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Dial U for Union
An Anonymous Coward sent in this story about a communications union trying to expand into the Internet age. Any Slashdot readers with Internet/programming-type jobs in a union?
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Unions just increase costs for the company and decrease freedom for the employee.
Which says nothing about such very useful (and not necessarily confrontational) services such as availability of legal counsel, contracts negotiated by professionals, training and the availabilty of health plans much better than a sole employer could offer. These aren't necessarily things that are anti-employer, and in the case of the training and health benefits, to the employer's advantage.
The idea that they are there to work for your (the employee) best intrests is also a bit off the mark, all they really want to do is guarantee themselves a steady income from your paycheck.
I've worked in Union offices quite a bit, and I can honestly say that none of these people are getting rich working with the Union. The vast majority of the people I've dealt with have been quite committed to the idea of trade unionism, rather than personal gain. Any one of them could easily make more money elsewhere.
Coupled with the inevitable violence that accompanies a strike I just don't get it.
Strikes are rare in my area. My own Local has never needed to strike, they have managed to do quite well simply negotiating and protecting their members in other ways (grievances, mediation, etc.). In fact, the only strikes locally have been when there have been pretty bad abuses on the employers' end, and that hasn't been often.
This is not surprising given the Teamsters' connections to organized crime. There was a strike in Detroit where the Teamsters steward led a gang of bullyboys smashing workers windshields with baseball bats too.
If you let these guys into the IT cubicles, they will be smashing workers' monitors!
The article touched on it: with the state of modern communications, office location doesn't always matter. Talking of unionising could be what it takes to lose your job: the company could lay everybody off and open up somwhere else, if it's cheaper for them.
An example of this is where I live in London, Ontario (Canada). Teletech, a Denver based call centre company moved here last year. They closed shop in Denver because of unionisation on top of rising costs (the job market there was very hot). They've found that here, the staff where of higher standard and their turn-over far lower than anything they were used to. The new employess in the call centre found jobs with better salaries than they've ever had. It's generally admitted that they have good jobs. However, people are never happy, and now they are talking unionising. Do the fools not realise what will happen? Have they not learnt anything from Teletech's recent history? Teletech will come up with some excuse, lay them off, and open another non-unionised shop somewhere else.
Unions are no longer the champion of the little guy they once were. There is no protection they can give you that your employer isn't required to by law.
A technology union would be every union organizers wet dream. Just think about how much the union dues would be on our already exhorbadent (sp?) salaries. And they would never have to pay anything out, because no one gets injured or quits IS jobs.
"claiming they're fighting "for the children"."
It makes me sick when they try to use that excuse.
Suuure, I sure don't want to pay for services I don't use. When was the last time I needed those greedy firemen to do anything for me? While were at it, I haven't had an employer explicitly try to screw me, so to hell with the unions too. Remember, Big Brother is your friend. (That said, I think that compulsory union dues are a fraud. You should have to pay them, just as long as you don't try to use their services when your employer IS trying to sue you.)
While workers are vauable, also remember what is more vauable: profit. You may not want to lose valuable staff members, but to save the bottom line, they are terminated left and right when needed. Hence the dot-com crash we have had recently.
Also, many employees are immediately terminated for no reason. I have personally known one person who was laid off, given their last paycheck, and escorted out of the building in ten minutes. They got called into their boss's office, were told, security was waiting by the boss's door to take them to their desk to gather their personal effects and out the door. They were not allowed to touch their computer or phone, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway since they had their accounts terminated before the meeting was even over.
This is the kind of stuff unions can help IT professionals avoid. We may not need them for the same reason our blue-collar brethern do, but the need is there.
Please state your marital status, number of children, and age.
Only then can we judge the validity of your statements. Otherwise the single guy with no kids, no wife, no life, will always be able to offer the employer more than you. So much for negotiations. Having a life means you can only work 40-50 hours tops per week (no more 60-70 hour weeks). And being older means you may "raise the group health care rates". Both make you too expensive to keep employed, resulting in regular discrimination against people who are married, have kids, or who are old.
Still see no problem here? "My company doesn't do that". Sure. Companies do anything they can to MAXIMIZE PROFIT.
I do believe that at one time unions were a necessity and the only thing that kept some workplaces above slave-labour like standards. In our time and age unions do have their place in some areas but should keep away from most aspects of our working lives.
We are proud of our individualism.
Tip: Don't use we when you mean I You don't speak for us, and anyway:
I don't belong to any groups. I don't affiliate myself with anything
Questions: Do you consider yourself a geek? Why do you read Slashdot? If you don't identify with any of us, why are you participating in a community such as Slashdot?
Like the poster above me says, it seems as though you're young, and need to loose some attitude and grow up a little. Saying "I don't need handouts, and I don't want any" might sound all very nice and idealistic at the moment, but you don't know whats going to happen to you in the future. What if you become ill? What if you need to look after a family member or loved one who is ill?
Don't be so quick to judge.
This was modded up? Have we really reached the point that when kids these days hear the word "union" they think of SQL? (relational databases, the spawn of the mainframe priesthood!)
For shame! This is what a union looks like:
union foo {
float bell;
int bie;
};
And this is how you use it, dammit!
union foo bar;
bar.bell=123.4;
i = bar.bie;
Unions just increase costs for the company and decrease freedom for the employee. The idea that they are there to work for your (the employee) best intrests is also a bit off the mark, all they really want to do is guarantee themselves a steady income from your paycheck. Coupled with the inevitable violence that accompanies a strike I just don't get it.
It seems to me that you accept your working conditions when you accept the job, pay, benefits, etc. You shouldn't be complaining about them after you are hired.
Union membership in the United States has continued to drop steadily over the past several decades. As a programmer for a community hospital, I don't see how a union would enrich my position, since it would discourage management from negotiating with me, as well as putting them into a position where they are more likely to keep on under/nonperformers.
If you think unions are so good, why can't they keep manufacturing and other industrial jobs from going to Mexico and overseas?
I do not see union participation has particularly attractive, nor do I think that unions always work in the best interest of the greater good.
I think that in certain situations, unions are warranted, but even with the slowdown, unions wouldn't have been in a position to stop the tide of pink slips for technology workers.
Read up on the FLSA, fair labour standards act of 1938. This is the law that provides for the 40 hour work week and overtime pay. You will find that if you are paid on a salary basis (i.e. you don't have to clock in, and you are not docked for missing less than one day) in the computer industry you have no right to expect overtime pay.
If you are in fact paid on an hourly basis, and you are refused overtime pay, call the department of labour. regardless of whether the employer says that the overtime was 'optional', 'unsolicited', or if they claim you are repaid with 'comp time', you have a good case for getting your time and a half.
I thought it was the Millwrights union who insisted that they move anything that can't be carried under one arm, not the UAW.
Still, I find it more amusing than anything else - I just find it funny to watch someone pushing a huge cart on which is a single Sun workstation.
The thing that I am really amused by, is that apparently you need a union electrician if you want to hook a monitor to a system. I'm not sure if they have to do it, or if they just have to watch to make sure you don't plug it in wrong...
-Pathwalker (over at the TPC)
--
_What_ tight labor market? O_O
Q: How many Teamsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: 15, you got a problem wid dat?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
That is as it should be.
If someone becomes less valuable in a given role, then they must improve or move to a role in which their skills are more useful. Unions are being described in this thread as a mechanism for fixing a wage independently of the value of work. ("I want to be able to stop working hard and learning new stuff and still have a paycheck forever.") I think that's just wrong. I don't want to pay a cut of my paycheck to feed the guy who doesn't give a rats ass about his contribution.
Minus the hyperbole, what you're saying is that unions are great if you have no talent or ambition, are incapable of learning new skills, and are content to merely punch the clock and write another 100 lines of COBOL.
If unions indeed reward the adequate at the expense of the adept, then they are a Bad Thing.
But, I'm sure that *you* will appreciate this state of affairs when you have your own family (if that is in your plans). Those family people might not be at the office as long, but they could very well be working harder and longer overall.
I completely agree. People who choose to raise children need as much support as possible from society. Anything else is just selfishness (in my biased opinion). If one chooses to miss out on having children, that's very sad, but it shouldn't be used as an excuse against others doing the normal and correct thing. Besides, if he works at a place that isn't flexible enough to allow him to re-arrange his day and go and get license plates, then perhaps he needs to work somewhere else or change management's attitudes rather than habouring resentment. Jeez! Get some perspective!
Bingo. Which is the basis for lawsuits against Albertson's, Rite Aid, and a couple other retailers. People titled as managers, and being paid salaries are suing for overtime because they ended up working 60-70 hours weeks, generally doing things like checkout, shelving merchandise, etc more than 75% of the time. Which are not "management" type duties.
Minimum wage??? Does anyone on /. work for minimum wage? I think not. Hell, to just understand most of the topics discussed here qualifies you for a little higher than that! Minimum wage is for kids just starting out. Anyone with real work experience or schooling can do much better than that. Not to mention the other potential problems laws like that cause. If you're going to make a point, please do so intelegently. ;)
Nope again. I've seen ads for cable pullers in this area. About $10/hr. A fair bit above the minimum, last I looked.
/... There are not going to be many /.ers at minimum wage. Those who make minimum have better things to buy than a computer and internet access. You know, things like food.
/..
Note, I said people on
That is not to belittle those who DO work for that level of pay or those who are below the poverty line. Just to point out that those people are probably not spending thier time on
...they will not agree to any increase in your salary unless everybody else gets the same.
Short answer: Wrong.
Longer answer: General salary incrreases would be proportional to your previous salary, but then you get an additional increase depending on what you are doing, how well you are doing it, and what responsibilities you get. In addition, whenever you want (or when you get a new position) you are free - and encouraged - to negotiate for a new salary on an individual basis; the union will frequently help out by showing what level others in your situation have, and, if you want, by helping out with the negotiation process.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Ehhh... No. I work for the employer, but it's the employer and the unions that negotiates. Of course, on top of that I can negotiate for benefits and salary on top of that if I'm considered a key employee.
To make it a bit more confusing, I'm also a part owner of a small company, which makes me an employer (or would, if we had any emplyees but ourselves), which doesn't stop me from being unionized anyway...
Told you, it's different.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
...But that's in Sweden, not the US. Unions and their relationships with the employers seems to work somewhat differently here; often, the employers prefer to have a union to negotiate with rather than having to do it individually with everybody. Also, since unions have a right to give input to cutbacks and other workplace matters, the decisions tend to be better grounded among the employees. Not that everything is peachy, but it seems to work...
:)
As recently as two eyars ago, IT workers tended not to unionize, now, however, there seems to be a renewed interest
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
you're right that Unions don't support mediocrity, they create it in the first place.
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
...i think you should go work for a company that mirrors your own ideas. or start your own. if your ideas are better, you'll have a decent shot at success.
also, don't forget that the usefulness of an intranet isn't so much a function of the tools used to build it as it is the content...
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
it sounds like you're getting a good deal for your 'like $30 a month', but don't forget that others in the union you were forced to join are subsidizing your master's degree...nothing is free my friend.
Have you seen Ironstayn vs Supergovernment yet?
Not in my old school district. 5-10 years ago, the local paper did a major expose that revealed what the teachers in all the local schools were making (by average salary for each level of senoirity, not by person). God, that article should have won the Pulitzer.
It turned out that 5 years ago, the average salary for a teacher in my old school district was in the middle 50's. With the whole summer off, and way more vacation during the school year too.
I was stunned, I thought the average salary was in the 30's from the way the union carried on.
I'll never forget it.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
What if everyone took this attitude?
Do you only want fast food workers that really care, that are excited about work, That are energetic and caring about every customer, that want to improve the process at every chance? Hell no. I want someone that follows the procedures and washes their hands occasionally, so the cost of the burger is ~$1 US. You know, some of your customers want the same; they want to predictably produce inexpensive systems solutions to business problems. They don't want to break new ground with the best solutions. The don't want to fund R&D.
We need "clueless PHBs, the cookbook programmers in it for the money, the middle managers who choose our tools based on marketing hype and FUD" to do the laborous work of implementing recipes.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
Interestingly enought I was a member of the CWA during my employment at ATT. I also was a tech employee working basically as a systems administrator.
So I am sitting here and thinking back over the time and asking myself if I benefited from the CWA's envolvement with ATT overall I think that I did.
When I went to work for ATT my salary was better than I would have expected, part of this was because of Union oversite of the hiring process, basically making the company have fair hiring practices which in turn allowed me to get my foot in the door.
I had medical/dental benefits which have been fought for by the union and made my life a lot easier.
When there was a disagreement with my boss, the union got involved and was willing to offer advice and council.
I had a minimum of 15-20 days of training per year which was a great incubator and helped me learn a lot. So that when my position did start to "evaporate" I had the skills to leave and find a new position quickly.
So it sounds pretty rosy, ehhh... Well, there definately were downsides.
ATT, in my opinion, has been trying to bust the union for the last 10 years, the problem being that other phone companies have to a certain degree limited union envolvement and thus ATT has higher costs, which hurts ATT in the market place.
One of the methods that ATT has used to bust the union is to give union representatives perks, they are buying off the reps with high paying jobs. It's a lot of power and ATT is attacking at the power center. Since CWA@ATT represents a lot of the non-technical positions as well as a small technical group, the techs a lot of times had their rights and positions traded away to get concessions for non-technical workers.
We also had the people that were incapable of doing their jobs, several times I saw these people promoted, because the company could not get rid of them, ie the union protection maintained them in their positions. So in order to protect company interests, they would be promoted, the old line being promoted because of incompetence is/was alive.
When I left, management did not have union representation and a lot of union positions were slowly moved into management in order to reduce the union's control on technical jobs. Seeing how most of my managers made less that 60% of what I made, I would guess that there were advantages being in the union.
I did at times see people promoted to management and then fired within 2 weeks of having lost union protection.
One of the reasons the ATT center that I worked at is located in Georgia, is because it is a right to work state, the union cannot have a closed shop. There is no doubt in my mind, that I would never have gotten the position that I did at ATT if it were a closed shop.
So good and bad:
Pro:
Manditory Training
Medical/Dental
Good/reasonable salary
Protection from abuses from management
Third party oversight of hiring practices
Con:
Incompetence rewarded with promotions
Power concentrated and easier to corrupt
Made less than people who had more tenure and less skill.
Overall, I would say that the union was good for me. I was able to take advantage of education opportunities. I received medical and dental care. I wasn't expected to work 80 hour weeks without compensation.
I'm currently split as to my opinion of the union, it did give a lot of protection that I would not have otherwise had, there was corruption and I wasn't able to advance due to low tenure.
My major problem with the union was the corruption of union officials and union practices, I have my doubts as to whether or not the union stuffed ballets... Most people when asked their opinion of one of the union votes said that they had voted negative, yet once the ballets were received by the national level interestly our area had a 80% approval rating.
Shrug, I look back on my ATT experience fondly, it was a major step up for me and I was able to learn a lot about not just technology, but how the system works. I can't say that I am 100% in favor of the union, but I do see that there were major benefits working for the union.
Lando
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Fortunately for the rest of us that is untrue.
In the UK the Engineering Council (made up of the main technical professional bodies) is an important tool in drafting legislation and in putting forward the views of its members to employers. It also handles certification and regulation of its members.
The key to getting something out of a professional body is to put something in. Apathy is all very well, but it doesn't get things done. May I respectively suggest actually joining the relevant body for your chosen career (I'd guess the BCS from your posting, or the IEE), and get involved.
S.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the obvious alternative: professional bodies. Programming and other IT related careers are considered professions, and have related standards setting bodies that do have significant power - often at a far higher level than Unions.
While many people see instutions like the IEEE and the ACM or the BCS as academic organisations, they're often as not actually working at a policy level with governments and large companies. They write legislation, and manage its implementation, set professional standards exams that mean something - and give technologists a workable career path that doesn't involve management.
So get involved with the relevant professional bodies, get a real certification, and see what that does to your job security and conditions...
S. (currently pushing for his C.Eng)
- walk to work
- bike to work
- take public transit to work
In any case, any extra money you won't spend on your scrapheap on wheels could be spent on a more expensive house, which will add up to your equity.But whatever you pour into a scrapheap on wheels will NEVER find itself into your equity.
And in the case of the first two choices, you will also be rewarded by an added cardiovascular capacity, which will definitely extend your livespan, so you'll enjoy more your extra equity at retirement.
So, your choice is to either fatten the parasitic automotive "industry", or to fatten YOUR pocketbook AND lifespan.
--
What the IT community needs is a professional organization like the ABA or AMA. There are several more specialized organizations, like the ACM, but not yet one that encompases all the various career flavors of the IT world.
So, if we're already voluntarily organized as professionals, why should we listen to these screaming socialists who want to unionize IT? The benefits we would receive in return for that are slim to none at this point; so the only reason to unionize seems to be the dark scowls and continual litany of "It may not always be like this..."
You know what? When it starts getting bad, and it looks like a union might help the situation, that's when IT workers will unionize. That's more or less the situation that's described in the article. Until such point, founding a union just is not worth the time, money, and effort to anyone except the union organizers.
Folks, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
When I give food to the poor I am called a saint, when I ask why [you let them] go hungry I am called a communist
It's a marvelous quote. And I'm sure the good Bishop would never approve of the rewrite, but the orginal quote implies -- and I think is meant to imply -- that you, the well-fed, are the reason they go hungry, and that you could change it.
Hunger on this planet is shameful: there is too much wealth, too much that could be done. But people don't like to be challenged in this way.
If they are a publicly traded company, then they are legally obligated to maximize profit. Yes, even at the expense of your wife and children.
I used to be in Sweden. I was a union member... until the day there was a dispute on the salaries. The employer and the union both fought for their stand in the negotiation. The union fought for the lower bid... It took me 6 months of non payment of union dues to get out, because you cannot leave a Swedish union, they can only expel you for non payment.
I used to live in Sweden. I was a union member... until the day there was a dispute about new salaries. The employer and the union both fought for their stand in the negotiation. The problem was that the union fought for the lower bid... It took me 6 months of non payment of union dues to get out. You can not leave a Swedish union, however, you can get expelled for non payment of dues.
I recently read in the paper that here in Toronto the City Council approved and bought a lot of new garbage trucks that can be operated by one person. Thereby they would be able to cut staff and cost. Now, union contract says that there has to be at least two persons on each garbage truck. So now Toronto has new expensive garbage trucks with one operator and one passenger...
Unions have a place. If working conditions are bad (for whatever definition of "bad"), organizing the workers can help get things changed. This is a Good Thing.
On the other hand, the big unions are also corporations in and of themselves. And, as such, they exist to propagate themselves. Have you ever seen a union voluntarily disband itself after the workers' needs are met? On the other hand, I've seen unions try to enter a shop where they're clearly unwanted by both the management and Joe-line-worker.
In an ideal world you'd have ad-hoc unions form when the workers collectively feel screwed. And that would dissolve again after an agreement was reached! There's really very little need for a strong-arm union in any industry in the USA these days.
Chelloveck
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I lost all respect for unions the day the first union member shot someone for working. The concept is morally bankrupt; modern unions exist to provide jobs for modern union organizers, not to protect the needs of workers. Over time, union dues go up, and the benefits provided go down.
I am good at what I do, what I do is likely to remain in demand, and I am willing to invest substantially in having a variety of useful skills, and could switch careers if I had to. I don't need a union to "protect" me, and I'd rather have my own choices about how to spend my money. I'm good at what I do; I'd rather have the chance of getting a raise based on my *personal* achievements, than depend on the average performance of a whole lot of people.
My mom is a union worker. Not by choice, but by force; her paper has to run all jobs that way. She gets the same raise as everyone else, no matter how hard she works. No chance to shine, no chance to exceed. That's not what I want.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
This doesn't mean unions are always a good thing - only that they can be.
This is precisely the point! Not all unions are good. Not all unions are bad. Some unions are good in certain areas and bad in others. I think that, in general, a union can be a positive force for its members. However, the stereotype of the violent, self-interested union is certainly true sometimes. Making generalizations that start with "All" is a huge mistake.
// mlc, user 16290
--
I know my voice is going to get lost in the cacophony of voices here but I'll try anyway.
I'm a unionist here in Australia, althought the Astralian Services Union - Clerical Division claims to cover IT workers I have seen no evidence of this. The closest thing I have to a unian is EPESMA.
I truly believe the IT industry need a union, this industry is not just the high paid programmers from IBM or any large other company. There are alot of unscrupulous people out there running small ISP's or consulting firms that take young kids with skills but no industry experience or quals and exploit them, I know I've been there. These people need to be represented, they need someone who can tell them what they deserve under the award or legislation that covers them and who can stand up to the employer on their behalf (negotiating for things you should be given under law is intimidating). The only way to do this is with a union and people in the high paying jobs should show some solidarity with their fellow techs and join the union so that it can afford to provide services to those who need them most.
And to those of you who say "the unions have never done anything for me" ot "the unions have passed their used by date" I say this: did you enjoy that weekend? or the paid vacation? or getting home after only 8 hours of work? what about your the health and saftey in your workplace? theses are all things that the union won for the workers of the world, so show some respect or give up everythign that the union has done for you and work 6 and a half days a week, 12-16 hours a day for ten thousand dollars a year with no holidays, apalling working conditions and no recourse against unfair treatment by an employer.
Interesting. I have almost the exact same thing except that I don't pay the $30.00 a month and my tuition reimbursement doesn't have a limit as long as it's approved by management.
I would disagree about the inability to negotiate with a large corporation and you don't need to be a "superstar" to do it. I've always found that if you are professional, show pride in your work, work well with others, and can do good problem solving and design methods you can do very well in business. A good manager will almost always reward someone he doesn't need to manage. If you make a manager's life easier they will want you to stay.
I doubt most of you have worked in a union shop at any point in your lives.
:)
Huh? I work in a union shop now, although I'm not union.
There are lots of UAW workers here at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, MI.
Let me tell you...union rules sometimes just defy logic.
I understand that unions may be a necessary evil in order to protect workers' rights to some extent. However, some of the ways the portend to do it are ridiculousness.
For example: you cannot move a computer in your cube, not even to the cube next to you. It's against union rules. A union worker must move any computer equipment that you cannot carry under one arm. So a laptop is ok, but a desktop or tower machine? No way. Supposedly this prevents people from losing their job. Ridiculous.
My journal has hot
Unless you live in Detroit, where the parasitic automotive "industry" is our bread and butter, and you better realize that, or you won't be fattening your pocketbook.
Of course, buying cars at $5K below the sticker price really sucks too..
--knick
If a bunch of tech workers want to unionize, I may disagree with them, but that's their perogative.
On the other hand, when an existing union comes along and starts 'recruiting' new sectors into the flock.. THAT is wrong.
It's not workers saying 'let's unionize and stick up for each other to get what we want'. It's a union spending it's other members dues to say 'You guys should unionize!'
The difference is in both age and size? A shop that unionizes, and all the workers who basically know each other (I use the term loseley), that unionizes, there WILL be good things happening. You get what you want out of it.
OTOH, shops where there has been a union for a long, long time, the union is a political force unto itself, and you can't get rid of it./
I'm not about to claim that the presence of teachers' unions increases their pay--the fact that I'm now (after 3 years) earning more than my father did after teaching for 25 years would seem to indicate that the unions are not being as successful as they should.
However, to claim that the absence of those unions would result in higher pay is equally ridiculous. Believe me, school boards, in general, are no more interested in doing things "for the children"--or in paying good teachers what they're worth--than the unions are.
As a case in point, I offer the recent debacle in the Ann Arbor Public Schools. They were found to be using an illegal contract for their subsitute teachers. They continued to use that contract while they appealed the case. Now not only do they have to pay damages and salary to the subs--to the tune of $30 million--but they're also involved in a malpractice lawsuit against the firm that told them that the contract was good (and that failed to advise them to stop using the bloody thing).
Had the school board and administration had the best interests of the students at heart, they'd have stopped using the contract after they lost in the first court.
As for evaluations, the problem is not that they're not done (my experience says that they are), but that they're not done properly. Even a horrible teacher--the kind that really shouldn't be teaching--can generally do all right for the few hours of a few days in a given school year that an administrator typically sits in the classroom to evaluate them.
Exactly! I couldn't have said it better.
That is why unions do so much damage. By raising the cost of labor to the employer (and the employee) they force companies to look for third world solutions to labor costs. With the unions in place, the individual employees have little input with the company in creating solutions to prevent that and save their jobs. The unions insist in "bargaining" (i.e. "forcing negotiations") and that creates a shield between company management and the line employees preventing constructive communication.
So you're right, if I want to put 25+ years in a company I'll want to have some input with the company and have the company respect my input for what it is. No way would I want a union preventing that.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Your statement that there are more people than jobs is a whole different philosophical issue that I won't even touch here. But it sounds like your point is that we either use force to make business stay in the U.S. or we use our money to develop other countries more to our "standard". Hmmmmm....pretty imperialistic, and not what our country is about.
I'm not recommending that companies pack up and leave. As another post pointed out, that's usually idle threat. But in order to stay in business a company has to make a profit (hello dot coms) and in order to make a profit they have to look at all expenses. Sure, it would be nice to pay every janitor a six figure income and feel good about helping him out, but business doesn't and can't work that way. The ability and freedom for a company to pack up and move jobs anywhere is necessary for it to be healthy and profitable. Without profit the company folds and you don't have any jobs in any country.
So it's the abilty to relocate that I advocate. I don't recommend that they do it, I don't want them to do it, and I damn sure don't like unions forcing them into positions where the costs of labor demand that they do it. But they need to have that option available to them.
If you really think that I'm being less than patriotic, remember this: Being American is not about being rich or making more money than the other guy. It is about the freedom and ability to do so. I advocate that people in our country be paid what the market will pay them. I advocate that the American companies be given the freedom to pay labor the market rate.
I see the idea of forcing companies to pay a certain wage as unpatriotic. Our country is about freedom, not force. The us/them mentality of company/labor is also unpatriotic because in this country you have the freedom to be the company, a part of the company, or create a company of your own. Restrict business, or use force on companies, and you are restricting your own freedom.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
If I understand correctly, one of the main purposes of the union is to give the worker a voice when dealing with employers. Say a co-worker is a real lazy bum. Should that bum continue to work there if s/he is not producing? I say no. The union says that the employer has unrealistic expectations and to stop bothering that fine union member.
It would appear that the union's duty is to give every worker a fair deal. Well, guess what. Life isn't fair. Something else that may have come as a surprise but we are not all created equal. Open your eyes and look around. Does that person over there know the same things as you do? Does s/he have the same physical skills? No.
The stories I've heard remind me all too much of Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bereron" in which people wear devices so as to remove competition. Instead of working to improve the skills/abilities of those lacking, the people with skills are reduced in some way. The ballerinas wear weights so that they cannot dance any better than anyone else. People wear devices on their heads that periodically create loud noises so that no one can think any better than anyone else.
This may sound harsh but if you don't like where you are, leave and go somewhere else. Only you are responsible for where you are and what you do. No one owes you a job. If you can't hack it, leave and go do something else.
I work in a non-union shop and nobody gets fired. The most useless employee we have makes more than the rest of his peers (in that group) and he can't even change file permissions in Windows. He blames everyone else when things go wrong. The managers KNOW he's useless, they're too spineless to fire anyone. Rewards aren't based on our performance, I'm not really sure what they're based on, but it's obviously not our performance.
I'm not saying a union would help, I'm complaining that we have those same problems in a non-union environment. Woe is me. Hahaha.
Now if I could only find a job that DID reward good performance.
And I'm sure have plenty of time to wonder exactly where all that pollution and traffic comes from as you SPEND 2 HOURS COMMUTING EACH DAY.
Sorry, but you're promoting a fallacy. While unions do indeed sometimes keep lousy employees employed, that is almost invariably the fault of management.
How?
With a unionised system, a worker generally has a few chances to screw up. When he does, the onus is on his manager to speak to him about it, and keep a written record of that. The second time, there would be written, with perhaps the manager's boss present, records kept. The third time is the last time. (Specifics in this procedure vary, but the idea seems to be pretty universal.) The union may complain if a worker is being unjustifiedly picked on - good! It might also complain even if the worker did screw up. But so long as records exist and an official policy exists, they'll have no leg to stand on.
If management doesn't consistently follow the procedure, then it's largely their own fault that they get stuck with slackers.
--
You're a suburbanite.
;-)
Unions have traditionally been very important to make sure that employee rights are not neglected.
In bad times when some employers could pay people obscenely small amounts of money for hard work, because people seriously couldn't afford loosing that income either, unions played a pretty important role, at least in some countries.
Just because things are generally better now, doesn't mean that it will always be that way.
I know plenty of people that work in professions where the employer have all the power, that are very glad for the added security that union-membership gives you.
Unions (as long as they operate within the current system, instead of trying to destroy the system), isn't necessarily a foe of the free market, it is actually part of the free market. Just as coorporations make alliances and merges, so must employees be able to.
If me being a Union-member can get me some benefits, I see nothing wrong with it.
Of course, the norwegian law sucks in the way that in some professions you are automatically a union-member, and the union provides funds for the election-campaign of the Labour-party in Norway. This means that some people are forced to support the Labour-party with their union-fees.
Well, just my 2 cents...
Once you get enough idiots entrenched in a department all the good people flee as it goes to hell. After a while, someone near the top notices the issues and hopefully reorgs the idiots around to thin the concentration. Then the cycle starts all over again... But wait! A union would stop the cycle and just leave crap stagnating - no thanks.
Teachers' unions (and I'm speaking of the NEA, the behemoth here in the US) can be the worst. First of all, they certainly aren't getting done what they supposedly exist to do -- getting teachers paid more. My hunch is that they actually are keeping salaries down by not allowing school districts to evaluate teachers and introduce competition.
Contrawise, some teachers unions are actively promoting teacher evaluation. See the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers' experiment. Instead of seniority, it uses a objective skills evaluation as a basis for pay. From the article:
Teachers will be evaluated in 16 areas within four domains: planning and preparing for student learning; creating an environment for learning; teaching for learning; and professionalism.
Based on their scores, teachers would be placed in a category: apprentice, novice, career, advanced or accomplished. Each ranking is assigned a pay range.
A starting novice teacher would make $30,000. An accomplished teacher would make up to $62,500. The range matches the seniority scale.
This doesn't mean unions are always a good thing - only that they can be.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Talent, on the other hand, implies that you have an artistic flair and that only your performance could possibly do. Anyone with a password is equivalent, as far as the computer is concerned.
Unless your company decides to subcontract your job out to some substandard Java conslutancy in India that uses == to compare Strings. Or hires someone from abroad on a work visa because they're cheaper than you are. Well, that's tough shit, boy, you're paid based on supply and demand. You don't have talent, you have skill. You'll be paid exactly what you're worth in the market at any given time. As soon as someone finds a way to pipe your job to someplace else for cheaper, your rate will also drop, if you want to stay employed. Did you see the comment a few days back in another article where investors only wanted to pay $45k for a CCIE certified network admin? (For those of you oriented against certification, a CCIE certification is temporary, competitive, and not least expensive. By the time you've gotten it, though, you know Cisco routers cold.) Serious blood, sweat and cash spent on a serious certification, and some sucka VC says he shouldn't make the going rate for college graduates? That in and of itself is an excellent example of where unions could help.Naturally, the good comes from unions and governments only if the people who comprise them do their "eternal vigilance" homework and make sure the leaders aren't running off with the bag. Force is, unfortunately, not an attractive option against either sort of conglomerate.
Why not? Keeping up-to-date with the latest tools only feeds the marketing hype machine. In hiring a sysadmin, for example, knowing the minutiae of Red Hat 9.3's particular flavor of init scripts is probably far less important than having the problem-solving skills to dig into them and find the needed information.I suspect your fixation on staying "hip" has to do with your own position being dependent on the upgrade treadmill? Problem solving is not a purchasable skill.
Then why are you not a consultant? You want the entrepreneurial endorphin buzz, you start the consultancy or the startup and stop ruining the industry for those of us who like to go home before the stars come out.(Oh, and ahem. Screen Actors Guild?)
Then why all the emphasis on "team play" in this industry? Why are cowboys so frowned upon? Why does your supposed "talent" never get recognized as individually your contribution? Because it isn't talent. If you want to exercise your bloody talents, drag your PHB grandstanding "mememememe" ass into sales and leave us scientists alone.-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
Of course in the UK we've had a minimum wage for about 2 years, and are currently enjoying the lowest unemployment since the seventies...
bil
Where you stand depends on where you sit...
>So you are admitting that even in the UK the workers are forced to pay political funds. They are forced to support certain political causes just because others have voted for it. Why not instead let each worker choose?
Actually I'm sure that when I was a member of a union (before I went back to uni) I had the choice wether to pay into the political fund or not, I think the cost to me was the same either way but I could choose wether some of that money was syphoned off to the political fund, or wether it all went to union activities. I have a feeling that this choice is a legal requirement on the unions, but INAL so might be wrong
bil
Where you stand depends on where you sit...
>That is an odd quote, since communists have historically been a major contributor to "why they go hungry" (Ukraine under Stalin, tens of millions starving in China under Mao, Ethiopia famine engineered by USSR "land reform").
I could go into the details of why Stalinism!= communism, or detail how many people are killed each year by global capitalism, but I cant be bothered...
The quote isn't mine to rewrite, but if you prefer change the word communist for any other insult you wish, the meaning remains. Basically good acts are saintly as long as you dont start to question the power of the elite ruling class, because then equally good acts will be portrayed as evil using whatever sort of FUD will be most effective.
bil
Where you stand depends on where you sit...
>Unions take away your right to individually bargain with your employer.
So you've never worked for a large company have you.
Large companies impose terms and conditions on its workers, if for no other reason then 100,000 people all individually negotiating contracts would be a nightmare to administer (and hugely expensive). If you dont like them, well you can either quit (not an option for most workers who need the money ) or try to renegotiate the contract for all workers at once, in which case a group that represents all of those workers has rather more moral authority (and thus chance of being listened to) then you by yourself.
So, work for who you want to, try to agree terms with your employer, but dont be suprised if they nod, agree, impose the conditions they want on you, and then laugh and show you the door when you threaten to quit...
bil
Where you stand depends on where you sit...
It wasn't the union that accepted that lower contract. The union asked that it be voted down, but since the union is democratic, unlike the employer, it accepted the will of the majority of its members to accept the contract offer.
Think of the union as your agent, just as actors and pro athletes have agents. Some of the agents are good and some are crooks. But that doesn't mean they don't have any value.
Either you negotiate your salary all by yourself or you get an agent to help you. If you decide to accept a lower offer despite the advice of your agent, it is not the agent's fault.
Anybody who'd care to point how the flaw in this line of economic reasoning?
yeah, it's called supply and demand. Do you really think these companys were passing on their labor savings to their consumers? The market charges the highest price that a product will sell for, if they can't make the product at a price that will meet demand they go under. That's capitalism, and unions are a part of that equation.
I give you the example of sweatshops in asia cranking out gap shirts at a cost of $1.25 in materials and labor and the price to the consumer somehow hits $35 by the time it hits a store in the US. If you would pay $500 for that pizza you were talking about it would cost $500.
What you are talking about is keynesian revisionism and adams smith's invisible hand came back and gave everyone the figure the last time we tried supply side in the US.
... because I was concerned about the unilateral changes IBM made to its promised retirement benefits (changes which have resulted in paper profits), but also because I was concerned about the impact a union would have on my job. I left in disgust three months later, because the "alliance" wasn't interested in holding meetings in Austin (a city with several thousand IBM employees), and the communications I received consisted of the CWA trying to tell me how I should think and vote, rather than showing any interest in adressing the concerns of any employees beyond the cabal in Endicott. I still support the stated mission of providing employees with a voice in changes to retirement and benefits packages, but if/when there is a vote to make Alliance@IBM our union, I'll be voting against it.
The State Government in Minnesota is almost all Union, including all the Info Tech people. The biggest problem we have is that we aren't in a union dedicated to IT staff issues so we're bargaining right along side Foresters and Special Education Coordinators, etc.,. Our salaries could definatly be more in line with industry.
And thus - Complacency. You feel safe at your job, secure in the knowledge that if you do your job well, you won't get fired. Could there be a greater evil in life than complacency?
When you become complacent, you become unmotivated to achieve. Your content with what you have, which isn't necissarily a bad thing, but it is unrewarding, unchallenging, and breeds the rut of life. When you're 60, will you be proud that you kept the same job for 35 years? When you wake up tomorrow morning, will you be full of life, excited about your day, and eager to try and make a difference, or challenge yourself and your co-workers to pull something big off?
Look duff, I realize that you are working for you masters degree and probably are not the typical agnostic 9-5er, but look at your co-workers. Most of them are 9-5, safe in the knowledge that they are there for the long term because their union offers them some protection. But the last time your agency, department or division set new goals for efficency or productivity (no matter how ill formed) how many of your co-workers put forth any extra effort to make it happen? I've often thought of how much better off someone would be if they just got fired from that job they felt secure at, but didn't really enjoy.
Unions have no place in the white collar world of technology either, especially right now. Those who are extremely qualified can dictate thier terms of employment, those who aren't should be willing to put in the time and effort to become so. Unions protect the blue collar workers from the excesses of the white collar initiatives. The only thing a union could offer the white collar world is protection from themselves, which to me, goes against natural selection.
Ctimes2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
I think it's fantastic that they did this for your father, but unions don't make sense for tech workers. They are not car hualers or truck drivers making 30-60K a year. 30-60k is the entry level salary, with many (who work hard and are dedicated) making $250k a year within 5 years.
And at $250 a year, your father could have paid for his own surgery - no need for the union. And that's what this is about... do we really need a technology union? I think if we do, we're going to marginalize the industry, because once a union is in place it will spread like wild fire, and cost everyone the open frontier we now have to compete in.
Ctimes2
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
I'm sure those 60 hours a week are burning us out, except for the fact that when I go home, I spend another 40 hours a week in my den. And those 3k classes are ruining me - glad I'm making that obscene paycheck to cover it. And I haven't yet stopped bitching that they took our cell phones away becuase it was costing the company $300k a month. Bastards. And that NDA - wait, I didn't sign one and they hired me anyway. And if I got fired tomorrow, I could still go back to my union construction job.
Seriously, if I wanted an 8 hour a day, 5 day a week job with overtime pay, I'd be working construction. But even with overtime, I can't make this much doing something I love. Unions... please.
Ctimes2
There are two things in life that you can do - the thing you love, and the thing you do best. If the two are one in the same, then you my friend, truely are blessed. = unknown.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
It was the STE not CWU (STE represented most of the managers/programmers, CWU the engineers). 10,000 was just the manager/professional grades, the company employed 120,000 - that ought to give it away. Its true though, neither union could really help temps and agency employees. There are a number of reasons for this -
- most employee rights kick in after 2 years, agents dont usually stay that long
- agents may not technically be employees of the telco. This is often intended to de-unionize the workforce and introduce personal contracts so there can be no collective wage bargaining (and before we get the arguments on collective bargaining meaning the good get paid the same as the bad, it doesnt - its supposed to help the employees get a clear understanding of how their pay will progress if they perform, while hopefully getting everyone more cash)
In the end companies close units as and when they want to; and with agents, usually with little or no redundancy payments. Its only if they are actually trying to realign the workforce that the unions can help mitigate the problem.
On a personal note, I came from a design area - may or may not be the bit you're referring to - and I left like everyone else I knew because the company was imploding on itself, descending into empire building and reorganisations instead of anyone caring about the work. The contractors, outsourcing etc happened there because we left en-masse.
-Baz
You seem to have had a particularly bad experience. Up until recently I was the union rep for a bunch of programmers in a telco, and I can tell you straight people did need the union.
Yes, everyone has rights, but the management are often clueless or deliberately lax in applying the rules. Far from promoting by merit when left to themselves, management promoted cronies, and almost exclusively male cronies at that. Managers in some projects had told their team that if they applied for their time off in lieu (the alternative to overtime) it would count against them at appraisals; and so on. I was personally involved in discovering some duplicity in company pay negotiations - as a result of which 10,000 people did not get their pay cut by £150 pa.
Asking the union for help in the UK at least is not like the Teamster example earlier in this thread where we smash up cars. In disputes workers here have a right to be accompanied by someone else in any meeting with management, and 9 times out of 10 they chose a union rep rather than a friend because we'd been through these meetings before, had been through courses on employment law, and could make sure the employee got a fair deal.
If the company wanted to sack a lazy, theiving or stupid employee as characterized by you they had procedures they had agreed to follow to make sure it was fair and not the product of a local grudge. If the company gave the worker a fair hearing and they should be sacked, they were sacked. We didnt stand in their way.
On the politics angle, our union (given its white collar background) was fairly apolitical, and under UK law the union members voted to stop political contributions. I personally knew members who stood for elected office for each of the 3 main parties in this country - hardly evidence of losing your political views.
I also think you made a huge jump from "job, pay, benefits" to "OSHA, Americans with Disabilities Act, and all sexual harassment laws." The first three aren't basic human rights guaranteed by the govt, while the three you mentioned are things every employee should have whether they are a good employee or a bad one. Also, unions don't enforce the three you mentioned (usually), the govt does (or should).
Unions MIGHT be needed in un-skilled labor jobs where the company can just hire highschool dropouts for min wage and then never give them a raise (and since all similar companies would be doing the same, there is nowhere for them to go). If they left the company, oh well, there is never a shortage of unemployed, un-skilled people. Highly skilled jobs need highly skilled and trained employees, of which there IS a shortage. If I don't like my pay and benefits at this engineering firm, I can go somewhere else and do (possibly) better. If I can't do better, why should I expect the company to pay more than any of their competitors?
IANAL, but I play one on
You're right, this is an example of a bad apple of a union.
The solution to this isn't to disregard unions entirely, but to consider the benefits of a union that's run by more honest and less shady people.
(FYI I'm neither for nor against them in IT, but I am unionized in one of my current jobs and there are some benefits to that, even if it isn't worth what they take out of my pay).
And I'm sure have plenty of time to wonder exactly where all that pollution and traffic comes from as you SPEND 2 HOURS COMMUTING EACH DAY.
You have to admit, he's trying to fix that by telecommuting. Live close to work? How much closer can you get than working at home?
[This is most important with contractors, as you'd have a place to check with to see if there were complaints against someone].
I do, however, take offense to a few of your comments:
Unions tend to be for hourly employees, and not salaried. You claim that we make 2-3 times the gross national average, but there's a cost to that. How many hours a week do you work?
I don't know about the rest of you, but it's not unheard of for us to work 100 hr weeks when deadlines come near. I made the mistake of only getting a verbal commitment to being given compensory time for my overtime. After 2 weeks of working through 2 weekends and a holiday, for 12-16hrs a day [12 hrs on Saturdays, so I could catch my cartoons], going home every other day to keep from losing the 2hrs in commute, my boss told me that I got 5 days of comp time.
I asked him how he came up with 5 days. He said it was from the 5 extra days I worked, the two weekends, and the holiday. Naturally, I was pissed. In the end, I did the math, and found that at a bare minumum, I had worked 120hrs overtime. My boss agreed to give me 10 days in comp time.
Had this been a union, I most likely would have gotten time and half for the time. My brother gets that, and 2x when he passes 80hrs for a week. He gets an additional amount for working holidays. Even assuming time and a half, I'd have gotten 180hrs [4.5 weeks] off for the work I did. I was asking for 3 [even hours for the work I did], and I got 2.
Chances are, a union would have protected me from that. It would have protected me from the time when I was planning on going to the PA Renaisance Festival with friends one weekend, but was told on Friday morning, that there had been an oversight by the contractors and I wasn't told that I could have started my part of the project 3 weeks before. As such, it had to be done by monday, so I was going to have to work the weekend, and come in on Monday [a day I had off for my DSL install].
In the end, I worked a 70hrs by Wednesday [as well, I had to get info back from the contractors, which I didn't have for the meeting on Monday, and I didn't get 'till Tuesday, and it took 'till Wednesday for me to figure out what had gone wrong, and that it was the contractors who had lied to me about the last upgrade we had done, which resulted in my doing all this work.] At that point, late wednesday night/thursday morning, I went home, as I didn't care what the project wasn't finished.
You said it, but you glazed over it. I had to make sure that I included it, so I'm not taking your other comment completely out of context.I do NOT have peace of mind when I'm driving home at 4am, thinking 'I can end it all if I cross over the median right now'. Medical benefits are useless after a few marathon weeks when I'm so sick I can't get out of bed, and have such a headache, I can't see straight, as my body tries to recover from it.
That's not to say that I'd like a corrupt union, like so many are, but my roomie's union [local 602 -- pipefitters] is good to him -- in exchange for his money, he gets guaranteed raises, training, overtime pay, etc. Yes, I get benefits that he doesn't get, but he's not expected to work 12 hr days s a daily thing and not get compensated for it.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Oh, pity the poor company, forced by its employees acting en masse to pay them a decent wage! The outrage!
The way to prevent jobs from going overseas is not to prevent U.S. workers from making a decent wage. It's to 1) enable developing nations to grow their own companies, rather than becoming a cheap labor pool for the first world, and 2) require by law that corporations, as a condition of getting and keeping a government charter in the U.S., keep the majority of their business here.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
In my country, I have to pay thousands of fucking bucks a year - compulsary tax fee - (for 'services' - soldiers going all over the globe to kick the shit out of people for no good reasons, cops locking up junkies, corporate welfare payments, and don't forget debt interest) or your freedom gets cancelled!
BTW, do you mean that they only give out condoms to gay men? Or that there are special condoms made just for them?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Unions and their employees don't like non-union competition.
damn straight. it's hard being a staff employee whose job is going nowhere because all of the interesting and challenging work is being farmed out to consultants, and advancement opportunites don't exist because "you haven't worked on any high profile demanding projects".
not all of us are black belts, gunslingers, or whatever the current cute buzzword of the day is. some of us are just doing the best we can to do a job we kinda like doing. in other words, the (gasp!) working class. just because it's IT doesn't mean there aren't blue collar workers.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Title pretty much says it all!
[Your Name] Was here.
More Caffeine. NOW
Doh! I posted to the wrong article. Just ignore it.
More Caffeine. NOW
If I worked there, just for spite, I'd case mod my full-tower with a handle, and walk off with it under my arm. Ditto my monitor - maybe a strap from a backpack and some clever use of D-rings.
If they gave me static, I'd disassemble the full-tower and move it, component by component, to the new cube.
Fsck 'em if they can't take a joke.
(Of course, I'd also make sure I had a low vandalism deductible on my car...)
Perhaps those of us who oppose unions on the (ideological) basis that a free[er] market is a Good Thing, will merely stick to our principles.
That's what principles are about.
I hold to the principle that capitalism, through the mechanism of "creative destruction", is a Good Thing that leads to higher standards of living for large numbers of people over long periods of time.
When (not "if" - when) my skills become obsolete, I will either live off my accumulated savings, acquire new skills that aren't obsolete, or starve. (Possibly all three at once ;-)
What I won't be doing is deciding that welfare rates suddenly ought to be doubled, income taxes on anyone making more than me tripled, and wishing that I'd had a union to protect my obsolete hide before I got canned.
I decided a long time ago - as a matter of principle - that I was willing to live by the sword; I must (on pain of logical inconsistency) be willing to die by the sword.
(Well, Adam Smith's invisible hand that wields the sword, at any rate ;)
I grew up in Pennsylvania.
I watched the Unions put so much pressure on coal mines, that now there are so many unskilled ex-coal miners in Cambria County, sitting on their asses, collecting unemployment, that I'm glad I left.
Ask Pittsburg about the steel workers unions.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
My first experience with unions was when I was 15 years old. I got a part-time job at the local grocery store chain for around $4 an hour. I soon learned that I had to join a union--which, even at the time, I found humorous. (A union for grocery baggers?)
Anyway, after deductions for federal taxes, state taxes, local taxes, social security, uniform fee (someone's got to pay for those orange and blue striped ties!), and union dues, my first few paychecks ended up working out to less than $2 an hour.
Needless to say, my career as a grocery bagger was a brief one...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If an employer runs out of work, they can't afford to keep people. They have to choice but to lay people off or go out of business. How is a union going to help me in that situation?
- Milo Hyson
Of course, since there is no behemoth union covering the tech sector, they do not have this effect. They'd have to exist first. What the existence of said union would do is exacerbate the problem.
And yes, poor management is also responsible for the promotion of incompetents. If management does too much of this, the company will suffer, and the market will take care of it. With a union's seniority rules in place, however, you can have the best or the worst management in place and it won't matter; you'll still promote idiots.
Basically, you are arguing that since these problems already exist, you might as well throw a union in there. That's a silly argument to mine that says a union will make these problems worse.
A union is the last thing tech workers need. The sector is already swamped with substandard workers who command ridiculous salaries and benefits for the work they do. Unions will just make it so that employers can't fire those who don't do their work, and have to promote the clueless because of seniority. No thanks; I prefer to work in a world where I get rewards based on my performance.
Teachers' unions (and I'm speaking of the NEA, the behemoth here in the US) can be the worst. First of all, they certainly aren't getting done what they supposedly exist to do -- getting teachers paid more. My hunch is that they actually are keeping salaries down by not allowing school districts to evaluate teachers and introduce competition. Really, all the NEA does is work to maintain the public education monopoly, claiming they're fighting "for the children".
Teachers are professionals, should be treated as such, and should not be forced to be unionized to get a job. Perhaps then we can start paying the good ones what they're worth.
How exactly is a union different from a struct? I've always used structs.
--
The day I'm required to join a union to get a programming job is the day I stop programming. Programmers are individuals. We are proud of our individualism. I don't belong to any groups. I don't affiliate myself with anything. I am productive because I choose to be. I don't need handouts, and I don't want any. Live Free or Die. Keep America free or I'll find somewhere else to live.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Actually, part of growing up requires personal responsibility and responsibility for others including my family. I have provided for them (not thanks to any union) and have both health and life insurance. I am quick to judge unions because nothing sickens me more than going into a job interview and being told, okay here is the standard deal. I don't want the standard deal. I want the deal that works best for me and my family and I don't trust an union to make that decision for me. "I don't need handouts, and I don't want any," is exactly how I was raised and is a fundemental part of my beliefs. The problem with the world today is people have lost that basic sense of pride that comes from taking personal responsibility in there lives. Personal responisibility for themselves and their lives. You might be perfectly happy letting a union negotiate your job for you. You probably also would enjoy for the union to take care of your retirement, educate your children, take care of your health needs, wash your car, and do your laundry. Hell, why not have the union do the work for you. Why bother working at all. You might need a union on your side when management has you against the wall. Personally, I have faith that my commitment, pride and discipline are better bargining chips than some charter.
As for my maturity and idealism, you are the one who's suggesting that the security of you and your family be left to a union. Perhaps I am guilty of being an idealist myself. However, I am also a realist, and I wouldn't trust my family's safe keeping with a union no sooner than I would trust social security for my retirement or the government for my health care.
Someone you trust is one of us.
"Right to Work " laws are just a device to give management more leverage against unions. Management has responded by abusing these rights in every state with RTW laws. States without them (California is one) still do not have closed shops, where you must join the union before getting a job. They might have union shops, where new employees must join the union after thirty days' probation. The union has no voice in any employee/employer matter during probation, as spelled out in the Taft-Hartley Law. After probation, the employee has full union rights and privileges, with otherwise equal cases being decided by seniority. It does not take much time in industry to realize that an employee is nothing more than a number, and managers will base all choices on personal preference, given the chance. The manager that does not abuse this privilege is a wonderful person, and should be valued. Employees will find that even in RTW states that forbid union shops, that the promotions and preferences will go to union members. This is because the foremen and managers worked their way up through union ranks, and have little sympathy for clueless freeloaders that want all the benefits and none of the costs or responsibilities. If you as an individual feel that you are too valuable to require union backing, I suggest you form your own company. If you really are that good, the company will prosper even in bad times and you will get rich. As for me, I have worked union and non-union jobs for over forty years. The union jobs were always more secure and more fairly administered. In good companies, the difference was very small, but it always existed.
A union shop requires you to join a union after a probationary period, and is legal. This was a right fought for, voted on, and won by the employees that negotiated the original union contract. Be assured that the employer fought it as hard as possible. A closed shop requires you to be a union member to apply for a job. It was quite common in construction unions, but has been outlawed.
No person is ever forced to join a union. They can always leave. As a shop steward, I had one man try to avoid required union membership. We wished him well as he was leaving. The other hundred or so new employees read the contract and had no problem with membership.
Defore you dis a union, read their contract. You might be amazed at the amount of stuff they guarantee you. There are a few large corporations that have treated engineers and other professionals so poorly thet the professionals called in the blue-collar union and organized.
The Taft Hartley Law and various state RTW laws were designed to deprive unions of income by giving workers the right to choose. The laws failed because employers big and small abused the privilege badly, attempting to pit old versus new, white versus black, men versus women, and any other difference they could exploit to divide and conquer. The surviving employees wised up in a hurry, and organized. Some companies have defeated unions by giving nearly the same benefits without a contract. They are very much aware that any attempt to backtrack will bring in organizers. For you, personally, I suggest you find such a company. You will soon find out how much you are really worth. They usually have probationary periods much longer than the thirty days mandated by Taft-Hartley. My uncle, a small employer, said he could tell in half a day if a new man would be a good worker.
Syndicalist Union. De-centralised, and not connected to any party. Syndicalism is what REAL socialism is about. Individual AND group.
You are the same decaying organic matter as the rest of us.
However, I do not believe that I could ever personally belong to a Union. I see too many people joining a Union just because they feel insecure. In addition, from the employer's perspective, it seems like the employees do not trust the company. In other words, the Unionized workers are saying, "Mr. Boss-man, we do not think that you treat us well enough, we don't think that you're being fair with us, and we're scared that someday you're going to treat us even worse. That's why we're getting into this gang to fight for our rights". I think that an atmosphere of trust between employers and employees creates a more beneficial and efficient workplace, not one where company and Union workers are put at odds with one another.
In short, Unions are a great idea and are very valuable. Just don't expect me to start paying Union dues anytime soon.
------
That's just the way it is
Twelve years ago my father was diagnosed with a rare genetic liver disease called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. While he had problems with his liver all of his life, they had not been able to diagnose and treat this new disease until recently.
When my father's symptoms got worse and worse, it was clear that there was only one cure for his disease. Liver transplantation was the only way to save his life. Because this treatment was "experimental" 11 years ago when it was performed, the insurance company flatly refused to cover it. The doctor told my father (quoting here)... "If you do not come up with $250,000 for the transplant, you will die". Did I mention I come from a fairly poor family? There was no WAY we could afford that.
The person who saved my father was a union manager. My father was a truck driver, a car hauler, who had been in the teamsters union for many years. After making the right calls and talking to the right people, the union stepped in and provided the money needed to save him.
After waiting a long time on the waiting list and with an estimated 2 weeks left to live, my father got his transplant. They gave him a 50/50 chance to survive the surgery at this point, and much less to even survive for the next 5 years. It has been 11 years and my father is still alive and enjoys a quality of life that's better than it ever has been.
Now I know this is slightly off-topic, but I saw many anti-union posts and I knew I had to say something. I'm always for expanding unions wherever possible, because I've seen in my jobs and in my life that sometimes the only ones who will stand up for you, is a union.
Employers use very sneaky tactics and they have a definate advantage (they pay the workers and can threaten them, of course this is illegal, but when was the last time our country seriously went after a corporation that was fucking with people...).
I think that the reason there are a lot of dissatisfied union members in america is that you can't expect it to just come in and do stuff for you (which is actually what I hear in the complaints from the former members in this discussion "I was in a union and they didn't do anything for me", well if you're gonna complain about no local control and you aren't going to work for anything, you can't expect anyhting good. The fact is, good unions get good results.) Corporate america has so fucked up the system (unions should be completely protected under the first amendment freedom of association) that of course there is a lot of anti-union sentiment here. You'll find a MUCH different opinion in Europe I assume.
Oh yeah, I can't speak for all unions, but it's not in the union's advantage to run the company out of business. They want to keep the jobs. Think of Big K and K-Mart. K-Mart has a union, so the K-Mart corporation makes BigK as a different corp, builds it next door to their K-Marts and one by one runs themselves out of business. Then the workers store closes, they all are jobless, but hey there are those GREAT non-union jobs at BigK. I am sure they get treated a lot better there! You wanna tell me that the union asked for SO much money that the store was gonna close down and it had to close itself down? That's fucking ridiculous, it's 100% greed and malice. (keep in mind, I'm sure the average k-mart worker didn't make very much, a lot less than a lot of programmers who work for companies with no profits, kmarts owners are getting richer and richer while the people get poorer and poorer) So don't tell me that unions make people lose their jobs by asking for too much, UC won't even tell us how much money they get from the state (this is a PUBLIC institution) so we can make educated guesses as to what is a reasonable raise. Unions, in general, just want reasonable wages, and in most places you'd want to live in america, you can't live great for 11 bux an hour (let alone the minimum wage).
Tony
I assume you're talking about the AFL-CIO... sure their tied together, just like most the corporations in this country are members of chambers of commerce, political organizations, and the like. Unions are about people working together so it is natural you'd have a national alliance. If you're insinuating that the AFL-CIO controls all these unions, then you have your head in your ass... as I said, sure some unions might be under outside control, I know that my union (which wasn't part of AFL-CIO untila couple years ago anyway) is locally controlled.
Unions can better bad policy Do you like workers who have no motivation to do quality work? Do you like workers who have little or know fear of being fired? Do you like having to kiss the ass of every low-life Union supervisor just to get his people to do their job. Come on. Everyone has had experience with the wonderful work ethics of Union workers.
Once again, quite a generalization... 13% of the workforce is unionized, 48% would be if they could (stats courtesy National Labor Board) All these people are bad workers? Just because you're in a union doesn't mean you wont get fired. And I don't quite know what you mean when you say "Union supervisor?" Supervisors aren't in the union, that's kind of how it works. Furthermore, you are using the same argument here as you do later on... Maybe you've had a bad experience with a couple folks, I know a LOT of IT people that are total fucks too...
Unions give you a voice Yes, let?s just remove any reward for being better at your job than the schlub next to you. We?re all equal in the IT industry and should all be treated the same. While we?re at it lets remove any competition completely and give everyone the same wages irregardless of their abilities.
First of all, you're not addressing the points I made in any arguement, instead you're railing on about the myths of medeocrity. I said specificly that unions don't require the same wages across the board... maybe you should learn to read.
Unions don't support mediocrity AHH, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA!!!! You?re killing me Tony. As soon as you pull your head out of the sand you let me know. AHH, HA, HA, HA!
uh-huh, maybe one day you'll realize that nearly every benefit you enjoy as a worker here in America is the result of union activity... you think before unions we had a 40 hour work week? You think we had widespread benefits and healthcare? Retirement? Safety standards? Don't think so.
Unions start with you Sure, I like your mentioning those ?stupid management decisions? because we all know that management are just a bunch of idiots who don?t know what their doing. You really need to wake up Tony. Management got to be management because they know how to get things done, something that the Unions seem to be very much against.
I am sure many managers are competent employees etc. And there are a lot that aren't, all up and down the line. I can't believe that you're saying, especially in IT, that most managers know more than their employees. That isn't the case. And when the decision-making power lies in the hands of those who don't know what's up... you get stupid decisions.
Not-Tony
Yeah, just a fucking coward.
Unions are diverse I'm gonna talk about something most people on /. don't have in whatever subject they are writing about... personal experience. When I say a union can do something, that doesn't mean every union will. There are hundreds, if not thousands of unions in this country and each one is different. There are really bad ones, there are really good ones, and there are a lot in between. Employee's vote in the union that they belong to (often against very steep odds considering the tactics and "natural" advantage the employer has against its employees) and they can vote to decertify a union as well (which, when it happens is most often a switch to a different union rather than choosing to go unrepresented). In my opinion, the best unions are the ones with the most member participation. This means that people need to be active in their unions for them to serve their needs. More on that in a bit, to get back to the bold, the point I am trying to make here is that your mileage may vary, just like some employers are better than others, some grocery stores are better, some parents are better. It's not realistic to assume that every union could be perfect and like with so many other things, you're not going to hear as much about the success stories than the failures (for every Jimmy Hoffa there are hundreds of "good" organizers like myself, who are really committed to building a better workplace).
Unions can better bad policy People think that it's all about wages or seniority. It's not. There are a lot of things that come standard in your average tech job you might not like. Do you like anti-drug flyers they make you sign saying that you wont do things the company doesn't like outside of its walls (13th amendment violation anyone?)? Do you like illegal non-competition clauses in your contract? Do you enjoy that your supervisor often has the power to enact pointless and ill-planned workplace rules that you have to follow and might have very little luck in changing? Those are all the type of things that a union, if its membership is motivated to do so, can change or work to change. The university has to notify my union when they change a workplace rule (so we can fight it if there is a complaint) and they are prohibited from enacting workplace rules that they can't prove are necessary or even beneficial.
Unions give you a voice I have a lot of friends that work for a certain LARGE corporation that hires a lot of programmers. One of them told me that at their company, you only matter if you're a vice-president or above. In fact, when you call tech support internally there, if you're a vp you go to the special pool of techs to help you, if you're just a worker, who knows when you'll get help. This point is to illustrate that no matter how important you think you are, no matter how much you think your boss loves you, it all comes down to the bottom line and quite often you're not on it. Unions give workers with common interests a common voice to negotiate as "equals" with their employers. If you're in a good union, it might be you that does the negotiations, or someone you know and respect. Working as a group you can get a lot more done that working locally, and I know, a lot of you might be thinking that you are doing fine on your own, well, there's probably a lot of people where you work that aren't getting the sweet deal that you're getting and that probably doesn't make your job easier.
Unions don't support mediocrity I should have made this point #1 cause it's often the #1 argument I hear. First of all, most union contracts don't prevent anyone from making more than anyone else. If you're hot shit and you're employer wants you, there's most likely nothing the union would do to tell the employer that they can't hire you at a higher rate than anyone else (however, on the flip side, if you're the boss' nephew and you're getting the big raise because of that, the union might, rightly so, have something to say about that). They also aren't entirely based on seniority (although they can be) but what is wrong with that anyway? The reason unions often choose seniority as the marker is because it's pretty objective. It makes sense that the longer you work for a company you should make more money. It also doesn't seem too horrible to me that if i work hard for my employer for 30 years, I'll have a little protection for myself. Most of us are real young here, when you're pushing 55-60 and looking a little less attractive, we'll see what tune you're singing then. It is true that unions work to benefit the majority of their workers. This might leave some of the very very best a little in the cold and bring the very very worst up a little bit more than they deserve, but for the majority of us (since we can't all be the very very best) it's much better (and the fact that the very very best can be expected to get their own additional increases since they are so awesome).
Unions start with you There is this idea that a union comes from the outside and does things to its members. This may be how a bad union works, but it's not how the one I work for works. In UPTE its almost all rank and file run. This means that the members make all the decisions and it's very locally based. There's not some guy in a limo calling strikes or making all the decisions here, it's the guy in the cube next to you, or hopefully you yourself.
Well, that's about all the rant I can handle right now. It's not everything I could say, but it's better than nothing. But even if it didn't convince you, try this. For the next month, anytime there's something stupid that happens at your job, some stupid rule or management decision that makes your job not-so-fun, think about if it's the kind of thing you might be able to change if you had the organized support of all your fellow co-workers.
Tony
But without Unions, what force will be left to sustain the upward spiral of inflation?!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
The Company railroad the shop steward and you blame the union.
The Company railroad the shop steward (or any employee) and you claim they are not evil or mean.
The shop steward is properly dealing with his responsibilities, and you claim they are still evil not or mean.
The union quickly appoint a replacement shop steward to protect their member rights and you claim this is a bad thing.
The perspective of your whole post (and posting history) is anti-union, I believe you are probably the devious management who caused these problems in the first place and not an ex-teamster as you claim.
The give away of this fact is that employee's do have a choice, employee empowerment is the whole point of a union. It's the management that don't.
And finally you history of anti-union rant't.
+5 insightfull, overated, vastly over rated!
I doubt most of you have worked in a union shop at any point in your lives.
Imagine the most incestuos, concentrated group of incompetents on charge of your job, your welfare and your career, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. The people who survive 30 years in a union shop to get the highest union positions are not the skilled, not the caring and not the intelligent - they are the stubborn, backstabbing, self-righteous oafs who push everyone out. They are encouraged to do so by management, which of course wants to break up a union and how else to do so but by making the union turn upon itself?
Unlike (I assume) most people who read slashdot, I've worked in "real" jobs that involve intense physical labor, and two of them were complete union shops. While I understand there being a need to protect employees from exploitation, do you think a programmer earning at least 2-3 times the gross national average needs protection? Even in extreme situations (coal mines, heavy labor factories), the union is a necessary evil, not a righter of wrongs.
With unions come politics, internal, external, and "fringe", as in Jimmy Hoffa "fringe". Blue collar workers have learned how to deal with the downsides of the union over the past century, they know how to prolong its usefulness. White collar workers have no such experience, they will have their unions manipulated and twisted into the personal tools of whoever happens to have the most influence in the union.
What will your union provide you with? Medical benefits? Job security? Work safety regulations? Don't make me laugh. You have all that and more, and it's NOT worth giving up a meritocratic system of advancement, peace of mind and your political views over.
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
Ehhnt, thank you for playing. Software is "assembled" by machine, copied from disk to disk. Maybe some data entry clerks put the stuff into the machine, but software engineers are designers - and heck yes I want my car to have been designed by someone willing to try the latest improvements, rather than, say, sticking with a design that leaves out seat belts and air bags because the old design worked. (Just so long as the car does work, but that's why we have QA.)
At my (state) university, the Graduate Student Organization (GSO) recently unionized us. They have obtained dental benefits for us. In addition, as our employment as TAs and RAs superceded our student status and would have prevented us from having free access to the new recreation facility, it was nice that the union fought for that as well. I am somewhat uncomfortable as a Grad student being part of this, mainly due to the threatened preferential hiring practices and substantial fee for joining (we don't get paid a whole heck of lot). However, given the University's occasional profit-centered mentality, it's nice to have someone stand up for you.
US Unions got started in:
A. Coal Mines, Steel Mills and other heavy industries.
B. Truck shops.
C. Garment Factories
Answer: C. Union frindly laws were promoted by feminists, maxists and other clueless loosers in New York city after a garment fire killed 100 or so hapless young women. The laws were a result of hyseria, not reason. Before this the unions could not survive even in the "harshest" of conditions because PEOPLE WHO DO THINGS ARE NOT EVIL, management included. FDR finished the transformation of the US workplace by making New York laws, bassed on the worst possible industry practicies, national. These laws have served the very worst in society and promoted negative behavior since.
It has taken 60 years to climb out of that insanity and some industies will never recover. Just look at US automobile and tire companies.
Someone I know watched his shipyard go Union. It is now more dangerous, lower paying, and oppresive to work in. The Federal government and due processes were abused to get it done. Bleh! Unions are mostly evil.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"and I can tell you straight people did need the union. "
You, my friend, are a bigot. Who's to say that people with 'alternative' lifestyles didn't need the union?
People in IT have been taken advantage of (and taking advantage of) employers for too long now. A central body would definatly be a good thing. If your boss wants you to work that 80 hour week, for no overtime pay and you say no, he/she can simply go out and hire one of the MANY other people out there willing to take on that many hours. A union would certainly force more fairness. I just hope it doesn't turn into an auto-type union.
Joe McGuire
tinfoil.music
tinfoilmedia
So don't you see why membership must be voluntary? Would you to be forced to join the Tories as a condition of employment? In the US, most union members had no choice; they were forced.
In the UK, Union membership is purely voluntery. No one is ever forced or coerced or threatened into joining a Union (Since at least the 70's anyway)
You know I always used to wonder why so many Americans were so opposed to Unions, until I found out that the American idea of a "Union" seems to be completly screwy. How can a Union be for the benefit of a worker if the worker is forced to join to work? How is threatening violance in the workers interests?
None of this happens in the UK, and we're supposedly the Socialists here, the ones who support the idea of worker unity. It seems to me that the best thing for all these people who are afraid of the Unions to do is write to your congressmen to get the laws regarding Unions sorted, and then get some real workable Union policies in place.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
From all appearances, this is the single non-inflammatory statement in your comment. This statement also appears to make the entirety of your point.
Presuming that you are still marginally dealing with unions at this point, you appear to be saying that untiosn will force companies to pay above-market wages for employees. You, sir, have failed economic 101 - wage controls, and above-market wages are coltrolled as much by unions as below-market by government, simply do not work. In the case of enforced above-market wages, compainies will do their best to avoid paying them (a common exanple of which would be shrinking the size of the IT departments). If laws or the nature of the buisness make outright layoffs impossible or extremely difficult, companies will seek to move as much as possible out of the union-controlled area.
Exempting physical maintinance and management, there is very little IT done here that can't be done in Japan. If the cost of buisness in Japan is cheaper than the cost of buisness in the U.S. (or UK, etc.), then companies will move -- it's as simple as that.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
So? Does this somehow make you more worthy? Does it somehow make the earlier poster less worthy of challenging, interesting work? No it doesn't. The original poster actually spends his time off doing things he really enjoys, and there's no reason for you to denegrate him for that. That you spend your time doing topics that also relate to your job does not make you a morally superior person. Your article reads as a troll far more than the original poster's.
It's not just the tech sector! If anyone gets a chance they should go see "Live Nude Girls Unite" it's this awesome documentary about how a grad student working striptease organized the dancers against unfair and _dangerous_ practices.
If it plays in your area (art houses, schools) GO SEE IT!
I'm in a "programming" type Union job.
I program food to go on the shelf at my local grocery store.
It's all about interpretation.
I was part of a support workers union at a College and I left because the union made it uneasy to expand. You weren't allowed to do anything outside your job description. If you were a sys admin you weren't allowed to touch networking etc. It had some upsides but not many.
Unions are famous for getting you to the top of your payband quite quickly but after that there's nothing!
Do you really want to get a raise based on how long you're there rather than based on how well you do your job? Unions support those who don't do thier job and shrug responsibility. They'll fight for those dead sticks to the bitter end.
Trevor.
Being a small web development company in my area would screw me over if a big IT union came in and started posting their stupid billboards that said not to use my clients company because they used a non-union (me) company to design their products.
That's how the strong seperate from the weak... competition. If they can't do a better or equivalent job than my company can at a better or equivalent price, why should anyone buy from them?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I do not have to pay union dues. I have excellent dental, vision, medical and prescription drug benefits. I get tuition assistance from the company although not 100%. I also get a discount on my mortgage and I have an excellent pension plan. I even have stock options.
As for my work environment, I have a nice office and I am expected to work only 40 hours a week although I occasionally work 45 or 50 when needed. The extra hours can be banked and taken off when the work slows down or cashed in. We also get a minimum 3 weeks of vacation although with seniority I have accumulated over 4 weeks.
It seems that most of the poorly treated employees appear to be in the pure tech companies and not so much those that work in the IT departments of non-tech companies.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
I realise that union bashing appears to be a national sport among the US readers on slashdot. I never understood it myself. Even in the US the union movement has had an important role to play in many industries.
Just remember that the majority of slashdot readers from the US seem to represent a right-wing libertarian ideology that very few Americans support. It's just that those who do support it are so scarce they have to go online to meet each other.
--
Mind telling me which agency? Sounds pretty good, maybe they're hiring...
--
--As an ex-Teamster from NY I can tell you that although there were imagined benefits of being in a Union none were realized. Union representitives never came to the aid of any of the employees in my ex-company. The shop steward was railroaded out of his $17US an hour job and the Union's response was to immediately appoint another steward. This wasn't a guy who was likely to make very much more than $17US bucks an hour. He lost his livelyhood trying to protect his fellow workers. The company wasn't evil or mean, but simply trying to save money by asking people to go home early. Most people jumped at the opprotunity.
--For $20US a paycheck ($40 US a month + $250 to join) we got nothing. The employees recently voted the Union out of their building. The Union sued the company and the company agreed to allow the Union to stay for 2 more years.
--Parking lot vandalism has markedly gone up. On 06.04.01 a Union Representitive was arrested for smashing windshields in the parking lot.
--Certainly this individual is not the whole of the Unions of America but one of the bad apples. However if the employees of a company decide they do not want a union protecting them they should be allowed to be rid of them.
--Imagine if you were at an ISP that was unionized and you were unable to get rid of them. Be carful what you wish for.
---
This
Just because its cheaper to now produce the same widgets in India (or the current hype low-cost place) doesn't mean you need to be fired at a 10 seconds notice without rights to pension money etc and a clause in your contract saying you can work in the same field for the next 10 years+.
Sure it might be the best for the company to just relocate to another country, but wouldn't it be nice if they were forced to negotiate instead of telling you to pack your stuff ?
I will be the first person in line to defend the premise that unions served a vital purpose in our (North American) society - they helped to formulate the labour laws that now exist to protect employees from abusive environments at work and prevent wrongful dismissal. However, now that these laws are established and in place, I do not believe that unions serve the vital role they once did. The standard arguments to this are: Who will defend an employee's "rights" to be secure in their job? What would there be to stop a company from halving everyone's wages? What motive would exist to defend those rights without a third party to hold them accountable for their actions. The response to that is two words - "Income Tax". The government wants us to be employed because they always want to have their hands in our preferably money-filled pockets. Thus, the government themselves will uphold the rights of employees and ensure that no-one is wrongfully treated in the workplace. The price we pay for this security is income tax, which I personally prefer to pay than to contribute to some union which only ultimately makes the union heads exhorbitantly wealthy.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Are you high???
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
Is that the best you've got?
Anonymous posts are filtered.
You are arguing from a particular case and
applying it to a general case.
Just because you had a bad experience with
a local teamsters shop, doesn't
1) Mean that that shop was bad. Others
you worked with could have had a positive
experience with that shop.
2) Mean that the teamsters are bad. There
can be a bad shop within the teamsters, while
the majority of teamsters shops are good.
3) Mean that unions are bad. The teamsters
are just one example of a union. There can
be other worker's organizations besides the
teamsters. A union dedicated to lobbying
Washington comes to mind.
Have a good day,
Anonymous posts are filtered.
You say the sector is swamped with substandard
workers who command ridiculous salries & benefits.
Then you say that you prefer to work in a world
where you get rewarded based on your performance.
Which world is it? One that pays substandard
people high salaries? One that pays based on
performance?
Anonymous posts are filtered.
Actually, that 40$ saves you from being a scab. The reallity is , is in West Australia where it's optional, moral people who do join the student union are forced to subsidise scabs ^H^H^H non unionists who use the facilities but won't pay. It's my take on it that freeloaders are worse than .. well worse than something anyway.
Get used to it, the alternative is to be an immoral prick.
And by the way, the term is faggot and it applies only to firesticks you homophobic asshole.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Of course what that means is that they need to be hounded down so that whereever they go, they are deprived of the ability to deny their workers the absolute right of association.
You know really govts should pass international treatys on this. If this company is so figgen cocky to screw hardworking staff in denver over staff meeting up and discussing conditions, london and ANY other country should say "Piss off, we don't wan't you here". The right of free association is too precious to allow it to be trampled on by out of control multinationals.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
IT workers need a Union for the same reason that workers have always formed unions: together you have more power to improve the terms and conditions of our employment than we do as individuals.
Oh, wait, you are doing fine, your 60-hour a week jobs have kept you entertained, the three grand training classes that you had to pay for yourself have kept you up to speed - but now you are unemployed and you can't do much about finding a job because you signed that NDA from hell. Its too bad that you were getting paid hourly and weren't qualified for overtime pay.
Oh well, don't do anything about it, just complain. Find a friend and complain together, but don't do anything about it because unions are lame.
If you want to give away your 8 hour work day, the weekend (all things that were fought and obtained by unions), then that is your prerogative, but don't come bitching and moaning to me when you are burnt out.
Didn't we just have this conversation a few weeks ago?
You should study up on your history. I mean,w hy do you think we (the people -- government) allow these entities to exist? FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD. That's why. How is it for the public good for corporations to do things that harm us?
So how come it never did that before unions came along? How come we were a nation of impoverished people with a few really rich people? How come children had to work just to eat? How come there was no health insurance or vacation time or safety protection or 40 hour week or sick time or ... you name it.
EVERYTHING you take for granted on your job came about because of UNIONS, not because of the generosity of corporations.
I'm curious about the anti-union people, what tdo they think THEY will get out of it if their philosophy succeeds?
Actually, you said it in your message, you EXPECT TO STARVE after your skills become obsolete. (You left out the possibility of a labor surplus occirring.) What kind of suicidal idiot advocates a society that is guaranteed to kill him?
Talk about being brainwashed!!
Actually, if you look at history the economy does much better when taxes are higher. Just look at a chart of GDP growth next to current tax rates. It's just a fact. Look at what happened after Clinton's 1993 tax increase which fell entirely on people making over $250,000.
This makes sense too, when you think about it. When taxes are higher on the rich, not on working people and is distributed downward by the government it means more government services -- while the overall tax burden is lower for working people.
We have a consumer-goods economy, which is driven by more people having more money to spend, not by a few rich people having more money to spend. So this would explain why the economy does better when taxes are higher.
I'm an IT person for a northern MN municipality, and am forced to be a union member (Teamster's), in the same barganing unit as the garbage, sewer, and waterworks workers (If one person gets a pay increase (due to market surveys, excellent job performance, etc.), everyone cries that they deserve one just because they need to keep their standing in the union ranks). I can't say that the union has ever helped me yet, I'm not making much more than I was at my previous job and the benefits are a little less...although I'll see what they do during the next contract negotiations
... when I was employed by a State University. It was an interesting place. On one hand you have job security and benefits.
On the other hand, since EVERYONE is considered equal, EVERYONE gets the same 3% (or less) annual pay raise. Luckily, I worked for a manager who fought for double digit pay raises for me, since I possessed a valuable skill set and was willing to work hard. I've seen people who in management positions, who were promoted simply because all the talented people had moved to better jobs. During one six month period during the time I was employed, almost the entire LAN systems staff quit.
I've seen people get shuffled off to meaningless jobs because they do the absolute minimum to stay employed. Firing someone for incompetence almost takes an act of God.
In the end, I realized if I wanted to something more than a 35 hour a week job with limited professional prospects - don't get me wrong, the pay and benefits taken together were a decent package - I needed to find a place where people are valued for what they contribute, not for longevity of service.
Now I know this shift entails taking on a lot of risk and uncertainty, but this is the way I want it. With greater risk and uncertainty, the rewards can be had. I shouldn't have to have a set lifestyle forced down my throat, which is what a union would do to me. In my opinion, life is by definition uncertain. There are pitfalls and hazards everywhere. It's up to us to navigate our way through it.
Information Technology workers may be better served by a professional organization rather than a union. If there was a powerful organization like the American Medical Association for IT workes, it would have a lot of the same benefits of a union without the inherent problems. It could provide access to employment information, discounted legal representation in employment disputes, professional standards, lists of companies with employment problems (that is, a black list), etc.
The key is obviously to create an organization that is well suited to IT workers. That is, an organization that conducts all its business openly, makes its finances available for members to see on its website, and has significant member input. The problem to creating such an organization is that you need wide acceptance to build something that has the power of the AMA. To get that acceptance the organization will need a leader that can generate a lot of media attention.
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
My environment is alot different. The management is ok, but the people I work with, both contractors and employees are competent and enjoy their work.
Also, I'm not trying to brag at all. I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to illustrate that my job isn't anything like being in some pipefitters or auto worker union. The only union influence i see is during salary negotiation and via benefits.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Thank you for reading my post, I think you are the only one to do so.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
No, I'm not.
Due to the nature of my appointment, I am not allowed to strike by law.
If I decide I want alot more money, I'll start consulting, and increase my salary to around 120k.
Apparently YOU have been paying WAY too much attention to the right-wing propaganda and Alger Hiss road to riches stories to. It's also very cool that you have managed to be successful and raise start a family already. I consider that quite an accomplishment.
I haven't bought into the whole philosophy at all, but I've worked at a couple of tech companies and noticed alot of differenes. At my last job, my time was their time. I was compensated well and was in a responsible and interesting job. But I was responsible for things at 2am on saturday or during thanksgiving dinner without compensation. I am still responsible for things now, but get paid when i have to sacrifice my time. And now that it costs money, alot of 'mission critical' things are no longer 'mission critical' at 3am.
If you were put on this earth to toil and sweat to make others rich, god bless you. My 401k needs more people like you. But my loyalties lie with my familiy, myself and my friends, not my employer.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Please. Tell that to the 20,000+ people laid off from Intel in the last ten years in order to avoid having to pay for benefits & pensions.
The biggest problem in the technology industry is that 3733t techies like yourself do not realize that your jobs will be obsoleted by computers, new technology & cheap foreign labor in another 10 years. We are paid inflated wages because of a tight labor market. Once the market adjusts, 100k java programmers will be a thing of the past.
And don't tell me I have no ambition. I have gone very far very fast in this agency and will go farther.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I'm a Programmer/Network Specialist for a state government agency, and required to join a Union.
I pay like $30/month but that includes good dental and vision benefits. I also get up to $2000 a year for tuition reimbursement through the union.
It's a great deal; I'm getting paid a good salary for interesting work, I'm not a slave, have a great pension plan (which is guaranteed by the state constitution) and 401k-like plan and am getting a free master's degree.
The union isn't a be-all end-all, but it serves a purpose. Unless you are a "superstar" who sacrifices his social life to keep completely up-to-date on the hottest tech fads, it is impossible to negotiate a good deal with a large corporation or government agency.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Unions have their place... but in this case, the particular union does not fit. I can entertain the idea of a union of and for people like myself (I happen to be a Unix Admin), but why on earth would I want a blue collar union? They don't understand my needs, my desires.
We vote this Thursday. I know how I'm voting. Please, Boeing paycode 2 & 6 people... Remember to vote. All it takes is 50% +1 of *THE VOTES CAST* to get unionized. Vote how you will, vote your own conscience. Just please vote!
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Because it is their children that will be paying taxes to pay for your social security / pension in your retirement - why should they do that?
not in the sense that lawyer and medical doctors are. AMA and ABA were set up to lobby for laws to RESTRICT the supply of lawyers and doctors. By restricting the supply, these professionals can charge a higher fee. Software workers are not in an environment where this is possible. 1. supply still lags demands, so there is no incentive to restricts supply yet. This is also the primary reason so many /.ers don't feel a need for an union.
2. quality supply is growing around the world, so it is hard to restrict the employers from going oversea. Indian and Chinese software workers are easily as competent as US ones.
3. lawyer, MD, and even civil engineers conjure up the specter of public disasters to support a rigorous certification process which restricts supply. Software workers cannot make those kinds of arguments yet. This may come to pass when a major part of everyone's life depends on some kind of software.
Of course, if you'd said Communication Workers' Union, I'd have found myself agreeing with you.
Tom.
Oh arse
Your other suggestion, setting up shop on your own, makes more sense. If (as I suspect) there are smart people willing to buy your services, you'll do much better!
sulli
RTFJ.
...are unionized and are going on strike
e ws -82312620010616-080643.html
http://atlantic.globaltv.com/mar/news/stories/n
Man, why do people like unions? The problem with unions is they are based on the (incorrect) belief that people have the right to a job, even if they don't do it as well as someone else. That goes against everything I've ever felt as an employee. The way to keep your job is to keep your skills up, and find a place where you are treated well. It's worked for me for the past 10 years quite well.
More importantly, unions usually demand that if you belong to that union, you pay dues for "protection" on every job you work. If you belong to a union, you can't take a non-union job. Think about that for a second. Would you be allowed to do work on an open-source project if you belong to a union? Probably not.
Unions are for wussies who fear their lack of skills and ability to keep up with the times.
The unions do not force workers to pay political money either. Most unions have a political fund. We vote as to whether we should have such a fund, and where it should do. To be honest though the idea of a union not involved in "politics" is absurd. If work conditions, pay, workers rights, and so on are not part of politics then what is?
No doubt some unions have support violence against workers, and have fought against workers political rights. No movement is universally good. There again I think you will find more of these attacks coming from the multi-nationals.
Phil
Why? Who is causing the violence? Is this a problem of your society rather than unions?
"does this mean that after the vote, each individual worker has no choice"
They get a choice during the vote. Do you get a choice to have a different president from everyone else if you don't like him.
"Why is it absurd"
Well as I explained a union is a inately political entity. A non political union makes little sense. "Not true, actually"
Then our experiences differ markedly. The last time that I faced the threat of extreme violence in the shape of a horse back baton charge it was not the union doing it.
Phil
Because its a damn union. Its a democratic organisation. You express your opinion, you vote on it, and then you act on the result of the vote. Even if you do not like the result of the vote you still act with the decision. This is the whole point of a democracy. In the UK the union votes as to whether or not it can engage in politcal activity. And almost all of them do.
This is like saying during a strike that you should only go on strike if you want to. Its crap. If the union membership votes to go on strike, then everyone goes on strike even if they do not agree with it. You can continue to argue that the union should not be striking but you do not work, and you don't cross the picket line.
It works just like a country. You get to vote for the legislature. They make laws. If you break them you get nicked. And just like a countries democracy its flawed. There are lobbiests, the unions are infiltrated people from many organisations (state and political). But like democracy its a hell of a lot better than many of the alternatives, and its a hell of a lot better than having nothing at all.
Phil
Yeah this is the direct funding for a politcal party which as you say is a voluntary contribution. The union is essentially just providing the administration.
As well as that the union has to vote on whether it can engage in political campaigning of any sort, and whether funds can be put aside for this. And of course on top of that the individual union branches can give money to who ever they damn well like. So I know quite a few union branches gave money to some of the parties to the left of the labour party at the last election whilst few of the national parties do.
The first two votes are a legal requirement. The first is probably justified, the second is absurd as a non political union is an oxymoron. And the last I don't know about. The union branches have to vote on it if the amount is of any size at all.
Phil
Why should a worker be unable to feed his family because the company that he works for decides everyone should take a pay cut because the management screwed up somewhere.
Phil
Can you read?
Its got sod all to do with bullying, its to do with being a part of a democratic organisation. You get to put your point of view, and then you get to vote. Following the vote then you go along with a majority decision whether or not you agree with it.
The whole point of a union is to act together, because that way you can get things done that you can not get done on your own. The nature of any democractic organisation is that sometimes it will do stuff that you do not agree with. Under these circumstances you go with the majority decision.
If you want to act with people then this involves compromise, always. The difference is with a union and company is that with a union everyone gets to express their opinion and everyone gets to vote. With a company you just do what the boss says.
Phil
Unions are not perfect and never have been, but it does not take a lot of looking at history to see how many things I have are as a result of union activity. Health and Safety at work, sick pay, various pension rights, industrial tribunals, and so on. It does not take much looking at recent history to see how much we are loosing as the result of the weakening of union power over the last 15 years.
I realise that union bashing appears to be a national sport among the US readers on slashdot. I never understood it myself. Even in the US the union movement has had an important role to play in many industries.
Phil
Union frindly laws were promoted by feminists, maxists and other clueless loosers in New York city after a garment fire killed 100 or so hapless young women. The laws were a result of hyseria, not reason.
hysteria? 100 women died needlessly in the Triangle Factory fire because they were locked inside a fire hazard. When the fire broke out, the women had two choices, to burn alive, or jump to their deaths from the 9th floor.
the fire itself may not have happened if adequate fire protection practices were used in the first place
basic rights you take for granted in the workplace did not exist back then
hiring celebrities to do their PR instead of improving working conditions for their employees
the reason is not just unions, although many third world countries do not have unions, or health standards or safety standards
in addition to all of these factors, there is also exchange rates
so while a factory where you can lose your fingers or catch dysentery is probably cheaper to produce in (none of that needless safety equipment), the exchange rate of the country itself may have more of an impact on the budget
"Proletariat workers" and "capitalists" (bourgeoisie) are drawn from the same stock, sure. And they're certainly not diametrically opposed. But the different natures of their social situation mean they work for slightly different things. In a worst-case scenario, workers are simply another form of raw material. A savvy employer may know to manage his resources well, but not every employer is savvy, and even that doesn't neccessarily prevent the most egregious problems.
To suggest that there are, ultimately, differences in what employers and employees want does not imply some sort of overwhelming class warfare. Heck, the fact that there are significant differences within this strata is what makes unions neccessary. If nothing else, they present a way to communicate between interests, and allow the employer to address the major concerns of his/her employees.
Sure, it doesn't always work that way. And sometimes the most votes won't win you the presidency ::grin::, but rather than dismiss the entire system as unworkable, a more sensible solution would be to recognize why unions exist, and then try to correct any faults with the implementation. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
My coworkers seem to look down on unions even more than they do anonymous structs, gotos, and bit shifts for division and multiplication. We're safe.
...I'm here to help.
If IT ever becomes unionized, I'll have to find a new career.
I worked for the Government for a while (comissioned USAF officer). Most of the DoD civilians I worked with responded to nothing more than the presence or absence of light, water, and food. Beyond that they were dead to the world.
Any bureaucracy eventually becomes a giant machine operated by pygmies. Unions are no different.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
"If you think unions are so good, why can't they keep manufacturing and other industrial jobs from going to Mexico and overseas?"
To do this they would sack all there workers? What are they gonna do? go on strike?
-----
"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
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"Almost isn't good enough - but it's almost good enough."
-Me
Well, that does sound like a great deal, doesn't it? For 50K all the teacher has to do is spend a few hours after class grading, preparing lessons, sometimes tutoring or mentoring. They get treated like sh!t by parents who expect them to raise their children and can't believe it's their own fault for bad parenting when the kid causes trouble at school. Geez, I really could go on, but I only know teachers, rather than teach, but it's one of the most demanding jobs with the lowest pay. Bad ones can make it look easy, and that holds for any occupation. Good ones put it a lot more time for their salary than you can imagine. Hey, guess what, because of the *great* retirement packages they get, the can't draw full social security either. I often wonder what draws people into it.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My dad didn't spare the rod and spoil the child, either, but when I went to school I certainly knew enough kids who needed some serious parenting. Worse today, with all the dual income families and latch-key kids.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Moving closer to work would cost about $600 more, per month in rent.
I live 2 blocks off the ocean and get fresh air, ran 5 miles last night, and usually bike 30-35 miles in the mountains each Sunday. The city I work in was 90 degrees yestertay, expected hotter today, it was a very comfortable 65 degrees at home.
Work is in a city which has air brown enough to see as I descend into the valley in the morning. I watch the brown crud rise several hundred feet during the day, just before I escape back home.
If the air doesn't get you, the traffic probably will. Some of the most dense traffic in the country.
The only public transit would take about 2 hours each way, taking away my time for a workout which doesn't require a club membership.
If I could telecommute then I could eat during breaks and run or bike during lunch.
If I could telecommute then I could save ~$160 per month in gas and contribute less to greenhouse gases and air pollution.
2 months ago I bought a used Dodge Dakota with a 4 cyl, 5sp. I get about 25 mpg on 87 octane. Much better than the 20 mpg/92 octane car which is now semi-permanently parked (tho the old car did the hills in 5th gear and the truck sometimes needs to dip into 3rd)
The answer really is for employers to understand that employees make a commitment to more than just their 8 hours (as per the subject, anything over is time and a half), they commit to a commute, long or short. Mine happens to be long, many of my coworkers have a longer commute. One flies in each week.
Management and Labor need to move beyond 1920's thinking. Particularly for those whose work could be done at home a few days a week. From organized labor's point of view, the worker is getting a better deal. From management's point of view, if they don't do the work then take away the carrot or fire 'em and hire someone who does.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ummm, no. F--- that.
Why should a union worker be unable to feed his family because the sheeple that he works with decided a strike would be a good idea? Does he deserve to have his car-windshield broken and his house vandalized because he wants to feed his kids?
If he wants to work, let him. And if a company wants to fire every single one of the ungrateful assholes who strike, they should be allowed to do that too. If the employees were really that important, the company wouldn't be able to replace them. If they can replace them, that just means that the union was ignoring economic reality in a quest to soak the company.
Tim
People have a lot of funny ideas about how much their "rights" are really worth.
StoneWolf
On the other hand, I'm pushing fifty. Five years ago after 3 months of coding 14+ hours a day 6+ days a week I wound up in the hospital at 3:00 a.m. with chest pains. Turned out to be a panic attack, not a heart attack. The cardiologist identified my as a programmer near a deadline from the symptoms. Turns out he sees 2 or 3 programmers a week having sever physical symptoms as the result of the stress of to many hours spent coding, too much caffeine, and to little sleep.
When I told my manager that I was under doctors orders to cut back my work hours to something near normal (40 hours a week) I was fired.
I am not a fan of Unions. But, I know that programmers are being exploited. So what if we make 2 or 3 times the average salary in the US. What good is that if you work 2 or 3 times as many hours to get it? What good is it if you can't keep working as a programmer when you are 40+ years old? What good is it if you burn out, freak out, or simply die?
The problem is that good programmers program because they love it. And that love is being exploited.
Now, when I interview for a job I tell people up front that if they are looking for someone to spend 60+ hours a week coding then don't hire me 'cause I won't do it. It makes it a lot harder to find jobs... But, I've managed. In some ways it seems to make me more valuable in the eyes of management.
Some days I still program for 12+ hours a day. But, when I do no more than 8 of those hours are for someone else. The rest is for me.
StoneWolf
I've spent the majority of my life working to hone my craft. While you're sitting on your arse watching American's Funniest Home Videos, I'm reading up on the latest implementation strategies for distributed systems. While you're hanging out with your buddies throwing back another can of Old Milwaukee, I'm busy doing research for my next book or magazine article. I spend an average of 2-3 months each year on sabbatical. You vacation in Disney World.
/. community. But trolls like this are a common occurance in the consulting industry and I'm in no mood to deal with ill-informed prujudices such as this. My only true regret is that this comment will probably never be read by laslo2, thereby depriving his poor undeserving soul of the wake-up call it so obviously needs.
I work hard and make a lot of sacrifices to be a, what phrase did you use to denigrate my profession?, a "black belt, gunslinger, or whatever the current cute buzzword of the day is." Are you trying to summon up the word "guru", perhaps?
It's my abilities, my experience, my presentation, that get's me the cool projects that you lament are taken away from you, not being spoon-fed as you seem to expect. "I deserve this cool project. It's my right that I should get this great assignment. The world owes me the more interesting and challenging opportunities despite my lack of effort to persue them on my own, to raise my abilities and core competencies, to work for that which I earn." By who's standards, I ask.
The fact of the matter is, and what pisses you off, is that people like me have more ambition, higher goals, greater dedication, perhaps even more capacity to excel at our chosen profession. It's not a matter of being a consultant -- I've seen plenty of consultants who aspire for the same level of mediocrity that you have so successfully achieved. It's not excluding employees, as some of the most talented people that I have had the good fortune to work with have been employees of my clients.
It's simply that you're upset that the professional world is passing you by, that you can't keep up, and can't bring it upon yourself to place blame where it belongs. If you spent more time trying and less time crying, you wouldn't be so bitter.
My apologies to the rest of the
Try becoming a contributor. Stop being a looter.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
The point is that he made a decision - a decision to persue liesure instead of profession. Do I hold that decision against him, of course not. Likewise, I do not expect him to hold me in comtempt because I have excelled farther. And yes, I realize that I am speaking in generalities and stereotypes, but so was he.
That I spend my time doing topics that also relate to my job does not make me a morally superior person. It does, however, make me extraordinarily fortunate that I have found a profession that I actually enjoy, nay, love to be a part of. But do not worry, dear friend, I have a life, hobbies, interests, and fancies that exist outside the realm of technology and the like.
Being a consultant requires a lot more work than being an employee. Many consultants must manage their own company, employees, and maintain multiple clients simultaneously, in addition to whatever project their current client has them working on.
Consultants tend to have a greater degree of specialization than employees, whose skills tend to be more generalized. When utilized properly, a consultant is brought in for that specific phase of a project that requires their services. When they are no longer needed, they are released. Employees have more stability--at the expense of flexibility.
Too many IT professionals are ignorant of what a consultant really is. Their ignorance leads to bigotry. This problem is prevelant in many companies around the world, just as it is with the above poster.
Do I feel that my being a consultant makes me more deserving of opportunites? Aboslutely not. My experience, abilities, successes, efforts, dedication, and marketing make me more deserving.
Does my being a consultant make the employee less deserving of opportunties. Of course not. However, if the employee were capable of fulfilling the requirements of the opportunity, their company would not be enlisting the services of a consultant. Companies turn to consultants because they either lack the ability or the resources within their organization.
But let's be honest with each other, shall we? The most common accusation that I hear is that consultants make more money than employees--that's the real issue, isn't it? Most employees have absolutely no idea what their realized cost to a company is. They assume that it's merely the cost of their salary. They forget that a company has to pay social security (8.5% in the US), payroll taxes (in addition to those that come out of the employees gross pay), insurance and other benefits, facilities (phone, lights, furniture), training, and ancillary services such as receptionists, human resources, medical staff (most large companies maintain one). Add on to this other perks that might be provided such as subsidized lunches, coffee, water, gyms, child care (all of which, by the way, are provided by a Johnson & Johnson, Merck, AT&T, and others), and the cost of an employee can end up being *double* their salary.
But, yes, at the end of it all, a consultant can still make more money. Why? Perhaps because the consultant has a better skill set, more experience, higher ambition, more drive. Or maybe they're just better at negotiating their fees than employees are at working out their salary rates.
Or maybe it's that the perception of consultants is that they bring a level of value deserving of those rates. Maybe it's just supply and demand. Maybe the system is just screwed up.
Maybe it's just the simplest, oldest business rule that has ever existed: "In business you don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate."
Mostly what I resent, by both his statements and your accusation of trolling and implying that I feel superior, is this notion of what is deserved. Quite frankly, I don't care what you feel you deserve. If you want something, you go out and get it, work for it, fight for it. I feel disdain for people who feel that they deserve something without earning it. That they should be handed opportunities, rather than having to find them for themselves. That the world owes them, without being expected to provide anything in return.
There's a term for people like that: they're called "looters."
Looters feel that the world should take care of them--because it always has. Looters feel that they shouldn't have to work hard--because there have always been others to work hard for them. Looters believe that others should produce, while they should take. Looters despise those who have made opportunities for themselves, who have achieved success and wealth and the respect of others. Looters feel that they are "owed", and should not have to "earn."
I've chosen to not be a looter. I've chosen to be a Producer.
I have decided that I will make opportunities, not demand them. That I will earn, not expect. That I will work for everything that I have achieved, rather than obtain a handout. If I fail at that which I attempt, at least I will know that I tried.
But don't make the foolish mistake of expecting me to be remorseful and apologetic for the things that I have achieved, for my success, or for whatever it might be that I have and that you do not.
And if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm not talking about anything even remotely having to do with money. Money is a by-product of success and effort. It is not the result. Happiness, pride, self-satisfaction, and fulfillment are the results. It just so happens that those are traits that people are willing to pay for.
I find it interesting that someone earlier mention ed Kurt Vonnegut's short-story "Harrison Bergeron." I think an even better example would be Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." I've already posted the link above--you can put in the effort to find it yourself.
You may not like my opinion about Looters. I don't care--your opinion means naught to me. Read "Atlas Shrugged", take a look at the people around you, above you, below you, and those you consider your peers.
Then decide who you want to be for the rest of your life.
A producer.
Or a looter.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
I am an independent IT consultant and I will do everything I can and spend everything I have to in order to ensure that unions don't make it into IT.
The reason is very simple. Unions and their employees don't like non-union competition. If a company unionizes, they will not hire consultants. They won't be able to for fear of their union employees striking/walking out/whatever you want to call it.
For those companies that do hire consultants, the unionized workers will be hostile towards the consultants. This is due to the "Remember the Union Label" team-based, all-else-is-heresy mentality that goes along with unions. I've worked in them (before I went into IT), so I know.
Here's another problem with unions--they tend to be specialized. No sooner after the IT union is formed, will we see the DBA union, the UI Interface Union, the Tech Writer's Union... You think it's hard enough to get things done now? You can forget it with several different factions.
And don't even think of prototyping your application against MySql or Access or some other stand-alone database. You're in the Application Developer's Union, and the database boys are gonna get pissed.
That's not an unreasonable scenario--just ask anyone who works in construction or similar industry where multiple unions all work on the same project. It's a mess, it slows development/work down, and it needlessly drives up costs.
It's simple. Unions are bad for IT.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
With a brand new baby I found it nearly impossible to keep up with the demanding schedule of my last job. As is the case in most programming jobs, tight deadlines resulted in many unexpected overtime hours. (ie: can you stay an extra couple of hours?) This unpredictability and lack of compensation for extra time worked added way too much stress to my already busy life. I began searching for another job in the area and eventually landed a unionized programming job with the provincial government. (Ontario) I can honestly say I love my new job! Compensated overtime, a fair salary (48k CDN for 1.5 years experience, PowerBuilder and Java), 3 weeks vacation, training and a large team of experienced (contract employees) programers to work with. I have more time with my family, more take home pay and a slue of benefits. I still work hard, but my level of stress is way down and as a result I'm much happier. As far as I'm concerned, for a family man or woman a unionized IT job is a great option.
and as much as I'd like to bitch about the union and the way it screws me over I have little reason to.
/.er complains about. Some of my coworkers are lazy because they know it would be difficult for the company to fire them. I also do not have as much control over my career (I cannot negotiayte my own contract). And yes, there is a bit more bureaucracy crap.
Sure, there are the typical problems every
After a year here though, I am noticing some real positives. When I compared my job to my non unionized friends & family I found a few interesting things out. I get 12 more days off a year then my wife who does development for a non union shop. I also work less hours, unless of course I am working a deadline. In which case I will most likely get paid overtime. My contract states I get a certain amount of training every year. So, even if the company is doing poorly they still have to supply that training to me. Since a new contract was just ratified a couple months ago I am guaranteed a raise for the next 3 years. I know some people who had to go without even standard of living raises this year, not because their employer was doing poorly but because their employer thought next year might be tough. My raises aren't big and fat by any means, but they are nice and definately help to raise my standard of living. My medical benefits are better than anyone I know. I pay less than one third of what my friends pay or what we would pay if we went through my wife's employer for insurance.
I know many people will still scream bloody murder when the topic of an IT union comes up. In my opinion though, as this new generation of IT workers gets a little older and starts to tire of 60+ hour work weeks, and they get families they will welcome some sort of entity to help bargain for them. I'm not saying you typical union but perhaps a guild of some sort. A worldwide body of IT proffesionals that sets guidelines for employment of it's members may be the way to go. A company that employees only 10 programmers probably would not interest a union much anyway.
Right to work protections suck, they make it even harder for me to fire incompetent scum that was hired before me. I'm glad I'm in NY though, at least I don't have to deal with that annoyance.
"Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
When I think of unions, this experience comes to mind.
We are in Chicago, some trade show, early 1990s. We need to hang up a poster on the wall of our little area. We hang it up, no problem. 15 minutes later, some big burly guy starts screaming at all of us in the booth and fines us $250 for not using the union workers of this said complex to put that picture up. We take it down, and submit a request to have the picture hung.
Now, I kid you not, two hours later, four guys show up to hang our picture. One stands back 10 feet guiding the picture, one guy stands on each end rasing it up and down, and one guy is on a ladder holding the picture.
Imagine this applied to say, GPL Programming
How many guys does it take to write a int main()? We got one guy to declare the integers, one guy to declare the floats, another guy that has to be consulted when long integers or double floats are required...heaven forbid we call another program, because then that programs steward has to be involved to make sure we don't cause a conflict between the two applications, but wait, we must engage the operating system people, and then the system people to make sure it won't cause the hardware to crash....
I'm sure that's an extreme exageration, but think about it folks. This could happen to some extent. Most of us Uber Geeks here on Slashdot have not ever had a job situation, and working 80 hour weeks happens, but it's rare and the rewards are great, at least in my experience.
I mean, how many other jobs have you pulling down $150k in a state where the median income is $32K? Gotta love the Nebraska/Kansas/Missouri/Oklahoma region. We have over 3000 open positions in the major cities alone....not to mention the boon docks. E-Commerce will get you all your toys....
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Unions thats why, they artificially inflate labor costs, resulting in people earning way more than they should for their skill set. They have seriously eroded the american job situation, and are in my opinion a reason for the gap between haves and have nots.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Interestingly enough most of the Southern States here in the US have "right to work" laws". YMMV from state to state the laws are different but the essence is that you can't be forced to join a union in order to have a job. This doesn't mean that unions don't exist, or that by not joining a union you arn't affected by collective barganing etc..
I currently work for a large cap telecom company and I am a card carrying CWA member, but not exactly by choice. When I was hired told to "choose now" and by the way, even if you opt out of the union you will still be paying the dues. What else could I do but join the union. The repesentation is there if I need it, but the quality of work seems to suffer greatly in a union shop. Speak the phrase 'Work ethic' in there and you are met with only blank stares. No one _ever_ goes the extra distance to further our the company's goals and the 'stick-it-to-the-man' attitude is the rule. Not a day goes by that doesn't include a meeting with the union steward over an individual being forced to work a holiday or a schedule they don't like:"I want to work Sun-Thur not Mon-Fri, so-and-so works Sun-Thurs and I have seniority!". It makes me sick to hear this after spending 15 years as a chef in various restraunts (not a bad job if you work in a nice place and maybe run things) where the work is physical and demanding, and the hours sometimes long depending on the needs of the business. If the business prospered, you prospered. Union empoyees seem to drain any shred of nobility the job might of had.
I don't care much for the union but it is a neccessary evil. I don't want to be replaced by 14yr old girls forced to work 14 hour days for little pay and no overtime. Which is what would happen if there were no unions (or laws,exaggeration admitted). What's more is I'm certain that I make more money, my job is more secure, my benefits more attractive and my life better, in the broader sense, than in a non-union shop. The adversarial relationship between the company and the union keeps both from running amok.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
>it sucks the way some IT workers are expected
>to give up their lives for some company.
It sucks the way that *most* people in *most* jobs or professions, especially corporate drones, are expected to subsume their entire existence into The Company... unlike most others, tech workers have much greater opportunities to say "stuff that for a game of soldiers" and up and and leave for somewhere employees are treated as human beings... many other people don;t seem to have that choice (except those blue-collar workers who are expected to work strictly the hours they're paid for, with no real expectation of loyalty on either side - both know that the other is only there for them until a better job | the next recession comes along. The middle classes, despite what Scott Adams hoped, seems not to have learnt that lesson.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
I completely agree. We, the computer literate - geeks, nerds, hackers, whatever you want to call yourself - I'd say the /merely competent/ for modern living -- should rise up, overthrow the clueless PHBs, the cookbook programmers in it for the money, the middle managers who choose our tools based on marketing hype and FUD, and (presumably) institute the First Republic of Hackers (something like the Republic of Perl?)
I've been hearing whispers that my employer is looking at a wholesale switchover to Java from mod_perl, entirely for marketing-driven reasons. Our intranet runs on ASPs and of course is a pile of shit - yet is touted as a "leading edge project management tool" in our PR guff. It goes on, and on, and on... putting massive investment into mobile data and WAP when any idiot could have seen months ago that it was dead in the water... drenching everything in Flash, unreadble arty fonts, blandest-of-the-bland 'Design'... and all the other signifiers of lameness.
It makes me sick - not just that it happens here, in what is supposed to be a nimble, aggressive young startup, but that it's seen as the norm, as something every company must aspire towards. Sadly, it seems that they're right to believe that our potential customers (blue-chip corporates) won't take us seriously without a sufficiently stinky pile of marketing bullshit in the pitch.
The hell with it, I say. I'm sick of explaining to these people why security is a Good Thing, or why it's Bad to have webpages that only work in IE 5 and above. Think I'm going to go work for myself in a bit, but (to get back on topic) a union of tech workers should stand up for those values. (Those SORT OF values, that is, rather than the things which just flew off the top of my head just then!) That's the sort of union I'd join, not one that threatens a nationwide PHP-monkey strike if their demands for at least two free soft drinks a day are not met... ("It'll hoit, buster, it'll hoit!" -HHGttG)
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"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
The right of free association is too precious to allow it to be trampled on by out of control multinationals.
I generally agree with you. Free association is very important. But I don't think that trying to unionize a plant or other business location falls under the category of free association. You are certainly free to meet with union people, talk with them, and even discuss joining. But when a shop goes union, everybody in the shop is usually forced to go union, even those who wish to choose not to associate with union folks. So why is it that your freedom of association can infringe on my freedom of association?
Furthermore, how is closing down a site and moving it to another city infringing on your freedom to associate with whoever you choose? You can still meet with your union buddies all you want, you just can't do it in my shop.
While reading your comment I saw this at the bottom of the page: "Superior ability breeds superior ambition. -- Spock, "Space Seed", stardate 3141.9" Kinda relevant huh? So anyway if you KNOW you aren't a hotshot and that is holding back your career why don't you concentrate on BECOMING a hotshot so you can be the worker/consultant who gets all the exciting projects?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Well, all this about unions etc. has been fairly interesting. What may make some sense is to organize a professional organization, such as doctors, psychologists, social-workers, lawyers, and many other service-oriented professions have.
These are quasi regulatory, quasi advocational organizations responsible for managing quality and standards of service, but also of promoting the interests and welfare of the members.
These are no less suceptible to the machinations of politics (my father is the Executive Director of a Social Workers' Association) but I have seen far fewer "nasty" politics emerge. Such an association could explicitly abstain from partisan politics in its constitution, and could establish mediation and arbitration policies for dispute resolution and some of the positive elements.
In essence, it's a restricted union-esque organization. Since it's not "in opposition" to management, but an umbrella organization that managers can be a part of, if they fit the professional designation, then it can be quite co-operative.
If nothing else, this organization could, rather than a force to confront management abuses, instead provide an educational, consultative approach that can be made truly win-win.
regards,
Christian Gruber
i - This sig provided by
Maybe not for computers, but unions are a good thing. You need to realize who sets your wages, your company. I just got hired, and they froze my wages. Funny stuff people. Thay're expanding, and they froze my wages. Even funnier. I can't easily move around because I don't make that much, and have a no compete clause. Guess what? I stuck. I could use a union. I am a news videographer, and there really aren't that many of us around, so jobs are scarce. Feel that love.
Yep, unions are the key to personal riches!
Fool! It's a LISP predicate.
(if (Communication-UnionP (car *person*)) (print (cdr *person*) + "is a dope!"))
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Tell it, bro. Wait till that luser sees the deductions from his first real paycheck. Socialism sounds so awesome...when it's other peoples' money.
Also, I want to know why he doesn't use free condoms, too, on his girlfriends...oh, wait, geeks don't need condoms to polish to FHM or Maxim.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I'd like to suggest that corporations that suck do so because of the absence of Unions. Look at Wal-Mart. I don't want to enumerate the reasons why Wal-Mart sucks, but I will say that Wal-Mart treats it's employees like garbage. (as garbage) They work for very little and their chances for advancement are always very small.
Why do the employees take the abuse?
During their training they are subjected to anti-union propaganda. Videos that might not brainwash the average Slashdotter are able to compltely melt the minds of Wal-Mart employees.
Wal-Mart works against unions in other ways too. Wal-Mart once had a meatpacking division, and when a Union was successfully formed, Wal-Mart terminated that part of their business.
While most IT professionals are well paid just because the skills are so in demand, and workplace hazards are limited to the vaporous carpal tunnel syndrome. Unskilled people are forced to take what they can get, and what they can get is very little without the power of unions. While unions in the IT industry do very little, if a union were to survive in a Wal-Mart-type environment it would really shake things up. Wal-Mart knows this. Realize that corporations are in business for shareholder's a profit, not worker's profit. Realize that Joe Sixpack has a crappy job, and he can't do anything about it on his own.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I work for the Canadian government in the tech industry, and as such I am forced to join a union. As health care is free in Canada, paid for by taxes, and as my employer already has a decent dental and vision package, I am receiving no benefits from being part of this union, other than a 10 percent discount in car insurance that in no way makes up for my union dues. Additionally, to demonstrate how ineffective a tech union is at the government level, my union has spent the last 1.5 years "negotiating" with the Treasury Board of Canada for a 12 percent salary increase, and recently had their strike mandate repudiated when members chose to accept a 7 - 11 percent raise over 2 years. Meanwhile, several other groups of government workers had salary increases of 20 percent or more. It seems that even while representing highly skilled workers who can dem,and large salaries in the private sector, the union was laughably useless in advancing my salary and benefits with the feds, who can merely legislate me back into work if I should choose to strike anyway. Union meetings I have attended were devoid of any real discussion and instead replete with rhetoric and bitterness. I really wish I could opt out of my union.
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
To me, if so, that's got to be more irony piled on top of that wire report of two days ago where ex-Dot-COMers are living from government handouts, as I suspect the people hardest hit by the downturn are going to be those who rejoiced in being able to negotiate their own situation and get the 6 digit salaries and game playing privileges that were oft-talked about. Just as the west coast dot-commers were the ones screaming about being over taxed, laughing at those paid less than they were in "old-economy" "secure jobs", those who are used to the high-living of a skills-shortage job market are going to find themselves most battered when their conditions suddenly look out of place - especially when general conditions plummet to below what they ought to be for any decent employer. Pay freezes and cuts, unfair (but difficult to prove unfair) dismissals, are all becoming more common.
I shall read this with interest...
--
KMSMA (WWBD?)
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Doh!
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Unions are like locusts, and thats not the kind of problem I need at my job, thanks.
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Sure, the primary intent of the union is rather grand. However, due to simple human nature, sometimes the reality isn't in tune with the primary cause. I think a lot of people are ignoring the idea that something (perhaps a union) can work in certain arenas and not work in others. It's all entirely contextually dependant.
Do you chat your mother with those fingers?
Painting all unions with the same brush is like saying all companies are like Microsoft. Unions are, after all, just a bunch of people in a workplace who have a common problem and decide to work together to solve it.
I'm actually surprised that the recent troubles in the e-dot-conomy haven't pushed more IT types to sign cards. When your skills are on the edge and times are good you figure you're pretty much invincible. What often happens is that people turn to unions when things are in the toilet and the water is swirling.
Uh, because in many of the countries where the jobs have gone, organizing for better conditions is not legally protected, and union leaders are often jailed, tortured, and killed. Oddly enough, the companies that move operations to third-world dictatorships also give money to politicians that vote for more guns for the same dictators. Coincidence? I think not.
If anything, this is an argument for unions, though for international unions rather than nationalist unions.
Uh, in the U.S., most unions are in the AFL-CIO, but some are not. The IWW for one. There is also the possibility of the workers in one company forming their own independent union with absolutely no outside influence.
Without a union, employees in most states are "at will". That means that the boss can fire them for almost any reason or even no reason. With a union, you can have a fair procedure that managers must follow when firing someone. Which do you prefer? A workplace where you can only be fired if you do bad work or if you are causing problems for your coworkers? Or a workplace where everyone is either covering their own ass or kissing ass and you can be fired based on your manager's whims?
Yeah, 90% of tech workers think they are in the top 1% and that all their co-workers are stupid. It's really quite embarrassing.
It is very clear that tech workers do not want everyone getting the same wage -- so why do you think that tech workers in a union would vote for such a contract?
If you have a manager that never makes unilateral decisions that you disagree with or are against your interests, then maybe a union isn't for you. It seems to me, though, that such a manager is rare, or you're so used to it and you have such a low feeling of self-worth that you don't ever think about what you would prefer.
Ah. So either:
- You are a manager.
- You want to be a manager, but aren't good enough.
Either way, I don't see why anyone should take your FUD seriously.or
Perhaps with their recent break from one-party rule, the Mexican workers will be able to take back control of their unions.
But, yes, Mexico is not a brutal dictatorship like China or Indonesia. As a result, products that are small and cheaper to ship to the U.S. tend to get produced in the farther off dictatorships. After all, workers with a gun to their head are, as you say, "better, more productive workers" -- just ask Nike.
The fact is that employers are happy to make us work as long as they can get away with. The gains union workers won decades ago will be whittled away to nothing if we don't keep up the pressure.
Maybe you think 60-hour work weeks are a good idea. If that's the case, I'd say either you're a manager spreading FUD, or you need to get a life.
While the company did comply with rules for overtime pay, the fact that it went on for years non-stop reached well past the point of abuse. For a company that says it respected the rights of workers, and espoused allowing employees a balance of personal and professional lives, it sure didn't seem that way when you could take two paid vacation days in a week and still have to work your 20 hours overtime.
And while it was official company policy that the company cooperate with any legal attempts by employees to organize, at least where I live, there are lots of reasons to fire people. It's also interesting to note that the company chose locations for its call centers in weak employee-rights states ... Texas, Tennessee, Kansas, etc.
Not all unions are good. Not all of them are bad. And sometimes they can provide protection against abuses by employers.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
Quick question for the midnight coders out there - how many years till you retire? Can you keep up this pace when your 30.. 40.. 50.. I'm not a great fan of Unions at the best of times, but it sucks the way some IT workers are expected to give up their lives for some company. If I'm going to burnout - I'll do it making ME rich, not my boss.
I'll think of a funny sig later on
I disagree, IT is a talent based industry. If it was just skill then anyone would be able to pick up a C++ book and acquire the skill to code well. This is not how it happens. Skill, in this instance, is a result of talent.
Unless your company decides to subcontract your job out to some substandard Java consultancy in India that uses == to compare Strings. Or hires someone from abroad on a work visa because they're cheaper than you are.In either case I can still get work at another company. As you point out, the quality of the work you describe is lacking. If I have talent, I can produce quality code. There will always be a demand for quality.
Well, that's tough shit, boy, you're paid based on supply and demand. You don't have talent, you have skill. You'll be paid exactly what you're worth in the market at any given time. As soon as someone finds a way to pipe your job to someplace else for cheaper, your rate will also drop, if you want to stay employed. Did you see the comment a few days back in another article where investors only wanted to pay $45k for a CCIE certified network admin?Demand, of course, drives need. But two peoples rates in the same job will vary depending on their talent, this is something a union does not support. As you said, I will be paid what I am worth and my talent dictates what I am worth.
Why not? Keeping up-to-date with the latest tools only feeds the marketing hype machine. In hiring a sysadmin, for example, knowing the minutiae of Red Hat 9.3's particular flavor of init scripts is probably far less important than having the problem-solving skills to dig into them and find the needed information. I suspect your fixation on staying "hip" has to do with your own position being dependent on the upgrade treadmill? Problem solving is not a purchasable skill.I agree that understanding the underlying technology is extremely useful, however, knowing new technology is a requirement in this industry. For example, how much work is there for a FORTRAN programmer or a System 36 admin. A little, but not much. Technology changes, its a fact of life in IT so we have to be conversant in the new technologies. As for problem solving skills, that is all bound up under the talent heading.
As for you little personal quip there, I program in Java, C/C++, Lisp, Perl, Python and a few other obscure languages. I've done everything from automation control projects to simple business applications to ecommerce webapps. None of these required up to the second knowledge of technology but the did require somewhat current skills.
Then why are you not a consultant? You want the entrepreneurial endorphin buzz, you start the consultancy or the startup and stop ruining the industry for those of us who like to go home before the stars come out.Actually, I am a consultant. I do both packages in house for sale and I am contracted out to companies who need my expertise. When I consult at a company I generally work on site for a length of time. In the interim I provide a stable maintainable application and train the employees in OO techniques, version control etc. How is this ruining the industry?
Then why all the emphasis on "team play" in this industry? Why are cowboys so frowned upon? Why does your supposed "talent" never get recognized as individually your contribution? Because it isn't talent. If you want to exercise your bloody talents, drag your PHB grandstanding "mememememe" ass into sales and leave us scientists alone.Once again you seem to have missed the point and attacked me personally in your misunderstanding. Projects do not get done without team players. Cowboy coders are detrimental to a stable maintainable code base. Does that mean that because I work in a team I shoud be paid the same as everyone else in that team? No.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
Unions are built on the premise that workers rights need to be protected, and workers need to be compensated fairly. These are very laudable ideals and, in many industries, are still needed. IT, however, is not one of those industries.
For lack of a better term, IT is a talent based industry. You move ahead by knowing more or doing better then those others around you. You negotiate contracts that are individual to you and that compensates you for your skill level. If working conditions become harsh you may leave and get work somewhere else, usually pretty easily.
This concept of an individual worker being responsible for himself is the antithesis of what the unions are about. Unions are about the collective, about everyone being treated the same, about making it difficult to fire people, about contract negotiations en mass. These are concepts that are foreign to IT, and rightfully so.
As an IT worker I want to be paid based on my talent. If there is someone that has been with a company for 30 years and is mediocre at his job then I want to be promoted passed him and compensated better. Seniority means nothing if the person does not retain their edge and continually keep updated.
I also want to negotiate my contract. I do not want to share a contract with every other IT person in the company. Then the contract is based on the lowest common denominator. So if I was in a union I might get a 3% or 4% raise where if I negotiated myself I would probably get between 8% and 12%.
Unions support the collective, IT is based around individuals and individual talent. They are mutually exclusive in my opinion.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
"If you think unions are so good, why can't they keep manufacturing and other industrial jobs from going to Mexico and overseas?"
Because they dont have strong unions there!
And when the people do try to unionize, the jobs are moved to a country with labor laws that are even more hostile. Or, the threat of moving can be enough to break a unionization drive.
Or sometimes the union organizers just end up "missing."
Ain't capitalism grand?
As long as capital is much more mobile than labor, there wont be secure industrial jobs in the US or a decent standard of living in the third world.
-J5K
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Duh. So who sucks then, the unions, or the guy before you who hired those people?
...
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Living is a way of life
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Isn't that some kind of SQL command?
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Living is a way of life
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
If you think unions are so good, why can't they keep manufacturing and other industrial jobs from going to Mexico and overseas? Non-union sites are shipping Merican mfg jobs overseas as well. The fact is that unless Mericans are willing to work for $1/day or "free", mfg'g and other jobs will be going overseas. Ever heard of the bottom line kid? Companies have cut to the bone inside and outside the tech sector. Its trendy and fits right in with the WTOrder. Unions are not just about wage negotiations and fair o/t practices, they are also about negotiating for benefits and employee plans such as pensions and health care. When AOL bought out TimeWarner they slashed and burned 7000 jobs across the nation. They have a skeleton cd mfg production facility here in the USA but the bulk of the Merican jobs are now in Taiwan. The staff that is left have seen negative wage increases, health care benefits switched to Aetna (nuff said), stock options and bonuses dropped, and their hours doubled or tripled to make up for the lack of staff without o/t pay or comp. time. The attitude is "your lucky to still have a job". Unions may not have had the clout to stop these arbitrary actions on behalf of AOL/TW, but is sure as hell would have slowed it down. We're not talking small to medium size companies here .. this is mega corporation and the story is the same across the board of corporations. Ah aren't trade agreements wonderful? Who was it that said the third world (developing) countries would come back to haunt us?
I'm father of the union chapel at my place of work (in publishing, hence the ecclesiastical union terms). I've carried through employee grievances (with some success) and advise members and non-members alike on their rights at work.
This is when I'm not working on multilingual typesetting and dictionary data development. The two aims are not incompatible; I gain great enjoyment from the tech side and the people side.
To those who have expressed rabid disdain of unions, I say that I'm glad you work in such a great place with great management, and that you and your dependents feel secure. To the rest of us, my cubicle door (if it had one) is always open...
"The union jobs were always more secure and more fairly administered. "
Sure they are but hiring Union specialists usually costs me around 50 % more and sometimes I am not even given a choice; I have to hire Union people.
To but it shortly, from my point of view unions are simply vehicle to artificially keep prices high.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
You are right but nobody will listen ... People here are too rich and too used to having just about everything available to even realize where all this wealth comes from.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
"They get treated like sh!t"
..
Hah, I remember disciplining my son at school for being too rude to his teacher
You know what happened? I was taken aside and basically threatened by schools staff for spanking him.
After that, our son told us he was encouraged to basically report any sort of spanking or other "abuse" to school officials.
Don't complain about parents, you people and the rules you have created are your own worst enemy.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
"This is like saying during a strike that you should only go on strike if you want to. Its crap. "
...
....
Whoa
That was enough. No need to write anything else.
I will make sure to oppose any attempts to organize union where I work.
Last thing I need is bunch of bullies "advising" me to join their strike
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.
... Anyway everytime the Mamma bell figuired she could coast a coupla weeks w/o her staff the Communications Workers of America [AFL-CIO]would throw a bitch & pull us out for a coupla weeks at precisely 16,30... our *clean-up* time... screwed for every last dime.
...As a further incentive when we get back we gota rebuild the main frams [cross connects local lines to street cables] so we get to do speed ups when we get back from a strike that doesn't get us a damm thing but a phoney apology from *mom*.
Today while looking for some ANGALINA JOLIE PIXXX I look up the Tomb Raider's Web Page... They don't even mntion her name.
Can You Beat that... like some god dammed Banana Repulic Menudo bit. Scrape upn some kids & put their faces on an album ... Then get rid of them when they're old enuff for legal rights. I mean not even a *JOLIE I S Lara Croft "cause she is, the padding is camp [she can burn your onions across the room just looking at YOU] She should get beter representation, & so should Web Persons[-;
For a number of years, prior to becoming an IT Professional, I was a construction Engineer in NJ. (I am a civil engineer by educaton) I can tell you that non union construction outfits are significantly more competative than union shops. Bids by non union shops were 10 - 20% lower. Is this because non union shops pay their employees less? No, leagly they must pay the prevailing wage (admittedly this wage is negotiated by the unions) for a particular job. (Yes it is enforced, though generally not necessary) The main difference is in union work regulations. (A bullldozer operator can only work a bulldozer, and each operation has minimum crew sizes) A flexible workforce is a very valuable asset, allowing companies to remain competitive. In truth many non union employees are better compensated then their union counterparts. As many people have said before, the non union guys work much harder and more efficently - the union will not allow people to be efficent, that would take jobs away from their members. There are a number of large union construction co. that have had to change their policies, and the unions had to negotiate away some of their benefits just to compete. The moral is, if your compamy will become less competitive you are in greater danger of losing your job due to a lack of revenue, then you are of losing your job because you are not protected by a union. (unless your incompentent or lazy, in which case you don't deserve your job anyway...) (as a side note, professional engineers are cautioned against joining unions by their licenseing boards, so as not to dilute their professional status)
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
I think the whole purpose of a Union in the IT industry would be to fight the hours that are being put in. /click/
We are not automechanics. If you call your mechanic to come and fix your alternator at 2am on a Saturday morning, he'll tell you to kiss his ass and bring it to the shop Monday morning, and maybe he'll look at it before noon.
How many of us would tell our CEO that we won't go check on the Exchange server on a Saturday night because he can't get his e-mail? "I'm playing with my son sir. See you at 8am Monday!"
Fired
Simply, there are different expectations for IT workers than normal workers. We keep hours like doctors. We're the doctors of the business world. But we're getting paid like mechanics. (they make good money, and they can tell you to kiss their ass!!!)
Peace!
Unions look good on paper, but the reality is that it is all about control and power, and not about whats best for the workers.
s/union/mafia/g
I have worked on union jobs before, where we were the only non-union workers on the site. We got paid by the foot, they got paid by the hour. We worked their arses off. They couldn't have kept up if there was a case of beer on the line. We worked better, faster, longer, and smarter. In the end we were there for 3 weeks, and they were there for 4 months, and the amount of work was comparable (on the 30 story Reno Hilton).
Despite how it looks on paper, unions are bad in reality, and are ruled in mafia fashion.
Smart enough to be rich?
I stuck it out because I had nothing better to do at that point in my life. But I approached the job with a level of professionalism; I always ironed my clothes before work, even though we didn't have to. I smiled and made conversation with the customers, rather than just uttering platitudes.
The number of hours I would be assigned were determined by my seniority in hours worked. But since I actually tried to do a better than average job, managment noticed and always called me first when they needed someone to fill in a shift.
After a year, my seniority ranked me for about 24 hours a week. I averaged 38 because of call-ins. Because I was working more hours, my pay went up faster than other people; the seniority was on hours worked. I was in fact the only part time employee (out of 300) who worked enough hours to qualify for the full-time benefits plan.
I got promoted to Cashier. This cut down on direct call-ins, because there were more "lifers" as cashiers. But there must have been some "old-girls" network going on, because I started getting call-ins from other departments like Bakery, Floral and Stock. The union contract specified that cross-departmental call-ins had to be paid at the higher of the two pay scales to discourage it, but the fact someone was trying to do a good job caught notice with the managment and didn't seem to offend the union.
I left after two years, deciding I needed something more challanging for a career. But now, fifteen years later, everytime someone makes that "only half a day?" crack when I leave work after only four hours of unpaid overtime, when the value of my "stock option compensation" has no relationship to my performance or my company's but rather to market trends, when the latest "We're changing our benefit package to be more competetive" email arrives, I think back to the days where there was a 1:1 relationship between work and compensation; I realize that that wouldn't have existed without the protection of the union.
If you're a bright star, you'll move up in any corporate/economic model. I think the real fear here is that people are afraid that managers might not recognize vitrolic diatrabes and political devotion to open source as the mark of a bright star.
I am a Java Programmer and have read a lot of discussion on here about how we wouldn't need a union since we can "call the shots". So, why would you want to form a union?
Well that's kind of how I thought before my last job. My former employers paid me well but for this they expected 80hr working weeks, frowned upon us having sick days, meal breaks and even lunch brakes. After this I was reminded that even though the market looks favorably upon my skills at the moment, my employer was free to screw us over as much as they could.
Most of us probably don't have conditions that bad. But I think there are important issues for all technology workers - like quality of work. As technology workers we don't simply perform a job. We live and breath the industry and take enormous pride in, what is for the most part, highly skilled work. I think as a collective (a union) we should demand things such as, reasonable development life cycles and proper training in new technologies, etc. We are held responsible for software that impacts on people's lives, (I'm working on patient diagnosis software at the moment). With responsibility like that placed on us, we really must demand the right to do our job properly.
How many Tech workers feel that they could do their job better if their employer had a better understanding of technology and what exactly our job entails?. Isn't it our task to make sure they listen? The open source community is a testament to how much we care about our profession. I think forming a collective is a natural extension to what we are already doing.
Surely, the market place is the programmers union? [uk]
However, does that mean that they are still that useful? From my experiences, unions cater to the lowest common denominator: the incompetent worker. Why? Because those are the very guys in need of the union. They are not competent enough to keep their job in the firt place. So, over the years, they get into the union-decision taker position and make sure nothing will happen.
Have you ever tried to get some unioned worker fired? Even as a co-worker, it's next to impossible. For example, there was that guy that didn't write any documentation about his program. None, niet, nicht. When asked why (even by the management), he said: "This is job security". There was nothing management was able to do. To be able to show the door to someone, you had to file 3 complains in 1 year. One complain takes about 3-4 months to file with witness, hearing and all, and you can't file 2 complains at the same time. Net result: impossible to fired anyone.
Who is the big winner then? The idiots, lazy and other incompetents who can't keep their jobs by themselves. How often have you worked with someone asking you what was a pointer? Someone who didn't know how to write a SQL query and was in charge of the database? An admin who comes to you when it's time to create new users?
We have many people already abusing the system in IT, so let's not give them more power with union. From my point of view, unions were once great and needed. They are not in our field (IT). The people pushing for unions are probably the ones you dislike working with in the first place because they are incompetents.
And besides, would you like to have your raises based on some stupid ladder? That the moron next to you is getting more money because he was in the company for longer than you? Unions means a lot of things, not only safety. We are working in a fantastic domain, with lots of nice jobs. If one employer is bad, move on, get another job. You can do that. If you are competent, that's it. If all you can do is write business paper about selling socks over the internet, maybe you can't, but there will always be some jobs for the good programmer, the wise manager and the creative web designer. What we have now on our hands, is a surplus of semi-incompetent from the dot-com era. Color me cheap, but I don't think it's a bad thing if they change industry.
Crevette
If an incompetent hit a wall at 80m/h... are you gonna miss him?
This sounds like more of a case of you needing to move on to a new employer. I previously worked for a telephone company that owned an ISP. All of the telecom guys were unionized, of course, but they didn't know what to make the ISP Help Desk people, so they created a hybrid position that was "in-between" a Union and a non-Union position. I did not realize how bad this was until I became a shift supervisor. I had one employee in particular that thought she was in a totally Union position. She wanted to "bump" someone off a different shift and take their spot because she had seniority. To her, job performance was not important. Luckily, I found that I was not required to abide by most of the Union rules, so I was able to ignore this person for the most part. But the fact remains that Unions place rules into effect that are good for some, and extremely bad for others. I do not feel that just because you have worked for a company for 5 years you deserve the keys to the city. Work ethic and professionalism need to be accounted for in determining raises, promotions, and other rewards. Otherwise you end up with a shop full of people that sit around and wait until they get seniority so they can move up in the world. This is no way to run a productive business.
I don't feel any need for a union. I've seen to much garbage through unions. -hobo
--Stupidity is Self Curing!
"Minimum wage??? Does anyone on /. work for minimum wage? I think not" "If you're going to make a point, please do so intelegently "
Millions of ppl work for minimum wage in this country, and they are not all flippin burgers. chances are that the ppl who installed the cat 5 cable in your office were paid minimum wage..
I used to volunteer at my church food pantry and let me tell you the majority of folks that needed help were working 40+ hours a week under dangerous conditions.
The fact is that a rising tide floats all ships.
Wonderful. Now not only can't we not get a server into the server rooms, but they won't be installed, maintained, nor serviced either. Great plan. Let's UAW the industry. Get a clue. For those of you without either the ambition nor the "days free of pot", GET A LIFE. This industry is swarming with dollars (US). All it takes is talent and an ability to play politics. The last thing we need is a union. That's why cars cost 40 grand and still roll over. And we want to ban guns in this country. Ha. Try getting people to work for a living.
I'm one of the union organizers quoted in the Red Herring article -- I work for IBM. With all the discussion here about pro-and anti-union viewpoints, I want to state why many IBMer's want a union, which is for a reason that has not come up here. For 20 years that I worked for IBM, the company promised excellent benefits in return for a competitively low salary. After I put in these 20 years, management decided to virtually eliminate retirement benefits that were promised (pension and medical). Some employees lost a total of $300-$400K worth of future benefits. All this happened when the company is in great financial shape, with a pension fund overfunded by $11 billion dollars (meaning that much is LEFT OVER after paying out to all retirees in the future). Is this legal? Yes. Have we been cheated? Yes. No one can tell me they would be willing to have this happen to them. All you programmers who think you've got it made by negotiating your own salary and benefits -- be forwarned, that can change at any moment unless you have an employment contract. So what can we do, sue the company? Sure but that could take 7-10 years and IF we win, all the money recovered may go to legal expenses. So what else can we do? Form a union, which has a legal right to negotiate a written contract so that at a bare minimum, IBM cannot legally take back benefits that were once promised. CWA is not telling IBMer's we need a union. We, the employees, called CWA for help. We just want to stop being cheated.