Slashdot Mirror
Dot-Coms Say 'Unions Not Welcome!'
subbiecho writes: "Automotive related e-biz software company, The Cobalt Group, has spoken out against unions forming within their ranks, in this article. Cobalt Group CEO, John Holt sent an un-prompted e-mail to workers, alluding to Amazon.Com and other companies undergoing organizing drives, saying he preferred a "direct dialogue" with employees. This adds more fuel to the fire of pro-union supporters in their attempt to build a cohesive technology workers union."
I have a friend who works at a California university. There is some kind of union present on campus. He has a tech job, and is not a union member, yet is forced to pay several hundred clams per month in union dues. The reason is that it "isn't fair for him to receive the benefits of union representation without paying."
He has constant disputes with the pointy-haired management, has a hostile workplace and a pack of other problems. Naturally the union does nothing for him, but he can't say, "don't represent me, I want nothing from you, and I don't want to give you any money."
It should be illegal to extort money from non-union members in this way.
It's unfortunate that so many of the people who are responding to this issue are completely ignorant of any history prior to the times of their own lives. The mere fact that we have weekends, vacations, child labor laws, minimum wages, basic safety standards in the workplace etc, etc all stem from the labor movement over the last century.
The notion that a skilled person can always go out and get a different job or create one not usually true. Before the "Great Depression" most skilled craftmen, which is what software engineers are today, were treated very poorly. So were academics.
It's stange to read postings by mostly technically trained people who are so attached simple minded notions like free markets and corporatism! I wonder how many such folks are born again Christians or how many could distinguish between the Vietnam War and the Peloponnesian War.
The pleasant conditions the most software engineers enjoy today are not necessarily going to last forever. The quality of software is generally poor even though we are well paid and engineers have little control over either the quality or purpose of the software they create. I suggest something like a Union of Concerned Programmers, at least for a start.
Many good points mentioned above. But my history with unions is awful.. case in point.
I got a job at a medical manufacturing plant from a buddy of my dad. They put me on a machine that was producing 720 units per shift and i was told that's all it could do from the foreman. So what did I do, I spent that night reading the instruction book for that machine. The next day I had the sucker producing 2700 units in half of my shift time. The foreman patted me on the back and my car window was smashed. My dad's friend told me to slow it down. So what did I do, I got the sucker down to 900 units per shift, got yeld at by the foreman, got my locker broken into ( lost one hell of great book), and had a wiper blade broken. All in 3 days.
So the end of that week I deciede to take my revenge on the entire union. I got the manuels for most of the plants presses and machinery ( plant was closed on sundays ) and wrote a 27 page memo to the president of the company. Come tuesday, I hit my machine and have it running at full speed, the next machine at full speed and 3 other machines running at almost there top speed. Total production I was told was about 13 days worth of output. I was smart enough to leave 1 hour before the shift change. All the while the president, and plant manager watched me behide a glass window.
I was told that most of the employees of the union were required to retrain and they would have to hit my production within 1 month. There were some layoffs from that plant within 2 weeks.
My fathers buddy never spoke to me again and we moved out of the area.
I think unions are good if the union understands that they have to produce at the maximum levels of skills they have and that they also have a good employer that will offer consistant training to improve the knowledge of the union. Better educated workers bring better productions with less stress and long term benifits to the firm.
above email is spam bait so look at my bio.
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> Although I am clearly biased on this point, I just dont see any other need for a tech-union, perhaps someone else can enlighten me on
> this issue.
Simple. Consider for a moment that having ``elite" status means that you are one of the top 5% or 10% in your work bracket. Employers fall all over themselves to give you want you want.
But what if you just don't make that bracket. You're in the 10% bracket right below yours. Or you look funny. Or you decide you want to only work 40 hours a week.
Or say you lose out on a raise because your PHB decides to give it instead to one of those slackers who just happens to offer something on the side that the PHB likes. (And it's not always nookie.)
Sure, if that happened to you right now, you could walk off the job & get a better-paying one tomorrow. But recessions happen, & all of the clued bosses who would hire you in a heartbeat have hiring freezes. Or you get into a car accident, sure it's the other guy's fault but he's a deadbeat & your insurance doesn't cover it, AND you are out for six months. Can't code, can't work, can't do anything but count the holes in the ceiling thru a medication haze. And you find your employer laid you off while you were out, & no one wants to hire you.
Don't say this couldn't happen to you. For generations people have been giving loyalty & their strong backs to employers, then something happens & you discover how your boss repays all that loyalty. All it takes is one PHB, one bad break, & your career can get toasted.
And that's why unions get started. Because you can't always trust your boss.
And be glad that there's an interest in unionizing high tech. You'll never see a union at a place like McDonald's or 7-11 (which need unions worse than the high tech industry) because you need some kind of stable workforce that'll be around for at least a couple months at the job. You need jobs that are worth fighting for, that are worth having.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
What I've noticed about the union where I work, and I'd imagine its similar elsewhere, is that the aim of the union is to "protect" the "average" employee. This is good for the mediocre employee as they are pretty safe from getting fired for doing mediocre work as long as they meet the minimum acceptable standards. Even if they're below those standards, the union will cry a river for them in their defense and they'll be able to hold onto their job for that much longer.
The bad news is, in their bargaining for better money for the lowest common denominator, they eliminated the possibility for anyone to get a raise based on any factor other than senority. It doesn't matter that one employee works twice as hard as another. He will get paid the exact same amount as the other employee. The raises are also fixed. Its gonna be 50 cents per year. Thats it. No more until the contract is renewed, and even then its not likely to get any better.
Of course, the employees aren't hopeless, but its ironic that the only way they can be truely appreciated for their performance is to move up into management, and therefore OUT of the "protection" of the union.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Wow, a comment worth reply. :)
.1 * c, the law of supply and demand stops working well when we move away from ideal free market conditions. Good and bad results that the free market system couldn't predict happen. Somehow, unionized industries are able to have real wage increases without massive layoffs. Somehow, Microsoft has been able to retain control of entire markets with substandard products in the face of substantial competition. Examples of results opposite what supply and demand would predict abound.
I guess if you take my argument to its logical extreme it is Functionalism (which is distinct from Marxism, but now I'm using that philosophy minor to split hairs). But it's really more of a free-market Functionalism - techies are the critical irreplaceable segment of an IT company. They're skills are unique and a finite number of people can do their job at all, therefore, like executives, they should be generously compensated (obviously less so than senior managment - but the point is that both groups are critical). Support departments tend to be a different story. However, techies, like blue-collar folk, tend to be isolated from management and most likely to be subjected to unfair treatment (I don't know any Marketdroids who worked 70 hrs/wk for two weeks to meet a deadline only to get laid off the next morning when the project got done on time). This is where some form of representation comes in.
This sounds racist to me.
There's plenty of documented cases of employers abusing the H1-B system. It has no checks and balances - these people often get fucked. You can read other comments here or the original stories for examples. (I wish to plead laziness for not supplying links.) There was absolutely no attempt by tech workers to lobby Congress on these issues, so suprise, we got shitty, one-sided legistlation. Until we live in a world with absolute free trade with a truly global market (never) restrictions on outsourcing employment are justified.
If they screw you, you leave.
That gets hard if everyone is colluding to screw you. It's true that some software isn't made by a couple oligopolies like cars are - yet. Despite this fact, anti-consumer initiatives like SDMI, CSS, etc. have managed to get universal support. It may only be a matter of time before everybody's management gets their act together to suppress developer wages. I'm not saying they would be wrong in trying to do so - that's their job, minimize expenses. The purpose of a union is to provide a counterbalancing institution - at least in theory. Someone needs to be looking out for your interests.
I'm not gonna play long-term predictor, but the dotcom shakeout indicates we might be seeing a world with relatively few software/networking/whatever companies. Most industries tend to consolidate as they mature, and there's no reason software would be an exception. If and when all software is made by Apple-Microsoft-Intel-NBC or IBM-Redhat-Sun-AOL-TimeWarner and three other companies, leverage would shift substantially away from the workforce to the employers. If you think this is absurd, bear in mind we once had dozens of automakers in America, we now have exactly two (Chrysler doesn't count). Troll-preempt: This an exagerrated example, please don't tell me Apple belongs in the second megacorp or something like that. (Somewhat OT, while I'm not a Marxist, he did predict consolidation decades before it happened. Rest assured, I hate communism as much as you, just should give credit where it's due.)
Three of the five groups you mentioned have recently pulled or are pulling strikes about bullshit issues and making ridiculous demands.
It cuts both ways. Counterexample: Pepsi workers where I live had shitty wages, pension plans, disability pay, etc. The union came up with a proposal that would have compensated Pepsi workers slightly less than local Coke workers with equivalent jobs. The company made a ridiculously low offer and then refused to negotiate "on principle." Who's the idiot here? All a strike indicates is an inability to reach an agreement - it isn't automatically the union's fault.
I may be going out on a limb by suggesting that we trust a system with a rather shady history. But we may have the solution to the problem of advocates who don't advocate well - the Internet. Rank and file union members have set up websites criticizing bad union leadership and company management alike. The NWA flight attendant contract (big issue when you have one airline like we do in Minneapolis) was scuttled by an independent website which claimed it didn't really benefit members.
In the olden days, all organizations had to be hierarchial - you had to have literal "bosses" even in unions. Today, you can set up a discussion site where anyone with a stake in the issues can voice their opinion. If flight attendants can use the net to prevent abuses of the union system tech workers should have no difficulty. It's awfully difficul to bullshit a large group of people who have the ability to communicate on a discussion system. I just can't see a traditional crooked union popping up when all the members can post comments.
It's a basic truth of economics that increased prices will result in decreased demand.
It is also a basic truth of physics that bodies move in accordance with Newton's laws and relations derived from these laws. Any so-called "basic truth" or "law" is valid only under a finite set of circumstances. Just as the laws of classical mechanics only accurately describes the world at relatively low speeds, the law of supply and demand only accurately describes the world in markets where all information is available to all actors, the number of actors is large, all actors meet the formal defition of efficiency, and the barriers to entry and exit approach zero.
Just as Newton's laws stop working well as we approach
These so-called "laws" become become less useful in describing behavior as we move away from the hard sciences to the soft ones, like economics and political science - even the Iron Law of Political Science has two exceptions (1930 and 1998) and social scientists still call it the "Iron Law" because relative to their other laws it's done an awfully good job.
...and I have 6 more to go.
There's only been one day that was less than 12 hours, and I fought like mad to get that one day.
Everywhere you go, you hear "that's how tech is."
Tech burnout, IT madness, whatever you want to call it, it's pervasive and for some unknown reason we're expected to be available 24/7 7 days a week. Beepers, cell phones, etc. totally invade our privacy.
It's got to stop before the tech industry eats itself. The business owners aren't going to do it, as we've seen lately with Amazon and Cobalt, they're going to do whatever they can to keep things as they are.
I it just doesn't seem fair.
About 25 years ago I worked in retail, selling home electronics. I was given the choice of joining the retail clerks union or quitting. I told my boss that I'd rather quit. He didn't want to lose me, so he promoted me to store manager. All the time I worked there, the union employees were making very close to minimum wage and were working in horrible conditions, and the union manager was driving a very expensive car and wearing suits more expensive than any worker could afford. There were no strikes. I'm sure there was lots of corruption.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
First, do you think that a union would really fix the H1 Visa problem? I'd assume that a union would just try to decrease the number of H1 Visas. I suppose it might force companies to pay H1 Visa recipiants more since this would make them less attractive, but this just means that only the companies without unionized labor would have lots of H1 Visa holders. I think federal legislation to force fair treatment of H1 Visa holders wopuld be much more effective.
Second, do you think that unions would really do anything to fix the problems with unfair co compeat contracts and NDAs? These issues are much to subtile for your average union and they only effect a minority of emploies (the more intelegent ones). Now, I suppose that a tech union might be a bit smarter then other unions, but I still think that it would ignore it's smarter most importent members in favor of the mass of dues paing html typing idiots.
I think the tech industry would be much better served by having a "tech workers loby" which did not deal with companies, but dealt with congress and the courts instead, i.e. it would try to help show that bad contracts and H1 Visa abuse should be illegal.
Alternativly, one could make an argument that unions would be ineffective since there are many many tech companies, i.e. unions are designed to deal with companies which have "monopolies on work." Now, the solution to this problem would be a more "distributed union" where the workers just discussed the problems they were having at work. It would be possible to look up people's opinions on companies to get a realistic view before joining a company and it would be possible to get help organizing "one time strikes." Actually, maybe we are closer to having such a place then we realize.. maybe a weblog like slashdot or kuro5hin could do this job.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It is true that technology companies expect un-sustainable levels of work, but in the vast majority of cases, these companies are fairly compensating their employees.
This is SUCH bullshit.
How do you compensate someone who is totally lost to their family because they're stuck in the office 7 days a week?
How do you compensate someone for the entire months lost due to crunch time, forced by the people who a) have the money to invest in realistic scheduling and b) aren't there with you the whole time?
I think it's interesting that your description of extortion, "either you give me this, or we [sic] wont work," is in fact a description of a market economy, which can be summarized as "either you give me a better price or I won't buy your gizmo."
You wouldn't know a market economy if it bit you in the ass. Markets work best when you have many sellers and many buyers, all operating independently. The tech industry has tens of thousands of competing companies and millions of employees, which is just the way things should be. The tech industry is damn close to an ideal free market.
Adam Smith, the idol of capitalists, would in fact have approved of unions, in my opinion
Do you know anything about Adam Smith? He would have viewed labour unions as market collusion, an evil that distorts prices and creates market inefficiencies. Your statement is about as ridiculous as claiming that Karl Marx would have favoured the AOL-Time Warner merger. Please, take an economics course.
With reasonable labour laws (such as those in Canada), there's really no need for unions in the tech industry. If you don't like your job, get another. When you leave a tech job, the company loses huge amounts of accumulated knowledge, and, whether the company knows it or not (the good ones do), it costs them big-time. This is more true in the tech industry than any other industry I can think of.
Nobody wants to pay you $75,000 for 8 hours a day with 6 weeks vacation? Maybe it's because you're not worth it. Ideal markets do a very good job of paying people what they're worth. Sometimes the truth hurts. If nobody wants to pay you $X, upgrade your skills, look around, and you'll probably get what you want.
Don't try to tell me it's hard to find a new job--it's easy if you don't suck. I'm only a co-op student, and I have no trouble. First co-op term, I had to turn down interviews because I was getting so many, and I got exactly the job I wanted. This time, I only applied to one place, and got the job without even an interview.
Yes, companies pull occasional bullshit like firing people without telling them, but that just means your labour laws need a bit of tweaking. If that happened here in Canada, you could sue their asses for wrongful dismissal.
Sure, unions increase wages in the short-run, but they ultimately harm workers by decreasing the supply of jobs or putting employers out of business or by taking huge chunks of your paycheck. It's simple economics--if you increase the price of something (higher wages), demand will fall (==less jobs). There's a few details (price elasticity of demand increases with time, etc.) that tell you that the reaction won't be immediate, but it will happen.
Historically, unions have been corrupt, anti-democratic organizations. I know this because, during the Cold War, my grandfather was an active member of the Communist Party in the US. He was ordered to infiltrate the UAW, which he successfully did. Maybe it's no longer the Communist party that has their fingers in the union pie--it could be the Mob--but they're not really about protecting workers. Corporations don't have a monopoly on evil...
I know what you're going to say "Aha! Those labour laws are there because of unions! So there!". Yes, very true. Unions did have a useful place in society. They're not needed in today's highly-educated, highly-skilled labour market, though.
Maybe you're thinking "but I deserve to be paid $XXX,000, and I should get 72 weeks of paid vacation a year". Why do you think you are somehow entitled to any of this? You're entitled to what you can negotiate in good faith with your employer, and you're entitled to have your employer honour your employment contract. Nowhere in the Consitution is flex-time, sick leave, or overtime pay guaranteed.
I'm not saying people don't have the right to organize unions--they do (and should) have that right. I'm just saying it would be stupid to do so in the tech industry.
Money is power. Employers have it, you don't. Unless you're an employer.
Maybe at McDonalds, that's true, but things are very different in the tech industry. What developers are selling (knowledge and skills) is extremely valuable, and good companies know this.
At the place I was working this summer, if the two most senior developers had walked, the company would have folded. Management could come and go, the market could change, but these developers were the company. The knowledge in their heads was irreplaceable, and management knew it.
That's power.
An intelligent employer will pay employees what they're worth and do everything possible to keep the good ones around. Unions make that harder, because now Joe Slacker has to be paid as much as Jane Ubercoder, just because he's been around as long. When you fuck with the free market, things almost always get worse.
Yes, and that would explain why bad management practices and lousy working conditions are so prevalent in the tech industry today, wouldn't it. There have been numerous stories on /. about bad treatment of tech workers, particularly in shit-kicker positions like tech support, simply because no workforce has ever united against bad management. Sure, an individual can take a stand or walk out of a job he/she doesn't like, but what are isolated individuals going to achieve in the greater scheme of things?
It's time that tech workers united, be it as a union or at workplace level, not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the clients/customers who put up with bad products as the result of bad management.
Yes. This is something that a lot of people miss about unions; the legal protectection against abuse.
Here i Denmark, the IT-workers has a rather good union called PROSA. When you have to sign a new contract, NDA or noncompete, you just take it to the unions lawyers first, so they can look it over. Since these lawyers are experts on their field, they can give you good advice,like; "this is standard stuff, you can sign it." or "take the contract back, and make them change this line, because..." or "This is a lousy contract, but you can sign it anyway, because if they try to enforce it, we will take it to court, and win."
Especially noncompetes, can be really, really bad for your career. Why learn that the hard way?
I know, smart US IT workers take their contracts to a lawyer too. But if push comes to shove, it is really nice to have a union behind you. It seems that a lot of US citizens, often prefer to drop to take any action against really unfair work treatment, even though they have a really good winning case, simply because, the thought of a long, legal struggle, would grind people down, or that the slight chance of losing the case, would mean personal ruin. So people swallow their defeat, and humiliation.
But if the union is behind you, the picture might change; The corperation can't play the "we grind you down in a long lasting legal struggle" card, since they now deal with an organization.
The employer can't intimidate the worker, with a bunch of lawyers, telling him lies, since the union got lawyers who knows the law.
And the union cover the legal cost too.
Most cases are standard stuff, but if a case is really unjust, the union can throw all its weight behind it. Something you can't get, when it is just you and your lawyer, against a perhaps large company.
Most intelegent programmers laugh at the thought of a "tech union"... demand is so high that for most of us we could easily walk and get another job. I recently did just that, much more frendly co-workers and much higher pay. Tho I noticed that there are a great many out there in the tech world that couldn't quite make it into the "elite" status. In fact I see so many freeloaders in my workplace, it makes me sick. The last thing we need is a union to protect these people. There are so many tech jobs out there right now that if you need a union to protect you from management, it means you just arn't smart enough to be in that line of work.
Although I am clearly biased on this point, I just dont see any other need for a tech-union, perhaps someone else can enlighten me on this issue.
-nite
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
1) If all programmers, as a union demanded that, tehre would be less programing jobs.
2) Tech companies screw employees usually only because the employees are young (or rather, if they were a little wiser, it wouldn't have happened).
3) Of course. Companies can always screw their employees. But I want to see big companies first. If MS Employees unionize, I can understand that. But I don't want to be labelled badly as 'non-union labor' just because I don't want to play in your club.
You know.. all too often, all the pro-union stuff sounds great at first. I mean, it does. Fairness across the board, benefits, etc.
I watched a supermarket go union. The promoters came in, and over a year and a bit, took a place where everyoen *liked* the boss, adn everyone was treated fairly, pretty much all would agree... and different people had different non-official benefits.. like the lady with her crazy sister who had to go take care of her all the time.. bos cut her LOTS of slack, gladly.. she was part of his community. Boss kept some peopel in who could only work a couple hours a week, because they tried, and needed the money. Boss did LOTS of things, like giving people extra days off, rewarding good work....
Once the union came in.. sure.. everyone got a little raise... the boss no longer had say in seniority, could no longer decide who or what should be in charge of what (not to the same degree anyway)... and.. no longe rhad the freedom to be generous with certain employees. Sorry... lady, yuo can't work enough hours. No job for you anymore...
Sorry billy.. you can't spend extra hours after work stocknig shelves.. you're a service clerk.. your contract says you can't do that unless I promote you adn give you a raise.. they say if I need shelves stocked, I should bring in a higher paid shelf stocker. I know you really simply want to work a few extra hours so you can save up to go to college.. but I'm sorry. The Union says no.
And now, everyone just bitches abou ttheir 'contract' instead of liking going to work every day, knowing that the owner of the shop, who is *responsible for the fact that everyone has a job there*, is their friend and respected community member. Now he is just 'management'.
Tech union? no thanks.
Labor history is the history of new technologies coming up, corporations racing to take advantage of them, and claiming that they want to have a direct relationship with their employees.
Railroad trusts operated camps of Chinese workers who came to the United States to do the jobs that there were not nearly enough Americans in that region to do.
Why deny dot-com employees the right to organize? Management organizes its institution as it sees fit, often ignoring the technical knowledge of their employees, to the detriment of the employees and the company.
Customer service employees-tech support staff, sales staff, and even web designers and sysadmins get overworked and underpaid.
Furthermore, the fact that real wages have been declining for decades has finally borne fruit in a growing group of disgruntled, disaffected people in many industries.
I feel that this peremptory statement dot-coms make about unions, which presumes to know the attitude of employees, misses the point: Dot-coms have good reason to be afraid of their employees!
IT employees realize that their skills are crucial to the operation of these businesses. What was once a tiny, specialized field has become the marketplace for more and more people. Unlike the drivers of a fleet of trucks, if IT workers go on strike, all they have to do is make a few keystrokes to disable a system. Only a lack of coordinated effort among these employees prevents them from having this kind of bargaining power.
Goat sex free since 2001
This sounds racist to me. If other people are willing to do your job for less, and they're just as capable as you, why shouldn't they get the job? Because their skin is a different colour?
You obviously know jack shit about H1 visas. Because of the fact that the ONLY reason someone on an H1 visa is here is because of their employer, they are AT THE MERCY of the employer. Everyone here is talking about how they can just change jobs if the work conditions suck- not so with an H1B. They are with that company for the long haul, no matter how shitty the wages are or how terrible the hours are. Ever heard of those stories of people who pay their life savings to be smuggled to freedom, only to be put in to indentured servitude when they get here? Guess what, H1B's are government-sponsored indentured servitude. Who loses? Guys like you and me, who don't get jobs because some poor schmuck from india is getting paid a pittance to work 80 hours a week.
Call me racist or whatever, but I don't give a rat's ass whether someone here on an H1 visa is fluroescent green, they're being exploited by the companies they work for, at the expense of people who live here. That's not racist, that's pragmatic.
:-)
Okay, seriously now...
I think I'm probably anti-union. I understand how important they are in a market where employers literally decide whether workers starve to death, but in the 21st Century tech sector, such a thing is uncessesary. I'm an individualist, and I would hate to be denied a job because don't want to be part of a union. This happens because unions make companies sign agreements not to hire non-union employees, and if the company breaks this agreement, the union members leave and the company is "blacklisted" in the same fashion that companies blacklisted union members a hundred years ago.
And this is largely a matter of perspective, but I also think that unions encourage laziness and a lack of personal development. That may be fine for some beer-swillin', gun-totin', wife-beatin' blue-collar white-trash steelworker (not to encourage stereotypes, heh heh) in rural Kentucky, but I'm a tea-drinkin', C++/Java-codin', pasty-white East-coast boy who puts his personal interests and the interests of his employer (after all, I am part of the company too!) ahead of the interests of some amorphous coagulation of power-hungery socialists whose only common thread is their current occupation. (Yes, unions and Socialism have a long, torrid history of pleasing each other orally. Just look at how much union supported Al "I went to China and all I got was this lousy failed political model" Gore.)
I mean, come on! In an era where any technology worker can turn a great idea into millions in stock options and become a bourgeois CEO overnight, why would anyone in this industry want to encourage such Mafiaesque organizations of groupthink drones who squeeze their employers' balls so they can do poor work and get paid [relatively] big bucks? (Heh, If you need proof of what this, look at the American automobile industry. Unions are the reason American cars have such a [rightfully] poor reputation)
I'm not discouraging all groups of workers. I am an admirer, for instance, of certain German labor groups who have strict requirements in terms of knowledge and training for their members. When you hire a member of one of these guilds, you are assured a certain level of expertise and quality of work. These workers feel a sense of duty to both their guild and their employer to do good work.
I am an adherant to what I understand is a typical Japanese business philosophy, where the workers feel they are representatives of their organizations, and work hard to bring the company, and therefore themselves, honor and fortune. In contrast, union members see themselves as their employers' enemies, and work for themselves and their power-hungry union leaders. Much like typical communist systems, the leaders end up becoming militant despots, and the workers, their unknowing robot slaves who think they're benfitting.
I enjoy my job. I know that I am a part of the same group as my boss, his boss, and the CEO. I know that by doing good work I bring acclaim to the entire company, and therefore, myself. I am not my own enemy.
Unions can suck my capitalist cock!
(This as really some wonderfully craffed flamebait, don't you think?)
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
It would be nice to see something like this for technology.
The problem is that right now we're settling for less than what we should expect. There are some fabulously profitable companies out there. But all of that money was made by coders, who got a generous amount of money, but in all honesty deserve more.
This sounds suspiciously like communism and the labour theory of value. Just because somebody didn't type a line of code doesn't mean they didn't contribute. As much as I hate sales and marketing, I know that they are also essential to most companies. Companies live and die by their management--just compare a well-managed company to a poorly-managed one, and you'll realize how valuable management really is.
Maybe you don't think CEOs deserve their multi-million dollar salaries. The truth is that the good ones easily earn their paychecks and more. For instance, Apple would be dead and buried without Steve Jobs. In that light, no matter how much they're paying him, he's clearly been a net contributor to the company.
2. Tech companies haven't been above screwing employees. People get let go a couple weeks before their options come due, often for fabricated reasons. H1-B visas get rammed through Congress to drive down IT salaries. Imagine if the Big Three automakers tried to import tens of thousands of foreign workers and then pay them substandard wages!! It can only happen in IT.
This sounds racist to me. If other people are willing to do your job for less, and they're just as capable as you, why shouldn't they get the job? Because their skin is a different colour?
Marketing practices of today may become labor practices of tommorrow. If a company is willing to screw consumers with "content protection" do you really trust it not to screw its own employees?
If they screw you, you leave. With sites like F*ckedcompany.com around, it's not too hard to find out which companies suck before you apply. If it's true that marketing behaviour is indicative of employee treatment, then it should be really easy to avoid loser companies. You have nobody to blame but yourself if you don't do your research.
A lot of anti-union people scream "I'm too good for a union - unions are for idiot construction workers." But many industry that depend on highly skilled labor are highly - pilots, aviation mechanics, teachers, athletes, actors. It obviously works for other "knowledge industries".
Three of the five groups you mentioned have recently pulled or are pulling strikes about bullshit issues and making ridiculous demands. I'll focus on teachers' unions:the teachers' union in BC used parent volunteers as an issue in a recent strike. They told teachers, "Remember, parent volunteers are here to take your jobs." The union actually wanted to keep parents out of schools. This had absolutely nothing to do with helping kids, and would have destroyed many sports teams and other extracirricular activities. These unions force job advancement to be dependent on seniority instead of performance. That harms kids, and removes any incentive for teachers to do a good job. The good teachers ultimately become bitter and frustrated with the system as they watch bad teachers climb up the ranks because of their seniority. The result is the mess that the public school systems have become today.
Technology unions probably would be different than old-school unions...
Oh, sure, at first they would be. They'd be all dressed up as something new and shiny, and they'd try to make us think they'd reformed. Gradually, they would reveal themselves, taking larger and larger bites out of our paychecks so they could donate money to political candidates we didn't support. They'd misinform employees to make them hate management, so they would have a stronger hold over us (I've seen this very trick happen before). Unions are corrupt--don't kid yourself. Unlike corporations, they have nothing to gain from good employer-employee relations.
I know of *no* industry where unionization has decreased wages or really adversely affected employees.
It's a basic truth of economics that increased prices will result in decreased demand. In other words, if unions artificially jack up wages, the result will be lost jobs and an inefficient economy. It's not a coincidence that the computer industry is ununionized and has experienced so much growth.
Unions are horrible things. They only make sense for people to stupid and unimaginative to know they can walk away from a job and join a competing company or start their own company if they don't like where they are. I remember my father working years going to night school after work so that he could progress in the world. Finally after a decade or more of special school and training he got a promotion to a job that was much better and paid better. The union sued him and the company and won. He was forced to train someone (without extra pay for doing so) else at the job when they had no prior experience in that field and honestly really couldn't do the job. That person got to take the job while my father was forced to go back to being a grunt worker. The company still arranged so he ended up doing most the work for that position but he couldn't get the promotion or the raise because the union always complained whenever he tried. To top it off the union often strikes forcing him and others who just want to make a living from being able to so that some idiots can fight over if they get 7 or 8 vacation days a year. Luckily now that his kids are moved out and he doesn't have so many responsibilities he is looking for a better job but it was enough to teach me my lesson. I've quit jobs before for organizing and I'd do it again. If I don't like where I'm at I can easily find a new job.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
That is hsortsightness: you and many here think that their talents are very special and will remain like that for ever. There was a time when differential calculus was mastered only by Newton, or when only Chopin or Lizst could play their own music. Now any high school or first year-college guy *has* to understand calculus, and in any music school you can find a dozen people that can play the piano as well as it could be expected in Chopin's time.
;-)
Lets say that the IT wrokers are better off *now* without unions, but that will not last forever because those skills we thing are so precious now will be common currency sooner than we expect.
God bless M$ that keeps moving the posts without reason. I loathe Linux that makes the skills I acuired 5 years ago be equaly relevant today
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Please read this before flaming ;)
I have seen several friends on H1 Visas abused in the workplace. I would happily join a union that would address this - and other issues.
Now, the above two lines were only an example.
The Real Meat of the matter:
* Tech companies expect un-sustainable levels of work from their employees.
* Tech companies will lay-off people without a second thought if it helps the bottom line.
* Tech companies will require unfair, new contracts to be signed by all employees, without any form of negotiation at all! (This is taken from real life experience - where a consulting firm completely revamped all employees stock option contract, without protection for wrongful termination / layoffs, and gave us no option but to sign or resign!)
For too long, people have been of the opinion that: Techies are overpaid, and thus should be mistreated.
I believe that Technical people are highly paid, for doing very challenging work, that most of the people (even educated well...) would not be able to or want to do.
Here's my support for Tech Unions and organizing. What does the industry have to fear, if everything is really A-OK already?
Might we actually get more than a week of severance when the filthy-rich board of our dot-com decides to lay-off half of the company?
Might people working here, away from their families abroad, actually be able to take reasonable time-off to visit their relatives, and return to work?
Please be reasonable folks... add the influence of the slashdot readers to the Unions organizing. Listen to their goals if you personally meet those organizing, and if you agree with them, support them.
If this is the case then the union won't last very long. This is because the company that employs it's members will probably wither and die.
My experience with unions has been from the point of view of a relatively new industry (electronics)and an incompetent and hostile management. This is where unions excell IMO.
However for people of a programmers or similar ilk I think that a guild or society (eg Lawyer)
would probably be more applicable. This would
probably fix the mediocrity tendencies of unions
(which are sometimes needed in non-skilled shops!)
but provide a protection mechanism for members by ensuring that only the Guild( or Society) supporting companies will get the best people.
Well it works for lawyers and engineers.
The anti-union sentiment on slashdot always manages to surprise me. Here's a couple of ideas for all you laissez-faire ideologues. Why don't you:
a) read a history book on the labor movement, rather than accept what's force-fed you by corporate media outlets and stand-up comics.
b) think a while about what's going to happen when the next big recession hits. Just because your skills are in demand now doesn't mean they always will be; or do you think PHP scripting and network programming are skills so integral to western civilization that you'll always have a job?
c) accept that collective bargaining can fit very neatly within a free market. If a company can't deal with workers organizing, then it's the company's fault. Nobody forces companies to accept unions, it's sometimes just the best business decision to make.
--
"Unions do nothing but promote mediocrity. They dont reward for being a better worker and they DO reward for being "just good enough" (Which in a union shop, is usually pretty bad)."
You have a great point about this. Unions also are allowed to dip into your paycheck practically at will and they use this money soley to promote ONE political party that over 40% of union members do not support.
Which is a stupid way to buy influence, the reason why the corpers contribute to BOTH parties is so that they have influence no matter WHO wins...
Also, unions have had a lot to do with the de-industrialization of the USA. Back in the 70's and early 80's, virtually EVERY factory where I'm from (Ashland, Ky) ended up shutting down, mostly after the unions comitted job suicide by strike after strike during bad economic times.
Now don't get me wrong, unions DO have their place, and at one time, in the early 20th Century did a LOT of good in getting reforms in workplace safety, the 40 hour work week, etc. But I think they have long outlived their usefulness in the places where they are still prevalent (heavy industry and government). Workers apparently realize this as well, as union workers are now a small minority of the total workforce.
Will unions come to the tech professions? Sadly, YES. Why? Because of operators like the place I used to work for. The management treated the tech department like dogs, paid us nothing (and refused to give me a raise at mu annual review despite the review being near perfect). They took full advantage of West Virginia's "Chineese overtime" system (as it is called) and paid us far less than our hourly rate for overtime that at times we were FORCED to work.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the tech staff turned over 100% from the time I was hired until the time I left.
So yes, I DO think unions will come to technicians, and other service workers. But it will be the beginning of the end of the tech industry as we know it.
I just hope we are a lot smarter about it and keep control with ourselves, and not create a political self-serving bureaucratic machine like the AFL-CIO or the Teamsters (who had a president, Ron Carey who stole an election, called the UPS strike solely to try to save his own ass, and ended up settling for pay increases that would take the average UPS worker 5 YEARS to recoup the pay they missed during the strike.).
We as a profession do NOT want to go down that road.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Unions normally exist in a market with one employer or a few employers acting as one. The goal of a union is to stop monopsony power.
The reason for this? The "menial" tasks that the anti-union people talk about in the auto-industry are actually considered skilled labor. They have valuable skills. However, if the "Big Three" decided that they would only pay $12/hr, these people would have nowhere to sell their skills, because there is only one employer. A union (monopoly of labor) and employer (monopsony of labor) negotiate, and you can something similar to a competitive market, but less efficient. However, it is more efficient than union/competitive industry or monopsony/exploited people.
If you have a competetive marketplace like in tech, (there are 10s of thousands of employers, and even in areas with sparse tech, there are probably 15-25) with lots of potential employees.
Unions will fail in tech, because "scabs" will laugh and cross pickup lines, and we're as a rule not imposing enough to scare them. Unlike the teamsters, I can't see tech unions working with the mob to kill scabs, but that's just me.
Alex
Manager Says Union Not Needed
This just in. In an important new development in labor relations, managers at leading firms have determined that unions are not needed. Despite widespead speculation by management that this was the case, positive proof was lacking until recently. An executive at a leading technology firm, Cobalt, was quoated as saying:
"Because clarity on issues like this is important, we have updated the Employee Handbook expressly stating Cobalt's position that a union is not needed here,"
When asked about safety regulations, taxes, reports to stockholders, and equal rights; management had no specific comment other than that they were "cautiously optimistic".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
One of the biggest problems the unions have had in breaking into the tech sector is most tech workers (rather correct) assumption that unions protect workers regardless of ability and productivity. They rely on seniority and other nonsense. These things don't fly in the tech industry. More ability and productivity = more pay. It should always work this way. Unions have never been structured to handle this.
This applies in tech and just about every other industry. The perfect example is my grandfather. He worked for Stanley (the US company that makes tools) way back before they were a union shop. He was a tool and die maker, dealing with 1/1000ths of an inch daily. He had good steady hands and a keen eye and could fix just about everything in the shop. He was a higher level tool and die maker because of his abilities. Then the shop unionized. He and the other high-level makers got pay-cuts, so that the lower-level (and lower-skilled) tool and die makers could get a raise and make the SAME money that he now did. Gone were raises, promotions and perks based on ability. Now things like seniority mattered. The work suffered, the tools suffered, and it was never the same through the rest of the time he worked there. But it was considered *OK* because now everyone made the same money and even the unskilled tool and die makers were now *protected* from the evil company that only wanted to make a buck.
You had to see his face while he told this story to fully comprehend it. He used to love his work, before he was in a union.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
After viewing the wide array of "Unions suck/Unions are for the lazy" posts here, I figured I should throw in my Cdn$0.02.
A couple years ago, my dad and another firefighter were suspended for speaking out at a town council meeting. The volunteer department found out through a 1-inch town newspaper item that their ladder truck was being farmed out to a nearby large city for a while, despite being told four weeks before the truck was staying in town. The firefighters had serious concerns about farming out the truck; the town has several tall buildings on the south end, and the ladder would have been moved to a department a good ten minutes away from where they normally were. The chief, who was involved in the decision to transfer the truck, said nothing about the decision to the crew.
At the next town council meeting, most of the department showed up. One firefighter, a lawyer, spoke for the group in front of the council about their concerns, both about the transfer of the truck and the secrecy in which the deal was shrouded. Despite being very civil and calm, the council ripped him, then called the chief up to back them up. After he was done speaking, he nearly ran out of the chamber. My dad followed and had a somewhat heated conversation with him. After the council meeting, my dad spoke with media that were on hand.
A couple days later, letters were delivered to my dad and the other firefighter. Indefinite suspensions! For speaking! My dad might have been suspendable for arguing with the chief, but the lawyer/firefighter was clean; there was no reason to suspend him. After a month, both firefighters were brought back on board. Soon after, some of the firefighters started looking into organizing. Despite several attempts to avert the organizing by the chief, the fire became a member of the Teamsters, and the first organized volunteer department in Canada.
The union wasn't brought in to increase wages, or let the firefighters be lazy; on the contrary, lazy people don't risk their lives around open flames on a regular basis for fun. They were brought in to preserve job security, to ensure fairness in disciplinary situations, and to ensure the firefighters have a group to defend them should the town try something stupid like that again.
So, yes, unions are still sometimes necessary in this age. If nothing else, tech workers might find them useful in making sure they aren't overworked by fly-by-night dot.coms that are likely to end up on FuckedCompany.com in the near future.
Much like big corporations, unions aren't all bad.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Although I am clearly biased on this point, I just dont see any other need for a tech-union, perhaps someone else can enlighten me on this issue.
1. Any group has more power acting cohesively. Imagine how much money we could pull in if we had real bargaining power with all the companies in the industry. Imagine if all the programmers in the US refused to work for less than, say $55,000. Free-loaders wouldn't be justifiable anymore, and anyone who was good enough/hard-working enough would be even better. Look at pilots - they're less bright than coders by a lot, (I speak from USAF experience), but they're highly skilled and unionized - most airline pilots bring in $100,000+ for doing a job that's substantially less challenging than writing complex code. Did I mention they have unions?
The problem is that right now we're settling for less than what we should expect. There are some fabulously profitable companies out there. But all of that money was made by coders, who got a generous amount of money, but in all honesty deserve more.
2. Tech companies haven't been above screwing employees. People get let go a couple weeks before their options come due, often for fabricated reasons. H1-B visas get rammed through Congress to drive down IT salaries. Imagine if the Big Three automakers tried to import tens of thousands of foreign workers and then pay them substandard wages!! It can only happen in IT.
3. Marketing practices of today may become labor practices of tommorrow. If a company is willing to screw consumers with "content protection" do you really trust it not to screw its own employees?
4. A lot of anti-union people scream "I'm too good for a union - unions are for idiot construction workers." But many industry that depend on highly skilled labor are highly - pilots, aviation mechanics, teachers, athletes, actors. It obviously works for other "knowledge industries".
5. Technology unions probably would be different than old-school unions - it would have to be easier to get rid of people, since it's easier to freeload than it is in manufacturing. Contracts would probably be shorter term, grievance procedures would be streamlined/scaled back, working condition issues would be much less important, etc.
I know of *no* industry where unionization has decreased wages or really adversely affected employees.