here is the source. We can slack and slow down. We can sick-in. We can boycott. We can Direct Action. We can be as Electornically Civilly Disobedient, and we can be... it works like we did with Low Power FM through an organized political campaign of radio piracy, we were able to sieze part of the spectrum from corporate monoplization for community interests. We can break mass media blackouts of information, by making our own media, like we did in Seattle, and like we'll do again in DC.

Are you tired of 60-hour work weeks? Of corporations making deals with politicans to undermine over-time pay and encourage permatemping? We don't have to be slaves.

Are you tired of technology developing that penalizes both the worker and the consumer, to the benfit of a handful of the rich and power... anybody remember the Java Class War? Where was our class in that? Complaining about how the standards needed to be independent of propietary control, and largely doing nothing about it! We need to take control of training and make it clear that it is those of us work in the industry that can figure out who knows what, rather than some profiteering third party or a way for leading software companies to gouge folks for certification!

We need non-profit employment services (or hiring halls) so we can dump our contracting companies (ie. pimps, job sharks, etc... ) once and for all.

We need to organize, and organize in a way that maintains our autonomy and democratic values. We don't need any union bosses, telling us what we can and can't do... but we do need to be in solidarity with our fellow workers so we can support each other in struggle. Who among you wouldn't strike to help the workers in hardware manufacture to get a better shake? Some more pay, a safer environment, etc... Who among you wouldn't refuse to work, if you knew by refusing for a short time you could bring in ecological sound practices. We can bring on the Viridian revolution, but innovation won't be enough... we have to force the issue and force companies to clean up their mess.

We have to become responsible, or we have noone to blame for how bad work is but ourselves.

Solid,

Flint

Baltimore IWW Telecommunications and Computer Workers IU560

(San Francisco, Toronto)

Also check out: Syndicat de l'Industrie Informatique, Washington Technical Workers Alliance, FACE Intel, Alliance@IBM, BITE Division of NWU (Business - Instructional - Techincal - Electronic).

We Can Win! No Nerds, No Birds!

I wonder if Boeing was trying to prove that they could pull off a successful launch without these people?

I'd like to think that the largest tech-worker strike in history counts as "news for nerds" (After all, _I_ work there...). Propaganda at http://www.speea.org. Also photos of about 25 undelivered planes sitting out on the line. Good news collection at Yahoo .

-a Boeing Employee