Slashdot Mirror
IT Unions?
aristotle2000 writes: "CNN.com has an article about IT unionization. I have generally been against the idea but the article raises some interesting issues, like training and development standards." Netslaves had a piece about the history of unionization a few days ago, good reading.
Labor organizes when organized management takes a few too many liberties with their workers. In my company, most people are treated well; even a few years ago when we went through a very bad patch individuals were still well treated even as they were let out the door. So even though the CWA is (weakly) trying to organize my location I don't see it succeeding.
But there are a few companies around my town that mistreat their people. Fortunately, a good person can still get a job eaily. But if the situation got a bit sour we can see organized labor making inroads.
In the early 70's, the aerospace business fell apart. Many smart engineers lost their jobs, but the survivors were still treated well by their employers. From what I've seen, the current dot-com meltdown has a lot of people on the street, and the survivors are scared. Though in the current scenario doesn't seem ripe for organization since the companies are also losing maney (though the CEOs seem to still make out nicely.)
why aren't you using ed then?
ED IS THE STANDARD!
You insure you stuff don't you? You tick the box which gives you legal cover for car accidents don't you? So why not join a union?
Then when you get wrongfully dismissed you have someone who'll back your case.
No, I'm not in a union yet but I was sorely tempted not long ago when I was ordered to do something I considered fraudulent. I kicked up a fuss but it got me nowhere. I guess I didn't know I needed one until it was too late.
Heres why I do not want a union.
/etc/aliases and add passwords or in 5 years, you could have learned how to design networks, configure routers etc.
In the regular union world, a person is usually judged differently than how the IT world is.
In the Union world, it usually falls down to how many years have you performed your job.
This has no bearing on the IT world. It all depends on the background you have been exposed to at your previous jobs and your dedication.
In 10 years, you could have learned how to modify
I have interviewed many people with "10+" years of experience who cannot even match 1 service to the port it runs on.
And yet I know many 5 years or less people who are running major sites in roles that say "senior" or "architect".
I know who I would pick, and also who would make it pass my interview screen.
That being said, with a union, you usually end up with the person with the most years being the highest paid person. That in itself is completely wrong.
Also, the person who is the most dedicated can transform themselves in a very very short time. Within a year, if you are starting out, its possible to increase your salary by 50% if you apply yourself hard enough. However in a union world, passing off a raise or review like this is completely impractical as well as violates union regulations.
I dont think this offers any benefit either to the people who are dedicated, or to the people who are working their way up the ladder. It only offers some help to the people that drag down the IT world by being "hangers on" and cannot apply themselves.
It's nice to know your rights don't need protecting and you're all part of the capitalist system.
Well, in the real world, you are sadly misinformed.
1)The highest, not the lowest, paid professions in America are unionized. Athletes, actors, and airline pilots all have unions. Why? To protect their basic rights. You keep talking about how skilled you are, but when your jobs are shipped to India and you're lucky to clear 40K a year, you'll see the ultimate wisdom of collective bargaining
2)I don't see Jim Carrey complaining about his pay lately. Seems he's in a union. So is Shaq, Alex Rodriguez and Nathan Lane. As well as the guy who flew you back to SF last week.
3)There is a massive gap between the commonly held idea of a union: industrial, and what the most successful unions:trade really do.
What a good IT union would do is assure your pension/401K where ever you worked.
It would provide uniform health benefits for you and your family, which would allow you to freelance, contract or set up your own business without worrying every time Junior gets the scooter.
Provides death and catastrophic injury benefits for you and your SO.
It would provide training and financial advice for you.
It would help you find jobs without recruiters
It would arbirtrate workplace disputes without resorting to lawyers.
It would not establish a maximum wage, nor would it prevent you from being promoted or becoming a manager. It would not mandate hiring and promotion.
I seriously suggest you take a look at the Writers Guild of America's website or the National Writers Union and see how these unions work.
4)The unlimited job market of today is going to end. Your wages will decline. Job switching will be a lot harder. Oh, and when you age out at 30-35, you might need a new job.
5)A union is not about politics as politics, but politics which benefits your career. So even if you vote Harry Browne every year, having a union kick in money to your Senator's campaign might be a good idea.
And if you'd like to slow down the H1B program, agitate for MP3's to be included in the Home Audio Recording Act, DeCSS and other fun things, it might pay to have lobbyists on YOUR payroll, acting in YOUR interests.
Because your bosses have their voices already heard in Washington.
I'm not saying that unions are needed in IT, but so many of you have such bizarrely self-inflated ideas of your worth as employees and how capitalism really works that you're setting yourselves up to be screwed.
In our 10Q series, one trend was clear, the top executives get millions of shares apiece and the 500 workers get to split 400,000-1m shares in options. So even if your options vest, you may wind up with a few thousand dollars, while your bosses wind up with a hundred million or so.
Even in failing companies, a dollar a share is a lot of money when you have a million shares. Or have sold off shares for 8-9 months while the employees with their vested options are taking it in the rear.
It's time you stopped being so happy to make $60K-80 a year in a job which lasts six months and think, hard about your future. You know, health insurance, life insurance and keeping that 401K plan consistent and invested wisely.
Instead of asking what a union would take from you, ask what a union would bring to your workplace and your life outside work, and how much freedom you would have if you didn't have to worry about being covered by every company you worked for and switching 401K's every year. Not to mention a more equitable sharing of the option pie.
Steve Gilliard
NetSlaves
How do you negotiate salary for a group? Programming depends too much on individual skill, which is pretty hard to quantify. Some programmers are just way more skilled and productive than others. Certification doesn't measure that skill very well. Lines of code doesn't measure it - a better programmer will write the same functionality in less lines of code. Years of experience doesn't predict it either. It's not like working on a production line, and the better programmers want to be rewarded for what they can do. Unions be damned.
How many of you work in a position where your job affects more than just the company you work for? I would guess quite a few of you are contractors of some type, or work on an account for your employer. I do. If I went on strike for a month, my customer would be gone when I got back. The same goes for a lot of large companies.
:-)
You also have to remember that I can freelance in this business. The first time you guys go on strike, I'll be hotter than a dot-com in late 1999. Hmmm... now that I think about it, why don't you go form your union
I guess you missed a previous slashdot discussion about the virtual impossibility of changing intellectual property rights assigned in employment contracts. There are lots of differences with unions, and I'm sure you realize that your post oversimplifies reality. Unions do reduce individualism, but nobody suggested that unions were meant to increase individualism. Unions don't appear out of thin air -- they appear when a bunch (multiple hundreds at least, I would guess from history) of people get really pissed off about how they're being treated.
-Paul Komarek
This is a great place to discuss the difference between median and average. A perfect driving record is definitely above average, but I expect it's not that far from the median driving record. That means, as a driver, you can be replaced despite your above-average driving record.
While I'm being pedantic, let's consider another example. There is an annual nationwide exam for math students called the Putnam exam. Despite the fact that the average score is some positive number greater than zero (out of 120 points possible, IIRC), at least half of the test-takers receive a score of exactly zero (all scores are non-negative). That means you can turn the test in blank, and still have 50% of the test-takers do no better.
Here's another good example. If you are a math major at an ivy league school, your best career move is to drop out in your second year of studies -- people in this group have an incredibly high average wealth! Of course, Bill Gates is in this group. What you really want to know, for security's sake, is what the median income is.
You may be above average, but that doesn't mean you can't be replaced.
-Paul Komarek
This is the single best post on this story.
-Paul Komarek
Be careful about using the term "we" so loosely. In effect, you are stereotyping your readers as images of yourself.
-Paul Komarek
Speak for yourself. By most measures (IQ, SAT score, GPA, income level, credit rating, average salary increase per year, NTN Trivia Player's Plus score) I'm well above average. Odds are not a factor in this.
If I don't like what my employer does, I'll find another job. I've done it before, I would do it again. I don't need to pay a union to bargain for benefits or salary for me, I can do it myself perfectly well with what I bring to the table and what I can do for my employer. If you can't say the same, find another field to work in.
Oh, and I have a perfect driving record. Guess I'm not average there either.
Uh, I think you're confusing "average" with "median".
Well, sort of. "Average" is an imprecise term that can mean any of mean, mode, or median. You're talking about the mean, he's really talking about the median.
Granted, when most people think of average they're really thinking of the mean. But strictly speaking any of the three is correct.
Unions today exist to give non-highly-skilled laborers artificial leverage to increase their salaries to a level which the job market would not ordinarily pay. Good IT workers are not easy to find, and because of the relatively high degree of specialization within IT professions, once a person has been in the IT field for a few years, he or she can usually command a fairly high salary by virtue of experience with a specific technology or within a specific industry. Because of this segmentation of the IT field, there just isn't the need for IT people to unionize.
This industry changes very quickly. Unionized information labor doesn't strike me as something that promotes keeping up with technology. It seems more like job security in case you find your skills are outdated.
I'm all for Unions. Corporations rip off every single one of their employees, except in the case of effective Unions, where the employees are the ones doing the ripping off. What's not to love? I'd just hate to see it at my employer, because I don't feel ripped off enough to want to reverse.
No one was talking about IT unions 5 years ago when VCs were pissing money away on ludicrous business ideas. People will obviously resent losing their jobs over this, but hey, did you really think you had a future in tieclip.com?
Seriously, anyone who deserves to work in IT should have no problem finding that their skills will always be in demand. When I hear people demanding Unions, I question the motivation. Maybe my outlook will change some day, but right now, I'm happy with my rugged individualism.
They might get a sunburn ;)
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
People today know all about unions, at least as they stand today. Here is what we know happens when a union comes in:
Did I miss something? I'm sure I did, those are just my major beefs unions. Unions have been highly successful in industries where the worker org structure is very flat, or the work is extremely dangerous. The second one is understandable, lets look at the first part.
Factories, physical labor industries... there are a bunch of front-line floor workers, some foremen, the rest are all management and administrators. At a table they sit opposite unions. Factory floor workers have virtually no chance of ever advancing beyond their current position. They had no new skills to acquire to do a lateral career change.
Compare this to the information industry, where the org structure is very deep, from data entry and html code monkeys and tech support to high level architecture designers, there are plenty of opportunities for upward advancement, well into upper management, even for the lowest of the low given enough determination and education. And there is a lot to learn, new skills to acquire and so forth to do a career change in case things go awry. So you're a java programmer right now? No problem, take a few evening courses and you can be a db admin, or a network admin, technical sales, even management. IT is a highly competitive and fast moving industry, and quick changes are made on a regular basis.
If you're putting bolt DF878454A on part Y2643-L 8 hours a day and your company decides they no longer need as many of you, or they have a robot to do your job, or maybe Y2643-L is now obsolete, they're very motivated to fire you. It's not like they're losing thousands of dollars in recruiting and training, they're not losing any critical knowledge or skills. If you lose a finger while putting on that bolt a similar situation could occur. This is where unions come in, to protect the ones with the least leverage.
The most common argument for unions in IT is that not everyone is making 6 figures and working in a lavish environment, not everyone is l337 (not even you), and even if you are, for how long? Who's to say your company won't suddenly change into another Ford plant? The truth is we're not all highly skilled, highly paid and highly sought after, we're not really arrogant or think we're so great we don't need unions. But, the IT industry has it good, and will for many years to come, until the next huge business ideology develops in a couple hundred years (space travel/exploration/mining comes to mind here). And by then we'll (well, our great-great-great-great-grand kids) be the cogs and automatons of IT, easily replacable, and the next wave of workers in the new industry will again be hot dogs. And the same question will be asked; should we unionize like our IT employed fathers were a few generations ago, and we'll have come full circle.
Maybe unions can change, but history so far shown this is not the case, unions are (almost by definiton) highly resistant to change, change is bad, change is when people go on strike, when they get fired and when they're forced to retire. Change is not opportunity for unions. So excuse us if we're a little slow in seeing a need for unions in IT.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Additionally, most programmers I know care very deeply about how their skills are perceived (myself included). Most of us like to think we are the top 25% of programmers (myself included)--although it isn't possible for 75% of programmers to be the top 25% :-) That being said, why would programmers want to unionize, to protect, in many posters' words, the lazy and the inept?
No, it won't happen. There will not be an effective programmers union.
BUT, I strongly believe there will be a network support/IT tech union. Those poor schlobs have it rough. Being on call and never getting paid (or whether they get paid or not is a point of debate with the employer), working long hours over outtages, not being able to take vacations. Those people will probably unionize. Especially with MCSE certification programs churning out so many, their jobs are probably in jeopardy. Whenever they start to get paid decent money for decent training, they could get fired for some fresh MCSE who is willing to be paid anything.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
I'd love to have 40 hour work weeks, get overtime for any time over my 8 hour day. Time and a half for saturdays, double time for sundays, and double time and a half for vacation days that I am forced to work (and triple time for anything over 8 hours on that forced work day on a holiday).
Then why the hell don't you negotiate that yourself? Are you that weak-willed or are you that incompetent? Where I work you'd be at the bottom of the food chain just because you are too cowardly to stand up and say what you want, instead hiding behind some union rep.
Grow some balls already; if you are that easily replaced then go to a union shop, pay yer dues and learn on the side so that you can negotiate your own terms with confidence.
Christ. "I'd love to this... I'd love to that... but I'm too scared to ask! Someone please take my money to do it for me?
asinus sum et eo superbio
asinus sum et eo superbio
in omnibus veritas
When it doesn't consume 8 megs of memory, yes.
Any union would have to officially recognise vim IMHO.
If /.ers are so individual they can hardly be categorised so glibly.
.....
Oh god, why am I answering a troll
Not exactly true. yes, I can still counted 10 but I've lost significant use in both arms, can no longer write code, and must use speech recognition to write text such as this message. This came about because of eighteen years worth of hours at the keyboard using what ever furniture was available. I was fired from my job, tried to work with workers compensation Hell to get basic medical treatment for my condition. My regular doctor could not treat me even when I had pain so bad I could not hold a spoon and feed myself because the condition was work-related. Workers compensation requires many lawyer hours to get permission to schedule a single appointment.
Eventually, I gave up, paid for my own medical, and built my own business so that no employer could ever hurt me that way again.
...are a sign of a company that could be operating more efficiently. The company I work at I consider to be one of the more well managed technology companies; the idea of having a union there is absurd.
When workes unionize they are saying "our interests are different from our company's interests" - this is not a sign of a healthy company.
Given that humans are terrible greedy beings it is inevitable that certain occupations will be unionized; electricians, carpenters, etc- but these professions are inherently different from technology workers. Management can easily fire any particular plumber, electrician, or whatever- they tend to be less invested in a particular job. However, techies who know their stuff tend to have relatively secure jobs without being in a union. (No, I'm not talking about all those 1999 nasdaq-high impulse hires.)
To summarize, unions are only useful in slow moving, bureaucracy-laden industries employing legions of interchangable workers; if you are a truly valuable employee you don't need a union and if you're not, well, don't expect a union to save you...
Actually IT shortage exists. But it's not so much about shortage of people, it's shortage of highly skilled and qualified people.
Given that You can't replace a highly skilled person with one, two, or even three average workers - only with someone of similar skill, and that not everyone is suited to the field, the shortage is pretty hard to get over. So, we're going to see even more average people in the field.
Of course there are lots of positions that are suited for people not so highly skilled in some aspects of the craft (art? I prefer craft). People with higher social skills are better in many support positions. People with social and organizational skills are better in project management. And most of the people in the field who have some organizational skills are well suited for programming and administration.
The people with special insight in the craft should be doing design and analysis - whether network security design or software architecture design.
However, that would require that things would be done in organized, planned manner - not in the chaotic way. In chaotic programming, everyone participating should be highly skilled and able to do design changes on the spot. In organized and planned software development it's easier for most people to work productively.
So, if employees noticed this and started to plan, organize and document procedures and processes, they'd notice that there really isn't shortage of qualified staff. Until that time, only some individuals can pull the projects to successfull conclusion.
Of course planned and organized project might take a little longer to conclude because of the additional organizational overhead, but at least then the result would be consistently forseeable. Now, the result is dependent on the heroics of few.
Happily, some companies have pretty good staff able to pull off a miracle after another. But always there are those who can't.
1) We make a lot of money. We have lots of opportunities for raises. I'll be damned if my 20% annual raise is reduced to a "cost of living increase" by a union
2) We are not politically unified. Programmers don't fit into a single voting block as factory workers tend to do. I doubt that we're all going to get behind Tom Harkin for the next election.
3) For many people, programming is a step towards management (not me, I'm a programmer forever). What the hell are those people going to do? Fight management one day, and then become a manager the next? Talk about blowing up a bridge WELL BEFORE you even get to it...
4) We don't need unions to protect our benefits. Generally, we don't care about benefits past the medical care and 401K. We just want employers to forget the sports equipment reimbursement type of "benefit" and just give us the fuckin' money.
5) I don't want a union to tell me that I can only work 37.5 hours a week. I work as long as I want to, or as short as I want to. A union would force some kind of stifiling structure on my life. If I'm going to be at work at 9 AM, then that's because I happened to be awake all night, not because I've turned into a clock puncher.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
>Not to pick nits, but in you example the median is 100, so you still only have 20% below the median.
Yeah, I realized this after the fact... but the point remains that it only takes one extremely high or extremely low score to skew the average so drastically that the "50% are below average" statement just isn't true.
Think Stephen Hawking in an IRC channel. Suddenly everyone except him is below average.
-LjM
Actually, the part about drivers claiming to be above average was irrelevant to the point, the important part was about the 50-50 statement.
It IS possible for 80% of the drivers on the road to be "above average". It only takes a handful of really REALLY bad drivers (and I think they all live here in Austin) to bring the average down so low that 90% of the drivers COULD be above average.
-LjM
>Well, guess what pal - the odds are somewhere around, say, 50-50 that you're below average. It
>reminds me of the stats that 80% or whatever of drivers say they are an "above average" driver...
Uh, I think you're confusing "average" with "median".
If you have 100 employees, and you give them all a test, it is possible for 80 of them to score 100 points, and 20 to score 0 points.
You now have an average of 80 points. However, 80 employees scored above that.
Which half is below average?
Granted, this is not a likely example, it's hyperbole to illustrate the point: 50% of the people are not always below average. 50% of the people *are* always below the MEDIAN. There's a difference.
-LjM
Training and development standards shouldn't be the responsibility of labour unions, they should be the responsibilities of trade certification organizations. My understanding is the in the USA you do things differently thant he rest of the world: the rest of the world has apprenticship programs that lead to certification in a trade, but in the USA people join a union and the union claims all it's workers are "up to code".
Give me independent certification any day.
Nor does being in a Union.
He didn't say it was. They can be invaluable so you don't have to face off against your employer alone.
All being in a union guarantees is that you'll have absolutely no say in how your are treated.
FUD. As a union member you can elect your union leaders, which is a lot more than you can do to pick your CEO.
Well, guess what pal - the odds are somewhere around, say, 50-50 that you're below average. It reminds me of the stats that 80% or whatever of drivers say they are an "above average" driver...
So sure, unions are designed around the average, but given that half of all employers are below average in how they treat their employees, maybe the protections a union can offer are useful.
And given the increased power management has been given by the government and stockholders over the last few decades to screw their employees at no cost to the managers (how do you "accidentally" hire thousands of people you then decide you need to lay off and not get fired yourself), now might just be the right time.
Silly Rabbit, sigs are for kids.
I'm no fan of traditional Unions. I'm constantly trying to take control of my own career, not have some Union decide for me when I can get my next promotion/raise/whatever. They also tend to protect deadwood in a company, which makes it harder for the rest of us. Plus, I'm at times privy to corporate info that would produce a definate conflict of interest. I really don't think a Union, in the traditional sense anyway, would serve my interests in any way.
That being said, there are times when I've wanted to speak with many voices (which is one of the reasons for my Slashdot account), and have no real recourse. I think that a real, legally sanctioned _professional_ organization would go a long way to help some of my problems (like being here since 3:00am this morning). Something like what the denstists or doctors have - not really a Union that has barganing units and such, but an org that can sanction shops that don't treat their IT workers properly.
This is meant for businesses, not for thier employees. I want something independant of any one special interest. (Oh well, might happen before I retire in 20 years. Right.)
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Tech is a field where employees have a marketable skill which they leverage to increase their salaries and benefits. This system works very well: most tech workers are paid much better than average and are treated much better than average.
The main complaint of the article is that timelines today are too short, so tech workers feel rushed. This unionization effort seems to stem from a desire of the tech workers to usurp the role of determining timelines from management. Presumably they feel the product should take much longer to produce and correspondingly have fewer bugs. Perhaps they would feel a better sense of craftsmanship if their product was more carefully engineered. However the purpose of an organization is not to further feelings of craftsmanship in their employees, but to sell products for money.
It is management that is best able to determine what is the best tradeoff between development time and bug count. A sense of craftsmanship is absolutely irrelevant. It is incredibly presumptuous for tech workers to demand that they should be able to determine product timelines, that the purpose of their employer is to make them feel craftsmanship, and that they should be paid well for doing it.
Even MORE paid vacation. Hell, around here people only start a new job with 3 weeks a year!
Whoah! Is 3 weeks a lot where you come from? The standard 5 weeks I got in the UK and the 6 weeks I get in Sweden must seem pretty damn obscene to you.
In Sweden during July things pretty much close down. Everyone goes away for a month. You know what? We come back fresher and eager to do work. You have time to take a 2 week holiday somewhere nice, but also spend a couple of weeks "recovering" from an active holiday, doing the gardening and basically enjoying the summer.
Yes, full pay.
Actually that was a crap answer from me. Here's a better one:
In the UK it is standard for your holidays to be paid. Thus when I had 25 days holiday every one of those days was paid in full.
Now, in Sweden they also give you full pay for your holidays, but they alse have something else I don't quite understand - maybe a Swede could explain it for us. What it basically comes down to is that you get paid more for your holidays. It isn't that much more (I think on my current wage it is approximately equivalent to 23 USD extra a day) and you seem to get it in a lump sump at some point of the year (I think it was in June), but you do get paid extra and it isn't included in the amount quoted to you as being your monthly salary. Very strange. Surprised the hell out of me when I saw it for the first time.
I have an IT job. I am well paid, I get excellent benefits. I am required by my employer to take a week of training a year, which they pay for. I am expected to take 4 hours of overtime a week, that's in my contract. If I didn't want that I'd quit. My benefits are excellent, should they degrade I would quit. If your job is not satisfactory, then leave it. I don't even want to heard about the H1-BA visa people...if it's so bad, go back home.
In my company, there is a small underground push for a an "IT Union". Ever heard of the CWA? They trotted out Jesse Jackson during a push for unionization during our last stockholder's meeting! You gotta be kidding... Fact is, the only people I know who support it, are not exactly valuable assets to the company. Their skills are weak, and they are unwilling or unable to learn new technologies.
I believe that if the company believes the Union to be a threat they will increase pay/perks/benefits to those employees who deserve it. Treat them right and they will stay.
Blar.
It seems that historically, unions have existed in order to represent workers in a capitalist society that places all the power in the hands of the employers. It's kind of a workaround that provides checks-and-balances in business.
The danger comes when workers have too much power, and employers (and the economy) suffer.
I don't yet see IT workers being mistreated to the point where we need a union. I think standards would be a good idea, but like others have suggested, a union is not the right place to create them.
There are undoubtedly things that would be nice to see, like ergonomic standards that require good chairs, ergonomic keyboards, etc. However, one would hope that companies would realize spending a little money now would prevent rising health care or disability costs in the future - this is probably a pipedream, but it's how things are supposed to work.
For now, I think the majority of IT workers have spoken, as no union exists. There have been incidents such as the Microsoft temp workers case and the Digital secretaries (bad keyboards = big time health problem for data-entry workers), but by and large class action lawsuits have worked on our side in those cases.
It's very easy to say this all now, because despite the slowing of the economy there is still a shortage of IT workers, which gives you a disproportionate amount of power at your job. To the majority of workers in this country your asertions are really a joke. Quit my job when the CEO leaves, just to start over again somewhere else with no seniority, worse benefits, etc, etc?? (Of course for most people to have some sort of "transferable seniority" means that you're in a union in the first place).
I guess having worked in an industry (film industry) where I can confidently say that the unions save lives, I have a slightly different perspective.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Only the good stuff
Seriously, there are certain compromises made for the good of society. The concept of seniority is one of them. Most of us probably make less than we're worth towards the beginning of our careers and more towards the end, and that makes a lot of sense to me. When we're young, our needs are less, and they grow throughout our lives.
Anyway, everyone needs to eat, even people who can't work for shit -- or would you rather they starve?
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
First of all, only a small part of the job a cinematographer is specific to the particular camera they are using, and it certainly doesn't include loading!
Secondly, a "relatively new videographer" would never get hired to shoot a $100,000,000+ film. The actual DP for Star Wars II (and ep. 1) is David Tattersall who has extensive experience shooting film, and as far as I know SWII is his first major project shooting video.
A producer would always prefer to have someone with film-experience shoot their project -- when they get an inexperienced videographer it's because that's all they can afford, and they often end up regretting the decision! (I get regular offers to shoot projects on video -- I usually turn them down because a) a prefer film, and b) most video shoots are understaffed, underpaid and generally lacking in professionalism. Of course, they don't have unions!)
A large part of what you're paying for in a DP is their experience. Sure a kid right out of film school might be able to do some nice lighting, but are they ready to be the head of a department? There's a reason why most DP's don't become a DP until their mid-to-late thirtys.
In the film industry these days the union doesn't so much protect seniority as it provides a safety baseline for a production. It is not uncommon to work 18-hour days on a non-union shoot, with 6-hour turnaround time (which basically means 4 hours of sleep, since you still need to wrap up after shooting stops, and drive home). People are litterally killed by these kinds of conditions. Remember when Brandon Lee was killed on the set of The Crow? That accident never would have happened on a union set -- any number of union-mandated safety requirements would have prevented it.
Frankly, I wonder if people realize to what extent the working conditions that they take for granted are the result of union organizing -- things like the 40-hour work week, employer-paid health insurance, paid vacations, etc. Even if you never join a union, you should be thankful that someone did!
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Who the fuck would want to buy stock in a company that has a union? A smart investor? Some of the most profitable companies in the world have union workforces.
The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants. - Albert Camus
I have seen offers of 1% or 2% (per year), but that's just a bargaining position on the part of the corporation. Unions normally start off at a higher level. Talking about losing a weeks wages for .2% raise is merely 'poisoning the well'. And do you really think that any increase in union dues is going to offset the wage gains you get through negotiation?? Hell, in your bracket, sunshine, your entire union dues wouldn't equal the usual salary increase.
Pfui!
"I'm so skilled/important/eL337 that the company will treat me with respect/pay me what I'm worth/never fire me."
"All unions are filled with thugs and crooks who just want to take your union dues and are effectively useless."
etc. . .
(sigh)
To begin with, being skilled does not guarantee you proper treatment by the company.There are a number of circumstances where your skills will not save you, for example:
- You get a new boss who is:
- the industry you are in suffers a panic in the stock market. To keep the stock price from tanking, Upper Management hands down the diktat, "Lay off 10%! So let it be written, so let it be done!"
- Oh heck, I could go on and on . . .
. . . but the point is there are lots of circumstances where if you are being mistreated by management, you will be unable to defend yourself despite your Mighty Coding Prowess. The company is bigger than you. It has more money than you. It does *not*, I repeat *Not!* give a Flying Fiddler's F**** about you.- Stupifyingly dumb (It happens.)
- a sadist
- a technological illiterate (and therefore doesn't understand how Very Important you are.
and is therefore quite willing to let you go/treat you miserably/etc.In which case, it would be nice for you to have a nice big organisation backing you up.
As to the point about the honesty of unions, they vary. I speak from my own experience. When I was fired by one employer (because of my political activities), the union I belonged to at that time said, effectively, "Tough luck!" The next union I belonged to had the motto, "Nobody Goes For Free!" (Which meant that if you were fired, and wanted the union to take your side, they would automatically go as far as second step grievance. After that, the union would have to spend money on lawyers, so there was an evaluation on how likely we were to win before we went to the next level of the grievance procedure.) Some unions are good and some stink -- sorta like corporations that you work for.
Forget defining 'karma', how about selfish?
;) but unlike you, I have rather fond feelings of a fair, intelligently run Union of our Tradesmen.
I'm in pretty much the same position as yourself (only 6 figures?
One that has the intelligence to limit itself to matters of universal importance (health care, worker rights and suchlike) would succeed perfectly in realising them and would be a Good Thing for everyone. It is perhaps our last chance as Workers to keep the Corporate Beast in check before we belong to it completely.
We've been lucky my friend but don't let luck make you blind to the misfortune of others.
The signing of the treaty ending the vi/Emacs wars
Gates and Ellison bury the hatchet and go camping together
RMS decides to switch to Solaris
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Maybe I'm biased because I served my country. Maybe.
But the idea of citizens in this fine country inviting socialist practices makes me want to puke.
You want unions, move to a socialist country. In any case, step aside and get out of the way because there are some of us with some pride left who have work to do.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I'm sure nobody is reading this at this point, but for the record I have to reply. I would have loved to reply directly to the author but he didn't have the balls to post with any identity.
So, because the type and length of my service to my country is different from yours, I'm somehow a REMF? Love that attitude. That's the same liberal attitude that my fellow servicemen encountered when returning from service in southeast Asia. Nice warm attitude there, not the kind of attitude one would expect from someone else who had served.
But I have reason to doubt your alleged service or even citizenship. The country I am refering to, FYI, is a democratic republic with a capitalist free market economy. It is NOT a democracy nor is it communist.
Perhaps labor unions would be a good idea in a democracy. I dno't know. I am unable to think of an example of a country which is a true democracy at present or of one that lasted long enough to have had to face those issues.
Last point: I did not call for your expulsion, nor did I claim that right or power. I simply pointed out that you have the option of leaving this country to live and work in a country with a government type that would better accomidate your pro-union attitude.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Does this mean I can't keep my BMW?
The president's guitar effects pedal?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
>CEO compensation is tied to stock prices and thus tied to the market performance [...] If you look at current executive compensation in high tech you'll see that its a pretty shitty deal.
:-|
Hahaha
That's the theory, but it just doesn't work that way in practice, although I'm sure a lot of CEOs will be happy to know that they've got people fooled. Fact is that CEO compenstion comes in so many different forms (stock, "performance" bonuses, salary, perks etc., etc.) that the *total* can continue to rise even while said CEO professes to be suffering along with everyone else.
The ones who have the grip are the ones who get to squeeze. Any time upper management starts talking about cutbacks and belt tightening you can bet that they don't mean their own jobs and their own belts.
Organizations have this nasty tendency to grow beyond their initial scope. Hell, look at existing unions in other industries...started out making genuinely needed changes in working conditions and pay. Now? Well...there has to be a reason so many people think most unions are corrupt and too powerful. Could be that they are...
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
It's a tricky question, really. I was directing my comments more against the assumption that a union would stay focused only on the original goals.
It is a sad thing that organizations almost always grow too large, often becoming evil in the process. It happens with corporations, governments, unions, even religions. Theoretically these could all reach a balance point that benefits all the organizations while not screwing the individual, but it never seems to happen. Perhaps it's not really possible, or perhaps there is not ever a true equilibrium...just swings towards different sides as time goes on.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
IT workers will never unionize, because the entry salary puts one fresh out of school graduate at or well above the median *household* income for the country... and this is before you prove yourself at all, get a few raises, etc.. Tough to unionize when you are making more by yourself with little/no experience than many two-job households with children...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Sure, IT people get a lot of work and abuse. I know programmers who work 60 hours a week just to keep up with the load of stuff they have to do. However, investment bankers routinely put in 100 hour weeks. Junior lawyers do the same when preparing for trials, etc. I can see unions being good for maintaining MINIMUM standards. However, trade unions exist so you get a UNIFORM talent pool. One electrician is as good as another, and one ditchdigger is as good as the next. You just don't see that in IT. IT people have a wide range of experience, and it's up to the market to weed out the idiots. The other problem is inertia. Think about how hard it is to fire a union guy. Now think about how hard they work. Gee, are the two related? And why would I be inclined to learn SomeWierdSystem if it's not a requirement to keep my nice cushy union job? IT requires constant change and innovation. After you get a core grounding in general technology, you constantly have to upgrade your brain, unless you want to be a desktop tech the rest of your life. NO UNIONS! I would much rather fight for my OWN rights and keep my paycheck.
Inertia...the enemy of IT.
Why doesn't anyone want to work hard anymore?
Does anyone else feel that way?
I can see it now...
Picket line of geeks get's busted up by big burly guys. Geeks go home, hack into the company system (not that hard if they're already working for the company.) Find names and info on company executives that ordered the strikebusters. Proceed to do more damage than a thug with a club could think of doing.
With our power, the suits should be afraid of us. We just never flex our information muscle. We control everything, let's use that to our benefit.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
- 27" plasma monitor
- X Terminals in toilets
- periscope in server room (for occasional glimpse of daylight)
- I'm only half kidding
~ inspired by the Sysadmin Price GuideOver time, unions tends to become another layer of management. Of course they don't start out that way, but please think about what will happen over a period of decades. Sometimes corporate management is so institutionally inept and feral that you need that extra protective layer.
I would suggest that unless your life or health is seriously threatened by unsafe conditions, to go ahead and push for unionization. Otherwise, think long and hard about it. If your company's management is so inept that a union looks appealing, I'd try to find a better company to work for. If I couldn't find a better company to work for, I'd ask myself if I was the problem, or if there was another line of work I could pursue. It's a lot easier to change yourself than it is the world, or even a moderately-sized corporation.
This is just my opinion, and god knows, others out there disagree!
Eventually, I gave up, paid for my own medical, and built my own business so that no employer could ever hurt me that way again.
So you wound up better off than when you started, based on your own determinism, skill and guts?
And this is your argument for unions?
The very first time some IT weenies tried to start a picket line, their corporate masters could have strike-busters there immidiatly. Those guys could clear the ITsters out in minutes.
No doubt.
They wouldn't even need guns, just a few hits from a strong club would ruin these weakling's resolve.
A club? Wouldn't it be easier to just offer scabs free use of the company's bandwidth to download distros and pr0n? Or maybe a company wide LAN party?
Corporate profits rose about 104 percent.
Perhaps that was due to the decisions that were made by all those expensives CEOs.
Just a wild thought.
The point is, Monte, did those CEOs deserve to get their pay increased 4 and a half times faster than profits increased under their tender loving care?
"Deserve"? I don't know, that's not my call, that's up to the board and the stockholders.
Using the word "deserve" in this context implies that there should be some 3rd-party standard of "fairness". That kind of kibitzing worries me far more than some CEO getting a fat paycheck. But perhaps that's just a knee-jerk reaction on my part, I tend to interpret the phrase "level the playing field" as "bend over, here it comes again".
Countries that have started socializing everything... sweden, canada, germany, etc. enjoy some of the highest standards of living on the planet.
These "standard of living" surveys rank socialist leaning countries highly because they are, essentially, a measurement of how socialist a country is.
I need some ruthless agent to go in and get me every cent!
;-)
It would probably be easier if I didn't actually like my boss....
What you just said is what I see as one downside to unions. Everyone moves in lockstep. I want the opportunity for a big leap. As a result, I gravitate towards jobs where there's a potential for me to earn significantly more money by working smarter and/or harder than everyone else.
I think that parts of IT are useful to unionize. The bottom of the barrel is Technical Support, people that work this job generally get low wages and slave driver managers. I used to work for an Virginia Based ISP, Erols Internet, which was bought-out by RCN. I worked there as a high-level technical support person, I made $8.50/hour, which I think still qualifies for welfare in my area. I worked 8 hours per day, and hated every minute of it. After I left, I heard things got worse, upto people getting written up for not going on break, exactally when they were supposed to or coming back a couple minutes late.
Technical Support Unions are a must.
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
Money is the least of my concerns. I'd be worried about the quality of the environment I work in. Work is something I enjoy nowadays, and sure I make enough and I could make less and not be worried since my life doesn't revolve around a dollar. However what would that environment be like when co workers start slacking because they're protected by a Union and can't be fired?
Even moreso what is going to happen when a salary based becomes a standard and I make as much as my manager or someone else makes the same amount as someone else without having the skills for command a salary, and tensions rise between co-workers?
The environment (workplace) becomes less desireable to be at. Thats my concern not money. Most people in this field with enough experience know how easy it is to move onto other jobs for higher pay, and I could have done so plenty of times for more money. Why should I when I feel comfortable where I'm at?
Want Root?
Often from what I've seen with unionizing is nothing is done by the Unions in reality. Lets see what a typical Union would do when things are erratic.
Strike for more money for so called more benefits for the people. Strike for better working conditions for the people shorter hours, and the rights to ensure an employee doesn't get fired improperly.
Sounds good so far but at what price? So as a tech union member lets see what that gets me. Being I already make a lot of money, this week my paycheck just won't come to me since I'm on strike, and at the age of 27 I'm already making close to 6 figures so this missing paycheck may hurt my lifestyle and I don't know how long I'll be on strike for.
While I picket with my "brothers" a Union rep speaks with officials to get about a %.20 salary raise for me, but then he wants to raise my union dues for this, so that raise is now null. How thrilling. While I work I see lazy people who do nothing since their unionized and can't be fired. Oh yea I'm just dying to be unionized.
IMHO I don't think the tech industry needs to be unionized. Its done great on its own for years, and unions see how much money we often make and are simply trying to get rich quick off our sweat.
Want Root?
- Why do unions seem to reward seniority over ability or acomplishments? Why should somebody get a higher wage simply because they've worked longer, when the quality of their work is inferior?
- Why do unions try and force workers in their industry or company to unionize instead of simply accepting some people's desire to remain non-union?
- Why do unions create such strict and incredibly small divisions of labor, thus requiring many more people to do a job than it should require?
I have my own ideas about these issues (see below), but I would seriously like to hear from others who may have different views. Perhaps somebody can enlighten me about something I hadn't thought of.So here are my thoughts about the above questions:
- Paying members more money the longer they work seems like an incentive for them to stay in the union. After all, when someone gets passed over by a collegue half their age, it makes them want to leave. Translation: Longer memberships at progressively higher salaries equals more dues for the union.
- True, the more members there are in the union the stronger their voice is against employers. However, the flip side is that more members equals more dues for the union.
- Strict division of labor increases the number of workers required to accomplish a task. Five people doing the job of one person equals five times the dues for the union.
Sounds to me like the underlying motive here is all money. And not money for the workers either. Am I wrong?- Milo Hyson
Not all middle-aged people (geeks or otherwise) choose to have families. Therefore, this argument doesn't necessarily apply.
1) As I mentioned-- medical, dental, pension.
I've never worked for anybody that didn't provide these things already.
2) Overtime for working beyond 40 hours.
I already get this -- guaranteed by state law.
3) My pager stays on my desk when I go home at night; i.e., I can have a Real Life(tm) with my family (and my compilers).
My pager goes home with me because that's the whole purpose for having a pager -- to reach me after hours. It's part of the job, which I didn't have to accept if I didn't like the terms. If someone needs to get in touch with me at work, they can call me, walk over to my desk or send me an email.
4) I'm not an at-will employee-- I can't be fired just because the boss can hire someone for less money.
So what? Whether you're at-will or not, you're not entitled to a job. You have to earn it.
5) I can't be fired for my continual, unabashedly militant leftist political and union organizing activities.
Neither can I, and I'm non-union. Again, state law.
6) I don't have to kiss suits' asses.
I've never encountered nor heard of this being a job requirement anywhere.
- Milo Hyson
If a business can find some resource elsewhere for less money, they will usually switch over to it. Sure, this seems unfair for the losing side. Welcome to the world of economics.
Excuse me for saying so, but this sounds like a very spoiled attitude. Most people work to make a living. Few end up doing what they want.
Nobody is guaranteed a job. Nobody is guaranteed a job they enjoy. Nobody is guaranteed the job they want.
- Milo Hyson
- Unions typically attempt to influence political issues via large donations to lobbyists.
- I've witnessed union members get irate because a non-member was selling union stickers at a garage sale.
- Unions try to increase their membership bases (thus leading to more money for the union) by distributing propaganda to the public.
Nope, not political.- Milo Hyson
I never said unions shouldn't be able to be political. I was responding to a post claiming unions weren't by giving examples of how they are.
- Milo Hyson
He still wasn't guaranteed to get the job. Nor is he guaranteed to keep it. If it pisses off the American people too much, he'll get booted out.
- Milo Hyson
Collective Bargining may have had its place 100 years ago, but lets face it, the parade is over. IT professions are highly skilled workers and are in demand. Unionizing any workforce in today's economy will lead to further market inefficiency and a drag to innovation. Unions are monopolies of the workforce. UAW, Teachers Unions, etc. Give me a break. They are just monopolies. /.ers are anti-monopoly and pro-individual. We don't believe in collective bargining. I dont want a fucking Union card when I want to get a job (I would need one to become a teacher or work in an auto factory). The day someone forces me to get a union card is the day I quit and do something else.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Like we want the Union to set up development standards? "Sorry kid, you'll have to ditch xemacs for VisualAge; its Union rules."
Someone you trust is one of us.
All of the things you've mentioned you could bargined for by yourself and have put in your employment contract. You don't need a union for any of these things. The difference is that with a union, everyone gets the same deal. That means if there is something that you want different, tough. You get no say with a Union.
Someone you trust is one of us.
CEO compensation is tied to stock prices and thus tied to the market performance which as you pointed out skyrocketed disproportionately with reality. As CEO compensation is more risky than average worker salary (which is garuanteed), the two numbers cannot be compared. Average Management Salary during the 90-98 period tracked below 28 percent at around 26 percent. If you look at current executive compensation in high tech you'll see that its a pretty shitty deal.
Someone you trust is one of us.
"Geeks and Hackers local 31337"
--
314-15-9265
Unions exist because some employees feel (or felt) abused by their employers, and rather than voting with their feet, they stayed, organized, and bludgeoned management into better behavior.
The catch is that many unions outlive their usefulness, and become parasites on the employees themselves.
The key to fixing that situation is to guarantee, in law, that union membership is always voluntary. That way, so long as the employees feel that a union is doing them good, membership goes up, and dues get paid. When the union is doing nothing, and still skimming a percentage of the employees' paychecks, the employees can individually stop that. The union must constantly demonstrate its utility, and convince everyone to be a member.
These sorts of laws exist in some states; they're often called "right to work" laws because they guarantee that you have a right to work at any job without becoming a member of any union. With that sort of set up, union problems become self-correcting.
"How much does being a union boss pay?" "Nothing." "Doh!" "...Unless you're crooked." "Woo-hoo!"
I see a lot of comments that the traditional union stuff; higher pay, shorter hours, aren't what we want, and I agree. But what about that clause in your contract that says 'everything you create or think of, whether on or off company time, awake or asleep, belongs to $company'? What about your right to own what you create in your own time? Your right to release it under the GPL or whatever damn license you like?
These contract clauses are industry standard, and if you ask your employer about them, they'll say 'oh, we don't enforce that' - but it's in writing, and if you come up with the next killer app in your basement, you can bet they'll want a piece/the whole thing.
It's needlessly difficult to negotiate these clauses out; there's lawyer overhead, and if you bring it up in an interview you're gonna look like a troublemaker. This is the kind of thing that only changes if many people stand up at once and say 'this clause is stupid and unacceptable' - which requires collective organisation, also known as a union, or professional association, or whatever.
Non-compete clauses (you may not work on anything in technology$ field for x years after you leave us) tend to get thrown out of court, but they exist anyway, and shouldn't, at least not in such a broad form.
There are plenty of other stupid clauses in contracts, and rather than wages, this is the kind of thing an association could fix for us. Unpaid overtime isn't an issue for those of us on hourly contracts or who expect it in exchange for a fat salary, but I agree that it's an issue that server support types could organise around...
[ hypermedia | virtual worlds | human interface | truth | beauty ]
Hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty.
In a new industry, Unions will move in where they are needed to aid the worker. Typically these are lower paid, lower skill workers. This doesn't describe most Technology workers. If you don't like working to fix problems at 3:00am, find a position where you don't have to, you don't need somebody stepping in, taking %20 of your income to get a better position for you
I can just see it now.
- Replace casual dress codes with boxers and t-shirts.
- Even MORE paid vacation. Hell, around here people only start a new job with 3 weeks a year!
- Higher salaries. Mid level workers can only afford Audis, they need Porsches.
- Remove all web blocking, not that we don't just find ways around it anyway.
- Gaming PCs and Counterstrike servers in all offices.
- Herman-Miller desks and chairs all around as proactive defense against repetitive motion injuries.
Seriously, what the hell do we need an IT union for? IT workers have it easier than many of the executives in their own companies! Even with all the dotcom/telco fallout there will still be thousands of unfilled tech jobs! This is just silly.
Why do you blame teachers when they strike? Why don't you blame the school boards who will not pay them what they deserve? Why don't you blame the citizens in that district that vote down pro-school referendums, and then complain why schools suck....and then have the nerve to blame teachers for the lack of "morals" in our teens (maybe parents should take time off of work to parent!!).
As for IT professionals.....I am a union IT pro. Two hours of pay a month goes to my union dues. In return I get a benefits package worth an additional 35% of my pay and includes full paid medical, dental and life insurance for the whole family and a generous retirment contribution that is vested immediately. Also, any overtime I work results in 1:1 comp time. All of this and our union has never had to strike! YES, unions work without strikes! Unfortunately, the only time you hear about unions in today's media is during strikes...you never hear about all of the good things they do for the employee (day care, same-sex partner rights, etc).
Finally, just becuase you are a union member does not guarantee job security....a common union myth. I can be fired just like everyone else in the world, however, there must be a reason for it. If my employer wanted to can me because I am doing a poor job, first they would have to notify me that I am doing poorly and give me a chance to improve (usually a month), and if I don't me their satisfaction I am a goner.
Being a union member does not make me a lazy, do-nothing employee. It makes me a happy, appreciative, hard-working employee....one that works to live, not lives to work.
ÕÕ
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Unions don't appear out of thin air -- they appear when a bunch (multiple hundreds at least, I would guess from history) of people get really pissed off about how they're being treated.
You missed one other critical part. "...how they're being treated..." and can't work elsewhere. The benefit of a union is to give leverage to a group of people that depend on that job for their livelyhood. If they could switch jobs as easily as I, an IT worker, can, they'd just quit and work somewhere else. I'd much rather quit and work somewhere else than wait for the months/years it takes for contract negotiations to get anywhere.
Having a union would probably help everyone who wants to write code on their own time without using company resources and not have their company claim ownership of it.
I'd imagine that union contracts would probably allow employees to retain ownership of anything they produce that isn't connected to their job.
Unionization would do more harm than good. There's too much of a cult thing going on with most companies to begin with. "We'll pay you $100K if you can put in 80 hours a week." Not to mention little perky things like in-house coffee shops, bohemian dress codes, etc. that make leaving the office guilt trip fodder.
Unionization is the feces of mass production. Putting everybody on a singular pay scale and demanding cheap benefits does not solve the single biggest problem of corporate America: the vastly overpaid CEO. That's what needs fixing.
Jimmy Hoffa was a union guy. Maybe we can get Steve Jobs to run this IT union and make him disappear to!
I'd rather take my chances with a jury of "my peers" than with organized labor.
Geeze, some hackers union 31337 would make
Yeah at least looking at job boards there does appear to be a shortage of very highend people. I think you may be correct that part of the problem is organizational and that if better structures are used not so many gurus are required.
While payscale and health benefits may not be the issues that inspire IT workers to unionize, there are other issues. H1-B visa workers are of course often abused and it would seem that a union would make a hell of a lot of sense for them. There is also the issue of the "IT shortage." IT unions cold lobby politicians to realize that the "IT shortage" does not exist.
There is no reason for unions to exist in a capitalistic environment . . .
In a capitalist society, business is supposed to maximize the return on capital. The best way to do this is to be a monopoly. It isn't easy to do achieve but the rewards are great. The irony is that while seeking a monopoly is the goal that motivates capitalism, actually achieving it results in the destruction of competition that makes capitalism so successful and beneficial.
Unions create a power that helps counter the power of business. Similar to a good business seeking to maximize the return on capital, a good union seeks to maximize the return on labor.
Where work is demanded, employers compete for empolyees. All that is needed is for independent groups to provide easy access to this employment data. Viola! No need for unions.
Mobility of the labor force has been a great boon for the economy. But that may not matter to individuals who like where they live. If they want to stay and can collectively force a company to remain, more power to them. The beauty of the Invisible Hand is that it is all about freedom. If business and labor are both free to seek the best terms they can, both sides benefit.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
How the hell is being crippled and in pain "better off than when you started".
Are you really that stupid?
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#1. It's just self-evident. It's why the US excels over Europe (in everything but auto manufacturing... hmmm).
Well this is just laughable. The UK, Australia and South Africa are the centres of medical research, Biotech is driven by non-US companies, electrical engineering and telecoms are driven by Europe and Asia. What exactly was the US excelling in again.
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Nobody is guaranteed a job. Nobody is guaranteed a job they enjoy. Nobody is guaranteed the job they want.
Your current president would seem to set lie to this adage. He has the job and position he wanted as an accident of birth, not by any stretch of the imagination a reflection of his ability.
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You have no inkling of irony what so ever, do you?
.sig
Reading through the outraged comments here, I've truly come to Grok the phrase "It's like herding cats"
;-P
You are absolutely correct. This is one of several reasons why Unions in general are a bad idea, especially for our industry.
Does extra money make up for more time to yourself, hobbies, friends and loved ones?
What if we organized and won the right for each worker to refuse or accept overtime?
Like many, I see unions as top-down organizations that disempower members at worst, while winning them better pay and benefits at best and working for a host of social and environmental causes at best.
Around the world, the people who worked in unions which empowered working people and mobilized them on stopping pollution, empowering women, and making it possible to work and to survive on the money you make have been imprisoned and murdered, at worst, and encouraged to become union bureaucrats, at "best".
In the eyes of the US military and the words of the establishment press, and in Java
if ( person.has_been_called("communist") ) { System.out.println( you.getName() + " can kill " + person.getName()); }
I want unions and unions of unions...and I want the unions to look like this:
1) diverse - why only one union per plant, what about a union of unions of people w/ similiar conditions/wants or maybe similar ages or races
2) cross-company - If we organize across companies we greatly increase our power. This will prevent unions from being anti-competitive as well, with the advantages this brings (as well as possibly some disadvantages of prolonging capitalism a bit).
3) cross-racial and cross-national - We don't want companies moving to Mexico, or India, or the US because of their lower wages and/or benefits and/or legal protection for workers, do we?
And the strength of a union depends of course how many workers put how much time and energy into the union and also how much of the decision-making gets made by the workers and how much gets made by the union leaders or AFL-CIO. Also how much community support it has, how much the media hates the union (.. actually I've seen some positive corporate media support of IBM's union effort ... ), as
well as how many other unions are
active in the area.
How much the governor and president works against unions matters too.
One of Democrat Harry Truman's claim to fame was making it illegal for working people to go on strike for people in a different part of the country and different industry, say.
So you could have your union, as long as you only worked on your own plant's workers and worried about your own asses... An effective way to disempower people...
On a different note, I also want to point out that we can not foresee whether or not computer programmers would continue to do well in a future capitalist economy. One could argue that we might one day make computers so easy to program With the experience I've had I have to smile real big after writing that. A more realistic threat to our mass employment would be smart machines, which have displaced so many of our brethren and sistren workers in so many other industries, and which might be better programmers than us some day. Or you could argue the other way... Also, all other things being equal, employers prefer to dumb down jobs.... for details I refer you to a search on Harry Braverman's writings about work.
There are no 'shop organisers' and none of the usual 'the workers' versus 'the bosses' rhetoric. So there is no conflict of interest; I don't tell them things that are commerical in confidence. This organisation is not interested in forcing a one-size-fits-all on employee or unions. (Although it has worked towards saftey net conditions.) This is not quite the balanced organisation you might like to see -- but it does balance my own country's employer body, the AIIA.
I've also found APESMA membership to be better value than my other membership of the more traditional IT professional society, the ACS, which seems more concerned with prestige and suit-ish stuff that I do not understand. But apparently others do, because Lawyers, Accountants, and the like see membership of the ACS as being a badge of 'professionalism' of the same value as membership of their more established professional societies.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
We'd complain about teachers less if there were strict guidelines about linking teachers' pay to students' overall scores. Students doing well in school? Pay teachers more. Students doing poorly, penalize teachers. That'd give them incentive to give a fuck, but unions strictly forbid it.
Anyone who's been through high school recently knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
Just a quick look at the postings tells me that not too many of you have given a long thought about what a union can be.
There is nothing stopping us from designing a union that only addresses the isses which we need to have addressed, WHICH was the entire point of the CNN story.
It is not about money or job protection, it's about standards and skills. The union need not be anything more than that.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
In a place where the rights of workers had been looked after to a fairly high degree, I was surprised to hear that DEC had -NO- unions at all.
It turned out that DEC paid so well, and provided such good perks on top of that, that it would be counterproductive (for its employees) to have to bring their conditions into line with (local) market conditions.
So, like other issues, I'd say that there aren't any Yes / No answers that work for all situations...
A corrupt Union leadership would not last long around a heavily wired membership.
Companies that have finished their layoffs will next seek to cut costs of remaining employees. At this point a Union can begin to look attractive.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
Unions are great for protecting people who's skills are not in demand, and for protecting people with a poor work ethic. It's also great for protecting people who have families from unethical work practices.
I worked at one unionized IT site (BCTel, now Telus) where you weren't allowed to get your own office supplies, or move computer equipment.
But all industrialized companies have legislation in place that protects workers. And if someone gets handed a shit-sandwidch, and the media finds out, the offending company is usually punished in the realm of public-opinion.
The tech market is in favor of the worker, not the employer. Any tech worker that needs a union is probably better suited for another occupation.
me, thanks. Seems to me that unions require traits that most IT workers just don't have. I'm suspcious of the motives behind the CWA and others when they try to round up IT people. It seems to me that they're trying to a)just add more people and b) add more influential and white collar people to their rolls. I don't think they care a whit about the people. Unions became self-sustaining entities long ago....much like some of the programs the gov't funds.....
Both sides are right. 1.) Unions were largely responsible for the 5-day work week, 8-hour day, benefits, etc. and 2.) Unions are largely run by corrupt, sometimes mob-connected strongmen who rule by intimidation and take an extra tax from their members (you can't work at a union shop unless you join the union) without much of any accountability as to how they spend it or what issues they advocate for.
As someone else here said, unions work best for jobs where the worker can be quickly and easily replaced without any loss of quality. Most of the jobs represented by unions today don't fall into this category, but in the beginning, they did. The entire point of mass production as envisaged by Henry Ford and others was to boil the process down to a set of simple procedures that even a monkey could do correctly (there's a great charlie chaplin film about a factory worker who goes nuts from twisting the same wrench half a turn all day).
Turn-of-the-century factory workers were horribly exploited, and unions were instrumental in turning that around. The result was a big expansion of the middle class. However, this just doesn't apply to knowledge workers. You can't replace a good network admin the next day, or even the next month. Good programmers are even harder to find, and the life of a business literally depends on the efficiency of its network and software. There will never be huge legions of these workers, because human intelligence remains constant over time. As jobs get more and more complicated, fewer people can do them. This is the real dividing line between white and blue collar. Pride-in-your-work aside, anybody can do a blue collar job with a high-quality result, but most white-collar jobs require some skill and innate talent to do well. Even the secretarial types (anyone who's had or worked with an administrative assistant can tell you that's not a monkey's job). High turnover in these jobs is extremely disruptive for a business, and union-or-no, there will never be over-the-top exploitation of these fields.
Modern union organizers should concentrate on the lower classes, not people who are already in the middle class. Of course, burger-flippers don't have much money to pay in dues...
*** ***
IT workers will never unionize, and for one very simply reason: They're Wimps!
The very first time some IT weenies tried to start a picket line, their corporate masters could have strike-busters there immidiatly. Those guys could clear the ITsters out in minutes. They wouldn't even need guns, just a few hits from a strong club would ruin these weakling's resolve.
The miners, the factory workers, the teamsters, the real men who started the Unions in the US, they did it by standing their ground, fighting the opposition, be it with rhetoris, clubs, knives, or guns. They didn't take any shit, and to try and believe that some asshole who gets paid to sit in an ergenomic chair all day could get off their ass and form a Union makes me laugh.
--
Feminism is the wild notion that women are human beings.
From my personal experience of working 70 hours/week and working 40 hours/week, i came to the conclusion that:
Working more hours does not lineary correlate with producing more
To be more precise, there is a point in which you are working so much time and your productivity per-hour is so low, that you are actually producing less in total than if you worked less hours.
Please keep in mind that (contrary to popular belief) being productive IS NOT THE SAME as producing lines of code.
What this means is that if you keep on working bellow a certain level of mental "freshness" you can actualy have a negative productivity (because you are introducing loads of bugs that later will take time to be tracked and solved)
As with everything, there is a point of balance in which you work the adequate number of hours to get the maximum total productivity. This will vary from person to person.
Knowing the right moment to stop and go home is what distinguishes the Really Excelent Programmers from the Simply Good Programmers.
Information about the work enviroment in each company (country).
This allows for informed decisions about the questions:
Social Skills so that you know how to handle your current manager and know how to negociate your next job
Any union with real teeth is going to have strict rules about work on the side. Open source work will be regarded as scab labor and threat to the commercial interests the labor unions work for.
Imagine if unions really took root in IT. Maybe you'd like to run a small business on the side. You might do a little web development to help make the bills at home. Not if you are in a union. You'll be blacklisted for that kind of behavior
Are you a political type? So are unions! As long as you're a democrat you probably won't think twice about how much unions spend of your dues (oh yeah, you'll owe dues!) But if you're republican, you'd better shut the f*ck up.
Then there's always the lovely posibility you might get to enjoy a long, drawn out strike! Ask anyone who's ever been through one (me) and they'll tell you it sucks going without a few months of income.
I want to remain a free agent. My skills belong to me.
Maybe it's not about making our job better. Maybe we could unionize and use our collective power to effect change in the world. We could shut the world down when ever we want. So when the leaders of the world go insane and try and start another war we could simply bring it all to a screaming halt!
Life is Short and Hard like a body building Elf
I'm a union member, and no, I'm not lazy and don't sit around doing nothing all day. I do replace lots of Mickeysoft stuff with linux and BSD, however :) . I am a public sector employee, so I don't make as much money as in the private sector; however, I get better benefits.
But here are the important things, things that get even more important as you young geeks grow into middle-aged geeks and have families. 1) As I mentioned-- medical, dental, pension. 2) Overtime for working beyond 40 hours. 3) My pager stays on my desk when I go home at night; i.e., I can have a Real Life(tm) with my family (and my compilers). 4) I'm not an at-will employee-- I can't be fired just because the boss can hire someone for less money. 5) I can't be fired for my continual, unabashedly militant leftist political and union organizing activities. 6) I don't have to kiss suits' asses.
All you anti-union dittoheads need to pull your heads away from your monitors for awhile (yeah, I know 2.4 is out, but...) and read some labor history. If it wasn't for unions we'd all be working 80-hour weeks and be at the bosses' beck and call 24-hours a day-- oh, wait, this is IT, that's the way it is....
Get the connection? And you know what the really sad thing is? You know why you've got your 80-hr/wk, no overtime job? Are you ready? It's because the boss is too fscking stoopid to do your job!!!
So hell, fire them.
Now, rank all the people working at your company. Find the average. There will be people below this average.
Hey! didn't I just fire all the below average people!
Are you suggesting that teachers strike in the summer then? A lot of good that strike will do them.
You don't want your union to protect lazy people? Don't do it then!
I can't imagine a tech union forming that didn't let everyone get a vote/say in how it was set up. If it didn't allow that, no one would join after someone tried starting it, right?
Basically the process is similar to starting a new country/organization with only technical people in it. The rules get to be written by the technical people as they start it. they get to elect CmdrTaco president when the time comes. They get to make CowboyNeal in charge of the SlashUniondot setup.
A tech union can't happen without technical people wanting to join it. So therefore, for it to occur, it has to be set up the way you want it to be set up. You get to set the rules. You set the policies. You define everything about it!
You don't have to whine about how you don't like unions because they do blah blah blah. Make your union only do the things you want it to do!
Nobody is getting eaten by copying machines, but plenty of shitty things happen to tech workers.
Have you seen marriages collapse since one of the partners works 75 hours a week?
Have you seen kids with no parents? (Both parents work for Intel)
Corporations want you to produce without any regard for you, your family or your personal life. If you are too arrogant or dumb to realize this (or like this) then you deserve whatever misery you get.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
the autoworker makes about $40K more than the MCSE.
Wait that's not true at all!! All the ATEC commercials say that brand-new MCSEs make 100k+. They couldn't possibly be lying, could they?
Enigma
Enigma
In some professions, but in the IT world? It's different when you are a construction worker, and are getting ripped off for long hours and minimal pay. Unions are formed to protect their members. As an IT worker, if you don't like your current situation, to pick up and leave fairly easily by posting your resume on one of the numerous search engines, and wa la you might increase your salary by 10%.
If unions did get involved, it might have an interesting affect on the whole software development process for many companies. Either the timeline for Software Development will be extended, or the price of software will be raised to keep the timeline, by hiring my SE or paying out overtime (Caused by Union Demands).
Raising software prices / licensing might cause a massive movement for companies to pursue open source alternatives, so maybe Unions could be beneficial...
Rehab is for quitters...
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Manufacturing has already moved off shore. Engineering is following. If you want to drive IT jobs overseas even faster, just push for unions.
Which is why I deny promotions that separate me from the hardware. As a pilot once said in response to why he didn't like promotions, he said, "Too many promotions and they don't let you fly."
Unfortunately, for reasons I do not understand, refusing promotions is grounds for firing at many companies. WTF?
They are out dated, useless, a waste of time and money, nad no longer needed. I have been a memeber of unions before because the company forced me too pretty much, if you work there you must belong to the union(because the union says so of course) the only thing they did for me was take my money. Unions DO NOT belong in the IT field. If you hav issues with your employeer get another job, if youra good IT worker, ANYONE will hire you.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Yeah, getting only $100,000 a year for basically sitting at a computer ranks right up there with slaving away 12 hours a day in an unsanitary steel factory for $5 a week.
Please.
--
The World is Yours.
Good call. The latest unemployment figures released say that nationwide, unemployment is at 4.5% or so, the highest level in 2 years.
Well, that means that 2 years ago, unemployment was higher than it is now. Two years ago, people were excited at how low the unemployement numbers were...
From an economic point of view, 3-4% unemployment is considered full employment from a practical standpoint anyway. Yeah, there are a lot of layoffs going on now -- I know a bunch of people who have been laid off (I've been lucky so far), but they've pretty much all gotten jobs again pretty quickly, so I don't think the end of the world is upon us yet...
"That's not even wrong..." -- Wolfgang Pauli
VIPER. There's your vi/emacs issues. We are a third of the way there :)
When I was getting certification (which I paid for), some of the people there were doing certification as part of their "you're unemployed - hey maybe we can retool your 45 year old plumber self into a programmer" Unemployment Insurance benefit.
I was reading a C++ book at lunch, and this former machinist comes up to me and says "hey, zat book on thuh curriculum?" I said, "no, but I want to learn about this." He looked at me like I was from space. I told him that if he wanted to do IT, he was going to have to spend the rest of his life keeping his skills up, researching new and better opportunities, etc. He was flabbergasted. I mentioned the words "work hard" and he just about cacked his trolleys right then and there. HIS game plan was to take his 4 month "intro to programming" certificate, go to Nortel, and tell them to give him a job for $85,000 per year (this was mid-90s Canada, where entry level, you'd be lucky to score $35,000/yr CDN). Cause he got 4 kids un a morgidge, eh. And then spend the rest of his life goin to the plant as a C programmer, punchin a clock, writin some C code, gettin cost of living raises per year, etc.
I told him his skills'd probably be obsolete or needing upgrade within 18 months.
He went ballistic. "So what are they doin this training fer, then?" I replied, "to get you started. You're looking at long hours, spending your own money and time on textbooks and training just to stay ahead, and you can honestly forget ordering Nortel to pay you that kind of money."
"I don't wanna do that kind of thing. I just wanna do C programming. What's union scale for a job like that?"
I laughed him out of the room. Suggested he drop out and take something else. He asked me why it wasn't unreasonable to ask for 85,000/yr cause that was what HE needed. I suggested to him that they could get people with DEGREES AND EXPERIENCE for less. And if they went to other countries, they could get a Ph.D from Bangalore for that. After a slew of trailer park racist garbage and anti-boss invective, he walked out and never came back.
We have enough idiots in IT management keeping their jobs through back-office politics. We don't need more - and I certainly don't want to pay for that kind of crap. Not out of my paycheque, and not in terms of increased software prices, either.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
And I moved to the United States and ended up making far far more than that, especially considering the taxes.
You wanna be a Chretien slave, all the more power to you.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I see the point that people are making about developers needing to work overtime as releases come up and other similar situations, but what about operations people? I'd say that just being in operations, I average 50-60 hours / week, and I average one 90+ hour week ever other month. I'd be living PHAT if I had a union-style contract instead of being an "exempt" employee.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
My Dad worked for a large equipment manufacturing corporation and was a member of a union, for about 30 years. I remember repeated contract negotiations at regular intervals (2-4 years) which generally resulted in additional pay and benefits for the workers. Sometimes there were work strikes, one or two in that 30 years extended for at least 6 months. But the union got a little cocky in my opiniun. They tried asking for a bit more than they should have, from a company that they knew at the time, was losing money because of a slowdown in their current market.
My Dad didn't like the idea, but he nevertheless went along with the Union's decision to strike. Almost all of the townspeople, and the local press, thought a strike was a bad tactic. They were already well paid and compensated. But the Union wanted to squeeze blood from a stone, I guess.
Eventually, my Dad noticed the talks went nowhere and it was a useless waiting game. I'm proud of my Dad for making the decision to cross the picket line and think of his family and his welfare at a time that it was completely obvious that the Union stopped doing so. The Union was blind to what was going to happen, even though everyone else knew that the company must shut down their operations in this town to survive as a business. Still, the remaining Union members supported their side of a losing battle. For those people, I have no sympathy.
The company hired temps to fill in positions and rewarded those who did cross the picket line with available overtime work and continued benefits coverage, even though the original union contract ran out.
My Dad made a fortune on overtime pay, so to speak. He was able to pay off all his bills, the mortgage, etc. To him, nothing was different as before the strike, except maybe loads of voluntary overtime and doubletime with the associated pay.
The company did eventually shut the doors, even while the picketers were STILL standing at the front gate. Those, like my Dad, who decided many months ago to cross the picket line received various compensation depending on their seniority. My Dad recieved early retirement, with pay and benefits. Not bad for a guy who is more than a decade away from federal retirement age.
He's not filthy rich from it, but with his mortgage, bills, and cars paid off, he can still live comfortably with what he makes with his retirement benefits. Had he stuck with the almighty union, he wouldn't have the time he has now to spend with his grandkids.
Also... This was no two-bit union. It was the UAW
Great and in a few years what happened to grandfather can happen to someone else. He was president of the Farm Equipment Union in the 50's. When the United Auto Workers Union came in and wanted his members. They threatened his life, said he was a communist and harrased my dad and his brother on the way to school. The family had to move out of state. Getting bricks through your windows tends to ruin dinner. Unions stopped serving their pupose a long time ago. Anyway working in an air contioned office is a hell of a difference from working in a factory where you can be mamed or killed. I do not see too many people being chewed up by the laser printer.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
Thats very kind of you to say so. I never felt that my membership of a union required me to be lazy or unintelligent.
"they probably got some benefit from unions in the past."
I have got lots of benefits from unions. If you want to stretch it back in history these would include the right to vote, the right to free speech. They would include pension rights, the health and safety executive, protection against unfair dismissal, the right to representation on pay bargaining, the right to paid holidays.
"Unions are just a symptom of a desire to socialize everything "
Gods above. McCarthy did a really good job on you lot didn't he.
Phil
It's not artificial leverage. Unions give workers the leverage that they, as a similarly situated market segment, deserve in the economy. If money is influence, one powerful employer has the influence that say 20 employees do, the employees together have more influence than that one rich employer in the issues that affect them all in common. The fact that their specific jobs are specialized doesn't change the fact that they all depend on corporations for their livelihoods, which gives them one HUGE similarity. Corporations are legal liability shields for the rich which give them unfair advantages in labor negotiations. Shouldn't workers have a similar right to "incorporate", so to speak, to act together through a representative body just as corporations do for owners?
This is a typical neo-conservative response. First they say free the market from regulation, then they say that employees trying to freely associate and set the price of their labor is against the free market. Whatever, dude.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
As long as seniority issues stay out of the mix, having a union to deal with issues related to training, work hours, benefits and sometimes even salary could be very beneficial to talented and untalented alike. Who wants to work long hours? (Answer: Those without a life, a family or a clue).
Talent isn't hampered at all by an 8 by 5 workweek. In fact, it's arguable that it would make the talented even more productive than they already are.
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I was a member of a union once, and I got the monthly magazine. I became tired of reading about:
:-)
1) Great deals on cheap vacations around the world
2) Great deals on memberships in clubs that offered me savings in different stores.
3) Great deals on insurances.
4) How bad my boss is.
5) What I should vote in the next election.
6) Their sponsorships for different sport-teams.
7) Their sponsorships for different political parties.
I don't want to pay for all that stuff and read about it in a 40 page montly full-color magazine. As far as I am concerned, it could be in black and white. If they just would tell me what they really are doing for me.
As a computer worker, I have been at several unions headquarters(btw, Im not American), and I was offended by the amount of money spent, not just on fancy flat-screen monitors for all PCs 4 years ago (hundreds of those babies). But the waste of money on funiture and housing. Trust me, the amount of money spent in fancy IT companies on housing, funiture etc. was nothing compared to these guys.
So I quit and saved about $100 every month.
fsck them, how stupid do they think I am. The only time they did a proper IT related article was when I was working in a IT dept for a company. They had a nice big article about how everybody should outsource their IT! Good work, and a good thing by boss at the time didn't read that.
I have also tried to get paid a company following the union rules for how much a "IT-worker" should get paid. That didn't work well. If you took responability on your shoulders it was just too bad because they didn't take into account the difference between a hotline supporter and a fx. network administrator. duh, like I could just go when the bell rang.
And finally, So today I work in another company, don't care about the union if I decided to go by the union rules and my boss said "OK, I'll do that too", I'd be much worse of. And I'd figure that if I needed a union, my job would be very crappy.
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I doubt if I could have said it better myself.
I recall a time when I was still in high school, and this wasn't all that long ago. Seven-eight years tops, my father's hours were switched around so that he'd be unable to take a qualification test because the union rep wanted a promotion and it's likely my father was more qualified for the position. This rep also held onto most bad reports he tried to get submitted to the "fair" union. Unions are a joke. Look at UPS, when they went on strike, throughput on fed-ex and the post office more than doubled to the point where they could barely handle all the packages. When airlines go on strike it's detrimental to us all. We lose perishable goods if they aren't stored, we lose time waiting for our new servers or needed software, the marketing and sales people can never get where they need to be in order to sell the product.
Nobody should have the power to totally stop commerce and services other companies and people depend upon for their livelyhood.
It seemed odd that the article featured the same graph twice, each time with a different title --"U.S. Union Membership" the first time, and "U.S. Union Member Trends" the second time.
Pictures good! More pictures better!
The guild fights for additional training, for example, for IT pros. The IT pro's agree that for a mutually agreed period of time they wont leave their job for another. If they do, they are kicked of of the guild and loose the guild seal of approval (read certication). If the Guild actually enforced rules on its members in a such a way that companies would no longer see the Guild as a threat, then IT kiddie could actually start seeing better mobility and a promising future within a job rather than by changing jobs and companies would have the piece of mind that their Buzzword compliantly trained emplyees won't leave them for a bigger and better position upon learning a new craft.
Burn Hollywood Burn
OK, I've gotta respond to this.
I'm a molecular biolgist who live in a very biotech heavy area of the US.
To say Biotech is not driven by the US is a joke.
Unions gave you the right to free speech and the right to vote?!
Don't make me puke.
Everything else you listed is not a right that is granted by the government. Those are nicities that make our economy work.
Unions exist because people [have not been able to/have not been willing to] gather information on the labor marketplace.
There is no reason for unions to exist in a capitalistic environment: Where work is demanded, employers compete for empolyees. All that is needed is for independent groups to provide easy access to this employment data. Viola! No need for unions.
In my opinion, unions can only cause long-term harm to the economy by providing unnatural stress on businesses when economic pressures mandate change. With unions, these necessary changes are much harder to implement, and hurt union members in the long run.
Hmm... you didn't actually refute any of my claims - you just told me I was wrong.
Let's be honest. Unions members are lazier workers who are not as bright as skilled/white collar workers. I'm not saying union members should be forced to live bad lives because of their lower intellect; they probably got some benefit from unions in the past. But it seems like the time of unions is over even for these people.
Employment information is too easy to get in today's world. Especially for people who are more capable. I know this isn't PC to say, but it is true. Some people are born better looking, some are born smarter, some are born faster - and some are born the opposite.
Every time a society begins to submit to the will of stupid and the lazy (a significant % of laborers), it goes all downhill. Unions are just a symptom of a desire to socialize everything (because poor Johnny is too stupid to function without big brother!).
I know programmers and IT workers are too smart to fall for that trick.
Instead of forming unions, let's create programs to Help the Stupid and Lazy overcome their handicaps (only put in more palatable terms if you wish).
I love your scare tactics.
...and someday all our jobs will be obsoleted by computers that know how to program for $0.01/hour.
As long as we have a democratic nation with an uncorrupt government and lot's of free speech, there's nothing to worry about.
What you should be complaining about is our government's desire to do business with nations that do not practice these ideals.
#1. It's just self-evident. It's why the US excels over Europe (in everything but auto manufacturing... hmmm). Guaranteed jobs lead to lower output and less innovation. I'm sure there are many union workers who are hard working, but there must be a significant % who are not.
Intelligence allows people to think for themselves and to create their own opportunities. Education is definitely not required, but it helps.
#2. http://www.google.com/search?q=jobs
#3. Your examples are of relatively homogenious societies (esp. sweden) (which the US is not) - as they receive more immigrants the situation will change and they will be forced to ditch many of their social programs (sad, but true).
Your USSR example makes no sense(corrupt, undemocratic, no free speech). Actually, I don't think history provides any good examples of countries like the US. What we do know is that socialism hasn't been able to keep up with the US.
#4. Live and learn. Mistakes are made. With big-brother they take a revolution to recover from - recovery in a free market is relatively painless.
I would maintain that programming requires a certain amount of creativity, and that creativity is basically intelligence. And how many layed-off programmers are unable to pay for food and housing?
ps - I know it all sounds like "elitist garbage." I have a heart, but you can't cheat reality.
Let's agree to disagree, I don't have the energy to continue this and I don't believe we will be able change each other's minds.
Personally I don't think Unions are such a great idea for IT, HOWEVER, I think there is a severe lack of both Industry Associations and good books for IT management. There is a lot for programming, Sys Admin, Networking, technical details, etc, but barely anything on IT management itself. I think there is a desperate need for good group discussion on how and IT/IS department should function within an organization, providing services to internal customers. The days of the computer geek department are over. Geeks are still necessary, yes, but a more business oriented approach is important, and it seems many IT professionals have nowhere to go to talk about ideas and best practices in this respect. That's my rant!
Unions are not yet appropriate for the IT industry. Eventally they will be though. As the industry grows, the work will not require less skilled personel, but the skills will become more readily available. As this happens over time a union may serve to benefit te workers for than it might today.
Every industry seems to go through this cycle. An industry like the computer industry gets a tremendous boost by, say, the introduction of the PC, and a half a decade goes by without there being an academic curiculum available to churn out reasonably qualified people, then as soon as that curiculum is in place, companies feel that they have a never ending supply of grist for the mill. The same is true for the rapid growth of the internet. With the advent of an easy interface to information (the web), growth is spurred, and qualified people are difficult to find. The academic community lags about half a decade behind, but as soon as a curiculim is developed - and I saw a TV ad for a trade school advertising "become a certified webmaster" yesterday, so the time may be nearer than I'm suggesting - companies feel there is a never ending supply of talent out there.
That would be the point at which a union might be useful (once this corporate belief that IT is a comodity job, becomes prevelent). After the work becomes commodity work, for which there are many (supposidly) qualified people. Today, however, the job market is still good enough as to allow the qualified IT employee to seek out good companies and negotiate good terms of employment (with regard to required overtime and such).
As an entity for collective bargaining, the need for IT unions has not yet materialized, although I'd expect that in the next 5 years or so the need will arise. For that reason it may be valiable for a few unions to begin gathering steam, although the vast majority (the referenced poll from the article not withstanding) of IT workers will not feel the need to join. As a collective bargaining entity they just aren't needed yet.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
...not a labor union. I'm more concerned over the representation I'm receiving in Congress then in my CEO's office. When I speak in that office my voice is heard. When my opinion takes the form of a letter to my local congressperson the results are shall we say, minimal at best. We need advocates that will make our jobs easier by letting us do things like reverse engineering, white-hatting our own networks (which almost became a crime in the EU), examining empirical data and being able to discuss our findings.
We make enough money to live comfortably and we're actually able to do something about it if we feel short changed.
BOSTON SUCKS!
The article mentions some of the same tripe you hear over and over again when people wonder why so few developers are interested in unions. I'm not going to go nuts here, but a couple things irked me...
This helps how? [RANT ON] Folks, if you are not growing your skill set - company sponsored or not, boot to the head. Staying current with the technology requires effort, but it almost always will put you in a better position. If a company decides Bob or Jane are only worth a 3.5% increase each year - never mind they picked up Java Developer, an MCSD, Oracle certification while they were watching your phone lines - that should be a good hint to move on. Then next company will appreciate this, usually with cash. How many developers do you know that "won't learn something till the Company sends me to training"? How about those who don't even have a home computer of any sorts? Classes can be a good thing, so can certification - the key thing is keep learning, regardless how you go about it.
So how would unions help here? Give everyone the same watered down classes? How about rewarding those who went the extra mile. Just look at those in the education field and see how much pushing forward helps them. Work for so many years, get x bump, earn masters get Y, and so on. Any work outside the formula does not count for squat.
Yah sure, unions will fix this problem... they are renown for efficiency and cost effectiveness. You get process, but I'm not sure that is a good thing - last week I spend an extra 45 minutes stuck on an airplane while they worked through the paperwork after a light bulb was replaced. Not that I am bitter, cause I'm not...
Got to get back to the sweatshop before they notice I'm not coding Nike shoes...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
So employers can conveniently coerce employees into not joining--if they join, they just be opposed to management's view of what's best for the company, right?
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
When I first started working with my current employer I looked at the union as a necessary evil. I was going to work for a very well respected company in my city and should get some good experience out of it so I figured I would stick with it for at least a while. Then the realization hit me. No matter how hard I worked I was not going to get much based on merit. Every year every employee gets the same percentage raise and the same perks. It made me start thinking why should I work hard? It doesn't pay off. /. readers seem to be the single male variety so they would probably prefer the Big Bucks, more hours, more pay option over a union. To each his own I guess, but I love being home by 5:00 every day.
Like the article states, it's not all about money with a union. In IT we hear so much about switching jobs and making the Big Bucks. Yes, with a union you don't get the Big Bucks. But, I work 40 hours a week, I am guaranteed training, I have great benefits, I get paid overtime, and most importantly, I see my family much more than at previous jobs.
I could go on about the pros and cons here but what it comes down to is preference. With a union you tend to have more job security and more guaranteed perks and benefits. You may get paid more at a non-union shop but you don't have much solidarity if management mandates forced overtime (which would probably be unpaid if you are salaried) or other similar negative policies.
From what I have read in the past it appears many
I don't believe that professionals should belong to unions. Unions do have their uses, but in the end they seem self serving than serving the true needs of their employees.
The best example of why professionals should never be subject to unions is the ALPA. This union, originally created to protect pilots now enslaves them. Through union rules a pilot can never go to another airline without being FORCED to the bottom of the ladder all because of rules the union fought for on the supposed behalf of the employees. If airline pilots are not "professionals" then I don't know who is. They are highly trained, rigorously tested, and entrusted with immense responsibility. Yet in turn their union makes them no better than numbers.
The worse unions are those in the public sector. Unions have no business there, there is enough protections by law for government employees, and for that matter all but the entry level regular employees, that they now have simply transformed themselves into political entities. Teacher unions constantly strike in the middle of school year, regardless of the effect on students, because suddenly they, the employee, have become more important than the students they serve. While teachers should be paid well and receive good benefits, in this case they should also be expected to not put themselves before the children entrusted to them. Want to be on strike, then show your professionalism by not doing it when children are being taught. These same unions also thwart almost every effort to require measurable results from their members. How is this a benefit to society?
This is why I don't think most IT level jobs should ever be unionized. For IT to work it requires people of demonstratable skills who are willing to work together to accomphlish the needs of the business. Considering the need for people in our field we sorely lack reason to be unionized. The common method is to scare people into believeing that they will lose everything and be constantly abused if they don't join. Why should I want to dedicate nearly 2 weeks of my pay to a union? If you don't believe that is what it costs, then I suggest you check into what some unionized people pay. Friends of mine pay more than one hour of their weekly paycheck as union dues! The unions explain away the true cost by saying things like "It only cost you xxxx per week, but look at the benifits. However look at the xxxx * 52 and see just how much money you really are paying!
The real money makers in unions are those employees in businesses that cannot afford to cheat their employees in the first place. The number of qualified people is way to low for them to get away with running them into the ground. Through networking I know which companies to avoid, and as should be they are always understaffed. It takes time, but they do come around.
With a unionized staff we would not have had the ability to rid the company I work for of people who thought the whole day was for smoke breaks and surfing. Thats the cost of a union, you will end up with people in your IT department who don't contribute, forcing those who do to pick up the pace.
No, the cost of losing my professionalism is not worth the benefits of joining a union. I take pride in doing my job, and learning to do it better everyday. I don't need a crutch, and fear having one available.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
unions less important in sunrise industries. question is how long its going to remain sunrise. basically unions are a good defensive association to keep up with inflation price rise , ensure training, help out members in times of problems ( hospitalisation, health care, family stuff like kids education, many more commonplace things which worry most of us. why not call them asociation or mutual help group.
several posters seem to think theyre political. not really. The only people against unions...are very obviously , employers. as an employer naturally i dont want anything like them. but the smarter employers know unions are ok.
in times of social crisis, of course, unions raise the red flag. like recession, great depressions. in china, russia tomorrow, for instance.
Between 1990 and 1998, overall inflation was about 22.5 percent. Average worker (non-executive) pay increased by about 28 percent (minus inflation, natch). Corporate profits rose about 104 percent. The S&P Index rose 224 percent (yes, we all know that's in the tank now). And CEO compensation? Well, that rose about 481 percent.
Interesting. Does anyone else find it odd that the study stopped in 1998? What if we extend it to include up to the first quarter of 2001? How much lower would that be due to stock market dips and cost-cutting? How many of those CEO's whose compensation rose 481% had that compensation drop to zero when they bungled some decision and ran their company out of business?
It's rise an fall...CEOs have a lot of problems. The compensation seems outlandish to us mere mortals, but as someone else pointed out it is often tied to stock performance. It's not uncommon for a CEO to have a $200,000 base salary and then options on 2 million shares. Or for there to be a performance bonus in the millions of dollars. But that's because they're driving the bus, and they'll only get them if the company does well. In that sense, the CEO's compensation is more tied to the well-being of the economy than the average workers (and 1990-1998 were GREAT years for the economy). But then we average workers don't get canned (usually) when the company's stock drops $10 and then have to spend 9 months with a headhunter to find another position that we're qualified for, so we have more security in that respect.
But beyond that, what if I found a company and am the CEO? Am I not entitled to outlandish compensation for my efforts in the company? As much as I hate Microsoft, when Bill Gates was CEO he deserved every penny of compensation that he received. When Steve Balmer took the reigns, he got a similarly large compensation package, and he deserved it too. They were both there busting their butts in the early days of Microsoft to make it into what it is today, and they certainly should be rewarded for creating such a large, powerful, and sucessful business.
All I am saying is that look at the long run, one day geek might go back to meaning a low life loser and not a tech stud. Just a thought
And when that day comes (if it ever comes), then that will be the time to form a union. If commoditization of our jobs occurs, then we can fight back by organizing. But by organizing now, we would be bringing about the very fate that we wish to avoid. Beyond that, I don't believe that the day will ever come that we would need a union to protect us from our employers anyway.
Unionizing is a great idea, the average union worker makes well more than minimum wage and well more than he would have otherwise made, or in teh case of some unions, had made in the past.
The average IT worker makes well more than minimum wage, and well more than he would have likely made in another trade, and most IT workers are making more money now than they did in the past.
Union workers have garunteed health benefits, garunteed retirement programs, work a maximum set of hours (how many 14 hours days have YOU pulled this year), are treated more fairly, are taken more seriously by management because numbers have clout, get liveable minimums set for a variety of other things.
IT workers (most) have health benefits, retirement programs (401K or IRA accounts), are treated better than the average worker in most of trades, and are well above liveable minimums for most other things.
On the subject of working a maximum number of set hours, I don't see an advantage to that. As a consultant I bill hourly, so the more hours I work the better. In most cases the average IT worker doesn't work more hours than he is willing to. Those that do end up working more hours than they care to usually end up going somewhere else to work, just like every other non-union workers. In most professions today you will find that most people work long hours. That's just the way of things with a professional job. When you are a tradesman long hours become an issue because you are a commodity. They don't have to have the same person there working that machine for 12 hours a day, but it's cheaper than hiring another person to work it for 4 hours.
As far as being taken more seriously by management goes, I don't know what you mean. My managers (the people I report to) always take me seriously. They are paying for my opinions and experience. The management at my consulting company takes me seriously because I am a good worker who knows his stuff (and I make them money). I think that you'll find the whole "not taken seriously" aspect to be far more prevalent in blue-collar, commoditized jobs. An expert coder is usually taken more seriously by his boss than an expert machine-stamp operator. White-collar bosses look at the employees more as equals than blue-collar bosses because they usually ARE more equal in terms of experience, education, lifestyle, etc.
Every industry seems to go through this cycle. An industry like the computer industry gets a tremendous boost by, say, the introduction of the PC, and a half a decade goes by without there being an academic curiculum available to churn out reasonably qualified people, then as soon as that curiculum is in place, companies feel that they have a never ending supply of grist for the mill. The same is true for the rapid growth of the internet. With the advent of an easy interface to information (the web), growth is spurred, and qualified people are difficult to find. The academic community lags about half a decade behind, but as soon as a curiculim is developed - and I saw a TV ad for a trade school advertising "become a certified webmaster" yesterday, so the time may be nearer than I'm suggesting - companies feel there is a never ending supply of talent out there.
IT has existed for decades, just not in its present form. Schools have had IT curriculums for many years...they're called CS, CIS, MIS, etc degrees. What you are seeing is an expression of people who still want to take advantage of the whole "dot-com revolution" by convincing people that a 2-week boot camp will allow them to earn $100,000 a year.
The IT job market will never become commoditized for the simple reason that a 2-week boot camp WILL NOT allow you to earn $100,000 a year. A great deal of education, training and experience goes into becoming a skilled IT worker. There is in effect a barrier to entry to the market. As long as that initial investment is necessary, the market will not become commoditized.
Second of all, you were able to start your own business with the skills you have. Was that really an option for the typical unskilled laborer working in the mills? We are not dependent on our employers to the same degree as the workers of days past, or even the industrial workers of the present. An autoworker cannot go off and start his own company doing what he did on a factory production line, but a developer can freelance or start his own firm entirely.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Unions had their place, and that place will come back if they disappear. Nonetheless, I don't think that we have such a complaint to lodge that WE need one. And, for the record, as someone who once had to deal with them from a management perspective, I hate unions.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I'm well paid, I don't work many hours, and my benefits package is quite nice. Why on earth would I want a Union? Unions have been terrible for teachers in this country (the good ones make as much as the terrible ones). Just imagine what IT unions would be like: IT flunkies that barely know Windows NT will be paid the same as talented Unix and Oracle admins. I think my knowledge of C, C++, Java, EJB, Solaris, NT, AIX, Cisco IOS, and a degree is CS is worth more than a what a union can give me. -ted
Go be a coalminer, jerk. Don't talk about the hardworking people the world over that bust ass to let the executives play golf on the profits. Some jobs are the pits. Literally. And to think that the power that runs your precious computer had to be personally dragged out of the earth by somebody... they surely don't need unions. Its only a dangerous job that hasn't changed much in centuries. I, being the child of unskilled trolls that you speak of only lost a grandfather to that business in a cave in. Yes, you are absolutely right about unions. We don't need to protect those poor, uneducated, loser workers. Hell, they're stupid. Because they are uneducated, I doubt they are human... they should at least be treated in a subhuman fashion. In Indiana, where coal miners do exsist, a multibillion dollar corporation changed its name so that it could appear on paper as a different entity, and not pay the miners that survived that lifestyle their pensions. They got away with it. They surely don't need protection. You need to rethink your pathetic opinion of other human beings, and think a little less about yourself.
Between 1990 and 1998, overall inflation was about 22.5 percent.
Average worker (non-executive) pay increased by about 28 percent (minus inflation, natch).
CEO compensation...rose about 481 percent.
So you're saying that the people who make decisions that affect an entire organization shouldn't be paid as much as they are? Considering that a large number of companies actually go out of business every year because of stupid mistakes of the CEO, what would you say a reasonable compensation package should total for a CEO who keeps a company humming along nicely?
Dancin Santa
And this is the latent prejudice that is behind much of the unionization movement. What is not revealed is that though some companies are laying off like it's going out of style, those same laid off workers are being snatched up by companies who can't hire fast enough.
Dancin Santa
Is that you, Bill Gates?
Dancin Santa
Sure, except that Company B down the street is willing to pay 'company growth'+100%+50% signing bonus to acquire your CEO. All of a sudden, your CEO is worth a whole lot more than the company's previous year growth.
You can realistically write the same story for the top software engineers at any particular company. They are probably worth a whole lot more than they are paid currently.
Basically, the value of a CEO is not 'previous year's growth', it is some multiple of that.
Dancin Santa
So how much should they be paid? It doesn't have to be a specific number, just some method of determining an acceptable compensation level.
Here's mine: whatever the market will bear.
As far as the difference in rate of growth of compensation, how many "workers" continued up the corporate ladder to management positions and saw their paychecks adjusted accordingly? New 'average workers' are entering the workforce all the time to replace the upwardly-moving workers, do you have the numbers that show the growth of compensation across all levels of employment, not just the bottom and the top?
Thanks,
Dancin Santa
The issues that are on their minds:
;-)
Training
This is a pretty good reason, but what amount of training is necessary? Training engineers to do a job beyond what they were hired to do is not in the company's best interest, that's why they don't offer it in many places. However, most companies will offer training on the existing or newly implemented systems, and those skills are transferable.
Establishing standards for software development
Like anyone really wants this...
Protecting benefits
IANAL, but wouldn't the company have to compensate you at whatever amount they signed to on your employment contract?
Forced overtime and the H1-B visa
Forced overtime and H1-B visas are two separate issues.
Forced overtime is an integral part of software development. This isn't highrise construction we're talking about here where a single contractor will be responsible for a single structure. Software is on the most highly competitive industries today. If your company averages 40 hours a week of productivity per employee, it's going to get eaten by the company that averages 45 hours a week of productivity. Schedules are short because they have to be. Unless you are an Open Source company (or even if you are) you are hampered only by your own ability to produce. Unions will do nothing to alleviate forced overtime.
H1-Bs are a terrible visa system, but frankly the only one that the U.S. has got. It would be better to have a visa that allowed job title changes, longer "out of work" periods (it's 10 days currently), and easier transition to permanent resident status (green card). However, the unions seem to be focused on getting rid of foreign workers altogether in an effort to "save American jobs", rather than supporting foreign workers' right to employment in a global economy.
Anyway, that's just my karma whore opinion.
Dancin Santa
I am saying that CEO getting pay increases nearly 4.5 times the rate of growth in profits is clearly out of line. I am also saying that considering that the average worker starts out with a much, much lower baseline pay, the fact that CEO compensation increased at a rate over 17 times that of workers demonstrates a real inequity.
Am I saying that CEOs are getting paid too much, more than they deserve and more than they're worth? Hell yes.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Perhaps that was due to the decisions that were made by all those expensives CEOs."
Yeah, and perhaps it was due to a rise in worker productivity, and perhaps it was due to unwise consumer credit spending and a generation of permissive parents empowering their materialistic children with too much cash. The point is, Monte, did those CEOs deserve to get their pay increased 4 and a half times faster than profits increased under their tender loving care? Did they contribute 17 times more to the bottom line than all the other workers did? Or were they simply the only ones in the position to really lobby for their own self interests?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
An excellent way to avoid the problem of expressing an opinion of your own. But just for giggle, tell me: do YOU think CEO salaries should grow at a 4.5X faster rate than profits? At a 17X faster rate than average employee compensation? I promise not to impose your third part standard of fairness on anyone. I'm just curious as to your opinion, as you seem so quick to defend CEO salaries.
"Using the word "deserve" in this context implies that there should be some 3rd-party standard of "fairness"."
It could be argued that 3rd-party standards of fairness are what made this country great and are indeed the basis of our constitution and system of justice. I would note that putting the word "fairness" in quotation marks does not invalidate it as a meaningful concept.
But in any event, you miss my point. I support no outside imposition of an external standard of comparative executive versus non-executive pay. I offered these facts about disparities in compensation as context for people to consider whether there is a reasonable case and justification for unionization for the purpose of collective bargaining. To make this determination individuals must decide, among other things, whether they think they are getting a fair deal, even though in doing so they run the risk of imposing a third party standard of fairness on reality, although we all know that the Market should really be used as the baseline for fairness. I would argue that by the same philosophy that a CEO has the right to lobby for his value to a company, so too do other employees. But employees at lower levels are hard pressed to make their individual voices heard and so it makes sense for them to seek methods to act collectively.
No doubt shareholders (overwhelmingly represented by the richest 1 percent of the world population)and boards of directors would consider this advice to be "kibitzing." But it's not them I'm giving the advice to, so their judgement of whether it is wanted or useful is not really germane.
"I tend to interpret the phrase "level the playing field" as "bend over, here it comes again"."
A fascinating analogy (or is that a metaphor?). Exactly who are you suggesting is being screwed by whom?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Here's a little data to consider in the context of this discussion:
Between 1990 and 1998, overall inflation was about 22.5 percent.
Average worker (non-executive) pay increased by about 28 percent (minus inflation, natch).
Corporate profits rose about 104 percent.
The S&P Index rose 224 percent (yes, we all know that's in the tank now).
And CEO compensation?
Well, that rose about 481 percent.
Unions are far from perfect institutions. Like any organization they are prone to take on a life of their own. Like any nexus of power they can acquire nasty relationships with nasty people.
But the fact remains that there is still plenty of room for collective bargaining on the parts of non-executive workers. It's fairly clear who's really reaping the awards under the current power structures.
Source: 1998 Executive Excess report, United for a Fair Economy and Institute for Policy Studies,
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Union workers are fat, annoying, elitist jerks who make too much money for what little work they do. Any time you contact one, he is as likely to ignore you as to actually help you out, and when he does help you there's a good chance he'll act put out.
This surly, onoxious attitude makes them meld perfectly with IT folks, with the small exception that I've yet to see a mob run IT department.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Training
At Boeing, training is offered only to the most senior permanent employee of each development group. Only employees that have completed Boeing training on new software packages may be granted a seat license for that software.
In practice this is (obviously), a living nightmare. During my contract, the decision was made to use WISE for the development of deployment packages. Unfortunately, my projects always seemed to miss the production dealines, simply because I could not create WISE packages for my own software.
Establishing standards for software development
What, you don't like Windows? Hate Microsoft products? Free software fanactic, eh?
If you answered 'yes' to any of the above, unions are not for you. When unions say standard, they actually mean 'lowest common denominator'. And that means Microsoft.
At Boeing, only one permanent employee in my team had even the most rudimentary knowledge of the C language. No employee had knowledge of C++, Java, PERL... What they did do, though not very well, was develop VBA applets for Access 97, using OLE for Oracle to link the 'rich client' forms to the databases.
Imagine writing a server with Visual Basic. That is exactly what was suggested by the team when I was assigned the task of writing a new security service. And that wasn't the only thing... I had to code every client that used the service on evry platform used by Boeing, using every development language sanctioned by Boeing. Twelve clients in all, all documentation, all design (No knowledge of UML, either), not to mention the server itself. What fun!
Protecting Benefits
You really don't want the kind of...er...benefits that unions provide. For example, during my contract, I was forced to move to new cubicles twice, due to the fact that someone with seniority wanted the seat. Choosing to take over someone's space (and vacate them on no notice) was a benefit senior personnel enjoyed. It was not one that I enjoyed.
Nor did I enjoy being forced to leave the building for a lunch break. At Boeing, every employee is required to take an off the clock lunch, and you must do it away from your desk. It matters not how busy you are, or how badly you want to finish what you are working on.
Forced overtime and H1-B visas
If you have been following the news lately, Boeing's attitude is pretty clear...any non-permanent employee of any kind is dogmeat. Contractors are treated with the utmost disrepect, and you won't find IT working there on visas of any kind.
As for forced overtime... well, contractors get paid for overtime, period. Not that you will get any; overtime is reserved for senior employees only.
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. - Andre Gide
That's cool and all. Now we need some French-style striking. Don't get the foosball players painted bi-weekly in your cushy office? STRIKE!
Then we can randomly break servers and cut cables until they give in and rectify these cruel situations. We're not working for Nike are we?
iluvpr0n.
To make things simple, my father build a "big boat". The only doc large enough was a union shop in Texas. It was such a lower cost, that the majority of the hull was built in Alaska and shipped by truck to Texas for final assembly. Tell me how the union protects anyone's job when they force pricing structures like this. The welders had to have an electrician turn their machines on for g0ds sake. I do a lot of VoIP work. And in many cases, once the box enters the closet or attaches to a PBX, I can no longer touch it. The union can file a complaint if I plug into the console port on a router. Several times I've had to wait for a union employee to arrive, just so he could sit in the corner and brag to a friend on the cell phone about how he was getting payed overtime for nothing. No wonder goods and services cost so much.
um, no...
what you are doing, in fact, is presenting an opinion of yours as fact.
the reason you can't present this as fact is that you '[have not been able to/have not been willing to]' look up the facts or figures.
Now, you are presenting the idea that organizations that DO exist and serve a purpose (albeit unknown to you) don't in fact have any reason to exist.
You are walking a very dangerous path of thought - that if you cannot explain or see the rationale for some phenomenon, then it is not valid. close mindedness can be a very self-destructive thing...
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
tactics? i'm not trying to sell you anything.
my point is that IT, like all skilled professions before it, will be squeezed. Many labor markets were unfairly exploited in the early 20th/late 19th century. In response, many unionize.d I'm not defending opportunistic unionizers, who saw a labor pool and started multiplying employees * $yearly dues...RICO laws killed most of them, and many of the good ones. Many, many field were legimately exploited - not only underpaid and underworked, but also forced to work in dangerous (miners, sweatshops with locked emergency exits) condition, competing with child labor.
If you think George W. Bush's republicans will do anything that is not in the interest of their corporate backers, then you're in for a nasty surprise.. (probably arsenic in your drinking water...). this only goes slightly less for democrats. the other solution you've glossed over is to have unions in our country and lobby for and support them in other countries....
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
You're right - you're very talented and deserving of your pay. But as technology is maturing, sysadmins that can program are going to become obsolete (all you'll have to know to do is call MS support).
You will be your own undoing here: you are eating into Corporate profits. If they can pay a less qualified person less money than you make, then you will be fired. If they can pay someone in India or Russia less (where the labor laws are more lax or unenforced), then you and your less talented successor will both be out of jobs... and sweatshop labor isn't good for Nike sneaker, Gap shirts, or IT. No racism behind it. Corporations will seek to exploit their work forces to get higher profits, no matter where they are.
Now if you seek to complain, you will be fired, and if you complain too badly, you will be blacklisted. then you will starve. histories lesson is that people will exploit others for personal gain if possible. organized reaction is one of most effective methods of fighting oppression. hence the unions. sorry the hobbesian outlook on life, but you are being naive to thing the people upstream for you wouldn't fire you if possible to make even a buck more a year...
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
i feel that quite a few people in slashdot who are not so familiar with the concepts of supply and demand will gain an appreciation of labor history and economics after 3 more graduating classes of IT employees.
...electricians were bleeding edge once, too...
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Unionizing is a great idea, the average union worker makes well more than minimum wage and well more than he would have otherwise made, or in teh case of some unions, had made in the past. Union workers have garunteed health benefits, garunteed retirement programs, work a maximum set of hours (how many 14 hours days have YOU pulled this year), are treated more fairly, are taken more seriously by management because numbers have clout, get liveable minimums set for a variety of other things.
An IT union would have the ability to set a better standard for working than we have today, most jobs view you as a resource and an expendable one at that, and that you are to be made to live to work basically. You're viewed more as an asset and less as a person, at least with a union they have a much more powerful entity to try to reckon with. The link to CNN the poll results says right now it's 31/40 against unionizing, while unions can be corrupted, one setup properly would have a better chance of actually serving the good of the worker. I dunno about you, but I've had several long conversations with firends who are in IT as well and we all seem to think this is a good thing for all of us.
I wonder if people have thought of the ramifications of what could happen in a truly bitter strike.
'Round where I'm from, when Teamsters (or the most recent example, the Detroit Newspaper Strike) go on strike, it's almost inevitable that some poor truck driving shlub is going to be shot at by a highway sniper, property will be destroyed and people will be beat up or murdered. Of course the Union will claim that none of the perpetrators of these crimes are really union members, just people who want to cause trouble. They might even go so far as to imply the company did it.
So, when routers mysteriously stop working properly, or a companies web site gets DDOS'd, or a really nasty virus somehow makes it into the network and the AV is turned off it'll be the same thing.
I wonder if the folks who make up the membership of the AFL-CIO and other unions have really thought long and hard about exactly who they're trying to organize. I wonder how long the mutual support of other unions will last when the payroll server crashes on Friday morning and the backup tapes have been erased.
My prediction is that programmers will remain white collar. Network techies will become unionized. However, once someone realizes who is organizing and what an extended strike could mean, the BOFH Brotherhood will become similar to other "critical" unions like the Air Traffic Controllers.
They'll pass a law saying, "You can organize all you want. You just can't strike."
I do first-level phone support for Windows 98 in the Seattle office of what used to be Keane, Inc. When I was hired three years ago, I supported Adobe's type products. That ended in 1999 when Adobe decided to move their front-line support to North Carolina, Adobe having decided that the $11-12-an-hour positions they were obliged to staff in the Puget Sound area could be filled elsewhere for a lot less. I transferred to the Windows project, immediately discovering that while the work load grew in response to Win 9x's grievous flaws, the pay did not. And it was not expected to -- at Keane, you either moved upstairs to a senior tech position or outward to the then-robust dot.com world.
Keane had, I believe, a 150% attrition rate, mainly people who either left for better-paying IT positions elsewhere or got sick of the entire industry. Because the position was considered entry-level, Keane found plenty of other people to fill the positions.
Earlier this year, the branch was purchased by Convergys, which decided that the entire Washington operation was too expensive to maintain; they're shutting us down next month. During the last few months, WashTech took an active interest in the branch, not so much to get dues-paying members into the union as to give employees a way to discuss the frustrations they were experiencing on duty. Even during the Keane period, Microsoft decided to increase the amount of documentation and customer callbacks required by its phone techs, without increasing pay or changing the job definitions. With Convergys in charge, phone techs were required to take calls continuously until the end of their shifts, even if that meant working overtime (although Convergys didn't use the term "mandatory). In this case, WashTech wasn't aiming for a work stoppage; they wanted to give employees the opportunity to do the jobs they wanted without the like-it-or-leave attitude typical for entry-level IT positions.
Would a union have preserved our positions? Maybe not, but having one would have let management know that its employees are far more than just entry-level serfs who can be replaced by someone else for less.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
What IT really needs is guilds ala Dune's Spacing Guild. Remember, he who controls the spice, controls the universe!
As the network administrator and SOLE computer guru for a medium-sized public library, I find myself getting the short end of the stick, so far as salary is concerned. You see, if you don't have that gold-embossed MS degree in library Science here, you don't get paid shit (pardon my language, I know many of you have sensitive eyes ;-) )
Some would argue that a higher degree should mean more money, but here I am with a degree entirely unrelated to computers or library science (Theatre Arts, thank you very much), getting paid 10k less than the librarians who are both YOUNGER than me and INCAPABLE of anything beyond typing a document in M$ Word. Do I feel slighted because I started as a Mac person who eventually worked his way to an understanding of Linux and still gets paid squat?
Mmmmmm...... COULD BE!
Of course, not having formal training in IT means that no one would hire me if I chose to jump ship, ergo my return to the classroom at the local community college. But I can see how IT unionization would benefit me, or at least others like me.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
But with regards to overtime pay, how about legislation that requires IT workers to be paid 1.5x (or whatever) for overtime like many other laborers.
As a side note, please refrain from trying to make "unskilled" and "union" synonymous. Unions are comprised of skilled and unskilled workers alike. If you're a machinist (one example), you're a skilled laborer.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
To the individuals who are laughing at a union. Think about your place for a moment. A union is there to protect workers rights from being exploited and making sure everyone gets a fair shake for pay, vacations, holidays, benefits in general. Now just because of the fact that an IT position is currently held in high regard. Meaning easy to find and pays well does not mean the industry will always be looked upon so highly. Many companies are deciding that a Tech department needs to be a support role to the running of a business and not a sole business idea. That is why we are seeing so many companies fail with poor business plans. Sure its kinda your fault if you quit your good job and work for a dot.com startup and then whine when your company is listed on f*ckedcompany.com but you have to protect the stupid if you want to protect the smart. All I am saying is that look at the long run, one day geek might go back to meaning a low life loser and not a tech stud. Just a thought
***I GOT NUTHIN***
The reason that I think would be the most valid to form unions, is the fact that serious conflict will cost the worker relatively more that the employer, who can simply replace the worker.
While this observation holds true for the traditionally unionized workers, my experience says that this does not necessarily hold true in IT.
If you have written lots of applications or components for your employer, it will cost him a lot of money to get you replaced and to get to the point that the next guy can maintain your work; all of this, while you happily move to the next job or contract, often even at a better rate.
Face it people, when used properly, the internet could be a tool to use to TRUE democracy. This does not only apply to Unions, but most certainly an IT Union could set an incredible trend for this.
IT workers work what seems like 24 hours a day and they dont get paid extra for this. They often work 14 hour days, and sometimes on the weekends. Overworked employees need a union
Most people arent making 6 figures, I dont care if the tech industry allows a select few to make 6 figures, MOST arent and wont be making this much money, and a union helps the majority. This is like a democrat vs republican thing, if you have a high salary helping other people hurts you, but the majority of the people overrule you, so a uninion is better. But if i were making 6 figures like you i wouldnt want a uniion either my point is just most people can benifit so a uninion is best for the people.
I hear people here all make 6 figures and all seem to have magnificent jobs. What about people like me who are just getting into the industry. Guess what, we outnumber you, most people didnt have computers 5 years ago when you guys started working in the IT field, and when you guys were in college people were still most likely using windows 3.1 or windows 95, Considering most people make more around 30-60k a year, not half a million a year, we have to look at what the average IT professional makes, not what the senior level employee with 5-10 years experience and a degree makes. Unions help the people. Sure if i were making 6 figures i'd be against the union but as things are now, I dont have alot of experience, its hard to find jobs, I dont make close to 6 figures, unions would benifit me alot.
Not just that but some companies i hear are setting up clauses which keep you from working for other companies for a set amount of time if you leave. So if you quit you cant go anywhere else for 6 months. How fair is that?
The problem is, people dont get hired on skills but on experience, I have skills that match any one of you people here, but as far as experience, only 1 year experience with no degree, the best job i could even attempt to go for is system administration and those jobs arent the best paying jobs. The point of unions is to allow EVERYONE to work up the ladder, people who were in on the ground floor of the computer revolution hate this, but its not fair for them to be at the top and no one else be able to ever make it to their level. Its going to take me 4-5 years of working to get up to the level alot of slashdotters making 6 figures are at now, and the thing is by the time i get to this level they will be 4-5 years ahead of me still making 6 figures and ill only be making slightly more than before.
It is not just our superior sill that makes us earn a lot of money, but the demand on the labour market. And you even if you can match with the best of us in skill, you can suffer from changes in demand and so on. Just look at the history, I'm shure there where plenty of them in Pitsburgh who just spoke as you do. And even if you think you will be OK because of your skills - there are others out there as well. If they are not organized, they are might easily be used against you (as they might be much cheaper because they can't sell themselves as well as you can), at least in the mid-to-long-term. It is really very short-sighted to think that in IT everything will be OK and we will never have to fight. Most of us are young. Who says, that once the labour market is not on our side anymore, the pressure and workload won't remain, but the wages will be lower, as there will be others ready to replace you (and everyone can be replaced, even if the cost might be high).