Aussie Techs Threaten Chaos

tintinaujapon writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that NCR staff with key responsibility (among other things) for fast food & supermarket chains, banking ATMs, schools and baggage handling at Sydney airport are preparing to walk off the job next week, in industrial action aimed at resolving a pay dispute. NCR's general manager thinks few people in the general community will care about the plight of the palest workforce, but the union claims potential disruption and financial losses could be huge. The strike could last up to a week and is the most significant action yet taken in Australia by the techie workforce."

Comments

Biased headline

[mrraven]

Shouldn't that be Aussie tech workers threaten walkout? Why is the Slashdot headline FUDing managements position? Without labor unions we wouldn't have ever gained a 40 hour work week or an end to child labor. Is that really the way we want to go? Further labor unions are way for workers to gain rights without government interference which ought to be just fine with the Libertarians among you unless you are really just hypocritical cheap labor conservatives.

Re:Biased headline

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Unfortunately there's a strong "unions == bad" meme among a lot of geeks. I think it's because tech workers' conditions have, until quite recently, been very very good by overall work-conditions standards: comfortable environments, low risk of physical injury, reasonable work hours, etc. What tech workers, and office workers in general, have failed to grasp is that these conditions exist because of the efforts of organized labor over the last century or so; and now, inevitably, with the decline in the power of unions, we're starting to see work environments become less and less comfortable with work hours extending to the point where exhaustion and burnout are inevitable and physical injury, particularly RSI, becomes a serious risk. Whether this will lead to more organizing efforts like the one in Australia is anyone's guess, but I'd sure like to see it happen.

Complicating this is that a lot of geeks are libertarians, and a lot of self-styled libertarians think unions have the smell of socialism. Which is stupid, of course; unions are in fact an admirably free-market solution to the problem of employer-employee conflicts. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that asking someone who calls himself a libertarian about his opinion of organized labor is a good way to distinguish between true libertarians on the one hand, and right-wingers who call themselves libertarians because it's fashionable in certain circles on the other.

Re:Biased headline

[NormalVisual]

Complicating this is that a lot of geeks are libertarians, and a lot of self-styled libertarians think unions have the smell of socialism. Which is stupid, of course; unions are in fact an admirably free-market solution to the problem of employer-employee conflicts.

I consider myself to be something of a libertarian, but I have mixed feelings about unions. On the one hand, collective bargaining can be truly necessary in those situations where the disparity in power between the employer and employee is such that the employer looks upon their workers as faceless, replaceable biological machines that perform a given task and refuses to treat them as human beings. On the other hand, I've seen firsthand the productivity hit and general attitude of entitlement that can result from a strong union, and many unions appear to embody an "us vs. them" mentality that makes it difficult to come to a compromise when the employer's needs/wants need to be taken into consideration, even when they're entirely reasonable.

Having said all of that, one thing that a lot of self-styled libertarians seem to gloss over is the inherent advantage that government confers upon corporations, specifically corporate personhood and all of the stuff that falls out from that, and the fact that corporations exist without fear of any kind of real punishment for criminal acts. I fail to see why some people don't see that for the government intrusion that it is, and then turn around and complain about other government involvement in free markets such as tariffs on imported goods.