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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...
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?
The ignorance and bigotry around slashdot about unions is really astounding. For a place that otherwise seems to celebrate the cause of the "little guy" against the corporation, an awful lot of people around here, I think, just don't get it.
No, it's YOU that doesn't get it. The fight is not against the corporation. It's not against the bosses or the big-money bigwigs. The fight is FOR individualism and AGAINST stagnation, so that we can all succeed and grow. The problem is that, in this regard, unions are just as bad as corporations. The collectivist push of union organizers is the complete opposite of the individualist attitudes that many Slashdotters share, because "promoting fairness" often means repressing those who truly ARE superior at their jobs. And stagnation? Nothing is worse than union bureaucracy. Union demands that force companies into adopting seniority based promotion and raise schedules, and make it difficult to drop deadwood and crappy workers from the system are the epitomy of what's WRONG with the old economy ways of doing business. I am not a sheep, and I don't need some damned union boss protecting me.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
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.
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.