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

[Marlor]

I think you need to retake history. The 40 hour work week was started by Henry Ford, prior to any unions being formed in his company...

Maybe this was the case in the USA, but in Australia and most of the rest of the industrialized world, the 40 hour work week was earned by unions. In Australia, the "8-hour day" was earned by a collective organization of stonemasons and building workers in Victoria in 1856. Demonstrations were then held by unions to win the same rights for other trades. By the 1880s, the 8-hour day was commonplace in Australia, and "8-hour day" parades were held throughout the late 19th century to celebrate the fact.

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.

Re:Biased headline

[mrraven]

Nice try stooge for the owners, you are off by about 30 years, with accuracy like that your labor should be worth about 4 dollars an hour on the global market. It's all good until YOUR ox gets gored, right?

"The struggle for the shorter work week is the thread that ties together the history of American labor. The country's first union 1;the National Labor Union in 1866 issued its primary demand, "8 hours shall bethe normal work day." The NLU died. But the demand prompted action. In 1872 in New York City thousands of building trades workers stuck for the 40 hour week. Some won. But their g~~h-s were lost in a tide of depression. In 1877 Pittsburgh workers, led by striking rail workers, seized the city and adopted a shorter day. They were shot back to work by federal troops.

1886. Chicago. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (later the AFL) called for a national strike for the 8 hour day on May 1. Nearly one million American workers stopped work that day. The nations industrial centers were hushed. Transportation halted. Some employers yielded concessions. Others sighted their targets.

*******

In the 1890's, as wealthy families like the Morgans and Rockefellers tightened their monopolies in industry , Spies' words stood true. The first general strike in the deep south, led by an integrated workforce in New Orleans, won a shorter work day. In this period the U.S. waged two wars. We fought Spain. And the government waged a war on the Western Federation of Miners led by Big Bill Haywood. Casualties in the hundreds. couldn't stop the miners, historically among the most militant of all workers. They won the 8 hour day near the turn of the century."

http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/ShorterWorkWeek.h tml

Headline after the strike

[Pao|o]

More Australian Companies Outsource to India & the Philippines

solidarity!

[berseken]

I propose a strike of all techies in the US to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters down under. The days off work would only be ancillary benefits.

Another type of "Geek Strike"

[vudufixit]

How about we announce that we will never, ever do another "computer favor" for a gal that we like, in hopes of "hooking up with them."
    One day, when their machines are hopelessly infected with spyware and their rockhead boyfriends can't do a damned thing, they'll finally value us... right???

well, in my case...

[YesIAmAScript]

I subscribe to this "unions=bad" "meme" because I grew up in Flint, Michigan (birthplace of the modern labor movement in the US) and experienced first hand unions driving the city into the ground and the UAW driving GM into the ground. You may have heard of this time and place in Michael Moore's "Roger and Me".

Every union struck every workplace as often as possible. In the mall, there would be at least one store which was being struck every time you went. The workers didn't seem to notice that a strike is a (legal) act of industrial sabotage, one which will hurt your employer and thus you also. It should be used as rarely as possible, or else you'll just put the company you work for out of business.

GM workers were apparently in need of new contracts, despite having work rules so lax that many would show up to work drunk, or not show up at all. Workers would clock each other in, then work their own job plus that of another, then next week the roles would reverse. This of course led to awful product quality. I do realize there was also a good dose of poor engineering going on at GM at the time too, but that wasn't why you'd get a car with the windshield wipers not properly attached or a wrench thrown into a closed space before it is welded shut.

It was during this time that the UAW agreed to changes which should have changed things so that the most desireable job occupied by the highest-paid workers wasn't a chip handler (floor sweeper). And so that it didn't take 13 people just to repair a press (the mechanical-expert repairman would not be allowed to even flip the switch to turn it back on afer he was done, that was against work rules, it required an electrical specialist). See, the union liked it when a press couldn't be repaired, because then the workers on the line still had to be paid, but didn't have to do any work. Because of this, often equipment would break on Friday, right when some services became unavailable until Monday. If the line was behind on production, the workers would sometimes be paid overtime to man the presses all weekend so that when it was repaired (which it couldn't be), the line could be restarted to catch up.

It was during this time that the UAW extracted the concessions from GM that are strangling them right now. Those are very very high-levels of expensive health care, and the "jobs bank" which pays workers 92% of their salary for up to two years to do nothing but show up at the union hall and not work. GM knew these would be expensive, but the UAW's side of the deal was to work toward a Jobs Classification Reduction to fix the problems I mentioned above. Well, as soon as the contract was signed, the UAW forgot about what they were supposed to do, and GM took it in the shorts badly. They know how much this would cost them in the future, and so they were trying to move out of union strongholds like Michigan and to the south. Meanwhile, Michael Moore reports why is GM closing plants in Michigan when they are profitable (on a current account basis)?

And as to the government not being involved? It's just not true at all. Unions are exempt from anti-trust laws so they can work across state lines and company lines to extract higher wages and benefits. Whereas employers cannot collude to maintain their end (see the rulings against major sports leagues, even though one of them is exempt). Also, some states (Michigan being one of them) have a "union shop" law that says that if a workplace is declared a union shop, you must join the union to work there whether you want to or not. Every grocery store is a union shop in Michigan.

Finally, if there actually is a strike, the unions employ thuggery and illegal sabotage. My grandfather personally beat up replacement workers (called "scabs" even though many aren't even replacement workers, just people who want to continue working) on the strike lines against Westinghouse in Ohio (of course, Ohio doesn't do nearly as much manufacturing now, and Westinghouse is destroyed as a manufacturing company and the last useful