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Hi-tech Work Places no Better than Factories?
Anonymous Coward writes "A
tasty bit of truth.
Again, a Sociology Professor has found out what we all know. He wistfully comments on the state of geekdom in the modern corporation:
"They face the lonely insecurity of the individual entrepreneur in a marketplace and culture that stresses, with macho imagery from war and sports, that they are ultimately alone"
and adds that...
"For many this may be the shape of work in the 21st century."
You want to start a union? I mean how much is your boss making at your expense even if he did start the company long before you joined up?"
Why pay someone 90% of the proceeds of your labor for the priviledge of working for them? I am self-employed now (as much as I can be, with disabilities) and even if back to 100% health would never go to work for someone else again. A friend is a mechanic, works for a big chain, doing mufflers and brakes. When the company has billed the customers $4000, his cut is about $300. His customers are so loyal to his work that when he left one place and went to another, they followed. So I ask him "Why not just work for yourself, start out on your own?" After all, he manages the day to day operations, knows all the ins and outs of ordering, etc. Answer? NO GUTS. For generations we have all been fed this lie - the American work ethic, that says to go to work for someone ELSE and work HARD, 40, 50, 60 hours a week to get by. Corporations count on us buying into that so they will have a ready source of peons.
This space available.
"Has the balls," or in the more likely case, has the family/school connections to bum enough money off of banks or investors.
And keep in mind that many of these buisenesses that he's talking about still have yet to prove thair viability -- in fact, their potential to profit is often based solely off of the abilities and long hours of IT workers that are socially bullied into overwork and treated like interchangeable cogs in a boss's machine, with no security to prevent them from being dumped on the street at the first downturn. That was the point of the article, not taht bosses don't deserve to get paid more.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
You don't get your fingers crushed in a high-tech workplace by dodgy machinery, you earn a much better salary, you're not breathing dangerous toxins and you are able to afford a life. I'd rather work in cubicle land than in a 19th century (or even 20th!) factory.
If it does, then I can understand.
This is the main reason why I want to involved with Research and Development and become a professor. I would rather create new things than (as one of my old bosses put it) "Tell a computer what to do" for the rest of my life.
In a factory, just like behind a computer programming, you somehow become subordinate to the machine. That is what leads to employee unsatisfaction in my opinion.
~ kjrose
The article makes it sound like having to learn new things to keep up is a bad thing. It's what makes the job better than most.
Sig is taking a break!
I couldn't agree with you more. Anyone where with a high-school history lesson under her belt will remember a few things about factories back in the day:
- Employees would frequently lose digits of their hands, whole limbs, or even be killed on the job. As a result, they were simply replaced with someone else with no compensation to the original employee or their family. It's not so far off today.
- If employees didn't like their conditions, and went on strike, factory owners would often choose to just ignore them, and then bring in Pinkerton guards. These would then bust up the unions, force employees away at gun-point while the factory brought on cheaper people. Even today, factory workers complaining of insufficient compensation are ignored.
- Now while some tech jobs require exposure to nasty chemicals (chip manufacturing for example), most certainly do not. People working in factories, even today, are exposed to substances that cause severe birth defects, mental illness, and a plethora of other nasty side-effects.
So, do you think you geeks really have it so bad on the job? I highly disagree. I have never worked in a factory (and I consider myself fortunate), but from a tiny little research, it's easy to see how much worse it is for people who aren't working in Tech.
Why bother.
so now that the union may serve your interests, you are for them? how convenient.
It's not convenience. It's being rational. Of course I am in favor of things that serve my interests. Duh!
Plus, I never said I was anti-union. I said that I initially (and incorrectly) viewed them as blue-collar organizations.
But ask yourself, at the end of the day, how much did the unions really help the steel industry or the coal miners?
Okay, let's look at the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and how they helped the coal miners. They got them the eight-hour day in 1898, collective bargaining rights in 1933, health and retirement benefits in 1946, and health and safety protections in 1969. They have fought for compensation for coal miners with black lung disease and for changes to the work environment (ventilation, scrbbers, water infusion, respirators, etc.) to protect today's miners. They have been at the forefront in pushing for mine safety reforms and rescue equipment.
Then take a look at how the union leaders and their families live.
Of course they live better than the average member. You don't get effective, well-spoken lobbyists, attorneys, and leaders by paying them what the average coal miner earns.
--what you said is true, but it's not an either/or situation. A long time ago I was in the UAW, and for sure the rank and file completely dismissed the threat of japanese inroads, it was laughable to them (not to me I saw it coming) and managment back then was completely out to lunch coke addled morons. BUT, another thing happened, japan not only sold cheaper cars initially, they "dumped" them, ie, sold them BELOW COST to themselves in order to garner longer term brand loyalty and market share. Exactly what they are currently doing with the hybrid cars as well. They also put a HUGE number of restrictions on US imports into japan, and we-our "leaders" just ate it.
To me it should be a quid pro quo, you tariff us, we tariff you right back. You won't allow US people to own property there (japan, mexico, china) they shouldn't be allowed to purchase and own anything here.
Our leaders are sell-outs, and they play the left versus right, repub versus dem,white collar versus blue collar angles against us, keep everyone faked out as they are creating a global two class technofuedal society. The US middle class is the biggest hindrance to those efforts, that's why you see them gleefully destroying first the blue collar manufacturing and agricultural jobs (white collars never cared for those people while this was happening), now they will be destroying the white collar jobs (and of a suddent the white collars are going HEY! what's going on?). They won't "run out" of technology, nor will these uber international pirate bosses "go broke" or lack for anything, they just prefer the master/serf style society, and are willing to trade off the loss of customers to a great degree. The bonus money to them is they get to keep constantly keep transferring ownership of all the land and buildings upstream into fewer hands. A headline last night, mortgage defaults at 30 year high. This isn't an accident, it's part of "the plan". Get people to establish credit well beyond any rational level, WELL beyond that, get them shilled into the phony manipuylated stock market, then destroy their jobs and income, poof, the uber bosses get to legally own everything. In the meantime they set people -the white collar and blue collar victims-squabbling with each other using propoganda and media manipulation with the "political" system with *one* political party with two names. It's a great scam for them and is working right on schedule. One of the easier ways to see the scam is to look at "official" unemployment figures, which are approximately 1/2 of what the real numbers are. How they do that? simple, they stop counting people who have exhausted unemployment insurance, they don't count people extremely under-employed in very low paying part time jobs, and they also really messed with consumer cost of living indices by taking out food and energy costs, which they used to include.
The economy is much worse than they admit to, despite wallmarts impressive figures. I'd like to see a breakdown of how much walmart's sales are cash versus credit card the other day.
Two other economic indicators, look at large banks derivatives exposure, then look at fortune 500 pension funding, and government pension funding and projected cost of social security and medicare/medicaid.
It's pretty dismal right now.
It's more complex than that obviously, but that is a good gist-cliff notes version over-view.
Yep, the man don't want you unionizing, they want you to keep voting for either crips or bloods gang at the polls, they don't want you to notice the daily factory closings and the daily importing of second world labor, white or blue collar. They want you to keep with the safe little finger pointing "it's all the dems fault, no it's all the repubs fault". They love it when people stop looking at that bare minimum level. They love it when 99% of the population is more interested in professional sports, movies, music, games, mindless TV shows and etc. They want you concentrating on ANYTHING but looking real hard at what's going on now and using common sense and logic to make a rational projection of events with some sort of realistic timeline. they want you to focus on "homeland security" and "terrorists" as they remove border patrol people and abandon the southern borders to humongous invasion. they want you to think "cheap prices on gadgets" now as these so called "american" companies all move off shore in search of the last dregs of short term profits. They want you to constantly take any "spare" cash you got and pump it into the magic beans stock market, or even buy government paper, which is just another form of indebtedness that falls right back on you in the form of future higher taxes to pay this paper off. You won't see any of those TV shills recommending people pay off their mortgage early, or perhaps get a smaller and more modest place so they can do that, nope, they still want you to buy-buy-buy, get those 30 year notes on fancy foyers and gimgrack houses and shiny things in the rooms. Just keep doing it on credit, that's all they ask, and don't look any farther than that. On and on. They baited the trap years ago, most people took the bait. The bad part is, people will still argue there is no trap.
Oh well.
Recruiting, sales, real estate, finance, law.......etc
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Now think about how hard your slave driving PHB makes you work to fix that last bug. 80 hours a week sitting on your ass in front of a computer, never lifting anything heavier than some liquid caffeine. Sorry, no sympathy from me.
Every day I think how lucky I am to have gone to college and got a job sitting on my ass in front of a computer. You should too.
There is that, but what you see day in and day out is more like this:
The company I work for has come kind of contract/union for guys who are supposed to move stuff: computers, gear, etc. which has resulted in this ridiculous situation where you have to either:
a) wait around for the union guy to come around and move the stuff you need to get on with *your* work
b) move it anyway, on the sly
I'm talking stuff like PCs and power supplies and test gear. I got a dirty look from some guy for carrying a monitor from one end of a lab to a different desk outside (he was delivering power supplies).
In fact, it's sometimes so ridiculous it's fun: I actually had another employee run interference (go over and talk to a union guy), while we carried a laser printer around behind his back!
I've heard "Would you like it if we took *your* job?" See if you can, is my response. Just try to come up with the skills that I have, while your skills consist of picking shit up and then losing it somewhere.
And the union techs that we have aren't much better. Lots of the guys have 18+ years, so there's no way they're getting laid off, but on the other hand they've been doing the same thing for those 18 years, maybe, and they are *bored*. I understand this, but it leads to them sometimes doing maybe 4-10 hours of work a *week*. Now, I really like some of these guys (although I'm a little disappointed at this work ethic, even though I understand it), but this friendship serves a dual purpose, in that I can lean on it a little to get my stuff done on time.
On another front, we had a tech in a lab who'd been doing very good work, and everybody liked it. However, it turned out he didn't have sufficient seniority for this (apparently cherry) position, so he got swapped out for some older guy. Now, the replacement guy does okay work too, but everyone's a little cranky and unhappy that Mike (the 1st guy) got yanked away like that. When union's can't be flexible about shit like that, it just raises opinions against them.
For me, I'd never join a union. Never. They have their place, but they gell into this rigid, ugly structures of power and entitlement far too quickly. I dunno how the guys at the bottom of the seniority ladder hang on: I guess they must dream of the day when *they* can abuse their positions.
And here on slashdot, we have macho male techies saying that the article is full of shit, because techies who aren't happy with their jobs can just go elsewhere.
Explain to me again how the author has missed the boat, because I really don't see it happening here.
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Unions have long outlived their usefulness. Unions have demanded such a high amount of security in all aspects of life from the employers of their members that they have wrecked salary structures across the board and caused them to stagnate (excepting executives, whose salaries climb ever higher). Corporate leadership isn't stupid or kind. They aren't going to guarantee every employee's on-site security, medical health, education, pension, family security, etc. without recompense. If they have to pay $30,000-salaried workers an extra $15,000 in benefits, guess what? They'll fire enough $30k workers to make up the difference.
If geeks don't like their working conditions - if they are "lonely" or "insecure" or have other mental maladies - they should just leave. If anyone could actually assemble enough geeks to start a viable union, why would they? Why not just start a company with all that disenfranchised talent? Truckers might not be able to ply their trade without a large overseeing organization to provide resources and direction, but programmers? Isn't that kinda what we're supposed to be doing no matter what?
Before you go off and form PU - The Programmers Union -- realize that it already exists. It's called "IEEE" and "ACM".
It does things to "protect" it's members, the same as any union. Things like lobbying against green cards and H1-B visas, to artificially control the size of the available talent pool, and thereby inflate the cost of their labor.
In general, it's not a bad idea to work to strike some balance between what top management is paid, and what the people "in the trenches" (to strain your metaphor) are paid; in fact, we have punative tax codes to do exactly this, including preventing matching contributions by the company above a certain amount/percentage for 401K and other benefits, to make sure that the people "on top" do not benefit more from the matching than people on the bottom of the pay scale.
On the other hand, it's unlikely that union tactics will be effective in the "at will" and "right to work" states, like California, where most high technology industry is concentrated -- no accident, that.
The communications workers union have been trying, unsuccessfully, to unionize IBM technology workers for 20+ years, now, and they have universally failed, due to their inability to prove that there will be any benefit to the workers, whatsoever, other than the union getting to take over administration of one of the larger private pension funds on the planet.
-- Terry
Anyhow, they are very well organized, the solution is for us to get organized in some fashion. How it happens doesn't really matter, it can be a professional association like doctors and lawyers have like the AMA and ABA (and the IEEE-USA is *not* such an organization, a list of which for reasons I will not go into at length here) or a collectively bargaining union like actors and electricians have (SAG and IBEW). We should get organized the way we want to be organized, but should get organized. They're well-organized and sending millions to Washington to screw us, our salaries and wages have dropped for the first time in a decade. People just sit around and say "it's the economy" as if the economy is some alien force and we're farmers who are in a drought or something. First of all, the H1-Bs, FLSA and 1706 laws passed recently by the ITAA may not have been the main cause behind the slump, but they were certainly contributing factors to things as they are - if things were going to be bad, they have made them worse. Secondly, the economy is not some alien force that no one can control, it doesn't just "go down" and up by itself, it goes up and down because the people at the Federal Reserve makes certain decisions, because management at corporations make decisions over capital, because labor and owners make decisions.
If you really want to do something, first of all, forget trying to talk to people who say "I have no life, my social life is watching Farscape with my handful fo dork friends, I get all of my self-worth from thinking I am the best programmer in the world so I don't have to worry about all of this since I think I'm hot shit". The industry wage has just dropped for the first time in a decade - factoring in inflation that's really bad, yet these self-deluded socially retarted morons thinkt he laws of supply and demand don't affect them. So ignore these people - there will always be socially retarted people who can't deal with people, and lazy people who have other people do all the work for them, who if they do anything just criticize the people actually doing something. That's just the way it is, tune these people out.
Now, what's left is people who want to do something. Maybe they want a guild, maybe a professional association, a union, whatever. They don't like the raised H1-B cap, the FLSA changes, section 1706 and whatnot. One does not have to start from scratch to find these people - there are places like the Programmers Guild, or for unions Washtech/CWA (which is in the CESO confederation) and so forth. You might meet people in the IEEE that are interested, but the IEEE would need such massive reform, including cancelling all corporate donations to it, that it's probably not worth it. Get into contact with these people, get on their mailing lists, go to the meetings, read about it on web sites, talk about it on Usenet (like alt.computer.consultants) and so forth. These organizations already exist, get involved with them, if something's missing, start another one. Then go around to places where techies hang out (like here!) and talk about them, forget about the socially retarted who think they're "programming geniuses" who will argue about this, and just tell those interested that this nascent movement, of IT workers helping IT workers, is growing and invoite them in. This is how things get better. Organizations like CESO, the Programmers Guild and so forth have already done good, we just need more people to come in, and bring more people in so it reaches critical mass.
In some ways it's kind of paradoxical, because I hear many people saying "I want to do something like this but there's nothing out there". That's false, there's a lot out there and some nascent organizations, but they need more people like you to come in. It's kind of like wanting to go into a startup and have your phone and computer there and set up on the first day. That just doesn't happen in a startup, it needs people like you there to grow it so it gets to that point. So people interested but less committed are more likely to join, because someone else set up the meetings, the web sites, the moderated and unmoderated newsgroups and so forth.
I have a web site talking about some of this. Don't sit around waiting for something to hop onto with this, work with us to build it up. Educate yourself, educate others, get involved, join the organizations and organize people. At least there's some been some success on the education front - years ago maybe 20% of IT workers knew what an H1-B visa was, now it's over 50% probably (probably because nowadays over half of IT workers are probably H1-Bs!). But they don't now about the ITAA's involvement in section 1706, the FLSA, and lots of other things. So don't sit around and sulk, help us get this nascent, growing movement going. The movement being IT workers working together to help themselves.
I know now the Steel industry needs protectionist tariffs to survive.
My father-in-law worked for Bethlehem Steel for most of his life...as a non-union engineer. He got to see first hand how the unions helped destroy the company. I know they weren't the only cause...but they did not make the company stronger.
Sure, I know things were terrible...people getting injured and killed on the job...but eventually the lawsuit juggernaut that is America would have caught up with the abusive companies without the aid of the unions.
Just ask Halliburton and the Asbestos litigants. Most of them are non-union people with their own private suits...
I stand by my original claim....unions are not the answer.
-ted