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The Jungle
asterisk5 writes: "The New Republic has an article from Seattle about the unions moving into new economy companies. Good stuff about the rise and fall of the Bezos cult of personality." When the illusions are stripped away, it's not pretty...
Amazon is struggling to even stay in business. Do the unions care at all about that? No. Those guys don't even stop to think about how they can help make Amazon a success. Instead, all they care about is themselves. They'll take the whole company down in order to make sure that they get what they want, even if it hurts a lot of hard-working people with families to support - hard working people who are doing good things for Amazon, rather than trying to spread the cancer of a union.
As a person who's started up companies before, I know that it takes a tremendous amount of cooperation and drive to make that company a success. If everyone isn't playing on the same team, even great prospects can quickly sour. Unions act only to divide the company up between "us" and "them".
Just take the primary subject of that article, Alan Barclay. He was planning things, talking with people, firing off emails, and generally focusing himself upon setting up a union. Hey, here's a tip, Alan: Maybe if you had spent all that energy on making Amazon more of a success, you wouldn't have gotten laid off. Odds are, you and a couple malcontents were starting to make yourselves dispensable. Next time, throw some of that energy into your job.
Especially in this day and age when anyone with technical skills is highly valued throughout the market, unions are evil parasites.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Unions in technology area BAD idea. Tech labor is still way too valuable, and techs hold most of the power. You don't /have/ to work 70 hour weeks in this industry. The people who do usually want to because they expect a big payoff (IPO what have you).
RIGHT ON! My girlfriend works for a unionized company, but I don't. My company just got taken over by a bigger one, and when I told my boss I wanted a 100% pay raise to go along to the new company, he had to scrape his jaw off the floor. I got it, because he knew I was worth it, and he didn't have a choice, because other people were jumping ship rather than relocate.
But if I'd have been a member of a union, I'd have been screwed, because my pay rates would have been locked down. I would have had to go through a chain of people to get any negotiating done, and everybody else would have wanted a piece of the same action I got. No way, folks, I work hard for ME, not for anybody else. If you want to get ahead, you just work hard. Amazing how people will take care of you if you're actually worth something to the company.
Besides, all these companies that are laying people off just plain wouldn't have hired so many if they had unions, anyway. My girlfriend is overworked to death, because her bosses would rather pay union overtime than risk hiring more union staff - people they can't lay off when times get thin. Does she like the overtime? No. Can she do anything about it? No, because her union bosses tell her that's the way the contract got negotiated, and it protects her job. Whoop-dee-doo. In the free market, she could bend her boss over the table, but not with a union.
Don't get me wrong, unions are great in certain circumstances. If you're an unskilled worker, and you want to protect your job, it's awesome. If you don't have the ability to go out and get another job easily, they're the best. But for tech people, who can find another job at the drop of a hat, they're a pain in the butt and a barrier to better wages.
What's your damage, Heather?
I've been a computer geek for over decades, and until recently have felt that labor unions have no place in the tech industry.
The reason I felt this way was largely a result of my (admittedly superficial) encounters with unions thus far. For example, if you are exhibiting at a computer show, you're not allowed to touch your own stuff. You are required to hire Teamsters to carry your stuff in and out of the building. Once your equipment is in your booth, you are not allowed to plug it in; you have to hire a member of the electrician's union to do that for you. Depending on the city in which your exhibiting, this process can be anywhere between a minor hassle and a sadistic nightmare only hinted at in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. You're busy, you're trying to get stuff done. But if you even think about doing something that's Somebody Else's Job, they'll jump down your throat.
Another fine example of excessive union activity is in the motion picture industry. This little excerpt from the film, The Wizard of Speed and Time should give you an idea of what it's like:
Director's Union Office:
"Hello, hi."
"Can I help you?"
"Uh. yeah, how do I join the Director's Union?"
"You need bring a copy of the D-O-mumble signed by your studio producer before you can pay your initiation fees and be cleared by union council, thank you..."
"Uh, excuse me, what's the initiation fee?"
"Seven thousand dollars, with a hundred dollar application fee, two hundred dollars every quarter, and ten percent of your salary."
"Seven thousand dollars! What is that for?"
"That's the amount you pay to get into our union."
"Well, what is it, like Social Security? I get it back when I retire?"
"Absolutely not! What is your classification?"
"Well, I'm directing special effects with a small crew."
"Well, then you must have an Assistant Director, a Second AD, and a UPM, all signed with the DUA."
"All I'm directing is animation!"
"Well, then discuss that with the Animator's Union."
Animator's Union Office:
"So, uh, what's your animation classification, huh?"
"Well, a lot of everything. Cartooning, kinestasis, rotoscoping, stop-motion..."
"WOAH! Well, cartoon animation alone is twenty-one hundred dollars, plus a fifty dollar entry fee, and a hundred dollar quarterly dues."
"Well, what about filming animation?"
"Well, then ya go to the Camera Union."
Camera Union Offices:
"No sir, the studio hires the next man on the roster."
"Well, how do I get on the roster?"
"You have to be in the union."
"Well, how do I get in the union?"
"When you're on the roster."
"You mean I can't join unless I'm already a member?"
"That's correct. Then you need thirty consecutive days camera operation, a complete physical exam, the producer sends a letter, and you pay your fees"
"Well, fine, I've done ten years of camera work!"
"Then you've worked in violation of seniority! You'll have to start all over as a film loader."
"Look, I'm just building a small set and filming it!"
"That's entirely another union! Set and Modelmakers. Next door."
I see software engineering as a primarily creative exercise. I don't especially want some self-appointed organization telling me what kind of work I can and can't do, and for whom.
However, I've recently come to the opinion that unions may well have a place in the tech industry, most particularly in the support sector. Some months ago, there was a Slashdot story about a guy's experience as a phone tech support person. I found the environment described utterly horrible. Individuality is forbidden; lying to customers ("Are you a supervisor?") is encouraged, the company has no loyalty toward its employees, the system is setup assuming people are going to be used up, burned out, and tossed aside. And if the quality of service sucks, that doesn't matter. Call volume is what matters; let's churn those calls through, people. Hang up in the middle if you have to, helping the customer is not the object of the game here, it's cranking those numbers...
I think that's reprehensible. This is not Dickensian England, this is 21st century America. I think a labor union representing phone tech support people would not only improve their working conditions, but also improve the quality of customer support. I'm sure there are several other low-level areas in the tech industry that could benefit from collective bargaining.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Being in the shadow of the biggest concentration of unions (Detroit's "big three" auto industry), I would say you are completely wrong. A union is kinda like Communism, it looks great on paper but it never seems to work out like it did on the big chief notebook.
Case in point, in Ford one cannot move a monitor on ones own desk (move it over a foot to adjust for glare, etc) you have to have one of the "union" guys do it. If you do move your monitor, you get written up and the company pays the union worker for the "work" that you did... just to justify that some dumbass actually requires a job. The tech guys are not allowed to put the $50k cad workstation they built on an engineers desk they have to get a "union electrician" to plug the cables in. How completely idiotic is this? They build it, installed it, but they can't plug it into a 110 volt outlet in the wall. What they would actually do is, tell the union guy how much the workstation cost (do you want to be responsible for it, scares most union guys), and if he would let them do the work, the union guy could take credit and the pay for it. Useless absolutely useless, all from the outgrowth of unions, and the belief that because you hired a dumbass, you should never get rid of dumbass screwoffs. (Don't even get me started on the union seniority bullshit, how old you are, not your performance determines how much you get paid... ugh).
Spelling and grammar checker off because I don't care
And all the talk of last years marketing and industry buzz. Where is the surprise that it wasn't all it would be cracked up to be? Did Barclay expect Bezos to give him a rubdown everynight after making his bed a putting a mint on his pillow?
Unions in technology area BAD idea. Tech labor is still way too valuable, and techs hold most of the power. You don't /have/ to work 70 hour weeks in this industry. The people who do usually want to because they expect a big payoff (IPO what have you).
This is nowhere near a situation similar to autoworkers where they are being treated with low wages and unsafe working environments.
This is nothing like the steelworkers who have been losing jobs by the thousand due to companies closing up shop.
Grow up, update your resume, and find a new job.
If he's as good as they told him he was in the first place, he shouldn't have a problem.
What good will a union do for these people?
The statement in the article concerning unsafe environments in Amazon's warehouses baffle me. I can't speak about the US but in Canada if I found myself in conditions where people are "fainting and vomiting from the heat" I know damn well that one call to my province's Ocupation Health and Safety office would get the company in big trouble.
I can't imagine this being any different in the US, in fact I'm 95% percent sure that if such things were to take place in a union shop, the first thing the union would do is place a call to the government types anyways.
The simple fact is that a lot of the abuses you use as an example from the industrial revolution have now been deemed unlawful and there are angencies to deal with this stuff. A union doesn't change that.
I do however, understand layoffs, I very recently got let go myself. I'll pick myself up and get something else, there's lots of companies that need my skills right now. When it gets to the point that I can't find another job then I guess I'm screwed. Probably should have gone to university when I was 18 rather than starting a corespondence degree at 25. I fail to see how a union will change that. I also fail to see how a union would have saved my last employer from sliding into a revenue shortfall, I'd still be out of a job, I would just have taken home less money the past 6 months because I was paying union dues.
The USSR and satellite nations used to have official, approved, unions answerable to The Party to which the employers were answerable too. But unions independent of the political structure were illegal and their leaders subject to imprisonment. The argument was used that in a workers paradise, unions were unnecessary. For obvious reasons, this wasn't true.
The most public example of anti-Union behaviour by the communist block was Poland's crackdown on Solidarity, the independent Polish shipyard(? IIRC) workers union.
Britain, which some slashdotters apply the S-word to as often as they do the USSR without differentiation, doesn't legally recognise the notion of Unions, despite having one political party (Labour) answerable and funded by them. Virtually every piece of industrial action done by a Union is illegal, and that Union's assets are liable to the siezed if the employer pushes hard enough. Again, the most evident example occurs in the 80's. Margaret Thatcher goes to war with the NUM, wanting to close a substantial part of the coal mining industry. The NUM at the time is run by a die-hard democratic communist called Arthur Scargill, and a political war breaks out which is far more, on both sides, about ideologies than it has to do with the economic viability of the mines the government proposes to close. Thatcher wants Scargill silenced, and unions emasculated. For the most part, she succeeds.
What I find interesting is that, for all the rhetoric about unions representing "socialism", in terms of what a union should be doing, the communists almost certainly had it right in a sense. The job of a union is to represent the workers. The communists saw unions as redundant in their world because that's what the Party was already doing. But, counterwise, it means unions have a major role to play in any capitalist economy. And in many ways, if it wasn't for the fact that unions in many countries were run predominantly by communists, and that unions are associated with rights for workers, I think that'd be pretty obvious.
Unions are simple examples of people organising together to improve their working conditions. In a pure capitalist, free market, economy, that's exactly what you'd expect people to do, to have to do if they stand any chance of getting decent conditions amongst employers who are ultimately answerable to their shareholders, not their employees. And here's the irony - this makes them a component of capitalism, a way of making capitalism work at every level, not the enemy of it unions are often portrayed as being.
Unions feed off capitalism. Capitalism feeds off working people. Working people feed off unions. I can't see it working in any other context.
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.