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Tech Workers of the World Unite?
okidokedork writes "Wired News reports on the lack of unions in the IT workplace. If you could join a union in your workplace, would you?" From the article: "The rich get richer, the shareholder is valued more than the employee, jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency (remember when they called firing people 'right-sizing'?) and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year. You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand. Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way. They'll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they're the first to scream, 'You're stifling innovation!' at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work."
I certainly do not want to belong to an organization where I can only be guaranteed a salary increase across the board next to the same slacker programmer who didn't contribute. You know how I fight the big companies? If the job sucks or I don't think I am being treated fairly, I quit, simple as that. Let your feet do the talking and get the hell out of there.
The fact is, when the PHBs numbers aren't going to be favorable, then your job may be on the chopping block. But with the same sentiment, when it comes times for initial salary negotiations, take the gloves off, and _fight for every penny_. When the going gets tough, and your team may be part of the downsizing, be sure that you've accounted for such job insecurity/risk.
Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ - A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.
...you have nothing to lose but your clothes!!
Might be more applicable. Getting royalties to work produced has served the information industry as it exists in Los Angeles well to date. Might be time for Northern California (and other parts) to investigate this model further.
There used to be a Graphics guild back in the day, I wouldn't mind seeing that return either.
IT people are too mobile to be in a union. IT people like to change job more so than other professions I've seen. Unions depend a lot on Brotherhood, and office people generally just aren't like that. I would have no interest in being in a union. The IT sector is too fast paced for unions who can really hamper a company's desire for change. Also, the seniority thing is what I think would drive most workers away, as most IT workers like to be rewarded for their work and not how long they have been there. I was in a Union when I worked at a grocery store, and sadly most of the things I had heard about unions I found to be true.
Another thing is I love my job, and don't mind working 60 hours a week. Unions really like to supress that behavior. I work that much because computers are my hobby, and there are much better computers here at work just for testing than I could ever afford at home. Is it bad that I like to be here that much doing my hobby? I know others like me as well.
I know I'm going to sound like a totally insensitive capitalist pig, but I'm been a programmer for years and my experience is there are lots of challenging well-paying jobs for good, enthusiastic, productive programmers.
Every once in a while someone in a group mentions the idea of unions and -- no joke -- it's *always* the laziest, whiniest, least productive member of the group that brings up the idea.
So I vote no.
boxlight
Count in binary and you'll get a larger number.
Don't give the suits yet another reason why offshoring is a better alternative.
Uh... did I really just read that?
Maybe the employee should buy some shares.
Never! The job I work is not mine... it is my employer's and they are free to can me at any time for any reason... just as I am able to leave at any time and for any reason.
Now that... is true freedom!
One of my major beefs with unions (and one of the biggest reasons that I would never join one) is that they provide the ability for... dead weight. People who either are unable or unwilling to contribute to the bottom line are able to be carried along on the shoulders of those who are capable and do do the work.
Lets also not forget that in many unions, ones loyalties are to the union and the company you work for far behind.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Yeah unions are doing wonders for the auto industry so I'm sure it will work wonders for IT industry...
If you can somehow improve job security while maintaining the meritocracy that currently exists in technological fields, then it might be worth looking into. Clearly, companies have become too quick to lay off tech workers (and other types of workers as well) simply to bump up stock price. On the other hand, I don't want a system where seniority is the only (or the major) consideration when deciding raises and promotions.
In short, I want a system where skilled employees are not let go just because the CEO wants to skim off the top 10% of wage earners in every department in order to improve his bottom line, but I also don't want a system where a company is forced to hang on to morons just because they're in the union.
If so, then a labor union is a good idea. Otherwise, not. Unions help people get rights, yes. Then they start sucking the lifeblood out of everything they touch. You are guaranteed a job even if you don't do it, and that is bullshit.
With that said, the BOFH union local 666 would rule the fucking world, so from that standpoint, it might be fun...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And seeing the truth about what management thinks of IT (basically that you're all a bunch of losers who failed to get your MBA and deserve to be treated like shit), I won't work for a non-union shop ever again. Keeping your job on merits is fine- until you find out that they reward your hard work by kicking you out with as few $$$ as possible, so that they can justify their million-dollar McMansions and pools and Mazda Miatas.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Because they did such an amazing job at preventing manufacturing jobs from moving out of the country. On the other hand, union management got very rich in the process. Hmmm...
If you could join a union in your workplace, would you?
Hell no!
Thanks for asking though.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
If I heard about a tech workers union forming at my company, I"d leave. Plain and simple, I don't need anyone free loading on my abilities to negotiate a better salary for their stellar ability to sit on their ass and play WoW instead of writing decent code. Likewise, if I feel my company doesn't appreciate me, I'm outta there. I'm in this for me, not to help me "fellow man" (MY fellow men don't want my help anyway) or to give my company something they don't appreciate and compensate me for.
I like the wild west feel of our job. It benefits the good coders and I'm a gunslinger. :)
I live in michigan... I'm no longer a fan of unions. They make it hard to fire the the worthless slacker even though he gets payed the same ammount as the hard working people. I mean $20 an hour to sweep a floor is briliant.
After seeing the joy of what unions have done to most major industries, no way would I want them invading IT. While working really sucks, I enjoy the fact that slacker developers that I've worked with have been culled, and that pay raises have been earned and not given because they have to.
Unions foster mediocrity.
- oZ
// i am here.
Fess up Zonk. You are just trolling for the Indian Chamber of Commerce. I'm sure they would love to see an unionized US IT workforce.
Bachelors, Masters, Ph.Ds,
For the coders want less sunlight
And they hate MCSEs.
There's trouble with UI group,
(And they're quite convinced the're right)
They say the coders are just too lofty
And they just don't see the light.
But the devs can't help their feelings
If they like how it's designed.
And they wonder why UI types
Can't just use the CLI.
So the techies formed a union
And demanded equal rights.
"These designers are just too greedy;
We will make them give us light."
Now there's no more tech oppression,
For they passed a noble law,
And the hackers only hack now,
With hatchet, axe, and saw.
U prefer to crawl deeply into my employers ass. submissive people are not fired.
From the About page:
I'd like to get me some of that.The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I'd quit any company that had a large unionization movement starting within it. It's that simple.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
They were a necessary evil when the Industrial Revolution came about, but now they're just an unnecessary evil. The unions are nothign more than legal mafias. Just look at GM. I have 2 family members who work there. My brother-in-law is a toolmaker, and his job consists of playing cards, working out, watching TV, and taking naps. Oh, and for about an hour out of the day he actually has to do some actual work like reset a machine or something. Poor guy only makes $35/hour after being there for a year. He started at $28 an hour. He has no college degree either, so GM is paying for him to get his journeyman's card, and pays for him to attend school (pays for the school plus his hourly wage why he is there). Up until recently, he could take as much overtime as he wanted, including double and sometimes triple time on Sunday. Guess what he pays for family health insurance? $0.00 a month. I guess this is why GM is so financially sound, oh wait.......
Mostly geeks are the ones getting beat up in school. Who would be the thugs?
I'm a developer and I don't need a union.
If I wanted to laze around my job, "wearing the minimum amount of flare", then I guess I would need a union in order to ensure I can keep my job. But intead, I work for a living.
I don't need a union because there are laws against unsafe working conditions and protections for a minimum wage.
I don't need a union because the market sets the standard for reasonable heath, timeoff, and other benefits.
I don't need a union because I deliver value to my boss and the company.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I once saw a quote on Bash.org along these lines - Get all the tech-support people in the world to join together and form a kind of union. The union would have one purpose, and one purpose only: Every month, the members all pay a due. The dues go into one large pot. Now, anytime one of the members has to deal with a REALLY obnoxious/annoying (l)user who just doesn't get it, the money in the pot can be used to hire a hitman. Sounds good, no?
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
And then you have to have the ethically backbone not to unless there is no other way.
Lastly, your grasp better be international in reach.
If there ever was an organization dedicated to mediocrity, impeding productivity and forcing people to be on strike and not earning money when they want to, a union would be it.
I've been a programmer for over ten years now. Keep your skills fresh, work hard, be a team player, and you'll tend to get further work (if one job dries up, someone you know and have impressed will pipeline you into another) and plan for contingencies like being out of work for a while. It's a nice indoor job with good benefits (I'm a contractor but I have been an employee enough times to know that) and good pay rates. Sure, you might get outsourced - that just means what you were doing is something somebody else *should* be doing since they can do it cheaper. Get into some part of the industry that is new and not likely to flow to parts of the world with poor infrastructure, language barriers, or non-existent IP laws. Or get into Defense or Security work, those won't likely offshore anytime soon.
In short, stop crying and start working towards the future you want. High-tech is still one of the best ways to get there for the middle class guy. Sure, the rich get richer, but if anyone can tell me when this wasn't the case, I'd be glad to cut the legs out from under them. Yes, you work hard. But if you enjoy the job, that's actually not a bad thing.
And if you don't like the field, get out. If you don't like your employer, move on. If you don't like the work, retrain, expend some of your resources readying yourself for something you do like.
It seems to me the article's poster expects the world owes him/her something. Get over yourself, I say. The world owes you nothing, isn't fair, and a Union won't do anything but take your money, impose restrictions that hamper the hard workers and the competent, and drive the work away faster. Oh, and add to that sometimes pull you out of work when you don't want to go. And consume your union dues along the way (like all bureaucracies).
Unions... no thanks. I'm doing just fine without them. The only people who need unions are lazy folks, people without foresight, or people without initiative. Do yourself a favour and go out and take the world on and beat it into the shape you want, don't wait for someone to fix it for you.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I don't think unions are the answer, I think like all things polictial they get corrupted over time. I wouldn't mind seeing a little protection for IT workers. For instance the loophole that allows the lowest level techies and programmers to be considered "management" and thus not be allowed overtime. Often times 60 hours a week is required with no extra pay. The way salaries was supposed to work is you do what it takes to get the job done, but few companies will let you leave early if you get the job done. So you end up spending hours trying to look busy until you can leave. We need to truly define what is management and what is not in the IT world, allow those who work there butts off 80 hours a week to get some extra compensation. Or perhaps help limit some of the hours requirements by some companies. We need some help, but unions aren't the answer.
Well, unionization did wonders for the Big 3 U.S. automakers. The workers got crazy good benefits ($0 healh premiums!) and pension deals. Now G.M. and Ford are going under and those worker compensation packages are becoming increasingly worthless. Of course, this situation isn't entirely to blame on unions (Big Auto didn't pay squat into the pension funds in the early days), but when a significant portion of yearly earnings are paying for retired employees, something's gotta give.
Did unions protect steel workers? Or textile workers or airline employees here in the US?
Steel and textiles are pretty much gone from the US. Why do you think an IT union would
stop offshoring?
Unions don't matter in that respect. What does matter is a legal/tax structure which
encourages corporations to ship work overseas. Not to mention a system that favors
large corporations over smaller ones.
If you want to protect jobs, then ban multi-national and even multi-state corporations.
Then put back the limits that a corporation can only work in the one field it was originally incorporated for.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
I would be against unions (at least ones for developers). In the short term, they definitely pay off, however, the long-run repercussions tend to be disastrous: often times unions become too constraining for a company, and they outsource their work. I'm not all too worried about outsourcing for developers right now, despite all the hype, but the potential threat is there. That said, I wouldn't have a problem with a more liberal union that doesn't try to suffocate the life-blood out of a company's revenues. For example, one that tries to prevent layoffs instead of one that forces unfair raises (I've heard that Detroit car factory employees in a union make about $50k starting, which is about how much a computer science major makes - that seems a little unfair).
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
As a Teamster I see first hand how crippled organised labor has become. A job gurantee it's not. And this is just for plain ol'laborer's, the tech world is totaly different job structer, there would have to be an overhaul of how a union would be organised for anything to be effective,. That's not happeneing any time soon, with the poloticians on the corporations payroll.
It's not like unionization is necessarily contradictory to free markets, nor is it necessarily aligned with the statism the author seems to think it demands. In a free market, workers can come up with whatever individual or group demands they want, and employers can take or leave them.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I can't bother RTFA; my own personal view of things makes me not want to be part of a union.
But larger than that, for a software developer (which is what I am) you usually don't need the company any more than it needs you, and often times it is the other way around. If I were to get "right-sized" and couldn't find any other work (which doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment) I could always start my own company. The barriers to entry in the software field are relatively low (just look at Google, or even Microsoft).
Unions have played an important role in society (although the value they add in the western world may be questioned at present), but that doesn't mean that just because some group of workers who is largely un-unionized needs to become unionized.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seus
Support IT in India! Support unions in America!
"Sorry, I belong to the Data Base Administrators Union, if you want someone to edit that startup shell script you'll need to get someone from the System Administrators Union."
At least those are the horror stories we used to hear about the old industrial trade-unions, a Carpenter could not touch a pipe, even for a simple job like tightening a joint. You HAD to get a plumber or face industrial action (strike).
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
One of the best classes I ever took in Engineering was Industrial Relations, delivered by an engineer who worked at GM for many years. His take was the best thing management could do to reduce a union's power is to treat employees well enough that they wouldn't want or need a union. What a concept! Give them good wages and benefits and don't screw them over, and they won't want to pay union dues.
Good management will think that way. The result is a talented, hard-working, happy, dedicated, and loyal work force. That's the step between 1. Steal Underpants and 3. Profit!
-rant- It's the same every time: Guy on top doesn't deserve the money, the little guy has no say. Bull$h!t. The guy on the bottom doesn't have the balls to quit, create a company, and run it in the way they feel.
And, that is exactly what I am doing. I decided several years ago that I did not like the way I was treated nor the way employees were treated. So, I left. I am about to graduate with a dual-degree (MIS and Accounting). I believe a lot of companies do not invest enough in their employees and believe that if I create such a company, I can grab the best talent and employees in the process.
It boils down to this: you either believe in capitalism or you don't. I am NOT saying that companies should be allowed to do anything they want (lazzi faire capitalism), but there is a reason why some people do get paid more than others: he or she was willing to take a risk and effort do something that this writter wasn't--get off their ass and make something in this world like they want.
You can't both be employeed to be a worker and believe you get to call all the shots. -/rant-
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
If you want to stop Unionization and promote outsourcing and more guest workers, the ITAA's Harris Miller is your man for Senate in Virginia :
... Harris Miller's public record attacking unions and working Americans is shocking and well documented. Miller has publicly opposed unions and has been a leading proponent of outsourcing American jobs. He has been a lobbyist for some of the biggest anti-union corporate entities in America. He supported George Bush's tax cuts to the rich. He has given personal campaign contributions to some of the biggest Republican anti-union members of Congress including Spencer Abraham and John Sununu. Miller even supported anti-union Attorney General John Ashcroft. Harris Miller is no friend of working Virginians," said Panvini. source : http://www.raisingkaine.com/frontPage.do?nextDiary Id=2
...
2 100
Here's what the unions have to say about him
There's more
Needless to say Miller is truly one of the bad guys. Over and over again on core issues like trade, immigration, overtime protections and privatization of federal jobs, he's not only been on the wrong side, he's been galvanizing corporate efforts against us.
As the state AFL-CIO and the labor councils throughout the state embark on their candidate assessment process, I hope they will take into consideration Miller's anti-labor, anti-worker activities and find him unfit for any kind of labor support. source: http://www.raisingkaine.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=
First.... I don't mean to be flippant, but why do the IT postings regarding this to continue to regard themselves as either:
1. The sole class of people these actions are happening to
2. The class of people who it's the "worst" for
If it continues, I'm going to start calling it the "IT Victimization Syndrome".
Unionization isn't going to help IT any more than it helped the car industry. In fact, it would hurt you far more. You don't have billions in legacy equipment that is simply to costly to give up like auto companies do. It's pretty hard to outsource nursing.
All it takes to dump most IT guys (from a manager's point of view) is turning off their computers and revoking their access. Then you turn on a computer in a lower cost country. It's a nasty fact, but a fact non-the-less. If an IT worker wants to survive, he's going to have to move out of what has essentially become a service industry. Move into on-site support (very limited, I know) or move into management where the IT decisions are made and the sent to India etc. for implementation.
The traditional goal of unions was an avenue for workers to achieve political goals. The greatest asset a worker has is his labor. Even more so for those who are greatly skilled. In a time when the politicians put aside the interests of the people for the interests of big business the power of strong unions becomes more apparent.
For example I assume the vast majority of Tech workers are against the NSA spying program. If there was some organization within the Tech worker community they could speak with once voice. They could have a one-day walk-out in protest. Of course there might be a backlash, people would get angry because they can't use the Internet for one day or get their computer fixed. But that's what standing for something means. You stand for a belief in the face of risk and those who will go against you.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
A year ago, I would've said no, and very firmly.
I'm not so sure anymore.
The problem with unions isn't the unions per se, it often is what they've become. Unions nowadays are often very much like the corporations they allegedly fight. They have hierarchies, and the top people are more managers than anything else.
A firm no to that kind of union.
But a fresh union, now that might be something. And there are many good arguments in favour of unions. One of the most important being that a union and a large enough group of organized workers can put a kind of pressure on a company that you simply can't get any other way.
And in IT, we might have even more power than in other areas. Only transport is as immediately noticeable, but it hits the public. If any modern companies' IT systems were down for the day, they could pretty much close up until the strike is over.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think unions can survive in an environment where the disparity between the star producers, regular contributors, and dead weight span a 3:1:0 ratio. It seems to me that even the most productive blue-collar worker can only produce at most 3 times that of the typical worker (and I think that's a generous ratio).
In IT, particularly with programming, I think the ratio is probably more like 20:1:0... It's hard to imagine unionizing in that context -- why would the star performer want to support the regulars and lock himself to the wage structure of the non-stars? Similarly, the average person in a non-union position will have an incentive to improve his skills to become a star (in a way the blue-collar workers cannot) -- so being in a union would hurt the regular guy, too.
I don't know if I would join a union. I once belonged to one in a PPG glass factory -- we made Anderson Twindows (actually a pretty cool thing). But, the work wasn't too hard, and the pay (for that market) was pretty good.
You could argue the salary and conditions were a result of the union. That is probably true. But, as power grows, so does (did, seemingly) abuse.
We were up for new contract and the union came so close to putting us on the streets. They were demanding a cut back of the number of glass "lines" each worker ran per shift. As it was at the time, I was barely able to fill much more than four hours of real work in an 8-hour shift, and now I almost had to strike because the union wanted to bust balls with the company on this.
I know sometimes it's about putting a stake in the ground way out to reach certain compromises, but this seemed off the scale.
If IT wanted to unionize it would have to be with sanity. I'm not a big fan of seniority being the only yardstick for who stays and who goes when there are cutbacks (more on that in a moment). An IT union worth its salt would allow for hearings and maybe prevent arbitrary and massive layoffs.
Which brings me to an abuse I only figured out 2 years after getting laid off from a major telcom:
Part of my severance package was one months pay for every year I'd been there, with a maximum payout of 10 months. I'd been there for 21 years, so with my 60 day notice and severance, it might seem generous that I'd be getting one year of pay. But why would any employee with only ten years get the same benefit? That didn't seem fair.
Turns out, part of the contract for getting and keeping the severance requires the employee to honor what amounts to a gag order... no bad mouthing the company, and no legal proceedings against the company or they would take all of the money back.
Coincidentally it turns out that the statute of limitations for EEOC actions against a company is 300 days which conveniently happens to be 10 months. Aha! So, the company skates with what (IMO) amounts to hush money and looks generous at the same time. (for those who would claim these were generous terms, consider there are many hidden "costs" to the 20+ year employees, including but not limited to: health care coverage and costs, pension changes)
If unions had the power to change that kind of treatment, I'd consider them.
Empirical evidence in recent news suggests though (e.g., United Airlines, et al. where pensions have been handed over in default to the government) unions ultimately have little power to stem corporate abuse. The rich will continue to get richer, the poor will continue to have babies.
Sigh.
Heck, I'm one wrong-footing-by-executive-management-appeasing-st ockholders from STARTING a union at my workplace! Sure, unions have their problems like carrying deadweight employees and tendencies toward corrupt practices, but all in all they prevent large corporations from abusing staff by providing a unified front that forces companies to treat its own employees as VALUABLE assets, not expendable resources.
"Courage is being afraid to do the Right Thing, and doing it anyway."
You can join your union... And when you all go on strike I'll fire everyone and pick up a new batch of VB6 programmers from the local radio shack.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Are you a mechanic or an engineer - do you simply plan on working 8-5, with 30 minutes for lunch and 2 15 minutes breaks - or do you see yourself as a professional with a career. If you're a professional with a career (where I see myself) then find a new job if you boss is an unreasonable jerk (note- we're at essentially full employment - if there aren't jobs where you live, then move). If you see yourself as a mechanic, looking for an 8-5 for 30 years - you might want to wake up, that dream died in the 70s. Trust me, I'm originally from northern Ohio - I've seen the corpse. Time to move on . . .
Frankly, in order for an IT union to get any real traction, you would have to unionize just about everyone in the world that's qualified, because outsourcing is so easy. Quality may suffer for a short period of time, but knowing what the IT people I know would try to demand, it would be cheaper to pour money into training of foreign workers than to cave to an IT union's demand.
Unions are organized and stay organized easier when the job cannot, at all, be exported. In-store workers, miners, hospitality workers, truck drivers, etc. I can't have someone in China clean my office in New York. I can employ a code monkey in China to code for my business in New York. In America, quality is job none, just look at the abysmal performance of our big car companies. Americans don't care about quality, they want cheap, and that's just what we'll be given. No IT union is going to be able to fight that.
I'm renovating a building. The only real local contractor is NOT union, and they have voted in the past and don't want to be. I hired them to do the renovation.
The union office from two hours away showed up trying to pass out flyers at an elementary school a block away stating that because my contractor wasn't doing things right that all the kids had been exposed to asbestos.
It's a crock of bull, I've even had state inspectors out and got the all-clear and have all permits for removing the non-airborne asbestos roofing material from the building. It's all politics of the union trying to scare and/or strongarm the local contractor and of course dissuade anyone from hiring them.
I would NEVER want to be associated with any "union" that attempts to hurt small local economies because they didn't pay up union fees. It's racketeering if you ask me.
i had this idea years ago, but i realized it won't work, because there are so many kinds of IT work, it would be impossible to come up with standards, and it wouldn't have the results we want.
the union would end up run my business guys anyway, then it would just be working for a company within a company. still all sorts of dumbass crap we'd be told to do.
no, the answer is just to work for people who have a recent IT background in the first place. that way at least they might understand what's worth doing, and what isn't.
we could form some form of labor organization, but the union style is not appropriate for us. coding anyway, is more like a production art discipline than anything else, maybe a guild? this was suggested before...more plausible than a union anyway.
sometimes, i wonder if i'm the only conservative on teh intarweb. ah well, back to mah hogs and warmongerin'....
It would have worked if people had bought the products from union shops. Instead they all went and bought from Payless and WalMArt
Workers in any industry must unite to wrest power from the bourgeoisie. Extracting profit from labor is immoral. If you develop technology, it's your technology -- not theirs. You do the work, they sit back and let their money do their work. They do not deserve it. They are stealing from you. Band together and take back what was yours to begin with.
I was thinking of calling it the commercial union of networking technicians
;)
whaddayathink
Unions can't stop jobs from going overseas. If the Auto-giants can move production to other countries, considering the rigors they have to go through with logistics and construction etc., moving Tech jobs would be a breeze. Just ramp down one set of offices and ramp up another, mission accomplished.
Techies? Laborers? Does anyone here have the audacity to equate sitting at a computer, eating Fritos and Dew, reading Slashdot, and helping someone with his or her computer to getting atop large steel-framed buildings with nary a safety net or crawling into dirty, polluted mines?
All you have to do to get a white collar, well-paid tech job is this: clean up your act, shave your pony tail, dress nicely, and be FRIENDLY so that people actually ENJOY your presence.
I can speak from experience. No sane company lays off competent, insanely friendly IT people. These folks are the last to go. If you're a smug, unkempt, incompetent dork who hates everyone, your days in IT are limited -- try to unionize... what competent IT person is going to want to be affiliated with you? Why would they want to stick up for you?
Puting myself in shoes of an company in India, here is what I would be thinking right now --
Please, Oh! please unionize. Increase your costs further so that the software we make gets comparably even cheaper India and and we can take over the world....
There are two things that kill whole industries: Government and Unions. Don't believe me?
Railroad? Check.
Airlines? Check.
Automotive? Check.
The only reason construction isn't dying is that we need it more than most. Try getting a job from the local musicians union. That doesn't work either. While there may be some benifits, 9 times of ten they only cause more problems, more disputes, and more hassles for their workers.
Here is where I stand: If a union for developers' starts where I work I will start looking for another job.
I worked for a union telecom company while I was going to university and my feeling is that they only serve to protect workers who don't really want to work hard and move fast. Heck if I was working for a union company right now there is no way I would get paid what I do since it's a fair bit above the average pay for my job level.
I have been working in the IT field since before the boom. From field work to tech support desks.
The union idea comes up about every 2-3 years. Then it fades again. Most of the commentary here is from programmers who don't want to see some slacker next to them riding comfy while they work hard. Programming jobs should be contract for just that reason.
Unions would help the rank and file workers who are far more at the support and field engineer/help desk end of the spectrum. I have seen companies let people leave and not hire replacements for 2 and a half years while praising themselves for "never having a layoff", and review processes where your actual performance seems to affect the outcome about as much as telling your cat to fetch.
Just something to think about if you're only seeing this from the "leet coder" perspective.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Life is hard, then you die.
It sucks, but that is just the way it is. There is no such thing as job security. The past of working for one company for your entire career has been over for several decades. You should plan around that. Find a job and work it as long as you can stand being there. Then look for something new. Possibly in a different field entirely.
If they get some decent illegal immigration laws passed and actually enforced there should be plenty of jobs opening up shortly. Stuff that just about anybody can do. You will just need to work hard at it.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I'll never be part of one. A good example, see what's happening to Ford, GM, Northwest, Delta... need I continue
...somewhere between the mantle and the inner core. I really don't believe that. I believe union's are good for dangerous jobs and probably save lives but outside of that, rare is the case a good one to form a union. I've worked in 15+ companies' permanent or contract and by far the worst IT departments were unionized. Lack of incentive and accountability were easily identified as the main factors contributing to the extreme ineptitude. I'd love to hear if anyone has worked in a strongly unionized environment that thrived or met some measure of success.
Unions suck! Can't put it any more plainly than that. They are outdated and unwelcome.
-Xen
My mother's father was a member of his local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He was an officer and I still have his union seal stamp he used to mark union documents. It's one of the few momentoes I have of him, that his sailor's hat from his time in the Navy during WWII.
He grew up in a time when the unions were gaining power, forcing companies to make concessions, improve working conditions, and pay a decent wage to everybody. Unions served an important function in the early history of the industrialization of our nation. But their power is waning and frankly that's a good thing.
It might seem seductive -- hordes of geeks, banded together for the common good, but honestly, would it accomplish anything? In this day and age, workers are disposable. My IT job can be shipped off to India or China in a heartbeat and then what? Is the union going to shut down Microsoft or Oracle for unfair labor practices? Is it right that some other guy in my department gets as much as I do when he can't write code for sh*t?
Nope. I'm not for it, not in my industry, and not if it means I get dragged down by others who aren't interested in being competent programmers. I'm not walking a picket line for them and not striking when I know there's some guy in another country who makes one-third what I do and would be happy to punch keys for it.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I can't imagine IT workers, designers, programmers or any other technical worker wanting to become involved with unions.
Unions rely on the lowest common denominator of employee willing only to do what is in their pre-determined job description.
Unions represent all that is wrong in the workforce. Besides, most business owners are so technology illiterate that the idea of having to replace an IT specialist is a daunting task at best. Unions will only complicate the matter.
Finally, who is willing to sacrifice a percentage of their salary? Benefits require dues and without a truly international governing body to regulate the industry, unions will only make things worse. Have we already forgotten the lessons of the automotive unions making American manufacturers virtually irrelevant?
Well, crap...
Many tech workers don't need a union, because they're part of management -- an imaginative coder, or one who keep your old mainframe afloat, is an asset that can call down whatever price s/he wants.
But there's a whole bunch who are treated as labor: whether here, or India, or wherever; and in some industries (*cough* video games), that labor is being ruthlessly exploited. I'm sorry, but when some management moron thinks that "permanent crunch time" of 80 hours/week is more efficient than 40 for intellectual labor -- contrary to just about every workplace study ever done --, then the people on the screwed end need protection, for their own sanity, and for the good of the company.
The fact of the matter is, you will find in the business managers who build their careers on employee burnout; and you will find managers who are idiots and torture those under them, thinking their getting some productivity benefit; and you will also find outright idiots.
In an ideal world, unions don't exist. In the real world, they do, and they never come about because people want to sit around and be lazy all day.
I had the grave misfortune as a grad student in physics of being forced to belong to a union. As a result, I was being paid 60% of the going national rate as a physics TA, while living in an area with 130% of the national average cost of living.
The scam was basically this. The union would bind together a large group of people with quite different interests and needs into a single class. In our case, all grad students where represented as a union, and the union required the university to pay them all equally. The problem is, the going rate of pay nationally for a physics TA is about twice the going rate for an English, Psych, etc TA. The net result was that TAs in technical fields where paid WAY below the going rate, while TAs in the liberal arts where paid way above the going rate.
The university was literally BEGGING the union for permission to pay me more, because their low TA salaries in the sciences where making it almost impossible to recruit grad students. The union refused. The union actually actively suppressed my salary.
Remember this, unions do not represent workers, they are simply an exploiter of workers who claims to represent their interest.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
The only place I've ever seen tech workers unionize is EFN, the Eugene Free Network:
Unionize It
Unionize It, Take II
And of course, after the GM left, this was the story:
EFN Union Update
(you'll have to scroll down to see the actual articles)
Many tech unions already exist, they're called recruiting agencies in our business.
These "unions" provide jobs for qualifed workers and they also negotiate salary for you.
Clearly this model doesn't work well for the bulk of tech workers because we're smart enough and resourceful enough to find full-time employment on our own.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
According to the NLRB, less than 10% (it's about 8% now) of the TOTAL US workforce, including 63% of government employees, are members of labor unions. Among white collar workers, the number is much lower, around 1%. Unite, my ass. Ain't gonna happen.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
An aquaintance:
He's worked for more than 20 years on this one particular system for this one particularly large company. A few years ago, his division was sold to a consultantcy company. The consultantcy company then resold the division to a larger companys' consultantcy division.
The worker is still sitting in the same cube, working on the same system for the same company. Between two resales in under a year though he lost 20% salary, 20+ years of seniority, all accrued PTO, and went from good health benefits to mediocre.
Such wholesale injustice would not occur [without repercussions] in a union shop. Just because most modern unions are corrupt or ineffective bastions of mediocrity does not mean they're invariably that. The concept of the workers' union should not be abandoned, especially with the increasing commoditization of the skilled worker.
Unions exist to protect their most incompetent member. (If you can protect him/her, everyone else should be less at risk, right?)
Thanks, but no thanks.
If you want a job, join the union.
Get paid to sleep at work.
If you like to work, you don't need the union.
Every union screws its members far worse than management does. Union leadership will sometimes even admit this, but quickly follow with "but if we weren't here, management would screw 'em even worse."
From what I've seen (auto industry), it's kinda hard to believe.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy : states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
I am in a union where I work. Our department just fought for a raise accross the board and we won. We got the largest raise in the district's history. 10% salary increase adn a 5% cost of living increase retroactive back to July 2005. It was quite a nice retro check and we now make the average for tech jobs. The only downside to being in this union is that some of the techs we have here are old school...real old school. They started back in the 486 days in DOS and haven't learned anything new. We can't fire them because they are protected by the union. That to me is one of the few down sides.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
"If you could join a union in your workplace, would you?"
NO, it's enough that managers make money because I work! I don't need another bunch of usless people making money on my work!
I work at a University where the IT staff are in a union. All it does is protect the lazy, useless, and incompetent. The result of unions has been shuffling useless staff around to positions where they can't damage critical systems. Now they just coast for the rest of their life to retirement. The real work is done by part-time contract people at much lower pay, no benefits and are let go every so often to please the union as the contract workers are perceived as a threat to their full time jobs. The university has a rich pool of talent to draw from for IT work (Computer & Engineering department). So it goes that the fat-ass, lazy, people keep chalking up more benefits, raises and demand for less working hours and the work shifts to more talented people who get paid less and have no job security at all other than a revolving door of 1 year contracts at the lowest wages and no benefits. Not sure who I hate more the unions for making this happen or the university for exploiting the loop hole of rich talent pool for unlimited contract working conditions. Also the union here for IT is represented by the Steel Workers union--I have no idea what the hell they have to do with IT. My guess is they get more members, collect more fees and become another layer of government we have to deal with to get a job...
The management thinking goes from
to
Unions in the U.S. might well accelerate outsourcing.Unions are like any other bureaucracy; their ultimate goal is their own preservation, no matter what their ostensible goal is. Unions screw up relations between employees and management because doing so keeps them "relevant". Union dues? Thanks, I don't think that solves my "low pay" problem.
Unionized industries tend to go bust, because unions tend to disrupt the adaptations companies need to make to survive. I'll pass.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
in the IT sector. Namely because unions enforce pay raises based and promotions based on seniority and not ability of performance.
In a union shop, the only thing you know for certain about the people with a lot of seniority is that they didn't fuck up enough to get fired. That doesn't means that they're the best, or that they're even good at what they do.
That mentality can work in unskilled or semiskilled labor driven fields like construction or manufacturing but in IT it won't survive. In IT only the best should be promoted. It helps keep the best people in an organization and allows those with less skill, ability or work ethic to move on.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
In general, my experience has been that programmers tend to be in the elite group anyhow. They already have high salaries and they're protected from being arbitrarily replaced because they keep the arcane secrets of the company's application in their skulls. Admittedly, this is bound to change, offshoring and programming becoming more accesible and less black magic.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
They didn't do such a great job in the auto industry. Sure, the workers are overpaid, but the companies are going under.
Besides, coding is generally a unique-project-oriented task, not an assembly line or tradecraft.
You're much better off becoming an entrepeneur. You can easily secure a six-figure income through the following process:
1) Identify a specialty that will be around for awhile (this is the tricky part, but do-able)
2) Get 3-5 years experience
3) Become an independent consultant at $50-$100+/hr, depending on market (did you do your homework in Step 1?). If you're ambitious, hire people who are in Step 2 and make 20/hr for their efforts too.
As if family responsibilites were the only responsibilities that exist.
This way the guild could do away with all this certifications confusion and you could rank members by their skill and that would set their pay rate. Companies could still hire non guild members but they could not be assured what they are getting. A similar example of this is the screen actors guild.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I would never join a union, even if it meant the loss of my job or a lower salary. Unions are economic destructionists, and eat what they infest alive. They are violent, enrich the union leaders at the expense of the workers, cheat, depress wages in non-union sectors, and force all workers to join a union in in non Right to Work states. The US economy is 40% smaller than it would have been otherwise. How much would your standard of life improve if everyone was on average 40% wealthier?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Everyone hates them until they need them. Everyone should be glad it hasn't gotten bad enough to make a programmers union a necessity.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Make that hell no.
Modern unions in the US simply manage downsizing on behalf of management. See the some of the most recent contract settlements:
Northwest Airlines: Unions negotiate huge (30-50%) salary reductions
GM: Unions give up jobs & plants to keep salaries up for remaining workers
Union leaders are just Management in another name, and I think that is why union membership is falling and new workers don't want anything to do with a union.
You're not worth every penney- you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for.
Oh yes, and if all of us tech workers in America join a union, I'm sure it'll make those folks in India look that much less attractive! That's what we need in this country -- make us even more expensive to hire.
So once all the good jobs get outsourced, which shift at Wal-Mart do you want to take? I assume you'll have to check with your manager down at Mickey D's first...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I live in Texas, a "right to work state." Basically, if an employer decides to fire you because he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, he can. (However, he will find himself paying your unemployment cost.) So, unions are next to useless in this state. Plus, in my opinion, they are just another extortion racket. I have a friend who ended up changing careers because of a union strike. What the union was paying the strikers to live on was not enough to support a single person, much less a family. And, they were threatening the lives of anyone who crossed the line (and their families). Unions have their time and place. In most of the USA, that time and place has passed.
Unions? Let's see what the choices are:
1) I can peddle my skills (20+ yrs,Masters in InfoSec, CISSP/CISA/CISM/GIAC-...) to whomever I want for whatever they're willing to pay.
or
2) I join an organization that wants me to pay them to negotiate artifically high salaries for me and thousands of lower-skilled types, which causes employers to cut back staff to afford the higher costs and so I (and those lower-skilled types) are then going to have to work harder to do the same job. This is the same organization whose primary leverage is to tell me not to go to work/not to draw a paycheck until the boss coughs up more dough they'll then take.
I'll pass - Unions are dinosaurs leftover from when sweat shops were a problem. Maybe they'll go the same route someday.
My biggest problem with unions is that when a union comes into a workplace, you aren't giving the option of joining, you are given the option of joining or finding another job. If your field is largely union you can either join or find another line of work.
Now in most cases you don't technically have to "join" the union itself, you can instead pay nearly the same amount that the union member does to the union and recieve none of the actual union benefits or voting rights.
It's simply unfair that if 50%+1 of a workforce votes in a union that 100% of the workforce is forced to be a part of that union, people say it's the same thing with politics but it's not like everybody was forced to join the Republican party after the presidential election.
Of course I have other problems with unions (as they are implemented in the U.S.) other than the compulsory membership/association. They create a culture of entitlement where people act like the main reason the company exists is to provide them with employment. Also they tend to erode any incetive to do good work, if the jackass next to you, who does half as much work as you half as well makes more money just because he's been there longer there's no point to busting your ass.
...that submitter is a communist.
The power of a Union is directly proportional to how capital intensive its industry is. That's because capital-intensive firms suffer huge capital costs as a result of work stoppages, strikes, and disruptions at expensive factories.
Software, however, isn't capital-intensive at all. The total investment in a software house is a few thousand dollars for PCs and servers. If you struck, then your employer could move your PCs out of the building, outsource your jobs to India, and fire you all on the spot, with very little cost to himself.
Unions in IT would accomplish one thing only: an acceleration of the outsourcing trend.
I've been kicking it around for years. It has nothing to do with being lazy, it has everything to do with protecting yourself from managers who questionably violate labor laws without ending up with you being fired. Especially if you're right out of college and you have no idea what to do when your manager tries to work you 70-80 hours a week with no overtime. That's basically a sweatshop, but it definitely happens and I've been in that situation.
Of course, those who've been around the industry for years and have built up a reputation...and thus, have no difficulty switching jobs and/or maintaining work will obviously not see anything wrong. However, when I broke into the industry after college, I took a software development job with a Fortune 500 thinking it would be good experience...and I was paid like crap. And disposed of like crap after a year of hard work that generally met or surpassed most expectations. I mean, I got a good letter of recommendation out of it...which got me another job that lasted a year, and I was laid off (and even had that company try and contest my unemployment benefits).
I saw a lot of other guys fare much worse in the first few years, guys who I knew weren't bad engineers at all...maybe not the best suckups, but they got their work done. However, young engineers are seen as a dime a dozen by management, and are easily replaceable. Heck, even after working in the industry for years, I've had to get dirty in legal fights for paychecks with various telecommute contracts I've had.
Another thing unions can do is prevent companies from forcing employees to work ridiculous work weeks, so potentially, they can mate and reproduce. They can prevent managers from working visaholders like literal slaves, then holding them up as examples to force their citizenship holding employees into working similiar hours (many times for nothing). Instead of hiring engineers on full-time with the full intent of requiring them to work more than 40 hours a week, they would need to hire them on as contract or provide for overtime. (Or at least give the employee someone to report such behavior to other than the labor department...which can make things really ugly when it's you against your company.)
There are a lot of good benefits to being unionized, as long as the union isn't too horribly corrupt. Most engineers can join the AFL-CIO, however...well, that sort of fails that requirement.
1. My number one concern is job security. If the company closes because the union makes unreasonable demands, I lose my job. If I lose my job because that's the way the company busts the union and the union is too weak to protect me, that's just as bad. On the other hand, if it seems like the union will actually improve my job security, that would be a plus in the union column.
2. My number two concern is compensation. I need to make a decent living, I have two dependants (one of whom is a grown woman) and would like to live comfortably. So, if the union will improve my compensation without impacting my job security, that's another plus.
3. My number three concern is reasonable hours. I don't want an unreasonable amount of time off, but I don't want to work crazy hours either. I'd prefer a 40 hour week, that was predictable all the time. If the union can help with this and not impact the other two concern, then that's a plus in the union column.
How will I know? I won't, I'll have to use my best judgement if it ever comes up. I think people who are talking principle, and especially people who think unions are bad, in principle, are probably College Republicans with no responsibilities. After all, if a union comes to your job, and you don't join, you're a scab. That can work against you just as badly as management displeasure. If the union comes because working conditions are atrocious, it means the "free market" (which is a mythical beast anyhow, especially in the United States) has failed. (Of course, unions have never arisen in a "true free market" economy. I'm pretty sure that all market economies are rigged in some way. Why should I settle for less protection than the catfish farmers, or the sugar farmers, or the softwood producers? Principle? Well, I'll still have to pay extra for sugar, wood and catfish. Hope I can eat my principles.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
"Now that... is true freedom!"
Thats true isolation. It has nothing to do with freedom. Your free to work for whoever you want and they are free to fire you. You are also free to join a union, or not. Unless it is restricted by corporate charter or by law, which is true restriction.
Nothing about unions restricts your freedom. Unions are simply a social structure designed to organize people for a purpose.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Hell Yes!! I've been suggesting this for years.
Can I flag TFA as Troll?
My family has always been pretty pro-union, mostly on account of my grandfather:
-NOT being issued shop glasses (he was a drill press operator in automobile production)
-NOT being allowed to bring his own
-being injured on the job
-being administered by a substandard alcoholic 'company doctor' who promptly removed one of his eyes and hacked up the other one
-being fired without compensation
-eventually being re-hired at an ornamental job and given a $10,000 payoff to drop the whole thing.
In addition, there were stories of so-and-so's family having to buy the boss' groceries, or so-and-so's sister having to 'deliver' them, if you know what I mean. It was enough to make most of his kids go out and get their heads busted in fighting for the right to assemble a union.
I'm not going to get into where that particular institution has gotten itself today, but for this knucklehead to equate that with today's tech workers is ridiculous. Where was he when a crop of English majors called themselves 'programmers' and 'project managers' and started making $50-60k right out of college? When the company soda was flowing, foozball was an HR necessity, and the break room had a couch and a Playstation?
What exactly are the author's demands? That we be offered guaranteed jobs for life? That'll work, just ask GM and Delphi. With the possible exception of game developers, I don't think I've ever known a great programmer that felt 'exploited' for very long. Between my wife and I, we've been hit by one round of layoffs and dodged at least 6 others. If any of our past employers had been prevented from trimming the fat by union regulations, the entire operation would have folded up sooner.
And besides, some of my best freelance jobs were put together with fellow layoff victims...does that mean that I turned from a proletariat to a robber baron overnight?
There are plenty of problems with a handful of executives doing the insource/outsource swing every couple years, and playing games with people's careers in the process, but is a union going to fix that? Only if they break a bunch of other things in the process.
Hi -
In theory it might sound good, but I would like to suggest it will not work well for IT because:
1. There is a huge difference in productivity among information workers. One study (cited in the book "Peopleware" I think) said a 10 to 1 variance was likely, and others have suggested the real productivity ratio between the best and worst programmers could be as much as 100 to 1.
2. Things change too fast. For example, I was an early pioneer in dBASE developement, and now just 20 years later it has become essentially a historical footnote.
Finally here's a real life union example, even though I am from Michigan and saw how much good the UAW did to allow many thousands of uneducated European immigrants and poor blacks from the American south to enjoy a true middle class life for many years...
Here in L.A. when movie or television crews film on location in the area, Teamster union truck drivers drive many of the large trucks maybe 30 minutes or an hour to the nearby location. Then, all day long, they are prohibited by union laws from doing any work to help the movie (except moving the trucks), so they sit around and play cards or flirt with female extras all day (and get huge free meals) and then at the end of the day (which often includes several hours of overtime pay, even though they were not doing any real work) they drive the trucks back to the local studios or warehouses. This has been going on for roughly 50 years, and yet some people wonder why so many U.S. produced movies are now being shot in Canada....
TWR
That would be one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry.
One problem with Unions is that they often lock you into a fairly small geographic location for most industries - at least if you want to be able to work. My father worked as a union tradesman for 30 years, and had to pass up a lot of work in favor of unemployment because of the bloody stupid union.
Other times he had to go into non-union jobs as a "salter" at the risk of getting his ass seriously kicked - which I think happened once or twice, he wouldn't have told us kids. There wasn't always much choice, either.
What I remember of it as a kid is sneakers that had to be worn until they literally would not stay on my feet because I'd grown so far out of them my feet tore the sole right off. I remember knowing that the bank might come tomorrow to take the house away (we built it ourselves in the sticks near Brooksville Fla; I helped hammer nails, pull wiring, dig the foundation for the concrete slab and trenches for wiring and water pipes, and even roofing and siding - when I was 12 - and yes, we did eventually have to give it up). I remember my father being gone for months at a time so we could eat, traveling from Maine to Nevada, Florida to Washington State. All because we decided to move away from the locale where he held his union ticket. And, no, moving your ticket is NOT as easy as moving your drivers license. Verbal threats of bodily harm tend to put a damper on your willingness to follow legitimate channels to force acceptance too.
Unions tend to be highly political and unless you kiss the right asses, you can kiss your right to work goodbye. They are overblown bureacracies that are NOT run by people who actually work in the industry they are holding under their thumb. They are run by politicians that want to get more power and money (from the guy working for a paycheck) to put into some fund they can trash on the next Enron so everyones plans to retire with a halfway decent pension can watch it go up in smoke.
For the record, my father has stated on more than one occasion that if he had it to do over, he'd have avoided the union like the plague that it is.
The absence of unions in the tech industry is one of the most attractive things about it, in my not so humble opinion. Who needs union thugs defacing your website just because it doesn't have a "designed by Union drones" tag? Aren't there enough malicious hackers out there?
Before anyone starts talking about the "good" unions have done for trade workers, well, sure. They've done some good, but they're no better than the Spanish Inquisitors that did so much "good" in South America. What's so good about something that was accomplished on the blood of simple people just trying to get by? It may not be a violent as the history of the Catholic Church, but the history of unions is violent.
No Frickin thanks. I want my children to do without that kind of life growing up. I may have to pinch pennies, but not when it comes to fucking sneakers for my kids. And I'll damn sure keep it that way if I have any choice.
The only place I'd like to see unions put in place are in politics. That way we could shove some of their own damn medicine down their throats. Then again, it'd become damn impossible to get rid of the useless assholes wasting public resources for personal enjoyment.
Ok, enough of the vitriol. I dare say you get my drift though.
the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year
I don't know about you, but I hardly consider myself part of the "working class". According to Salary.com the average American makes $39,795. I make more than double that, but am not management or executive level. To lump myself in with the working class that makes $40K per year does them a disservice. There are people in this country that have it a lot rougher than I do. I'm just fortunate enough to be in a field where I can ask for more money than, say, a teacher or a nurse. I work hard and am well paid. Does our CEO make a large amount more than me? Yes, but he's also got more responsiblity. The market will determine what a skill set it worth. There's a reason the janitor in your building doesn't make $100K per year. People with skills that are in demand have the luxury of holding out for more money. Likewise, people with skills that are not as in demand will have a hard time commanding the same salaries. Does that mean that those lesser-skilled workers are being taken advantage of? No. It's just about supply and demand.
The real definition of communism aside, don't you think the company being owned by shareholders is at least as communistic as a labor union? Do you own stock? What opportunity are you choosing? The opportunity to choose which communistic corporation to work for? And how would you give that up by joining a union? Union workers have the same freedom to change employers.
In my previous job I was in a professional union, as where most IT staff (most employees for that matter). There were good things and bad things that went along with that. One of the good things was our contract...not necessarily what the contract read, but the fact that my responsibilites and my employeer's where actually written down on paper. The second "perk" was that us employees actually had a say in our benefit package when the contract came up for renewal. It's not like HR could come by one year and say "you are now responsible for 100% of your premiums." *eek*
The bad, well, the bad was THE CONTRACT. Our union puts more emphasis on seniority than performance in the contract. Should there have been a large layoff, our performance reviews could not save us...only our time worked at the company. Also, only a small fraction of our raises were based off of performance, the rest was essentially a gaurantee COLA. The only way for me to get a decent raise at my job was for my manager to have my posistion reclassifed into something with a higher pay scale, which makes no sense if I'm doing the exact same job as before.
There is a lot of misinformation about unions in the other posts here. But I do think that a union's conviction that an employee's worth should be based on their seniority is misguided and does not really apply to the much more mobile IT crowd. Not to mention that it makes it tough for a union to even survive with that mobile workforce.
The real problem that IT employees face, like competition from H1-B and L2 visa employees, won't be fixed by unions. However, IT obviously need a better representation in Washington so there is a counter to the large employeers out there.
ÕÕ
Many factors played in to why I left. Two years at SAP programing ABAP killed my joy for programming. But after being laid off for the fourth time in seven years and seeing the bottom fall out I could see what was coming just fine. Where once my pay would have been 85K and only going up I was seeing that 65K and mucho ass sucking, long hours, and constant threat of off shoring or new grad/ young buck to displace me. While I enjoyed the work I also had a life and interest outside of it and I was not willing to give my life up for that.
Now working in health care I have a union. I will get a decent raise, be protected from being fired if some manager decides he wants to bring in his best buddy from some former dotbomb and will be paid well if and when I want to work overtime. I was never a freelancer and made the big bucks, but I contracted and did well for others and decent for myself. As a regular working stiff though the yearly wage and the bonuses never added up to the work I did nor the time I was expected to give.
Yes unions do hurt a merit based system but you know what? Unless you are the best buddy of the owner/CTO/etc I have never, ever seen anyone get what they should in a merit system. Promises promises.
Maybe a Guild would be a nice middle ground, but I am happier with the work I do now, and have tons of security (Thanks Baby Boomers and a Graying world!), and I can work as much or as little I want, and I can work anywhere in the world without having to "Upgrade" my skills set every year to the latest hyped tool. And I get to help people directly, instead of eliminating jobs for people who may end up falling through the cracks and never have a decent job again.
Unions are bad.
You don't deserve a job or a paycheck. Nobody will acknowledge this contradicts all property rights.
Middle management is always right, even if they are proven wrong mathematically.
Nothing you ever accomplish means anything unless it leads to maximum profit.
Nobody in this discussion will ever acknowledge that destroying the labor force will destroy society.
There. Just saved everyone hours of typing.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
No you don't make your own, you have to bargain for it, and that's where collective bargaining comes in.
i know i may be the only yes vote here, but i see unions as a necassary evil. an evil to counter the greater evil of greedy management. yeah, there are side-effects like mediocrity and what not. but without unions, we would not have a middle class in this country. we would be stuck in the early days of the industrial revolution where workers were just rats to be killed off when the bottom line (or extra mansion) called for it. some argue that unions only protect the lazy, but they protect everyone. all you union haters should try working at a place like walmart. you will be thrilled by their anti-union stance.
Not to mention, of course, that even if you can keep finding new jobs, eventually you will be perceived as "job-hopping" or "churning," and are therefore not a safe employment risk, even if you had legitimate reasons for leaving each company. *wry grin* Then again, stay for over a decade with a company and you're liable to get labelled as "stagnated" or the like.
if(You.Do){Damned(You)} else {Damned(You)}
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Unions in their original form were great. They stopped literal abuse of the workers; unsafe working conditions, below-poverty wages, and more were eliminated because of unions. Most of the full-time IT population has health care, and is well paid in relation to the work they do.
So where are the abuses that need correcting in IT? At-will employment? Getting paid for the work you do, instead of some artificial number based on seniority? Oh, the humanity...
I love it when people refer to the mythical rich getting richer. Buy stock and partake in the endless supply of riches if you think they are so boundless.
Unions will do nothing but lower job count, encourage mediocrity at higher salaries and push jobs offshore faster.
Why would I want the playing field artificially leveled? My playing field greatly favors me because I am better at my job than most people. A collective bargaining agreement would end that advantage. I could only do as well as anyone else.
Well said. I agree; the playing field looks just fine from where I'm sitting, and I damn well don't need anyone jiggering around and propping up the low end of it, thanks very much.
If I had wanted a lowest-common-denominator, unionized job, I would have gone to trade school, become a machinist, and made auto parts for a living. Oh wait -- all those companies, that whole freaking industry is going out of business in this country, because of the way the Unions have driven the cost of production through the roof. I hope they've had a good run, because they've collective-bargained themselves out of a job.
And that's exactly what would happen in the technology sector, except it wouldn't take half a century for the jobs to start to disappear, it would take half a decade -- and that's at the most. We already have a problem getting businesses to not outsource tech jobs to places where the cost-of-living is a lot lower, and now people want to unionize and make that even higher? It's insane.
Joining a union is about as appealing to me as chaining myself to a half a dozen people who can't swim and jumping into a lake.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think creating a programmers Union would be a great idea! Then we could be as successful as airline workers or American car manufacturers ... um, wait a minute.... maybe it's not a great idea.
it's easy to tell your boss to shove it from u'r parents basement. some ppl have families to support.
Think IT jobs are fleeing the U.S. at a fast rate now? Unionize. Then you'll really see them go!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I've considered this type of thing in the past. I'd like that warm, fuzzy, union feeling. So, how do we go about starting one?
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Sig?
wow, you saw the same walmart propaganda tape i did?
How in the world does any owner of a profittable company make it communistic? I think you're confusing the board of directors and share holders. Your beef is with the board.
You would completely change your mind if you were a small business owner.. or even hired people to do considerable work on your home. Think about how you'd react if you hired someone to do extensive construction on your home, one employee kept mucking things up, and when you tried to fire that person, they staged a walk out to keep him employed? Now you're forced to pay for some jackass that screws up all the time.. or suffer not getting any work done at all. Oh.. and the law says you signed a contract so you can't just find another pool of laborers. You wouldn't be too happy.
It's a two way street. Don't complain about jobs being shifted overseas for cheaper labor, while tying the hands of our companies that are trying to be successful.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
I couldn't agree more with the negative posts about unions for IT positions. I'm part of a "closed-shop" healthcare organization, where you have to pay dues to the union even if you aren't a member. The union creates an impossible mess where you can't fire slackers; but, they still get the pay raises! If you are a motivated, smart IT worker, you'll do much better on your own. If you are worried about your job getting outsourced, pick up some new skills and stay marketable. Don't look to unions.
UNTIE!
I think that family responsibilities dwarf all others.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Saw that on a bumpersticker.
However, many tech workers in the US (DC area) are very well paid for what they do, especially if you have a clearance. Many, many jobs.... However, it requires skills, degrees, experience, and, tickets.
If you are one of the ones that don't live here, don't have a clearance, or one of dem farners, you are SOL -- sorry (SOL is the Standards Of Learning here in VA -- my kids take them).
First you assign each of your fingers a power of 2. Then you set finger down as a 0 in that power of 2, and up as a 1 in that position, or vice versa.
Learn to love me ... well, never mind, never mind
...
Assemble the code
Now, today, tomorrow and always
My only weakness is a linked-list of objects
My only weakness is
Oh, Tech Workers of the world
Unite and take over
Tech Workers of the world
Hand it over
Hand it over
Hand it over
Learn to love me
And assemble the code
Now, today, tomorrow, and always
My only weakness is a listed domain name
But last night the plans of a future shock
Was all I read on Slashdot
Tech Workers of the world
Unite and take over
Tech Workers of the world
Hand it over
Hand it over
Hand it over
A point-haired hand on my shoulder
A push - and it's over
Web server crashes down
(sixteen hours a day is a long time)
Tried living in the real world
Instead of a command shell
But before I began
I was bored before I even began
Tech Workers of the world
Unite and take over
Tech Workers of the world
Unite and take over
Tech Workers of the world
Unite and take over
Tech Workers of the world
Take over
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
I've dealt with the CWA (Telecom network wiring and such) before and the thing I remember is needing to get a few network wires plugged into switches, and it took half of a day in order to get 5 minutes of work done. I was on-site installing a product for my company, and had to twiddle my thumbs until they got it done (at $2000/day). I also had a little switch/hub in my bag and connected my laptop and the two systems I was clustering to the switch so I could have temporary connectivity. The guy I was working with said "I'm glad you are doing that. I'd get a grievance against me if I did it!"
NOT the type of organization I would want to work with! If Unions were widespread throughout IT, we'd probably be at twice the unemployment rate, and half of the GNP here in the US.
Let the free market decide!
The debt we owe to unions is OSHA. Unions were useful when they helped with life threatening conditions. OSHA does that now.
Unions suck the life out of companies and workers.
Ask GM, Ford hell ask ALL OF FRANCE!
They don't want to hire anyone because the unions won't let them
fire anyone.
I like having most of the money that I earn. Pay taxes to the govt.
I don't want to pay taxes to the mafia.
Unions exist for themselves. They live off of worker's earnings.
It is in their interest for you to be unhappy. The only worse set
of blood suckers are the Rainbow Coalition race baiters.
I would like to see something more like the Fraternal Order of Police. Something that isn't a union in the sense that they will negotiate contracts and all the seniority stuff, but something that a worker can call on to help advocate for their side in personnel discussions. That would be more useful to me than a Teamsters-type of union.
They are the only ones that count. All others will be gone in 100 years- but if you have grandkids, they'll live on.
However, having said that- family responsibilities tie you down. Thanks to the bankruptcy courts, you can always get out of everything else, move halfway across the world, and get another job.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If there was a need for unions in the IT field, they would exist by now. If there ever is a real need, people will create them.
In the same way that it was the population of USSR that made it communistic. In this scenario, the shareholders are akin to the population of USSR, and the board is akin to the highest government officials, and the people working at the company are akin to lower government functionaries.
I work for a state government and my agency is unionized. It's no different than working in a non-union environment as far as I can tell except I get significantly better benefits and my employer is required to follow a specific procedure if they want to get rid of me - if they don't follow that procedure then the union has my back and will hire lawyers and go to battle for me. We get to re-negotiate our contract every few years and if I want to be a part of that I can run in an election to represent my area on the negotiating team from my agency. If I don't want to be that involved I can go talk to my represenative and tell them what I want to see happen. I get all of this in exchange for something like 1% of my income in union dues - to me it seems like a deal. I know that if my supervisor doesn't like me for whatever reason they can't just fuck me over. I know that if my agency decides to outsource IT like so many businesses in the area have been over the past three years they can't because it would violate their contract with the union. I know that if I want anything in the contract to change I can have a fair say in it. I know that if I ever see something shady going on I can bring it to the union.
The only real draw backs I've found are that getting hired here took a lot longer than other places because the union requires a committee based process and that things like bonuses are out of the question.
I was pretty skeptical about being in a union before I got the job - I bought into the whole "union=lazy" rhetoric, actually being in a union and seeing how it really works has changed my mind. We don't have any more lazy or incompetent people than anywhere else I've worked and not only are we unionized, we're "state workers" too so if you believe the hype we should be twice as lazy as all you poor suckers in non-unionized private industry. Guess what, we're not!
Until people understand this, they will always bitch and moan about losing it, or how unfair it is that some rich dude has vast control over their lives. Those companies out there who have jobs you want are NOT your slaves, to be forced to give you a job to your liking when you want. Neither are YOU their slave to be commanded to work for them on their terms. The fact that the opportunity for you to have a job you want doesn't exist in your locale is not the fault of the companies in that region and is not their responsibility to correct. If that is too abstract for you, break it down into a simpler scenario: If you are a single person operating a business alone, should YOU be forced to provide a job to some other person even if it doesn't make any business sense TO YOU? Or should that person be able to tell you what should make business sense and thereby force you to employ them? I suspect you would not stand for such a thing. And for those who are saying "But, it's more complicated than that" you are right. I've glossed over the fact that corporations have special dispensation from the government and are therefore somewhat beholden to the needs of society. The key thing to remember here is that a corporation is a group of individuals, and none of them, individually, can be made to be responsible for providing you with a job. And if they are not individually responsible, then they are not collectively responsible either. The sooner we all start thinking and working for ourselves and not blaming others for our lot in life, the better off we will be.
If unions get into the tech workplace, you have little or no hope of EVER getting rid of co-workers that aren't picking up the slack.
Auto
Airline
Teachers
Manufacturing
These indusrtries haven't exactly had stellar performance lately. The truth is that the Union is an obsolete idea that's time has come and gone. The last thing we want to do to the tech industry is unionize. We want the tech industry to be even more independant actually. Ideally, we'd have more independant contractors which is the polar extreme of Unions. The advantages to this are both for the Tech workers and the companies. Both have more flexibility in the end.
No Sigs!
If you are alive, then the others will not be gone. If you are dead, then that one will be gone too.
the shareholder is valued more than the employee
Here's a radical idea: become both an employee *and a shareholder*. If you see a downside to this, quit immediately.
Anybody want a peanut?
Why? When my father-in-law moved to being a supervisor, he became the "enemy" to men he had been friends with for 25+ years. These are guys he played golf with, went to their children's weddings, etc. When a union strike was called, my father in law received death threats because he was now "management". Not that he had a rat's ass say in anything regarding contracts. Hell, his car window was broken by a thrown brick when he reported to work (which he had to do, because the union sure as hell wasn't protecting HIS management job).
Only in 21st century America can someone raise a question that was first asked over 25 years ago and claim it's "news". In the late 1970's and early 1980's this was a hot topic. What's so new about that? (p.s. Be careful you don't upset all the CWA workers who worked IT for the Bell system for so many years.)
My grandfather and great-grandfather both worked for West Virginia coal mines that used their geographic isolation to create pretty unthinkable work conditions- extremely dangerous mines, low wages that were promptly reclaimed at company stores that sold goods for unreasonably high costs.
For them, a labor union was fairly neccessary. The pros outweighed the cons. Their situation also beared NO resemblance to mine as a programming professional. They would both look on my station today and be very glad for me.
Many industries in the United States face a basic threat from the fact that it is simply cheaper to produce our product in a location with a lower cost of living, and that businesses that do not produce their goods at a strong value are businesses that fail.
What bothers me is that the union mentality in the original post fails to recognize this as a shared problem between the business and the employees. Unionizing when a company has set a value on goods so low that they have to mistreat their workers to get it is one thing. Unionizing to strongarm a company into an unjustifiable and disadvantageous relationship with you is another. Even if you successfully force a company to bear the full burden of the geographic disparity in cost of labor, all you have done is signed the death sentence for that company. It seems like when people talk about unionizing the IT industry, they aren't solving a problem- they are forcing the burden of a problem onto someone else's shoulders.
I think living in a region with a disproportionate cost of living will bring with it commensurate higher demands of its citizens, and that that is painful. However, the problem still isn't as severe as people make it out to be, and I have found that striving to be good at what I do, and not be a pushover in negotiations still gets me a job in the United States that my grandparents would be see as a definite uplifting of our family's fortunes.
The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. -Yeats, The Second Coming
The tech world seems to be littered with shallow ignoramuses. I would like to know where they are all getting their knee jerk group think ideas. It's eary.
People are allowed to form corporations in order to enrich themselves, give themselves multi-million dollar raises, expense accounts, etc. But to the "worker", your on your own buddy! Don't even think of organizing you f'in communist. The corporations will litteraly beat you down. It's pathetic.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Tell that to the airline industry. I can list *dozens* of such people who were laid off, some of them both extremely competent and friendly people who were also heavily experienced in a wide variety of areas.
Why? Because whole branches of the tree were lopped off post-9/11 without consideration for individual characteristics. Whole teams. Non-critical development groups. Paff! Gone.
I survived the first huge wave of layoffs at NWA in 2001, and I saw the whole rows of empty cubes just sitting where folks I knew and worked with for a decade had been just a few days earlier, and I never want to see anything that again.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
There's nothing libertarian about a disorganized labor sector. Unions are organizations among workers, not a government. Libertarians stand for freedom from government control - and corporate control, too, which unions can provide. Libertarians stand against unions which control people, but those are much less common than governments, corporation and other management that controls people. Especially in the absence of a union, disorganized laborers' liberty is defenseless in the world of corporate and government control.
--
make install -not war
I can still count to 1023 on my fingers though dammit!
Man, you really need that seminar!
IT workers could certainly benefit from strong, rank & file controlled unions, but I think culturally most are not ready for them. Employers have no problem banding together and exploiting every trick to maximize profitability for shareholders. And generally it's the workforce, we the people, who are downsized, mismanaged, have our benefits cut, jobs moved overseas, etc. Without unions of working people, the employers have no counterpoint to their own power (except the government, yeah right).
But most IT people believe the hype that the "free market" should not be interfered with. We, more than trade or unskilled breatheren tend to identify with the employers and internalize their culture. We ignore that workers banding together to improve their barganing position, in no way undermines the "free market" There's a free market for labor too. You're free to negotiate individually with your employer if you want to. But you'd clearly have more barganing power if you cooperated with your co-workers and negotiated together to protect the things that make a real difference in your lives, ie. working conditions, schedules, compensation, benefits, training, etc.
IT workers don't like to think of themselves as workers in the same way as a steel worker is a worker. We think our shit don't stink. We think we're somehow too smart to be members of the working class. But the working class is anyone who doesn't own the "means of production". This sense that we were somehow special was at a peak during the dot com bubble when it was a sellers market for labor, and should have died during the burst and outsourcing epidemic. IT people need to get a clue and realize that by aggregating our labor power, we would have so much more power to protect the things that are important to us, like the net neutrality, privacy, time with our families, patent reform, etc. It's one thing to have EFF out there fighting with whatever staff and budget they can scare up. It would be quite another to have an SEIU size Tech Workers Union wade into some of those debates with a pile of dues cash, and the threat of work stoppage or other on the job actions. Want to take away network neutrality SBC and Comcast? Well then, we can't be bothered to keep your routers patched.
At it's basic level, a union is merely a group of workers aggregating to advance common goals. In practice, trade unions have become big, often corupt bureaucracies. This is where unions get a bad name, well besides employer propaganda (which is huge). The solution to bad unions is rank and file control. Get rid of the bad bureaucrats. It's really that simple. American individualism really reaches it's zenith with IT workers. It's hard to imagine IT folks rare enough to see IT folks cooperating over lunch, much less their livelihoods. I think we're too lame to do it.
I used to be involved in Tech Worker organizing for the old school revolutionary union, the IWW (www.iww.org). That's the union that won the eight hour work day, which we dumb shits have voluntarily abandoned (so we can work 12 hour days, wheeee....) There are many cool strategies that can be tried. One we worked on, but didn't get very far, was a hiring hall for tech workers. It worked much like an employment agency, but everybody was in the union, and had a willingness to support each other's struggles. I've also started a unionized and worker owned web development business. I think workerer ownership is probably the smartest way to organize production so that it meets human needs, not arbitrary stockholder needs. In our business, we had a managment structure that people had to follow, so that the buck stopped with someone. But if that someone was really lame, workers could vote to remove them. We setup our processes how we wanted. We reaped all the profit from our work. We earned a base salary, and then yearly dividends based on what profit the company had made.
There are also all sorts of workplace solidarity actions that can be done even w
... you didn't listen, and now look where you are!
Rock -- you are here -- Hard place
Seriously, an engineering "career" (if you can glorify it with such a high sounding noun) is a sucker's game. Pay a zillion dollars tuition, work your ass off to get an engineering degree, reach your earnings peak at age 35, and then watch as the lawyers/MBAs who run the place pull out every stop imagineable to marginalize you.
There is no such thing as an engineering career in the U.S. You'll get off to a fast start relative to your peers (salaries are pretty decent for the first 10 years), but then what do you have? You have no security, no defenses against being replaced by younger cheaper "talent", whereever it is located. You're smarter than the competition? Well if you are a true superstar, then you can probably make a decent living, either through entrepreneurship or as one of the engineering poster children working for corporate America. But there really aren't that many superstars. I know a dozen Ivy League/MIT grads who didn't make it, and are now scrambling at age 40 to figure out how to make a decent living.
At the end of the day, the rules of the game are defined (and constantly redefined) by law makers (lawyers) and the corporate masters. You are either one of them, or you are little people (meaning nobody gives a shit what you think). These people, by and large, have nothing but disdain for the "geeks"-- the same attitude they displayed towards you while you were in college. And now, they hold your fate in their hands.
Case in point. It's not enough that corporate America is moving at breakneck speed to offshore everything imagineable-- they are now complaining that they cannot find enough "talent" onshore and need a huge new supply of H1b visas. Actually, they are pushing for no limits at all, but if they can't get that, they'll settle for a mere 150K visas/year (not to mention all the other visas they have at their disposal). This is all because engineers have a mean salary of a whopping (ready?) 80K! 80K? What a joke. Corporations find it insufferable that they should have to pay such outlandish sums for what amounts to digital fruit picking.
Contrast this with medicine, which has the one of the most powerfull unions in the world (called the AMA). Doctors have a mean salary of roughly $300K, and how much momentum is there for visas that would allow "guest doctors"? Inflation in healthcare has been rising at double digit rates for quite some time, yet the careers of doctors are secure.
Very simply, the only talented people who will find it cost effective to pursue engineering careers are third-worlders (excuse me... people from the developing world). Their government will pay for their education, and that 80K salary will look like a kings ransom to them.
I haven't read the *!&^*@# article, so I'm certainly vulnerable to that criticism. However, the Slashdot summary was enough to beg the question. In what way have unions prevented or ameliorated the effects of outsourcing in other industries? Which of these industries, if any, is on an economic course IT should emulate?
Pidgas
Diagnosis: you are paranoid. As luck would have it, you're also being followed.
I'm not in the camp who thinks unions are inherently bad nor do I think they're inherently good. They are but one solution. I offer another solution that I hope could be instituted into the workplace: management should be held responsible to the outcome of their decisions, good and bad. My experience has been that management makes decisions that have no traceability back to them. Specifically, they are not held responsible for the risks they take. If something goes wrong, the blame rolls downhill OR they just transfer to a different part of the company. In other words, there is no personal responsibility. And, even more insidiously, it is in other manager's best interest to keep it that way so that they aren't held responsible either. Just my two cents...
I have worked in tech. for over 15 years and it is filled with lazy, ignorant, prima donnas that entrench themselves in cozy little positions and act like the company would come unglued if they ever left. I've seen these people quit over silly management disputes and the company moves on without a hitch. I doubt highly that unions could make things any worse.
In fact it could potentialy make things better by working out a compensation package that is based on... _actual merrit_. Then your precious salary would be safe because clearly you will be in the top percental of valuable contributors and so take home most of the bacon.
Unions can actually work out solutions to problems so as to benefit a company and the people in it. It's about having the leverage to negotiate.
Yours and others line of opposition sounds firghteningly ignorant.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
One of the major issues with the tech industry is the lack of a unified voice.
Capital Hill needs a strong technical voice. Issues such as Net Neutrality, VOIP wiretapping, blocking of social networking sites, outlawing firewalls, COPA, SPAM, and MANY others need to be addressed by knowledgeable individuals. Not just those with deep pockets or personal agendas.
"United we stand; divided we fall" - John Dickinson
Every time my father's contract was up, the union would strike for weeks. Unemployment in Missouri wasn't very good, and I think it still probably stinks. They'd get a little pay raise, maybe a bit more paid time off. This was an every-year thing, because the union would never negotiate a multi-year contract -- no matter how much the local membership wanted one.
Then the union, seeing how it caused a strike around Christmas with January heating bills coming up and got us that little more money once they guys went back to work, would up the dues. Most of the raise went to the dues most times.
Then, one day the company couldn't turn a profit. They sold the plant, and the new company just wanted the name. They closed the plant and opened another in another state a few months later. Nearly 300 families had a breadwinner out of work -- mostly primary bread winners. My parents cancelled my plans to enroll in a private boarding school. My sister was worried how she'd afford to go to college. My father went back to work making one third what he had been making. That's because the union insisted he made three times as much as the non-union plant down the street before the closing instead of a mere twice as much.
Yes, the union did help someone financially -- the union bosses were well compensated, and probably went on to close bigger and better funded plants through other locals later.
If I were to marry the first woman who'd have me and we set about pumping out kids, then I'd have family responsibilities with no way of meeting them. If living in a way that makes that not happen is "avoiding responsibility" then so be it, but I call it "being responsible".
That is one of the worst analogies I've seen here in a looooooooong time.
Shareholders, if they disapprove of the company's direction, can sell their stock in one of the most open and liquid markets on the planet, and "vote with their $" for another firm that they wish to own, in a matter of seconds.
Citizens of the USSR had no such freedom of choice.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
"IT people are too mobile to be in a union."
/. after all.
I believe that effective mobility is proportional to the desire to unionize.
Where I live, I'm only aware of three big/stable, well paying companies (by my standards). And many people have been employees of more than one. Now, I think this means that if you are downsized, you go to another company, but that only leaves you one of the main companies to go. Now, you could work at a startup, while the jobs there are typically the most interesting, the stability and pay are the downsides (I've observed).
Also, at the last of the big three I worked at I also noticed that everytime a person left they were ALWAYS replaced with someone younger (typically 20s). This might not mean anything, but it did strike me as odd. The exception to this was management.
So, I'd think in a place in a similar situation to the one I described is where something like a union might not be a bad idea. I would also argue that this place isn't good to settle down in if you want to be a part of the technology industry, but that is another issue.
Not that I disagree with you in general, I just want to note an exception that should be observed. I could be way off base, but being accurate is meaningless on
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
They become just as corrupt as every organization as there power increases.
I grew up in a mining town in Labrador .... United Steelworkers of America.
..... and the resulting wildcat strike untill he was hired back beause he was the prez's buddy.
.... how many jobs will they shift - and how QUICKLY ..... if wages go up overnight, regardless of merit, by 30% because of the coercive power of a union?
They have some really, really, REALLY big trucks up there - the suckers will all 240 tonns of dirt in a single load.
My first memory of unions? One of those truckdrivers being fired for drinking on the job (caught with the flask to his lips in the cab)
THREE TIMES
And as far as the mean, evil PHBs sending the jobs to Indea to save 5 bucks
Thanks - I'll pass. Unions are the last refuge of the incompotent and lazy.
I'd rather not have a beaurocracy for a union. That said...
I'm guessing the purpose of a union is to bring the workers together so that no management at any level can abuse the workforce. Because they are a voice for the workers, they neatly cut the legs out from under the beaurocracy that is the corporation. Unions can do things like organize strikes (or even a mass exodus), negotiate wages, and so on -- returning some of the power to the workers, instead of the corporate beaurocracy.
Unfortunately, it usually ends up replacing one beaurocarcy (the corporation) with another (the union).
What we need is good communication, without the beaurocracy. Remember ea_spouse? As it is, it took forever for her to even write that anonymous letter. I think the workers of each company need to set up a forum/list/newsgroup, outside of the control of the company, in order to organize independent action. It'd be the kind of unofficial thing that the guys in the next cubicle tell you about your first day of work, but your boss never has a clue. Think like a flashmob -- if things get bad enough, everyone quits at once. Not because The Union told them to, but because they all know how bad it is, they all know they're not the only one, and they've all decided it's time.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ok, someone will not think this idea is positive. Everyone know IT people do not think the same as "normals" :) right?
I had an idea to form an IT Guild (union of some form), with the point being to look out for the workers without being petty, mony grubbing (fair day for fair pay) and doing their best to help the company including accepting layoffs sometimes. The point would be to have a network in the "Guild" so that members that are laid off can transition smoother to another job, maybe some ties with headhunters or employment services. It would not be an expensive guild and volunteer supported kind of like an open source organization to keep the cost of membership down.
And yes "Guild" I know there are a bunch of D&D IT guys and gals out there, and if we want to put our stamp on something why not be unique.
What's interesting to me is that most of the reasons ("problems") presented for unionization...
... still exist for unionized industries.
- rich get richer
- the shareholder is valued more than the employee
- jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency
- the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year
- they'll offshore your job to save a few bucks
- lay you off at the first sign of a slump
Are the rich not getting richer in the automotive industry ? Is there no offshore outsourcing ? No layoffs ?
Did you think no one would notice ?
In a capitalist system, employees have to recognize that their success depends on the success of the business, and the best employees will work hard to see their business is successful. This results in the best employees getting better pay, and a better lifestyle.
In a Marxist system, employees demand an artificial "equality" whether or not the company is successful, and thus don't work very hard to ensure the success of the business. Then when the business or the entire economy fails, they are left scratching their heads as their entire social structure turns on itself. The only equality they achieve is that everyone who subscribes to this delusion becomes equally impoverished.
Marxists believe that all economy is a zero sum game, if someone is overly successful, then they must be taking it from someone else. Just as they don't understand that a successful economy makes more money for everyone, they also don't understand that striving to damage that economy also causes damage to everyone.
The dramatic economic growth that has occured from technology has shown us that this economy is definitely NOT a zero-sum game. As technology expands, as new tools are developed, and as business is given the ability to grow, everyone who wishes to try and be a productive part of that society has the opportunity to get an ever-larger piece of the pie.
Cut the fiber optic cable? Is that really productive?
Slashdot, where you get modded down as redundant for stating an opposing viewpoint... Independent thought anyone?
Then put back the limits that a corporation can only work in the one field it was originally incorporated for.
Great idea (not)! If we did that, then we could go after Apple Computer for getting into that pesky "music" business. And we could go after Berkshire Hathaway for not being in the textile industry. And after those two go down, we can go after WD-40 for being in the lubrication business instead of the oil production business.
Forcing companies to "fit" into certain molds is not the way to go about this. There is too much derivative value and derivative success that stem from businesses "branching out" from their core competency. If you restrict the products and markets they can compete in, the you - by default - restrict the free market.
(note: I am not saying the free market shouldn't have restrictions - it should in certain places (monopolies). But doing it by industry is not the way to do it)
IATSE is working on organizing game developers. There are some interesting things going on with EA in Redwood City, where both Dreamworks and EA have buildings in the same complex, with people doing roughly the same jobs. But the Dreamworks people have a union, reasonable hours, and overtime pay, while the EA people don't.
That's the real question here. Do you want to be treated as a professional, or a laborer?
On the one hand, you have more rigorous entrance requirements - think of lawyers, doctors, engineers - and a pay and advancement structure that's pretty much based on merit and how hard you are willing to work.
On the other hand, you trade the various perks associated with a "professional" job with the security of steady employment and a generally stable (if moderate) financial future.
Over the last 10 years, I've seen the topic of unions/professional qualifications come up more and more frequently. Whether you like it or not, I think that sometime in the next 10-20 years, those of us in the IT field are going to get pushed into making a decision one way or the other. Either we're going to have to bite the bullet and push for recognized professional status, or trade potential earnings for security in a union.
So the question is - which would you rather be? Myself, I'd rather be a professional. While it's a tougher life to lead, I think the potential rewards are more than sufficient to make up for the challenges and risks. On top of that... I know that most managers would prefer things remain as they are, with IT workers being something of a mix between non-union labor and professionals. When push comes to shove, though, I have no doubt that the cheaper cost for business overall will be to encourage IT unionization. That alone is enough to make me think that IT as a professional career is the way I want things to go.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Wont make you rich. You'll have to pay dues and answer to a second set of bosses. You'll lose the ability to go into your boss' office and negotiate independantly.
Besides, its the computer industry. When you go on strike the computers will keep working.
They could always defect.
I'm not for unions, but some kind of organized strike in the tech sector is long deserved. Not to strike back at the companies, but to strike back at the politicians and culture as a whole that have "downsized" our value, deserved respect, and contributions for so long. Most likely people will just get mad, but maybe they will learn to pay slightly less attention to the American Idol show they are watching and slightly more to the technology they are watching it with.
I've always wondered why IT people don't throw their weight around more. Some of the guys at this customer site would be almost impossible to replace. They have a firewall/router/network eng who is really top notch. Windows and *nix background, Cisco certified he has the keys to their data kingdom in his head and they treat him like a dog. And he takes it. If any of them here treated me like that I'd walk out in a heart beat. If I left it would take them a couple months to gen a new contract for a consultant. No big deal. If he left I'm not sure they'd ever get as good of a person to work out here.
It sounds like personal finances influence a lot of people, including the person above. I started years ago paying off debts, saving even when it was painful, making good investments and even traded down in houses to a place we can afford comfortably and started my own business. It makes a huge difference in my attitude now that a full-time paycheck is optional. Oddly I have more work than ever. Part of that is the job market, but a definite part is companies are willing to pay more to get me on their projects. Maybe because I'm not a sniveling underling living paycheck to paycheck who has to kiss butt out of fear of losing my job. I play golf with the higher ups, they bring their kids over to my place to go fishing, we have cook outs and knock back a few beers. They treat me like an equal and their net eng like a dog, even though he's worth more (in my opinion) and harder to replace. I'm not digging on anyone over-extended financially, I'm merely suggesting that changing your financial lifestyle could give some of you the kind of security you may be seeking in a union. Just a thought.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
We don't need unions for programmers... We have it pretty good already. As many others have noted, a union will most likely encourage mediocrity and stop rewarding individuals that excel.
However, we do need more representation at the government level.. i.e., lobbyists. We need to prevent the rampant abuses of the H1-B visa system, and get rid of tax breaks for companies that ship more and more jobs out of the country. I believe wholeheartedly in capitalism, so companies should be free to go after whatever labor pool they think will work best for them. BUT - we should certainly not be rewarding companies with tax breaks for taking jobs away from citizens and shifting them to other countries. If anything, we should be rewarding companies that create jobs in this country.
The corporations have their own lobbyists, and spend millions of dollars each year to ensure that they can treat their employees like crap and hire cheap foreign labor. The employees need their own representation to balance the equation.
Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.
You spineless worm.
If you really cared about keeping a roof over your family's heads you would be looking for a new job that paid more, not hiding where you can follow the path of least resistance to keep the paychecks coming in.
Getting a new job doesn't mean quitting and then looking for a job. Since when did it hurt anyone to start looking on their own time? Find something with better pay and prospects, skill up, sack up, and get out there and work for your family.
It's a free labor market (for now and thank god). Get out there and start acting like it instead of making excuses.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Your definition of make is clearly different than my own. "Make" all you want, if you don't bargain with others, you won't be around much longer to "make" anything.
The reason why IT is a growing and prosperous field is because we DONT have commie unions and other BS... I hate how slashdot has these communist posts. You linux using little dick socialists!!!!
If you want to have the option of working 60 hours a week, put it into the contract.
If you want management to be able to fire people who don't adhear to best practices or meet their deadlines, put that into the contract.
If you want people to get promoted based on merit reviews instead of seniority, put that into the contract.
The attitude and tone some of you have in your posts, it wouldn't surprise me if a couple of you have been "laid off" because you just rub people the wrong way. You'd think you'd want some protection from that too.
...why does it not surprise me that you're bitter, jobless, and will probably die alone?
There are PLENTY of one-man businesses run out of a house in this country.
Let me give you one model that I am intimately familiar with: the sales representative model.
You represent 1 to X companies and you go around selling their stuff to YOUR customers and taking a commission. It's not cost effective for each company to have their own salesman in your area but it IS cost effective for each company to pay you a cut and have you sell many (non-competing) company's products.
This model can - and is - done out of people's homes all the time. There are countless other examples across countless other industries.
And none of them require employees, office space, rent, or other "high" expenses. Yes, there is *some* cost involved but if you can't scrape together $5k to start up, then maybe you shouldn't be in business in the first place.
(disclaimer: it does take more than "balls" but the barrier to entry is nowhere near as high as you describe. Go pick up a mag called "Agency" and you'll see PLENTY of companies looking for representation - some good, some bad.)
I'm in my country's equivalent to IWW http://www.iww.org/...Being a wobbly techie type works absolutely fine...even better, you can stay in the "one big union" even if you change jobs or assignments..i get legal help (and supply some as i go along and learn labour law), i get camaraderie, and i get to meet'n chat with all sorts of people of all classes and professions, hell it even helped me get hints in employment opportunities. Nothing is stopping you from joining the union I realise i sound like a union-bot right about now, but it's that good, noone should stand alone, no matter their profession.
How about the employees of a particular location and/or company form an organization? This organization can act as a way of tracking and negotiating large issues and explore complaints of abuse by the employer. To minimize corruption, the organization's officers would democratically elected by the members of the organization. And, in order to mobilize the whole organization, a vote would have to be held and a pre-determined support level would be needed (e.g., 50%? 60%? 75%?). The organization could also negotiate large group rates with insurance companies and the like.
The administrative work could be done by volunteers or some kind of fees could be collected to hire administrative staff if the organization was large enough.
Think it could work?
Unions have outlasted their usefulness, and would do nothing but bloat and overburden tech companies. It would benefit worker salary levels, but then the people who can't hack it would still get the same pay level.
Case and point...look at what the United Auto Workers have done to GM. Not that GM isn't at fault at all, cause they most certainly are. But the union and their reidiculous contracts are killing GM, by forcing GM to pay for work regardless of whether or not it is needed or done. It's why the Japanese, German, And Korean auto industries are that much farther ahead of Detroit.
Children are a form of immortality- your DNA lives on in them, your teachings and customs live on in them, after you are dead. That's why they are the only responsibility that counts.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Good example. Now here's an interesting question:
1. When was the last Pixar layoff?
2. When was the last Electronic Arts layoff?
Hmm...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The average CEO makes 430 times what the average employee makes. THIS is the main problem with American technology today. When CEO's are mostly fly-by-night postions, and the only interests they are looking out for are their own, it's no surprise that productivity drops while actual employed workers decreases. What justifies making over 400 times what one employee does? Do CEO's perform 400 times the work? No, in actuality, they have become less effective than they were 15 years ago, when they made 107 times what the average employee makes. This is the rift that corporations are building. More greed, less production. This cannot end in any good way. Unions are not the answer. Ending war profiteering, rampant handouts for the upper 4%, banning corporate lobbyists, and bringing power back to the middle class are the way to close the gap. Corporations should NOT have more power than citizens. Vote these fucking back talking assholes out of office. Normally, I'm all for the two party system, but libertarian is looking more and more sane every day. Sources: http://www.faireconomy.org/press/2005/EE2005.pdf Matt.
Even if you are willing to accept all the rest of the hype in this summary, in no sense that that convince me that Unions are the solution. With a Union, you're doing little more it seems than funding a new elite class (Union bosses) who make more money than you do while working less hard than you do - all the while funding political candidates and causes using dues money that are at odds with half their membership on average. Great work, Union boss that is, if you can get it, but not for me.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Here's a different example. Skilled construction jobs are way up, and they are largely union.
Therefore, unions create larger markets.
Fantastic! Not since my 9th grade health class have a heard such a good example of impaired mental ability demonstrating faulty logic. The example back then was:
"Jesus was a man with long hair. I have long hair. I must be Jesus."
Again, great job on ignoring the largest real estate bubble ever to hit a capitalist economy in your pro-union analysis.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Anyone who isn't a communist but works in a unionized shop quickly grows to resent unions. If IT were unionized here is what will happen:
- The union workers who have a decent work ethic will quickly become disgruntled when they find their raises are limited to 1.5% COLA increases, and yet the slackers who do the absolute minimum required (as bargained by the union) spend most of their day smoking in the back room and harassing the people who actually EARN a living, complaining that hard workers make them look bad
- If you are say, an architect, and accidentally kicked out your mouse cable and you go under your desk to plug it back in, and a unionized MIS employee sees you do that, you'll have a grievence filed against you
- If you're an architect and you need, say, Visio or Kivio installed to quickly build some conceptual diagrams, you know you'll have a grievance filed against you because the union has dictated that installing software belongs strictly to the MIS department, not engineering. So you ask a nearby MIS worker, and he tells you "it's not my job, all I do is plug in mouses and keyboards" and to submit a requisition. Of course, the fellow who is the only employee authorized to install flowcharting and diagramming programs is not in today (he called in sick and even though another employee spotted him at the beach there is nothing that can be done because he's unionized) so you'll have to wait.
- You find you don't like the placement of your workstation so you rearrange your desk. What happens? Yes, another grievance because it's not your job to move your computer equipment around. The union requires that you file a requisition with the MIS department so the individual responsible for rearranging workspaces will be assigned to that union-protected job's task.
Meanwhile, you've been working 65 hours a week and although you're union, you're salaried. You're still at the office at 8:00pm and your wife is pregnant and busy with two toddlers, and you want to get home. You have been working so much that you believe you deserve a raise. You go to your supervisor and discuss a raise or promotion with him because not only are you prompt and courteous (not abusing sick time, etc.) but you get more work done than your peers plus your rearchitecting of the server component increased performance by 85% while at the same time fixing all confirmed defects present in the previous release, resulting in grabbing 45% more market share in the last three months compared to your two largest competitors (who were previously each ahead of you) combined. Your boss, with whom you have a great rapport and have earned his respect and share a common disdain for communist Unions, apologetically explains that the union dictates that all you are eligible for is a 1.5% COLA at the end of the year and an additional 1.5 personal day, and as far as promotions are concerned, John, a slacker who writes extremely buggy code (in fact the very module you just rearchitected) comes in 15 minutes late every day and leaves at 4:55pm, who has used every sick day for the year by March (after bragging about his new skis and ski lodge timeshare in Maine to all of his unionized coworkers) has three months' seniority and will be the one who will be taking the Senior Architect position when the current unionized Senior Architect is promoted or retires. When you mention John's skillset he reluctantly replies "Oh, I know John has no experience in software design but only programming, but sorry, that's what the union contract requires."
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Hmmm, I don't think I have ever run across anyone who owned a mansion who would be caught dead in a Miata.
Joining a union is about as appealing to me as chaining myself to a half a dozen people who can't swim and jumping into a lake.
With infinite time, I don't believe I could think of a more apt analogy.
I'm a big tall mofo.
The laziest, whiniest, least productive member of the group will be the constant target of my sharp-tongued, replace-your-own-damned-toner-cartridge BOFH sysadmin skills.
They will find that to be a far worse fate than death.
Besides, I got my Master Marksman back in the day, so I'm probably a better shot than they are.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I guess in this case it would be 'nothing to lose but your jobs'.
While unions have the good sides I find the negatives too appalling to contemplate being party to one. I have been in union jobs before and all I ever saw was the deadbeats getting away with crap that no employer or fellow employee should be forced to suffer with. I have seen union bosses rack in the bucks while the "subjects" get the same old shaft in the end. I have seen an hour of my pay per week go to some group which made promises to us that did nothing to better our situation. Basically all I found was that the union was there for you provided you followed their group-think.
While there are employers out there who run their salaried workforce ragged, their "professionals" ragged, nothing prevents those who are employed there from seeking better conditions. I have seen shops go from hell to near paradise as people fled which led to management changes and even wholesale gutting of the problem.
Acting like a responsbile adult, a true professional, means acting with integrity. This means you leave a job which runs contrary to those beliefs. Sure you can't just up and leave, thats part of being a functional part of society. You do however don't sit and stew, that helps no one, especially yourself. Think a union can fix it? Tough chance. They will insert at most a buffer but that doesn't sway minds. What sways minds of management is constant failures brought on by low morale and attrition. Yet I know, why should I wait for the change. Fact is, if your truly a professional in your field with good skills you don't have to. Putting up with it is the easy road, yes I said the easy road. Its far lazy to accept the BS than take the risk of going elsewhere. I know many people who bitch and moan on a daily basis but never take the one step to free themselves. They are afraid of the change. If you will not change how do you expect your situation to do so?
Yeah jobs can suck, but you control the most important element, yourself.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I was just reading an article from this morning's newspaper claiming here in the midwestern U.S. (St. Louis, Missouri area to be precise), our "blue collar" labor force earns closer to the typical "white collar" salary than anyplace else in the country.
... only it happens to currently be more cost-effective to use human labor. When you work like a "humanized robot", you can expect to be thought of rather like one. You're a "fixed expense". Your employer doesn't feel any motivation to keep increasing your pay over whatever was initially agreed upon (just as a machine costs a certain amount in repair and maintenance expenses to keep it going). If you want more leverage in getting pay increases and better working conditions, teaming up with all of your co-workers under one "voice" makes sense.
They went on to discuss theories of why that might be. Of course, some of the ones you might expect were thrown about. (EG. We're near the middle of the country, geographically, so we have a higher than average number of union truck drivers here, who of course, earn more than, say, laborers picking crops or sewing clothing goods together.)
But the point they neglected to touch on was one that immediately came to my mind. Our I.T. and technology workers generally get paid far below the median pay for comparable jobs nation-wide! It's not so much a situation of the unions really helping those midwestern laborers collect a good paycheck as it is a situation of our business professionals being underpaid!
As far as I'm concerned, one of the other Slashdot posters was absolutely right. A union makes sense (within reason) for workers doing repetitive tasks that require little creativity or deep thought. They're basically doing jobs that could be done by robots or machines
If, however, you feel you have unique, specialized skills to bring to the table as part of your employment, why pool yourself in with everybody else? Even if you don't, merely having a sharp mind and a willingness to learn puts you leaps and bounds above the "typical worker", and has innate "value".
There's definitely a problem in America with pay-scales and professions. Our grade-school and high-school teachers can often barely scrape by a living on their wages, for example. But I don't see unions as the solution. If anything, they may have indirectly caused part of the problem because it created generations of workers who weren't given much motivation to better themselves. (Why make the effort to learn new things when I get paid more, guaranteed by union contract, to sit here and keep screwing these bolts on these cars?)
Slashdoters don't like IT Unions. Ok, we've got that.
Now, is there a way that organized labor can improve the tech workers world? Yes.
Meritocracies are always championed by those with greatest merit. IT is a meritocracy. Slashdoters can code like demons.
Right now IT is still fairly cutting edge, it is something you really have to be interested in to pick up. But it won't be that way forever.
Soon the hackers who love what they do will be surrounded by those who do what they do for a salary. And for those people, job security and equitable work environments matter.
If you're a star, anything that helps out the non-stars looks like a handout, and a drain on your potential salary. Beside the fact that makes you a greedy insenstive pig, it also ignores the fact that most people don't work with the kind of passion and love you do. They work for the money.
Right now the tech workers of the world are being happily exploited. But that won't always be the case. EA getting sued over unpaid overtime is just the start. Geeks are aging, the field is getting crowded by the mediocre, and with these things come the need for security and additional support from a so-far cut throat industry.
The hack it or quit mentality, besides being crass, selfish, and heartless, just doesn't work the more important your industry is to a large segment of the population.
If IT is to drive the economy for years to come, it needs to be controlled, stagnated, leashed. Otherwise you get the abuses of a young industry where people happily tolerate them, in an aging industry where people who can't live life on the edge are being really hurt.
I'm angered by the "it works for me, screw you if it doesn't" mentality I've seen on a lot of high modded posts. I would have hoped that people would at least recognise the dangers and flaws of the industry before proclaiming themselves coding gods who sneer at mortal coders. (Which is how they came off)
Unions have problems, but organised labor is a good solution to combat organised and exploitive management.
-Ian
At least, that's what I got from my dad, who was a union member for 30 years, and a union steward for part of that. (Communications Workers of America, in case you're curious.)
And it sounded to me like the ultimate goal was "An honest day's pay for an honest day's work". And that presumes that everyone is doing an honest day's work, rather than surfing the net or posting on slashdot. Ooops.
I saw him go to bat for a guy who showed up drunk at work. Helped to get him involved in AA or whatever, and managed to save his job. It happened again, and that was it, not promising anything again. Not all unions are about keeping the slackers around, and I think that programmers should be bright enough people to handle that concept.
I am better at my job than most people.
Yeah, we all like to think that, dude. Hell, I should be President, while we're at it.
I know many IT people that take just this kind of attitude. They chase a higher saliry as soon as they see it, transfer all around, etc. Well, when you want that kind of fluidity as an employee, don't be supprised that companies want the same ability to move your around or lay you off as needed. Job security has to be a two way street. If you expect your employer to stick with you during a down time, you need to be willing to do the same for them.
.com boom, you know they've gotten some better offers, but they've stuck with it because they like it here and so good work. They all know the system very well and function as a team.
.com boom you had to replace almost your entire workforce.
I mean look at it from a bosses' point of view. We go through a period where our demand is such that we only need 80% of our current programming staff. Profits are down to match, so it's a strain to keep all those. So let's take two different scenarios:
1) Almost all the programmers are lifers, they got this job and have stuck with it. They didn't run off chasing high salries during the
So you decide to ride it out. Going to be rough, but better to keep that good team together than risk having everything all upset when business picks up. You tell everyone they'll be no raises and such, without fear that they are all going to jump ship because of it. You can show them loyalty because they've showed it to you.
2) All your programmers are new hires. Your "veterans" are maybe approching 10 years with you, most employees are under 5. You have regular turnovere of people chasing higher numbers. During the
So you decide to cut 20% of the staff. I mean why not? You'll just hire new people when you need them. That's how it works, people stay for as long as they want, usually not long, and then just jet. It's not going to cause a lot of unhappiness anyhow.
So really, if you are one of the #2 types that changes companies all the time, then yes, you've said you don't want job security. You've made other thigns a priority. Now that's fine, I am not telling you that you are wrong in doing that. I know many people who bounce from job to job and are happy and rich for it. They feel now loyalty towards employers, and expect none in return. Some even become consultants which is that to an extreme, where it's spelled out that you are just working for the one thing and then you are gone.
However, if you choose that life, don't get pissey when companies don't think twice about canning you.
I think that unions are really only helpful if the company is sufficiently large. Think about it, if EA's employees were unionized, do you think they'd still be taking it up the ass? Would the turn around time be less than a year? I doubt it. Unions give people the courage and ability to stand up to benefit cuts, shitty hours and shitty pay. If one is built correctly, it doesn't really hinder anything. Yes the mandatory raises are kind of lame (the last one here was 1.5% though, its really only keeping up with inflation, I myself got ~8.5% raise, which is huge). We still get hired, fired and get raises in the same ways others do though (I work in an engineering unit). But we also keep the company from slicing benefits for people that are about to retire, get a say in what kind of healthcare we are provided with, retirement investments, etc. It is actually a pretty sweet deal and I'm glad for it. And I'm glad that, if the company ever really tries to screw me over, my fellow employees and I can do something about it instead of trying to find a new job and start over.
Trust me, when we all walk out the door and refuse to work, they lose a LOT of money, every minute we are gone. We, however, aren't quite as readily replaced as programmers might be because the tribal knowledge that is gained here is pretty valuable. No I don't think, for most IT companies, it would make sense. But I bet if you put EA under a union the working conditions would improve...
Except you can communicate your teachings and customs to those already among us without the overhead of raising a child. Besides, I hope to have my DNA corrected. I strive for correction in all things first.
Except in France, where if you make enough noise in the streets the government caves. Germany is probably lucky they never got France for very long. The chances of France destroying German resolve and work-ethic is certainly greater than that of Germany reforming French attitudes!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Your manager is good at the only skill that truly matters - protecting his 3X salary. As long as his incompetence doesn't sink the company in the process, you should learn from him. After all, he's the one making 3X for being a jellyfish!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yes they were a good thing many decades ago, but now they just suck money out of your paycheck.
I have never worked for, nor knew anyone who worked for, a union that was worth a damn.
If my company became unionized I would quit and go elsewhere rather than deal with the union bullshit or pay them one red cent.
Moreover, IT workers, most of whom make considerably more than average incomes (I make twice the US average), hardly need a union.
I think the article pointed out a good contrast of social trend against actual sentiments. The dearth of anti-union comments on here is unsurprising, but also misleading. Never heard of WashTech before either, so that was very interesting. Just more proof that a union isn't all that of a toxic or alien concept in how people work.
My marketing teacher in college just busted out a very insightful comment one day on the subject of unions and whether it was right to be for or against them. She just looked at us all and said:
"You are going to have organized management, so you are going to have organized labor." Matter of fact it is just a part of everything.
If a union can toss my boss in the trash, where can I pay my dues?
I know it is so popular to rag on bosses. How they know nothing, add no value, blah blah blah. The funny thing is there is a segment of the boss population that is like this. But I bet it's pretty small. The reality is that it is far more likely that your boss possesses skillsets (whatever they are) that you may never comprehend in your entire career. Rather than admit that, it's easier just to chalk his success up to luck, or brown nosing, or nepotism or whatever other nonsense you can latch on to.
Realize that everyone has something to teach you... everyone... and you just may find yourself the one making the decisions some day. Or, keep grousing on Slashdot about your lack of opportunities and your stupid boss. Makes no difference to me.
Best of luck to you.
I'm a big tall mofo.
The Union didn't want to bust the company's balls. They wanted to increase their membership, and hence their dues. They intended to do this by lowering productivity and requiring the hiring of more Union workers to get the same amount of work done. That's how they destroy good companies, but it is calculated, and not out of sheer spite.
It's also stupid!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You'll have six human-sized flotation devices to choose from.
The thing is that the people out here now are already out of high school and there is no attempt to make up for the education they should have gotten there.
It may be easy for you to say quit and depending on where you live there may be a plethora of jobs available...
The rural setting, the opinions of a spouse, the job market, the competence and pay of the manager - they are irrelavent. Those may be compelling reasons to take action in some other way, but they don't change the fact that nobody owes us a living, a standard of life, a career. Understanding that will cause one to strugle thru the very kind of solutions that turn them into leaders.
There is a very identifiable reason why unions in IT are so scarce -- intelligence. The intelligence of IT people across the board is significantly higher than most likely any other profession. The lack of unions isn't the result of greedy corporate executives, since the executives of current international companies don't have nearly the strangle hold on business as the Robber Barons of the 1900's did, and unions flourished at that time. No, IT personnel themselves understand the economic system of world far better than the average citizen and moreover, they know that. IT people know they are also more intelligent than the corporate executives themselves, those wielders of the mighty hammer of business that call IT when they are panicking because they accidently reduced the size of their start bar.
To answer the question though, no I would never join a union, IT union or company specific union. Unions I find are far more destructive to both company and employee than companies themselves. Additionally, I almost shudder to think of what an IT union would do. What would they try to control? Obviously first would be salary. Would they equate someone who fixes printers and someone who is a SQL manager the same? How about a "manager" that technically knows CISCO router programming and the people under him that ACTUALLY know CISCO router programming. The thought process only gets worse...How about programs? OS? Can the union stop me from installing Office 12 pre-release just so I can learn it, because it "Might reduce functionality" How about server upgrades? I have a hard enough time convincing my boss why we should migrate our servers to 2003 from NT without having to convince a union to agree with me first.
Another reason is unions are inherently based off of seniority. In IT that system wouldn't work. For insistence, in my profession I am the 3rd in line under my boss; yet I make most of the budget and buying decisions and my co-worker (or the one right above me) is in charge of the databases and websites. The first person under my boss is utterly incompetent and even worse, is infatuated with the status-quo. If our actions resulted in him getting a raise, or he was in charge of reviewing my decisions I would quit tomorrow. I am positive very similar scenarios exists all around the IT world, a large percentage that truly understand technology and embrace it, and a few that fell into IT by accident and don't understand, appreciate, or care about technology; and having both of those in a union which wouldn't be aware and/or care about that difference would be poisonous to IT departments around the world.
Lastly, IT is a somewhat unique profession; we share the trade skills of master carpenters and sometimes what seem to be the responsibilities of brain surgeons. Because of this IT needs a far more free hand to explore and understand the bounders of the digital world without the trappings of inept bosses sticking their ignorant fingers into it; adding unions to IT would just be multiplying those already numerous ignorant fingers.
Here is a quick way to tell, 90% of all those people in IT who are "a large percentage that truly understand technology and embrace it" read Slashdot. And 90% of all those people in IT who are "a few that fell into IT by accident and don't understand, appreciate, or care about technology" don't read Slashdot. So look around, figure out who in your IT department doesn't read Slashdot, and just make believe they are in charge of your union, look inviting? Didn't think so.
The problem with unions is they suck the motivation and drive out of the workforce which reduces their worth. In a global economy, reducing the worth of your employees pretty much adds up to reducing their pay, their numbers or both.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
"Anger management counseling" is one of the bigger lies out there at the moment, having experienced it first hand myself and discovered that they were pushing me to be even worse off than I am now!
Actually, having a Union is not all that bad. We ARE the new blue collar workforce in case you're wondering. We are the first cut, the first out the door when things go bad.
Having worked in several hi-tech companies, EDS, SHL-System House, MCI-Worldcom, and several dot-coms bombs, being unionized is a completely different environment.
The crap I saw at EDS and other tech companies would not be tolerated in my work place. As a service desk manager for a IT help-desk, I have to say I enjoy the union agreement that forces my managers not to make bad decisions. Outsource the IT? Good luck in convincing the union. Good luck trying to force someone to stay at work because their dad is dying of cancer, or their wife is having a kid. All the sheit I put up with in a non-union tech place is mind boggling. Face it guys, most IT managers are IQ smart, not EQ, and we suffer as a result. My niece was on her deathbed - my old IT manager was wondering if it was ok if I was there just for the funeral. In a union environment, even asking me to stay at work when I'm entitled to be there would quash the every-day bullshiet we put up with because we're IT.
We are generally underpaid, outsourced at 3X what they pay us in return, and are viewed as a cost-centre (meaning that we're also the first out the door during layoffs).
If my manager calls me at home when I'm sick, it costs him my time in return. No such thing as working extra and not being paid for it. How many times have you seen EA or other software game companies being sued by employees for working extra without being paid for it. No earned time off.
Managers treat us like crap, and it's about time faced the fact that as the new blue collar workforce, we are entitled to union rights.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Oh, and how do you propose helping them become more competitive. More and more people are finding themselves unable to compete. These people are called losers. However, they retain a strong will to continue fighting. Winners of a battle will eventually decline in power and become losers, and then those 'losers' will cultivate a new leader.
What lack of unions? I'm a contract programmer, and like most of my co-workers I'm in SIF. Some of the others are in CF, and a few in Jusec. I can't recall ever working for a company that wasn't unionized (I've heard of them, but that's that).
Oh, the article is about the situation in the USA, right? That place is kind of the odd one out in this respect. So, before you start saying that having tech unions is never going to work or will destroy the industry, please remember that it does work and doesn't ruin the industry - in just about every other country. What is it that is so different about the USA that prevents unions from being viable there?
print "Yet another p{erl,ython} hacker\n",
I find the idea of unionizing outright offensive. I for one will NEVER join a professional union. I just don't believe in them.
Instead I outcompete.
td
hard core geek-ware
Unions will never work for IT or tech in general, because everyone knows that geeks fancy themselves elite intellectuals, and equate "Union" with "Grunt". That may sound troll to you, but it is true. Every programmer I've ever met thinks they're a modern day Da Vinci.
Also, it's true that corporations have been largely successful at stamping out unions and bribing the officers to the point where the common worker is not well represented these days.
What tech needs is a unified professional association with licensure similar to the American Medical Association or the Bar. Why? Because tech workers lack polical influence and have no lobbying voice in Washington. It takes an organization with money to spend to make a difference in the United $tates these days, and a banding together of technology professionals is very much needed. Don't like H1-B? What can you do about it? What can an organization that represents 1000s do about it?
Think about it.
While I value the display of emotion, your post lacks a certain charisma. The expression of emotion is ever under attack, and when I am making a case for it, people are constantly pointing at examples like yours, and characterizing me as the same.
Please join. At least get their newsletter. It's VERY informative. You don't have to give them money.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Unions are not a bad thing in most aspects. When they try to control merit raises and job security by longevity, it becomes a problem. I think the best way to fix current unions is to make the union NOT take membership dues from the worker. Instead, they should be alloted shares in the company where the union is established. Say 100 shares per individual. If the shares earn money, the union gets its dues. Each quarter, the shares are sold back to the company and rebought at the current rate, with the delta in shares as appropriate.
If a "Google" style company appears where the stock goes through the roof, the union should be rewarded. If the the company starts to flounder like say "United Airlines", then thier dues will get smaller and smaller.
I think this forces the union to not work against the company while still representing its people.
I have witnessed first hand the detrimental consequences of an IT union, I contracted for Hydro One (a Canadian energy distributor, who used to be The Canadian Energy Distributor.) I have seen the darkness at the end of the tunnel and it was everything I ever thought it could be. Management was not allowing permanent jobs to be created, people were working in what is called 'part-time positions', no benefits, no security, only contractors were hired (good for me.) When anything needed to be done, I had to go through 9 levels of Hell to get to the right person, who was the Gatekeeper. They know pretty well, that you do not let any power out of your hands. Anything and everything that in other companies is allowed (and expected) to be done by any developer, had to be allowed and done only by a special designated person, and that was the 'job security'. Permanent developers were not allowed to work 30 minutes more than the daily maximum without some written authorization, but projects still had crazy deadlines, so most work was pushed to contractors. The office politics made me sick in more ways than one in only 3 months of that assignment. No, thank you, even from technical point of view I don't want to work in a unionized environment, forget about political side of it.
You can't handle the truth.
Right on.
If you want to protect jobs, then ban multi-national and even multi-state corporations. Then put back the limits that a corporation can only work in the one field it was originally incorporated for.
You don't have to go through all of that trouble if you take care of laws that favor larger companies. There are some economies of scale in any industry. The size of a company is not the problem, the problem is an unnatural lack of competition. Competition can and should be encouraged for the country to remain robust and competitive. It's as simple as rescinding obnoxious regulations, widening government bidding and enforcing existing antitrust laws.
Competition is good for everyone. Customers get good service, shareholders get good value and employees are paid what they are worth. You will never get a good deal in any industry that's dominated by one or two big players.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I worked for a state gov't and we were union. I took the job because we had 40hrs a week, time and a half for over-time, decent health benefits. But here is the downside. The employees were the laziest ignorant people I have ever worked with/for. Also, the union's main concern was to curb health care costs, which is understandable, but they did this in lieu of increased wages and ultimately encouraged the growth of an environment of older workers, who do not share my opinions on health care, wages, working environment, etc.. so the union did not really represent me. I lasted about 2 years. I went through 2 reviews where I was told I got my one percent raise this year because I met expectations. Turns out my co-worker who spent all of her time swapping tapes, when she wasn't calling in sick or taking one of her many vacation days, received the same exact review.
I think we have to be able to adjust to changing environments. If there is a chance your job is likely to be outsourced learn another skill, adapt. If you have the mental and physical aptitude and all you want to do is turn a wing nut on an assembly line, you are asking to be unemployed.
There's a lot being said on this thread based on predjudices and stereotypes about unions. Most of it looks pretty knee-jerk, based on media and political portrayals of unions. But it's largely ignoring the core economic and political problems. Let's step back for a second and think about the real issues here.
Unions were not created to guarantee jobs.
Unions were not created to guarantee pay bands.
Unions were not created to eliminate drive or incentive.
Unions were created to address the power imbalance between the individual (small, low power) and the corporation (large, high power). As long as every individual fights for his or her interests alone against the company, he or she is at a radical disadvantage. Unions were created to address this imbalance through the power of collective bargaining. If all of the workers can present a united front, they have a much better chance of getting what they want/need.
Furthermore, by banding together, the workers can combat a "tragedy of the commons" effect -- companies that don't radically exploit their workers are at a disadvantage relative to companies that do. Therefore, every company has independent incentive to ruthlessly exploit their workers (e.g. 90 hour work weeks, short/no vacaction time, minimal benefits, etc.) Note that this is exactly the same disadvantage that the US is at with respect to employers in lower-cost countries with fewer employee protections and benefits. If, however, the labor pool uniformly rejects those practices on the part of all employers, then the employers have independent incentive to play by a common set of minimal guidelines (or else lose access to the labor that they critically need).
The alternate approach to balancing the power of companies is through governmental intervention, which can establish a uniform floor for acceptable practices. This has many of the same benefits and detriments as the union approach, but it has the drawback of often being harder to achieve and having a slower reaction time than a grass roots movement.
Have unions been abusive on their side too? Absolutely. Have they made extortionate demands and forced contracts that remove incentive? Sure. But those are not the critical features of unions. The important thing is that unions represent a large power base with a set of interests that opposes (and balances) the power base and interests of the corporations. Every power base inevitably acts in its own, selfish interests, so you inevitably get some abuses on each side. But when there's no balance of power, one side has essentially free reign to fulfill its interests to the arbitrary detriment of the other side.
Those of you who don't believe this would do well to meditate upon the checks and balances system of the US Constitution.
It also wouldn't hurt to read a little history and check out working conditions before unions and government regulation. Worker exploitation in the tech industry now really isn't that different from exploitation in the textile mills of the nineteenth century -- you're just being paid better now and are less likely to be mauled by your equipment, so you think you've got a better deal. But if you're "90 hours a week and loving it", then you've given up a huge slice of your life because it makes someone else's life better. You may think you have a choice, but the power really isn't in your hands these days, and there's basically nobody out there rooting for the hackers.
Your fault for not being financially solvent. So smug, so self assured. You know, bad things happen. And in an economy where wages are stagnant, gas and health care costs rise, and you can be outsourced in a second - financial solvency becomes much, much harder.
Here's some things that can blast your smugness damn fast:
And it's really easy to buy a cheap home after prices have gone up 9-10% per year for the last decade. Average price of a home is well over 200k across the country. Where should you live, a cardboard box? Don't say rent - in many areas you can't find a good home to rent.
Things are messed up, my friend. Your planning is at risk to economic fate. Don't judge everyone so quickly.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Slashdot's baby neocons don't like to hear the facts about unions. They are too busy sucking up to Bush and wiping their asses with the Bill of Rights!
For two years I was out of a steady job, but I NEVER considered extorting an employer.
"But I have kids and a mortgage" justifies it for some people. Would those same people, in the absence of unions, feel that it was okay to rob a bank if they were out of work? Why not? They need the money, right?
Unions served a purpose before we had laws ensuring basic rights for employees. The laws on the books now (in the US) ensure that no one works in a sweatshop. But unions have gone too far, driven by an entitlement mentality that way too many people have: "I want this, I deserve that." Bullshit. If you think working conditions are inhumane, write your senator. If you just want more than you're getting, learn a field where you're not expendable. Then you'll have honest leverage, and won't have to extort your employer for leverage.
"The rich get richer,....
Yay! There's buzz-phrase #1. That's because the 'The Rich' (dramatic music plays) have this annoying habit of turning situations to their advantage, rather than sitting around whining about them.
"....the shareholder is valued more than the employee,...."
Well, then buy stock. Last I checked, it's still legal to do that.
"....jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency...."
Yup; and where they won't, or more commonly can't due to union rules, they eventually end up in bankruptcy, or teetering on the edge of it. Check the news on General Motors/Delphi/the steel industry/the big airlines/etc, recently?
"....and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year."
And whose fault is that? Is it The Rich (dramatic music plays again), who simply follow their own self-interests just like everyone else? Or could it be someone or something else?
"You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand."
That's because (most) IT people are smart enough to not need a Defender of the Proletariat.
"Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way."
Oooo! I just LOVE those musty old buzz-words! Let's see if we can fit fascist and running-dog in next time; those two are my all-time favorites!
"They'll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they're the first to scream, 'You're stifling innovation!' at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work."
Who are doing the work because certain someones stuck their collective necks out to create the industry in the first place, the overwhelming majority of whom ended up in bankruptcy as reward for their efforts. Hmmm; I wonder who those people could have been?
People, Socialism doesn't work. And while I sincerely believe the original American unions saved the country from it's own October Revolution, they have since evolved into just another self-interested, bureaucratic institution that couldn't care less whether the rank and file live or die, just as long as the union bosses can continue to pull down their CEO-size paychecks.
Meet the new boss; same as the old boss....
Regards;
Untie!
Unionized labor may help a group in the short term but leads to the overall decline of the group as a whole in the long run. Unions are only out to help the members without any consideration for keeping the company running in the long term. I'd never join a Union and I'd laugh in the face of anyone that tried to start one. There was a place for them once but that time has long since passed.
Ok, two words: hell no!
What we do need though, is accredited associations: Lawyers, Doctors, and to a lesser extent engineers all have them. IT folk should as well.
This way, we can still work privately, but at the same time combat our skills being undervalued, either by domestic unskilled labour, or off-shoring.
However, it is my understanding of the stock market that you can only get out of owning a company if someone wants to buy that company. and if a company is really that bad, then no one would want to get in, so where are we again?
Reading this thread is like watching some massive scale version of the Prisoner's Dilemma where everyone always defects.
Everyone in this thread is convinced they're the best at what they do and only lazy schmuck's get laid off... until they do of course. Never seen so many "best in my field" in one place before.
They're more than willing to put up with substandard benefits, low pay, insanely long hours and non-existant job security and they'll shiv you for a marginal gain because gosh darn they're so superior to everyone else. I mean, you're obviously lazy and stupid because you don't like looking for a job every nine months. Sometimes they even hit the jackpot because some sucker tried to cooperate. All the while the pot gets warmer and warmer. Has anyone checked out real wage growth lately? Or even noticed that there isn't any?
Good luck guys with an economy where no one who isn't already wealthy can risk having long-term financial committments. I guess that sort of thing is just "stupid." You've made your bed; it's just too bad the rest of us have to sleep in it too.
Please come to the state of Washington, USA. There, if you are/were a state employee, you get to pay union dues whether you want to or not. We are a "union Shop" state, so get out your check book and pay up. You don't get anything for your money except the ablility to sit and do nothing at your desk and collect your pay. Complaints? Tell it to the shop steward!!
I mean, the ones with families to feed? This Ann-Randian spewing is the sort to come from high school or Rush Limbaugh.
I certainly do not want to belong to an organization where I can only be guaranteed a salary increase across the board next to the same slacker programmer who didn't contribute.
Without a union, you have no say if the boss' lazy-assed nephew gets a raise while reading slashdot all day (ahem). With a union, you can vote any contract that allows this down. Nobody else wants to do a lazy man's work, either.
If the union negotiates a contract that lets this happen, you can vote againt it. The "union boss" is a myth: he works for YOU, not the other way around.
If the job sucks or I don't think I am being treated fairly, I quit, simple as that... But with the same sentiment, when it comes times for initial salary negotiations, take the gloves off, and _fight for every penny_.
Fight? No, unless your skill is so unusual nobody else can do it, you mean beg.
The company is organized, all the shareholders and board is against you, you all by yourself. A union evens the playing field. "United we bargain, divided we beg."
There is no such thing as a permanent job, and you're naive if you believed that.
Naive? Funny, most of the people I know from my elderly father's generation are retired, with a pension, after working at the same company all their lives. Why shouldn't you be able to as well?
And as a country, the LAST thing we need to be doing right now is making ourselves less competitive with regards to the rest of the world.
Where's my cluebat? There are no more American companies! At least, no publically traded ones. Crysler's profits don't help America a bit unless THEY HELP AMERICA'S WORKERS. I am an American, Sony and Disney and Crysler and Toyota aren't. I'm patriotic, a company cannot be.
How Toyota treats the workers in its North American plants affects America. Welcome to your new foreign overlords (I for one...)
If only we could make stupidity more painful...
Are you some kind of masochist?;)
"I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for." So? Your investment and choices in life are not your company's responsibility to deal with.
Which is precisely why if that company mistreats its workers it needs a union. They have no reason to give two shits about you or your needs.
It's better to loose *some* jobs than to have the entire company collapse like the auto industry is collapsing to foreign competition.
The unions haven't killed the American auto industry, its incompetent management has. Japan sells more cars (made in unionized American plants) because they make what is percieved (probably rightly) as better cars. Note before the '70s a foreign car was rare on the highways. Then the oil crunch came, but Big American Auto continued to sell big, badly designed and built pieces of shit. It wasn't the unions that made the decision to ignore the Japanese.
Why would I want the playing field artificially leveled? My playing field greatly favors me because I am better at my job than most people.
So long as your employer treats you fairlly there is indeed no reason for a union. In the '80s, the head of the then non-union Eastern Airlines rightly stated that "any company that gets a union deserves one."
Folks only unionize when management comes from a Dilbert cartoon.
Oh yes I loved being in new york when the trains werent running. 60K a year retire at 55 and they wanted to retire at 50.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
All unions aren't full of the stereotypical fat, lazy, inept guys that are just taking up space. I am lucky enough to have a great job, but many others I have met in the course of my life have not. Many of these hardworking, capable people were postively affected by unions. I have never been a member of a union, but I have worked closely in various capacities with unions from several different industries.
- Unions protect you from being forced to work in unsafe conditions.
- Unions protect you from being forced to work insane hours
- Unions protect you if you refuse to do soemthing unsafe, against policy, illegal, etc that you have been ordered to do.
- Unions protect you from that mid-level manager "with an axe to grind" who just wants to find some made up reason to get rid of you or to continually punish you.
- Unions protect you from abusive/disruptive co-workers that management will not do anything about.
- Unions provide you with...respect, for lack of a better word. Upper level management will not treat you with disrespect or like a mere "resource" as much.
It saddens me to think that so many people hold this notion that all unions are so terrible. While its true that unions can foster the whole "us vs. them" attitude, I believe the benefits of unions far outweigh their drawbacks.
I see a lot of threads on here smack-talking the idea that we should unionize based on arguments like "It rewards lazy programmers", "Just quit if you don't like your job, etc." ... I'm a little sad to see this narrow and corporate view of what unions are and what they do coming from you guys; Unions are more than just collective bargaining-bins - They offer a way for people who have a common interest to communicate and organize around those interests - to take *action* to see that those interests are protected...A way to communicate with each other. That's why it makes me so sad to see my brothers here, who I think are the best communicators and organizers in the world - if not always the most eloquent, trash-talking the idea that we should have a system...a network...through which we can share information to our mutual benefit. We don't have try to strong-arm companies or force anyone to join...but what the hell is wrong with sharing information with each other? Isn't that what are core competency really is, at the heart of it? We've created this huge internet..we maintain the channels through which everyone else communicates...So why shouldn't *we* use those channels to share information about what employers do to us...not strongarm them...but just to make sure that our brothers are aware when someone treats us poorly...promotes the bad programmers over the good ones...offshores our jobs and then tries to hire us back to fix the mess...Shouldn't we be telling each other this stuff? Maybe just to give those companies something to think about? (i.e. "If I treat my programmers like crap, I won't be able to hire good programmers because they'll all know about me") Wouldn't that help all of us?
You know, I think that Slashdot *is* our union in a way...We're all here reading and posting at the same place and we should start communicating with each other about this kind of stuff; It could be a force that doesn't just *punish* companies that treat their IT workers badly, but *rewards* the ones that treat them well (i.e. "If I treat my programmers well, all the good programmers will want to work for me.) That's not "communist"...in fact, I would argue that it doesn't get more "free market" than that in any flavor.
I said before I found work in the *IT* field. That was what I was referring to when I made the unemployed statement. I didn't consider temp work to be employed. It was shit money for shit jobs but (mostly) paid the bills.
I did temp work in factories, in offices, in wherever work could be found and money made.
I had a feeling that the lay off was coming and had started firing resumes off well before it actually happened.
I'm not dumb or lazy. I work my ass off and I'm damn good at what I do. The fact of the matter was that there were very few positions in my area and many other unemployed people in my position who likely had more experience than I.
I hate to call someone I don't know an asshole, but your entire reply was flip and condescending without even a hint of thought that someone could legitimately just fall into some bad luck at some point in their life.
Please, consider yourself lucky to have (obviously) never been in such a situation and may you never find yourself in it.
This is the truth. Without workers, wealth would not exist.
There's nothing wrong with unions per se. If a group of people can stick together and are valuable enough to negotiate for better wages, good for them. But to use the government to coerce companies to overpay for labor or to set up an arbitrary standard of "conditions" is immoral.
So if I want to work 50 hours a week at a normal wage to undercut some other prospective employee, I'm out of luck. Some freedom. These things can be negotiated by two rational parties. If the conditions are too oppressive, the company will not find labor to perform under it.
Child labor laws
Child labor was vastly obsolete by the time these regulations were passed in the US. The efficiency of machines were such that parents made more and did not feel the need to force their children to work.
In England, child labor laws forced children into less efficient out-of-the-way shops where conditions were even worse.
These are not rights. They are governmental subsidy for the less-competent and theft from the more competent. Why excel in your field when you will make the same regardless? Why pay a less competent worker the same as your star? Proposing these solutions demonstrates a fundamental failure to understand the nature of work and value. There is no such thing as a right to a certain level of compensation. The level of compensation should be determined on agreement between employer and employed, not the government.
This is a basic right... if union thuggery was required to secure it then that's a failure of government more than union virtue.
Protection from unwarranted dismissal (can't be fired without reasonable cause)
You should be able to be fired for any reason under the sun. The government should have no say on whom the employer may hire or fire or for what reason. They are paying a wage for some expected benefit for themselves from the labor done, not out of the goodness of their hearts. You are being paid for the value that you provide, not because you are entitled to it as a human being.
All right-to-work legislation does is protect for workers the freedom to work independent of the union. They are not FORCED to work through the union if their shop votes to join a union. To oppose right-to-work laws is to support FORCING everyone in a shop to join the union.
Jobs are created by employers and when the government sets conditions on employment, they become squeamish to create jobs. When you are unable to fire an inefficient worker or forced to pay them an outrageous wage that far exceeds the value they provide to you, the job gets neither made nor done. And the economy suffers. This is why socialist paradises like France have double-digit unemployment.
A union doesn't work for IT. What we need is what the doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants have - a decent Professional Association.
:-) ).
We don't need a Union to help with collective bargaining of base pay rates and do the other things Unions do well, because we're professionals, and generally don't have the problems underpaid blue collar workers have.
However we could very much use a Professional Association to help with dodgy employers, legal aid for badly treated members (think all those stories of people fired for showing security flaws), bulk rate bargaining on things like indemnity insurance, advising government on IT issues, and (and this is the biggie; think doctors) enforcing professional standards.
In Australia we have the 'Australian Computing Society', but as far as I can tell it's been subverted by industry sources such as recruitment agencies and large IT employers, and does sod all with regards to representing IT workers. However a ground swell take over bid and a bit of branch stacking could probably get it back on track. Follow that up with an act of parliment (like with lawyers, doctors etc.) to set standards and you're on the gravy train.
Then, if you're evil, you insist that all 'security related' IT work can only be done by an 'ACS approved IT security worker', and your off-shoring worries go out the window. (It's a scam, but one used very successfully by other professions - cf all the stuff in the states about not buying cheap scripts from those naughty cheap Canadian doctors...
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.
I'm not saying that physicians are "under-paid." However, it's a long road before they start collecting "real-doctor" pay. Physicians do have substantial job security and we are reimbursed well. The AMA has had something to do with that, but it is not a sine que non relationship. That organization is hemorrhaging members and it certainly cannot call a strike. Docs have job security because of demographics, disease, and the third-party payer system (which, as currently structured, essentially destroys the supply demand relationship). As you rightly point out, the cost of health care has been rising substantially. However, utilization has been increasing faster! In such a market, how could one NOT have job security?!!
Finally, this is not some kind of gravy train. This too will end. You can bet that there will come a reckoning. No union will be able to prevent that, and, to the extent that unions inject rigidity when flexibility is necessary, one could almost certainly make it worse.
Diagnosis: you are paranoid. As luck would have it, you're also being followed.
The economy is a fluid, endlessly intertwined balancing act of factors.
People are well intentioned when they try to form unions or push for raising the minimum wage, but they don't realize that the full ripple effects of such changes ultimately come back and defeat any initial benefit they were intending, and in fact can do more damage and leave people in worse shape.
Example 1: Workers form a union out of a well-intentioned desire to make management pay more attention to their desires and get more bargaining power. But the union keeps growing and demanding more and more, becoming a self-interested political beast itself. Pretty soon the union and management are fighting while the workers are left out to dry again. Even worse, the union keeps demanding so much that the company ultimately can't make a profit, and the company goes broke and then everyone's completely out of work.
Example 2: People say we should raise the minimum wage. Okay, suppose we did it. Then people who were previously making 50 cents more than minimum wage would still demand to make 50 cents more than the new minimum wage, because they are more valuable employees and feel like they've "earned" it, right? And likewise up the economic ladder for people making $1 more, or $10 more, or $50 more per hour. when you raise the minimum wage, you actually raise everyone's wages the same. It doesn't make minimum wage earners less poor relative to everyone else -- it just shifts everyone up, resulting in a net reality change of zilch. It's just like trying to solve low SAT scores by rebasing the scoring so that stupid students score higher numbers -- it's artificial, and it doesn't mean the stupid students are really doing any better.
I think unions are well-intentioned but a bad idea. I think a better idea would be some kind of federal law limiting the ratio between how much the highest and lowest employees in a company are paid. A CEO is definitely not 10-million times more valuable to society (or to the company) than a janitor is, and so it's wrong that they should be paid 10-million times more. If a CEO is limited to earning 1000 times what the lowest-ranking employee earns, then if the CEO wants a raise, then the lowest-ranking employees in the company automatically get 1/1000th of that raise. That's not only economically effective, it's actually fair, too.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
There is definetly a line of thought that says that many of the things that we enjoy today (such as weekends, antidiscrimination practices, etc) are a product of Unions. The truth of the matter is more likely that these things came about in spite of unions; I would argue that these came to be becasue of rises in productivity. Rises in productivity are driven by free markets and entreprenures, definetly not the anticompetitive practices of unionism.
+5 courteous! Impressed with the measured response to the troll above!
That's not correct. Many dyslexics have problems with individual words, which can include getting letters in the wrong order, as well as using letters that shouldn't be there. Dyslexia covers a broad range of symptoms, ranging from mild to severe, and can affect either or both the auditory and visual pathways. If you're dyslexic or have some dyslexic friends, and are basing your experience of dyslexia on that personal knowledge, you probably have very little idea of the full range of the syndrome.
Let me get this straight: IT jobs are already going overseas to reduce costs, and you're suggesting I should try to make it even more expensive and inefficient to employ me? Riiiight!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Not IT, but check out www.uawsucks.org and www.bce-info.com -- professional engineers (lower case), these guys.
A Union is good for taking your money. Here in Brazil registered workers are obliged to join their professional unions.
Result #1: All the small unions do is to get from their "members" one pay day per year. This payment cannot be avoided. By law it's discounted from you paycheck by your employer. Needless to say, union owners do not have financial problems.
Result #2: All the big unions do is to grant to their members that they have a fair chance of losing their jobs, since companies burdened by crazy colective contracts are choosing to leave the country in search of less regulated places.
Result #3: Both big and small unions together managed to stablish this great concept, the "minimum wage". So, every one of the lowly skilled people whose services aren't worth this "minimum" are confortably unemployed, having to work under illegal terms to get any payment at all. And of course these illegal jobs pay these people far less than what they would get in case the magic "minimum wage" didn't exist.
Now, I won't say unions weren't usefull when they appeared in the XIX century. The point is: for most of the industrialized world their time has come and gone. Unions are an historical solution for an historical reality, namely, the sub-human work conditions under the pre-scientific management of pre-information age industrial plants. Those are extinct almost everywhere. And they are extict precisely because the unions accomplished the goals they were set to reach.
The globalized post-industrial, service-based, information age is a whole different beast. Trying to apply to it something that worked 150 years ago is nothing more than being a "conservative" in the depreciative meaning of the word, i.e., trying to "conserve" some old idea simply because it was good one day, not because it remains good today. Unions, as they now exist, are past, and must be left in the past. The modern world demands a modern solution, not a deficient model whose utility is long lost.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
There are two high tech companies (they were once the same) in New Jersy at which the professionals, engineers and scientists are unionized. The union was created after WW2 and is still active representing about 4000 professionals. The union also performs lobbying in Washington to help bring work as a benefit to the company and the engineers. They have dues, they have meetings, and they have collective bargaining. Are the engineers and scientists better off, that is a value judgement. They do very well with many having been there for 25 years and longer. Is it perfect? no. I was a member of the union, but now, not. I would say more, but I hesitate to. The organization they have might be a model for others to follow. By the way, management and the union and the represented get along fine, well better at one company than at the other. The relationship is much than at a labor oriented company.
Government which is tasked to lookout for the people, not the huge trasnational corporations.
If there are no permanent jobs, then they should pass a law that *no* pensions maybe offered. An offer of a pension is a clear cut allusion to a job that lasts long enough to receive said pension. If there are no permanenet jobs, then they should pass a law setting a time limit for a full stock buy back after the initital IPO. If they can reissue, swell, if not, they need to pay it back with any profit they have made. If there are no permanent jobs there sure as hell don't need to be any industry organizations, lobbyists or cartels allowed. If there are no permanent jobs and your job can be outsourced to nation x,y,z then they should make it a requirement before that is allowed to occur that nation x,y,z has totally open immigration policies, so that you can go there and re-apply for your old job,so that you can compete on a level playing field, at the reduced cost of living in nation x,y or z. If there are to be no permanent jobs, then banks need to rethink how wise it is to offer multiple decade mortgages, perhaps make it illegal all together. If there are no permanent jobs, then the government shouldn't be selling multiple decade long bonds and t-bills to foreigners, based on the premise that a lot of "someones" will be working and paying them back well into the future. If there are no permanent jobs, they sure as hell should use every resource avaialble to keeep the damn borders secure and to stop the illegal invasion which is driving down wages faste than anything else, wages for people who can least afford any further cuts in pay or job availability.
This should work both ways-unless you think keeping the deck stacked *legally* against the worker bees is the only thing fair about it.
Just keep it up with the policies in place now, you WILL see the collapse of the dollar, and most likely a pretty nasty multi part civil war inside the US and it will be ugly beyond your wildest violent fantasies. There is nothing magical about the US in that regard, it is as likely to happen here as any place else if the economy gets trashed enough by outsourcing tons of wealth creation jobs and by insourcing vast herds of workers for service jobs *simultaneously*, which is what we have been doing.
That is clearly and obviously a recipe for utter disaster.. You cannot by legal policy imperil your middle classes without a host (historically proven over and over again) of consequences. Creating a two class society *on purpose* by the way the laws and business policies are riggedis the quickest way to plutocracy and pure dictatorship.
I just wish the globalist free traders, the ones loyal only to money and the profits at any cost meme and lifestyle, would go ahead and get their RFID implants and facial tattoos now, for identification purposes. Go ahead, be the first to identify yourself to your neighbors as one who does not give a crap about their well being, or their childrens well being, that all you care about is squeezing the last possible penny the fastest way possible out of their pockets, because that is "just business", and if making that penny means he gets fired and his family is put on the street is more important to you, so maybe you can pick up another property for a nickle on the dollar os sdo that your stock portfolio bumps up a little, then you should be proud of your efforts and mark yourself accordingly. Then we can plainly see who stands where on this deal out in public, and then let the "free social market" sort things out.
Organize to the point that you can raise enough money to lobby congress. Then, insist that, for the good of the public, certain jobs must legally require: USA citizenship, certifications, degrees, clearances, licenses, etc.
Remember, officially, it is *always* for the good of the public. For example: argue that software used in medical system, or for air traffic control, or whatever; can be life and death critical. People who work on that software must, by law, be USA citizens, have a degree in software engineering, and be HIPAA certified. Use your imagination, think of all the software, and networks, that somehow might relate to national security, or are economically cricital, or something along those lines.
Remember: it always must be for the good of the public - not just for the IT workers. Real professions: like medician, law, and even construction, have been using this scam for a century.
Another upside to this: it would help eliminate some of the real bozos in IT. I know, a degree or cert, doesn't really prove anything. Some people without degrees or certs are actually better. But, at least, degres and certs prove some level of knowledge. Would you want a doctor or lawyer who never went to school?
This is some text.
I started a Union once for IT Geeks. The Consolidated Union of Network Technologists, Didn't get to far as the acronym was found to be offensive....
and if I don't like my job, I quit and get/make a new one. I went to school to learn how to think -- not to be a sheep.
Unions are for unskilled workers who can't compete in the open market because of their lack of marketable abilities.
We have unions for many jobs nowdays that don't meet tese qualifications, yet unionize anyway. Never, IMHO, to their better. I'd rather tech not be one.
I would mod you up if I could. I have been involved in IT since the early 90's and you are completely correct. The ignorance of the young slashdotters here is astounding.
Neocon scabs are worthless un-american trash.
Businesses exist to benefit the stockholders, and have every right to fire people and outsource their jobs unless they have a contract agreeing not to. Freedom.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Very sad actually.
I do believe in a capitalistic society. The founding fathers of this nation intended for Congress to raise revenue by taxing imports and not income. This was to serve two purposes:
1. Raise revenue for Federal government.
2. Prevent the country from being undermined by cheap, slave-produced products.
Now that tariffs have been unconstitutionally eliminated, people have become slaves to the taxman and they have also lost jobs to slave labor. Yes, we may be able to do a job twice as well as a slave in a foreign country, but that does not matter when that slave is allowed to take a day's time to do an hour's work and still come out at 1/8th the cost of hiring American. I agree with another poster that we as a people should not be lied to by our "educational" system. They should say straight up that if you spend $60,000 dollars and 5 years of your life in college, it will probably do you no good because once you graduate college, due to the fact that your technical field will have been sent oversaes where a labor is cheaper than what it costs you to go to work.
I left the I.T. field after my ex-employer secided to send our entire campus overseas. This, by the way occurred about 6 months after the company president stated that more innovation came from our campus than anywhere else in the company. A good job done apparently means nothing when short term profit margins are concerned. I would advise people to go into nursing or some other field where physical presence of both client and provider in the same location is required. However, even this is no longer allows the American worker to compete on a level playing field since the government ignore the fact that slave labor can now be brough to the U.S. with near impunity.
Yes, I like working with computers, and I wish I could move to India to get a good paying job doing what I love. However, these companies do not like hiring American ex-patriots - they prefer to hire citizens of the country in which they are set up. The Indian workforce will soon feel the heat once companies find even cheaper sources of labor.
It is no wonder kids in the U.S. have no interests in scientific or technical jobs. It is the people who are athletes, music stars, and movie stars who get the respect and adoration of the population. The big media companies themselves are bitching and moaning about filesharing. If the government of the U.S. will not stop the influx of slave labor, then they have no business stopping the filesharing, after all, it is the so called free market.
You know those 'unemployment' figures you quote as valid data...Well guess what? Those figures do NOT count those people whose
Unemployment ran out during the last period in between 'counts'! And those 'Employment' figures DO count those who are working but for less then the necessary monthly hours to
qualify them for ANY benefits other then showing up to collect their minimum wage paycheck. Many of these people come out of the previously mentioned "Unemployment" has run out group who now may be working multiple jobs, sending wives back to work part time, just to keep the wolf from the door.
Then of course, employment today requires certain contributions from a prospective employee that my nearly 50 year old son does not find demeening, insulting or an invasion of Constitutional rights. Quote Son "Jeesh Mom!, you are such a radical old hippy"!
After raising two generations of children, never having been arrested for commiting mass murder or mayhem, I REFUSE to submit a Credit Application, pee in a bottle or give a prospective employer a thumb print! AND certainly NOT FOR CHUMP CHANGE!
As long as this country continues to cave in with no protests of meaningful or substantial consequences, continue to wave goodby to your rights and your jobs!
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It simply wastes your time and truely annoys the pig"
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
Insert the phrase "at a given price" in there a couple times, and that might make sense.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
With collective bargaining, you certainly have a stronger position because the union bosses know what everyone else is making too. Without the union, you often don't know what those around you earn and whether you are getting fair pay.
On the other hand, unions tend to push too hard so that company's go out of business or prefer to offshore.
What makes this worse is that the companies will then lay off everyone at once rather than laying off a few at a time. If they lay a few off at a time, those few have a decent chance of finding a job in a reasonable time. If everyone goes at once, then everyone is competing against each other for the same jobs at the same time.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I do not think we need a union. We need a professional organization such as LOPSA http://www.lopsa.org/ to, as they say it,
"Our mission is to advance the practice of system administration; to support, recognize, educate, and encourage its practitioners; and to serve the public through education and outreach on system administration issues."
I have seen what the AMA does for doctors, IT folks need the same kind of support.
Heck man, a Union just makes it hard to get bonuses and raises!
Like, wow dude, when's the last time you got a bonus or a raise?
If I joined a union, I wouldn't be able to rise on my own merits!
Geee, I sure do appreciate my being promoted twice in the last four years! NOT
Unions are anti-business!
If being anti-business means I want more of the share of the value I add to the business process, more protection from losing my job to a college or high school drop out that works for less than my gas bill, then I'm all for being anti-business. You are an expert at what you do. What did it cost you to be an expert? Time and money, I'll bet. Now, if the dropout knows his stuff, I'm not against him. But too many times have I seen qualified senior positions eleminated and management runs in three or four people to take the place of one person. The former employee get shafted, the new ones don't make squat, the job suffers, and the customers are left in the lurch.
Unions stifle innovation!
Like when was the last time you got to innovate? More likely you were tasked with yet another crap death march project for more PHB eye-candy.
I do better without a Union involved!
Chances are, if you look around, you can pick out two other people that get paid more than you do and don't do as much. So where does that leave you? With all the other programmers flipping burgers because a Paki works for $8,000 USD and likes it?
I HATE unions! There's no room for being me!
I was in a union. We didn't critize or belittle people for being unique, able to do things with flair, or were better at their jobs than we were.
Unions will prevent me from going management!
No, they won't. I went management (which is why I'm no longer union), and simply wrote a letter 30 days in advance informing them I was leaving the union. Note that it did not ask permission, it simply informed them of my upcoming new status.
Unions are almost like commie pinko communists!
I double dog dare you to go up to a union member and call him a communist.
Unions run a business into the ground and force them into bankrupcy!
Let me ask you, are you are reasonable person? Will you demand your employer give you so much that it will bankrupt them? Will you make unreasonable demands on health, life, retirement? Why do you assume a union will? Who told you they did? What agenda were they hiding?
Unions keep the deadwood in place and won't let management fire them.
Not in my experience. When I was union, the shop steward repremanded people for job failings much more often than management did, and twice called a vote at the request of the membership to refer another member to Management that wasn't pulling his weight. One was drinking too much (went to rehab and did ok afterward) and one was smoking crack (couldn't hack rehab and was fired.)
Unions contribute to Liberals, and I don't like the Liberals!
Depending on the union, that may be. In the IBEW, my local did not make contributions to political parties from their own funds, but only from funds specially earmarked by the member over and above the dues to be given to a particular party. There were Dems', Repubs', Sociliasts, Communists, Libertarian, Green, and a slew of others listed.
Dues! Why should I pay dues?!
For the same reason you pay a cable bill. You get a service that benifits you. And let me add that while making 45K+, my dues were about $20USD month. A lot less than I paid for cable at the time.
Let me just say, I've spoken to a lot of people about a union. Most have a horrible misunderstanding of what a union is, does, or is responsiable for. Since almost all of the people have the same misunderstandings, I have to think that it isn't an accident they hold those misconceptions. A business would rather not to have to deal with a union, because then if they
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
You left out three critical points in partcular to the auto industry. We allowed foreign autos to come in where their import taxes for ours were much higher, and still are. Japan for quite a long time had a near 100% import and inspection fee for US made cars. Japans and china's import taxes are still much larger than what we charge them for imports, it's not even a balance. We tolerated them "dumping" cars-selling below true cost of production-for many years (they do that to kill competition,it's a time honored predatory business tactic, the same way walmarts move in, have prices subsidised to the low end, the REALLY low end, they float that new store in other words, based on their entire corporate financing structure, until such a time as all the local competition is wiped out, then they raise their prices to a more realistic level-all legal). We then, on top of all that, gave corporate tax breaks for exporting industry, actually paid the corporations by dropping their taxes for all the work they shipped overseas.
Go look that stuff up, something the globalist and anti union but pro corporate cartels (the corporations "unions") folks don't like people to know about.
Oh wait, you do probably know about that, don't you?
naughty naughty! Nothing like little teeny lies of ommission on the internet, eh wot? "it's all the union's fault" and etc.
Unions produce what MANAGEMENT tells them to produce, it isn't their fault if they produce crap,the designs get handed to them, the sales are out of their hands, and it is not their fault when government MANDATES unfair trade practices and taxes that are completely in favor of the top 1% economically in the nation.
Well, I will take that last part back, if they vote for a D or R (both parties are made up of corporate globalists at the decision making level) than it is partially their fault for being human and succumbing to elaborately stage managed official lies.
I MOD YOU +4 (with just my middle finger extended)
Should we consider it ironic that every dumb and/or lazy person that's bad at what they do says these exact same words?
I got his point. I just disagreed with it and I thought I'd have a bit of fun.
Unions did kill the industries you mention. Chief among any mismanagement that went on was caving in to ludicrous union demands.
If you don't want to be dragged down by lazy or shoddy tech workers then don't let them into the union!
Yeah - that way it will work just as well as the fabulous tenure system with teachers. Never get a bad apple then! Every tenured teacher is p-e-r-f-e-c-t.
I'm a big tall mofo.
The unfortunate thing is that anyone that thinks that it was not in fact unions that caused the US car manufacturer's problems is not worth having a conversation with.
Which is why it's more fun to make fun of you.
Next you're going to tell me you're Jesus.
I'm a big tall mofo.
We have the programmers guild (http://programmersguild.org/).
They are doing some good things, but could really use more (all of our) support.
You'll have six human-sized flotation devices to choose from.
That's only if you bludgeon them fast enough to keep from drowning you in their flailing. And even then, bodies only float for so long.
I'm not really sure how that works into the union analogy. I'm pretty sure it translates into something illegal. Or at least really unethical.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you could join a union in your workplace, would you?
Certainly not. I've worked with many, many people during my career. I'm 41 in July. I've worked with very few people more productive than myself. I don't see
why I should be paid the same as joe unproductive sitting next to me when I'm between 7 and 10 times more productive. And I don't see why Sam Superstar over there (who is more productive than I) should be paid the same as me, he should be earning more.
Simple as that. Unions will mean people that shouldn't be involved in software will be compensated at the same level as those of us that actually know what we are doing. I'm not interested in that, at all.
If I'm contributing more I should be rewarded more, and vice versa.
Unions are good for preventing exploitation and poor rights, but they suck when it comes to arranging sensible compensation.
The rich get richer because they continue the behavior that made them rich.
Ditto for the poor.
I'm not going to get into an economic argument about personal debt, but I think using the dollar as a measure of the strength of the economy is probably wrongheaded, at least over the past few years.
People have been talking for years about how the value of the dollar, relative to other currencies, hurts US exports, encourages imports, and similarly encourages foreign tourism rather than domestic stuff. Devaluing the dollar relative to other currencies was always part of the Bush administration fiscal policy from day 1: I clearly remember people talking about it during his first campaign. I even recall distinctly a bunch of editorial cartoons which proclaimed how the falling dollar was going to "land on" or "flatten" the Euro and other currencies.
The theory was that you could help the economy overall by making exports cheaper and imports more expensive. (However, as he apparently just realized, a lot of what we import is basically inelastic: we're too addicted to oil to cut our demand for it much, even as the price increases, thus the increase in price hurts us.)
Now, we can debate whether his fiscal policy is intelligent or not -- I'm tempted to say that it's probably not been, and that history won't be kind to him on that front -- but the devaluation of the dollar was at least partly intentional/allowed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It may never come to pass, but if a union for IT workers is ever created, I'm thinking Marxist Hacker 42 is the obvious front-runner for union president.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Unions THRIVE on an antagonistic relationship between "boss" and "worker," and intentionally suppress competition between one worker and the next. If you shut up and slog along with everybody else and put in your time, you can't be fired and you get your raises with your "seniority." After you put in enough years, you get retirement. It's the same track, everyone's on it, and everybody's the same.
That's not a system that rewards creativity or superior ability, or any other types of individual differences. It's a system of artificially-enforced equality that has the effect of bringing everyone down to the same level.
That is very true and also a very right-wing/neo-capitalist point of view. Reality, however, is not quite that simple and the truth lies not to the extreme right and not to the extreme left either but somewhere in between. There are alot of things, rights, that we today regard as normal that were won through hard work, grit and fighting spirit both by unions and other organizations of what used to be called 'the lower classes'. Urinating on the things that these people achieved is all right I suppose, at least in a democracy where such freedom of expression is rightly regarded as the norm, but it is still unfair to label unions and union like organizations as the root of all evil. While the system you describe of each employee being his own man and standing alone against the corporation may be your utopia, and I admit it has some advantages that I am in favor of such as rewarding excellence, some of the rest of us would rather balance the best of that system with the best of the old union system where the might of workers numbers was often able to make right abuses by employers that no amount of individual excellence initiative and ability could have put right. Only the unity of workers can counterbalance what seems to me to have become a very sucessful strategy by employers of breaking up worker unity by employing the old Roman strategy of 'Divide and conquer' which has increased their latitude for commiting acts of abuse to the point that they now can treat people like items of equipment. This does not mean we should eliminate rewards for creativity and superior ability but we employees/workers would be damn bloody stupid to ignore the power worker unity gives us to kick the corporations in the crotch when they try to knock us about.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
There's too many categories in IT.
Programmers
Desktop Support
QA
I'm sure the list can go on.
I don't think a Union would be good for programmers. Programming is more or less a personal skill, some programmers have an almost rock star status for their greatness, and they should have a rock star salary to go with it. You can't really certify a programmers skill level.
Desktop support should be unionized. I worked 10 years in IT before the bubble burst. My bubble burst 2 weeks after I bought my house, then 9/11 happened 2 weeks later.
I have friends at Xilinx. The entire bay area desktop support was outsourced to Ireland or Scotland(I get the two confused, apologies in advanced). All desktop support was handled by remote desktop, with drop in ghosted machines to fix more serious problems.
Problem was, it turns out that employees and managers did not like the outsourced remote support. Face it, when someone fucks up their computer with remote support, it's not like you got a desktop guy there upon who's broad masculine shoulders you can cry upon. Or the flip side, pass the failure of the machine onto them.
So Xilinx got all new desktop support people now. They didn't bother calling back the ones they shitcanned either. (Or at least the ones I know).
I can say within a very wide margin of confidence, that in the desktop support trade, it doesn't require a supergenius to go around installing apps, configuring email and printers, and being a nurse not only to sick PC's, but the users as well. For a group, we're pretty cookie cutter. We can be certified, trained, tested in addition to any experience we gain OTJ.
For me desktop was just a train stop along the way of computer science. I can do way beyond what I used to do 10 years ago.
I am not ignorant of those effects, and I don't value any a one. Why should I value that which makes me a slave?
Naturally, the right to organize is good, but it existed prior to the labor movement. It went away for a time and returned, and it is a good thing which came from the labor movement(even though it partially caused it to be need to be regained). But, this is another case of flawed logic. Because something good came from an action does not mean that the action itself was good.
If one makes an agreement with another, be it a company or a person, one is bound to the terms of the agreement. How else should it work? I don't want any of this "Oh, it's a gray area!" and "It's not as simple as that!" bullshit. Everything is simple and clear. And, you may apply that statement to itself; it means what it says. It is true without reservation.
Unlike others, however, I am not hypocritical in my application of freedom; I also do not agree with the "right-to-work" legislation. If a company makes an agreement with a union that it will only hire union members, it may only hire union members. When an agreement is made, it must be adhered to... by all parties.
If I am not free to make agreements or to have agreements upheld by the law, I am not free; I am a slave to that which controls which agreements I make and which will be upheld. I am a slave of the government.
Not only do you demand submission, you demand willful submission. You claim others' lives as your right.
Well, I'm sure that once people had enough money, defection became a lot easier too!
Let's see... divorce... whose fault was that?!?
Illness... yeah that never happens to anyone! Couldn't prepare for it?
Long term unemployment. Please. Long term laziness is more like it.
"Things are messed up, my friend"... Yeah.... especially among the lazy and incompetent. That is why when your guidance counselor in high school tells you to take education seriously and get the best education you can.... you follow. Otherwise... well I guess you already found that one out!!
As a 411 operator for a cell company.
I always loved getting the the newsletters with the pictures of the huge multi-million dollar office buidlings the Union bigwigs needed to run the union. My union dues hard at work. Oh and Howard Dean got a good portion of my dues too.
Unions are great, as long as you move up the union political ladder.
Quit and work for a company that treats you better?
The whole point of being an employee is that you help the company earn a better profit. That's why they pay you. If the company isn't making more money with you there than it would without you there, you DESERVE to be fired/paid less/have your job shipped overseas.
You don't deserve a job just because you want one. You deserve one because you're worth being paid to do it.
paintball
After you put in enough years, you get retirement.
After you put in enough years, your company, hobbled by the large labor and benefit costs that make it unable to compete with other companies, files for bankruptcy and greatly cuts back on or cancels your retirement benefits.
paintball
Single human vs. Corporate Monster.
flesh - organization
mortal - immortal corporation
needs food - needs money
needs job - needs people
I have heard of developers working 80 to 120 hrs a week.
No, they don't get time and a half.
They are salary and they are expected to work 60 or more hours minimum.
Their bosses leave before 4 PM every day, and on Fridays, usually right after 2 PM. And the bosses don't come in on weekends.
Slavery was banned decades ago -
but it seems that some abusive corporations 'haven't gotten the memo' about no slaves...
They should've been given a taste of the trust-busting laws long ago.
And when the members (threaten to) engage in criminal behavior (such as when UPS workers were slashing tires of the company trucks), then it is simply racketeering: "Pay us more, or something will happen to your equipment".
Maybe, it is my background, of course, but I have only a well-oiled rope for the union organizers. The only extra benefit for the decent ones among them (if any) are the lamp-posts with a view...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
(That is choice D ;)
I made the mistake of replying without reading the background.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
No Union, even in Cali, should have the power to force people to join. It's crazy that they do have this power in some states.
Let's apply this logic to management and Republican politicians, since it is clear that these rants are all pro-business and pro-Republican.
"Duke" Cunningham, Republican House member from Califorina, took bribes and is now in jail. All Republicans in the House are whores with their votes for sale.
Enron was a huge fraud that cheated both investers and energy consumers out of billions of dollars. All big business is corrupt and dishonest.
Seventeen years ago, the Exxon Valdez dumped oil in Alaska. They are still fighting $4.5 billion punitive damages. Last year Exxon made $25 billion dollars, and this year they will make on the order of $36 billion. No matter how much harm they do, big business never has to face any real economic consequences. See http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News /Frontpage/042606/richert.html for details.
Are there problems with some unions? Yes there are. Are unions all evil? No. If you think that unions haven't made your life much better as a worker, then you are a complete moron.
I bet that not one person bashing unions is over the age of 40. Software development is notorious for discarding anyone over that age, no matter what they are willing to work for. If you don't think you need the protection of labor laws, you just wait. I used to work in the film industry, and we talked about if we would be forced into a union. Well, I don't work in the film industry any more. I work in government aerospace, where it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of age. I look forward to the day when all you "Unions foster mediocrity" types find youselves out of a job because you're too old or are outsourced or some 1H-B visa "guest worker" is willing to work for %25 of your pay. Then you'll be crying a differnt tune.
Yes! Paradoxically, if it's easier to fire workers, employers will be more willing to hire them. So yes, the French reform of the rules restricting firing of young workers were a job creation measure. They would have succeeded had the young workers not fucked themselves.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I'm afraid I must weigh in and say that yes, indeed, the union DOES protect the lazy ones. It's nigh impossible to fire anyone after the first three months of their employment, unless they're rude for a few months to every last customer that comes to them. If I really wanted to, I could go to work and do crap except smile and talk to customers nicely, and I wouldn't be fired.
"If the conditions are too oppressive, the company will not find labor to perform under it. "
The problem with your reasoning here is that when every company can negotiate with employees individually, they can all put the squeeze on the employees because their conditions will all deteriorate together. The employee won't quit because everywhere else is the same, or not different enough to make it worth the sometimes significant costs of quitting, moving, etc.
Employees won't quit unless there is a better job to go to. If there is a better job, they'll quit and go there, but then that employer has every incentive to simply put the squeeze on. What's the employee going to do, go back to his previous employer? So there's a tendency toward squeezing the employees which can only be countered by collective bargaining, law, or companies that are not run by rational wealth-maximizers, i.e., socially conscious companies.
One of the most important civilizing influences in society is the labor movement. Much of the best social legislation that has been passed in this country either originated with the labor movement or had its support: Social Security, Medicare, abolition of child labor,workplace health and safety standards, anti-discrimination laws etc. etc.etc.
For tech workers to stand aside and let others carry the burden of maintaining a civilized society is unconscionable. For all of its weaknesses and policy mistakes, the US labor movement is one of the few places where the ideas of racial and gender equality are preached and even practiced more often than many people realize. It is where people of many economic levels come together to solve common problems.
Our labor movement has been battered and weakened and its own poor policy choices were certainly a major factor in this.
This is all the more reason for the largely unorganized tech workers to join up. We can bring some fresh perspectives to a movement in desperate need of them.
We can decide what kind of organizations we want and on what basis we affiliate. There a lot of diversity in the labor movement.
I'm a member of the National Writers Union for example. Writers are a bunch of independent minded individualists who often work alone and in isolation. Yet, several thousand of us have discovered that by networking together, we can share knowledge and help find the strength to resist the demands of an increasingly brutal publishing industry. My partner is a member of the Graphic Artists Guild and she has found the same kind of help there.
It would be foolish for tech workers to rely on the forms of labor organization that were born out of the struggles of the 19th century, the New Deal period or the 1960's. Life goes on. Times change. We need labor organizations suitable for a 21st century global economy.
It would also be foolish for us not to ally with other working people to push for legislation that benefits all of us while constantly reminding employers that we are human beings and we demand to be treated as such.
I've been associated with the labor movement in various ways since the 1960's and I'm well aware of its many problems. Becoming a part of it does not offer any guarantees. We live in a tough competitive market economy and you can win as well as lose as an individual or part of a group.
I hope tech workers can see through the FUD that is being spread here about the US labor movement. Join in and lets get the job done of creating a better America in a better world.
"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir. Mighty scarce."- Mark Twain
You're wrong. That's the whole point of having an employee. The whole point of being an employee is to accrue benefits to yourself, otherwise we'd all have employees and not be employees, which is where robots, not needing to accrue benefits to themeselves, come in.
End of story. Unions are a knee jerk reaction to a bad situation. Don't like it? Move on. The best reaction is to stop working for the company and form your own with co-workers.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
In that case, I see a growth market for companies that steal from the rich that aren't their shareholders to give to the rich that are their shareholders, since profitable is not the same as legal.
In my life I've been a member of a union three times. I was a Teamster twice and in the UAW once. At no time did I feel represented and most of the time my dues were taken and used for whatever the union leadership (closely releated to corporate leadership....) felt like using it for. Teamsters cost me $180 to join (1982 dollars) and then refused to give me a withdrawl card when I quit the job (UPS). Less than a year later I had to join Teamster's again and had to pay nearly $300 (California this time) to join again. Major crookedness....
On the other hand, I've often felt that all of us together could bring about some needed changes (better working conditions, time off, banning ridiculous practices like being on call attached to a pager 24x7 with no compensation unless you're called). The thing is that the current business community WILL send your job to a country with slave labor at the first sign that they can do so for less money than having to deal with you. The government (both sides) and our current social structure (profit isn't everything it's the only thing) supports them in this.
I think that until some basic controls on business are put in place governing the outsourcing of the labor force and controlling the influx of foreign labor we don't have much hope. As a country we have much more respect for entertainers and sports figures (traditionally the least useful people in society) than scientists and engineers. This means that those that do manage to get through school and overcome all the other hurdles involved in being in the technical work force do so for little more than the reward of doing what they (hopefully) love to do. Big suprise that enrollment in the sciences and engineering is WAY down for Americans (though we have plenty of foreigners coming through our schools).
I think at this point in time we're all pretty much screwed.Fighting either of the above mentioned problems and you'll be called anti-business, anti-capitalist, anti-American or (if all else fails) a racist xenophobe. Good luck to you young guys................
I have been completely shut out of it and am currently on disability with no end in sight and no opportunity for it to be brought to an end in sight. Voc Rehab and the Mental Health 'profession' is a huge, obscene, lawsuitproof, joke.
/Flame On/
/Flame Off/
There are a metric-crap-ton of so-called 'developers' in my company who:
a) Have no love of the work.
b) Do not take the time to learn their craft inside and out.
c) Do not understand basic computer science.
d) Are a drag on the rest of us who do (because we have to take up the slack).
e) Make projects overrun time and cost and when they do arrive not perform as requested.
f) Are not willing to change (particularly the ones trained in the 1960's/70's who think every project must conform to the waterfall development lifecycle - and these guys are invariably in charge - and cliques of brown-nosers flock to them).
I will not shed a tear when these guys get shit-canned. Most came into the job during the dot-com bubble with dollar signs shining in their eyes. The times they are a changin'
I have kept my job because these guys can't perform; I deliver the goods to my subsidiary and change as the needs of my business changes. The large majority of developers are a lead anchor - and is a major reason we are stuck using outside vendors to build critical infrastructure. Furthermore, the leadership in the IT department has fostered a culture of protecting and expanding their 'turf' (bugetary and manpower) - at the expense of their internal customers and ultimately the business as a whole (even going so far as to prevent me from using an outside vendor or building an application myself on a project that then goes millions of dollars over budget and years late as a result - that is then abandoned, forcing us to resolve internally ourselves anyway!).
I get paid very well for what I do. Unionizing would not help me at all, and would definitely worsen the situation as described above. Given the way my industry is going - we will have to be agile in order to compete with our nimble competitors. Unionizing these slackers would not help us at all.
If I were in control, I would interview all the developers and determine who is dead weight and who is not (not only am I a developer, but I have also been a project manager and a key stakeholder in various projects over the years where the IT department was involved). If they will help the company compete flexibly and put internal and external customers first - then they can stay. If they want to keep the status-quo - then they can go. All the top 'empire builders' would be out on the street - for no other reason than the damage they have already done to my business.
Sadly, I am not in control - so I will probably have to continue to carry these folks on my back.
I've been doing this for over 10 years - and have experienced the limitations I've listed over and over again, project after project. It should be noted that one of the signs of mental illness is performing the same process over and over again expecting a different outcome. It is time for change within IT - and it involves building small effective teams - instead of outsourcing (because our experience has also shown that outsourced work is just as bad as poorly motivated internal development), or conversely clinging to a crumbling IT empire. The business must survive! Eventually the business will determine what is a drain on it and remove the problem. Your mission as an IT person is to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I saw some earlier references on here to the Guilds (for writers, directors, and producers in Hollywood) and the Associations (for doctors and lawyers across America). I think this analogy is spot on.
IT is a high-skilled profession; traditional unions organised mostly unskilled labour, like flight attendants. If the IT community were to organise, it would be better served by a union similar to the Guilds or Associations.
So let's just see how many people on Slashdot would actually be eligible for membership. Joining an Association requires a terminal degree from an accredited university. How many Slashdot posters have a PhD in computer science? Joining a Guild requires a produced feature-length film from a signatory studio. How many Slashdot posters have been the main technical leader of a large project from a big company?
It seems to me that most of the people on here would NEVER be eligible for membership with a union that only represented the truly high skilled. My advise: be careful what you wish for.
Now regarding the presence of a lobbying body, we already have the IEEE-CS and the ACM. Those groups will occasionally weigh in on legal issues, such as intellectual property reform. But they are not unions for the high skilled; they allow anyone to join. (For that mater, they don't even require prospective members to pass an ethics exam, unlike the CFA Institute.)
Ultimately, I don't believe unions would ever work in the IT field. Yes, unemployment sucks, big time. But one need look no further than the paralysis in Europe to see where strong-armed labour tactics lead to a stagnate economy. Would you ever higher someone fresh out of school if you knew you could never fire him? Didn't think so.
I think the man might benefit on this one. How many talented programmers have walked because some belligerent manager p0wned him to help him with his fubar excel workbook day after day (tech-retary) or burning out sys-admins by making them shuffle desks in marketing three times a week for no reason.
This industry allows talent to pick and choose where they work and the "enough is enough, I'm outa' here" threshold is way lower than in other industries. Finding replacements is not always possible. I'm sure the poor SOB's in HR would agree.
You can't replace your talent, you have to recreate the job and do without.
Heck, half the people I work with in IT are clueless, lazy, or habitually late/absent anyway. Might as well unionize so nobody gets fired for it, right? C'mon, maybe most American IT employees deserve to be replaced by a hard-working individual in a third-world country who gets paid 1/4 the salary.
If IT has a bad rep and can be replaced so easily, then maybe the problem isn't with the corporations, but with the people who jumped on the MCSE bandwagon when they got laid off from fry duty at McDonalds and now call themselves IT Professionals. Wait a minute--if they get laid off then there will only be more "consultants" floating around the rim of the IT toilet bowl. (((shudder)))
:%s:work:/.:g
dhasenan
How much does it cost to become self-employed? It depends on the industry, of course, but what's a reasonable minimum? $50k? $100k? Do regular people have that kind of money?
No, they don't, but you don't need it. You can take part-time work, in a less-than-ideal field, live right on the edge, and spend the remainder working on your business. Or work full-time, live on half of your wage, and then take time off. I have done both.
Or let's say you wanted to get a loan to start a business instead. Would a bank be willing to provide you with the necessary funds? If so, would you be able to feed yourself while paying back the loan?
I can answer this one pretty quickly. Most banks will practically laugh at you if you don't have income backing you. The first two questions you'll get for any type of business loan are "How much are you currently earning?" and "How long have you been in the (profitable) business?". They won't talk to you if you are below their specified thresholds. They don't care how carefully you've planned things out. Not one has even let me go into details.
Investors are a different beast though.
And what if a larger corporation took notice of what you're doing and decided it didn't want the competition? How long would your company last?
Not long at all. Investors will note this too. If you're going into a field that makes it easy to do this, they won't touch you. They'll leave you to fail on your own. The trick, apparently, is to get into an area where you possess some uniqueness that is too costly to replicate.
The truth is, self-employment is an option for a select few. So in this regard, it's more of an aristocracy than anything else, even if the border between the classes is loosely defined.
You can still make a start in a self-employment field without financial backing, it will be very hard, outright miserable at times, but possible. Some people have made it this way. Most will not. Yes, the people with financial backing have an obscene advantage. It's a horrible state of affairs.
This came up in a conversation yesterday. There are numerous Medical transcription companies running HOME BASED medical transcriptionists out of the Philippines for a penny a line. The have no security over the data.
The probability of fraud or worse, blackmail high.
Hi, Mr. VP Sales, this is Carlo, I do medical transcrition work in a developing country. I noticed, you recently caught a "mild" case of syphillis. I am sure your wife doesn't have it. Why don't you buy this $500 widget from me on eBay and we can forget I know anything?
Sounds like a good reason to have proper registration of workers.
Learn About Outsourcing. http://www.pioutsource.com
I should point out that the real irony stems from the fact that every egomaniacal idiot that thinks they're better than the rest of the world does too.
Very well said!! I couldn't agree with you more.
Well, right, for ME, the whole point being an employee is to get benefits. I should have been more specific, I meant the whole point of having employees....
But I think you figured that.
paintball
I've read a lot of these comments, and wanted to point out Unions in and of themselves are not anti libertarian. It just says that it sometimes makes sense to collectively bargain. And why not? Provided the associations are voluntary, they do not violate libertarian principles of freedom of association and freedom from coersion. I don't even think they violate capitalist rules. Manpower is quite like a union, except the members don't own it.
So if IT workers, or computer programmers were to unionize, does it need to be in the same fashion as Unions of the past. Well, I don't see why they need to be. We could create our own unions with our own bylaws. Unions could be created to prevent things like outsourcing, lobbying the government for instance.
Furthermore, under the current climate it seems to me US companies are trying to devalue the creative talent that produces the products necessary to compete. Send the jobs to India or China, for instance, as if the real value is in having money in the first place. Sorry, but I don't believe that.
On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with outsourcing. Ideally, outsourcing would obtain the best talent at the best price, which would make for the best progress in the world. But I'm captive to the US prices for many things that my Indian colleagues are not. They can live lifestyles much better than my own on a lesser salary. So I say make laws that level the playing field. Some thoughts are to lobby congress for a worker program in the US, lobbying and advocating laws that will make home prices affordable (I live in San Jose, and I'm just amazed at the amount of space available that is untapped for home prices).
I have some work to do on my house, and the person wants $70.00/hour to do the work, not just a one day job either, but a month long job. That's ridiculous. That person is not competing for the fair value of the labor they do, and they can get away with it because they have a captive market. My job can be outsourced, but this person's can not. Let's get a union that lobbies congress for a guest worker program, so the cost of local labor is fair in the outsourced world.
Let's get a Union to lobby the local governments to open up development for housing, clustered work centers, for hub and spoke communities so homes are affordable, and get them off of their crazy let-them-live-in-a-sardine-can notions.
These two things will make home ownership equitable for all.
Let's lobby congress to get rid of the crazy perks they give out, such as the new prescription drug bill. They aren't doing that in India, and it's really expensive.
Anyway, I think that's what it takes. The economic forces have to be equalized. The current path is to create an enormous service sector in the US, and buy the creative labor elsewhere. That works so long as you have the strong military to keep the world open, but what happens once the macro shell game the US is engaging in with China, Japan, and our other creditors, collapses? It looks pretty grim. I don't see how you can keep the lead with a bunch of butger flipping people raised on feel good Dr. Phil mentality, to keep the US strong in the world.
We need to compete, but not by getting rid of the value we as a nation create. It isn't in funding things, though that's a part of it. It's in the million ideas that go into creating new things, and if you give that up, you give up everything.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
You really don't have a clue, do you?
I'll bet you think we always had 40 hour weeks, weekends off, and liveable wages. Either that, or you'd actually like to haul bricks 14 hours a day six days a week for 50 cents an hour so you can starve in a coal cellar with 4 other families.
Go read Dickens, or Engels, or any historical account of working conditions in the pre-Union Industrial Revolution.
Impeding productivity, laziness, paying out on grievances for idiotic things, and all of those negative things are the result of the contract that "THE COMPANY AGREED TO!"
The workers decide on what the contract should be and so does the company. "The evil union" does not shove a contract down the companies throat that forces them to protect the useless. If such exists, it is negotiated by the workers and company. The trouble comes when company profits are booming and the company sells out for a terrible contract to keep the profits rolling - this is the path that got the UAW and United Steel Workers into a mess.
I've been a manager and a union member as well. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Not every union has a contract like the UAW that prevents any non-union member from infringing on the work of union members. Some union contracts actually help the company by allowing management to select the most skilled person to do a job rather than the highest senority member (a gold mine I worked for).
As a manager, a good contract makes the job much easier because everyone knows what is expected. On the other hand, an "old boy" contract like the UAW makes managing challenging to say the least.
Not all companies are good to work for. Not all companies are bad to work for. Not all unions have onerous contracts. Some companies are very successful even with unions. Some unions are even successful in "right to work" states. Some unions even assure that the workers that the company gets are skilled laborers (IBEW, CWA) not just hacks that calls themselves skilled.
Sweeping generalizations about unions exhibist a lack of experience and knowledge about them other than what is available in the news, or blindly following the "free market capitalism is good for America" line.
There are reasons that positive stories about unions are rarely aired and it isn't because they don't exist...
Having gotten that off of my mind, I think unionization could help the tech industry. Consider this, if you're an IBEW member and you're laid off then you can go to the local IBEW hall and they will help you find another job. You can go look at the job book to see what jobs are available and take the job if you want it. I have electrician friends who do this and are never out of work - they just go to the hall when their job is done and go on to the next one. No interviews, no psychological profiles test, none of that. Just go to work.
There are plenty of other benefits to such as standardized benefits, guaranteed minimum rate of pay, and guaranteed skill level. I'm sure there are more that others can think of...
The folks organized at Cingular were certainly not your top level software developers/engineers/architects -- these folks were your cable splicers, CO techs, outside plant, and call-center employees. Hardly jobs I would classify as 'IT' in the traditional sense. That was a very bad example, a misrepresentation that doesn't come close to what the average
I do agree there are jobs where unions are absolutely necessary. True IT jobs (not technician helper jobs as in the Cingular example) are not the place to do it. You must have a layer of workers who have the flexibility to get unusual jobs in emerging technologies done quickly and effectively; the union will not provide that workforce (as I have seen from my own experience - with their departmental and job description limitations - creaking buraucracy and frivilous grievances - they don't do 'new' well without it being handed to them on a platter, and then you better have the paperwork done in triplicate, and clear instructions for how to accomplish the new job that conforms to their contractual agreement).
Making the jump from unionizing a call-center to unionizing your software developers is a questionable jump in logic. In the article Tony Long mentions 'smart' people he knows who lost their 'tech' job - and were not able to find another comparable. Nonetheless he doesn't elaborate on the circumstances - could it be the friend was not willing or able to change - learn new techniques or increase their education to enable them to remain viable inside the organization or in the workforce as a whole as the world economy changes? How would being in a union be beneficial - other than to keep someone in a job they are not suited for - to the detriment of the business. Does the person who allows themselves to get into that position sound 'smart' to you? Perhaps his friends' evaluation of their own skills was skewed by their overinflated sense of worth (I know folks who think they are smarter than they really are - and open their mouths to prove on numerous occaisions).
The future of IT is the future of small, highly capable teams that outperform traditional IT monoliths using advanced processes and tools. Contrary to the trend in other industries, the opportunities for striking out on your own are only growing: The outsourcing experiment is being seen as largely a failure because of cost overruns and shoddy workmanship, that needs to be identified and fixed by native engineers and developers locally anyway. The influx of poorly trained and motivated developers during the dot-com bubble is reversing - the pendulum swings back into balance; differentiate yourself now, or lose. If you don't care about being the best IT developer/integrator/engineer you can be - then maybe you don't deserve to be in the field at all.
Leave the computer science to the computer scientists (or people who have the drive to gain equivalent knowledge and apply it consistently). There is no room for a union in this world - and I can't see how you would circumscribe a union job in such an open-ended field.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
1991, when they dropped out of the computer business.
2. When was the last Electronic Arts layoff?
Feb. 2006 , 5% of EA's Redwood City workforce was laid off. This followed the 2005 layoffs in LA.
Since we are talking about Unionising and since I consider myself an anarchosyndicalist, please let me point out that Anarchy does not imply disorderly conduct, but rather a lack of structure. Thanks :)
~/o come on you good workers o/~
----
I think you misread what I posted.
Unions always end up more corrupted than the problem(s) they were put in place to fix.
And yeah, I'll take a job with whoever's offering if I don't have one, thanks. Fuck your strike. If I get paid, then I feed my family.
It's that simple. Yes, I'm quite happy deciding my own hours and managing my own business. You need to learn to think for yourself. A union won't allow me to work as much or little as I'd like. You simply don't have the same opportunities when a union is involved.
Unions hurt workers.
Steel and textiles were mostly killed off by rising companies in foreign countries. Offshoring, on the otherhand, is killing jobs in the U.S. to export them to other countries, usually because of executive greed.
The good ones mostly hate them.
Most IT professionals are too independant minded to join a large faceless union. I don't believe many would be willing to accept a Salary based on a union opinion of what you should make.
Minion of Gozer
Free market capitalism proceeds inevitably toward one end; money flows to money, the poor inevitably become so poor as to be worthless to employers, and must rob to survive.
...and capitalism squashes merit because any retarded fop can be born poor or born rich, and being born rich can ensure what is miscalled "success" born poor with no public school system (socialism) means you can be an uneducated einstein, and perhaps become a brilliant criminal....crime is indeed part of the free market. life is a commodity with infinite value, and so it makes sense for entrepreneurs to trade a wealthy man his continued existence for the price of his wallet's contents.
If FDR hadn't come along and instiuted socialist programs, the poor would have killed the rich. We literally had half the country living in shacks or slums, barely managing to eat. Another decade of that and heads would have rolled.
french revolution...brought about by disparity like that.
hitler himself rose to power in large part because of poverty. Jews were seen as wealthy moneygrubbers and wham. And yes, wars are often fought for jobs when hunger happens.
free markets cannot ever exist, because money itself allows control over any market.
Police are socialism, NOT free market. Hired bodyguards and private armies are capitalism and free market. but that of course leads to private nations, clan warfare, etc. A true free market can brook no government at all; taxes cannot exist in a free market.
And at any time, a free market entrepreneur can kill the wealthy and take their goods.
The only true free market is total anarchy.
As does everyone who is smart, industrious, and damn good at what they do.
/. comment. If you have a non-troll point to make, I encourage you to log in and share it with the rest of us. Have the courage to allow us to attach a name to the flame.
I'm impressed by your ability to make snap judgments about a person's character based solely on a single, non-inflammatory
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
"It's about cranking out good little drones who will do their factory jobs"
What factory jobs? What America do you live in where there are any real factory jobs anymore?
Here in California, where I work as a programmer, we used to be salaried and we could (and would!) skip breaks and lunches and work long hours just for the joy of programming.
But then our human resources department was re-educated by their legal advisors and we were made hourly. After more than three years of this treatment, we are still struggling to get used to it. We are forced to take breaks and lunches and we get paid overtime. I know, they are taking care of us and it is good for us, but it feels just like a collar and leash at times.
We miss the old days. So does management, because they got more for their money in those days, too. It is a virtual union for us, but at least we pay no dues... at least none we can see!
Sigh ... speaking as a libertarian, I'm always personally FREE to do as I want, as I accept absolute responsibility for my actions. As a free person, I see no reason why I could not choose to join a Union or any other association that I felt was in my best interest to do so.
After reading all the comments from all those who've condemn unions outright, I can say that in every case, all I see is fundamentalism and prejudgement. In fact, most professional people belong to Associations, all of which are just unions for the affluent. Why don't we see these being condemned with the same rigour? Simple, the affluent only disparage unions in an attempt to lower wages and pervert the labour market to their own advantage. The amount of rhetoric concerning unions is a sure sign of how effective collectivism can be, and as such, will always be attacked by those who want to retain their elite positions.
In fact it's so cool it's reason enough to change the field of IT work. It's the Pixelcorp and they call their type of organisation 'Guild' as in the olden days. A pretty fitting term if you ask me. It's a global organisation of Digital Production and Media Professionals. I'm seriously considering founding an IT workers Guild based on their model. They even bargain with Software Vendors for discounts on those hideously expensive Digital Production tools and are called in for expertise whenever needed. Well respected within the industry and the workers.
A very well executed professional organisation indeed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I have worked in both unionized positions and non-union positions, so I have some perspective on both. My main take on this, however, is to note that trade unions are an industrial age strategy that is unlikely to work in knowledge age corporations-the one's for which most IT professionals will be working. Remember that it was the trade unions that most strongly opposed the automation of the automobile industry, with the consequent loss of jobs to Japan, which had embraced it.
Perhaps the best strategy is to make sure that you are not over-specialized in any one field so that you have more flexibility when you have to search for a job. Lifelong learning may well be key to all of this.
yeah, let's do it!
I really, really want the union to protect my job from those that want to join the IT industry later than me. Also, I really want those union fat cats cashing in by blackmailing my company.
How could I life with out needless bureaucracy and improved surveillance (those who don't know, attendance recorders are in most cases instated by unions.).
What's not to like about getting paid not by your performance but by how long you've been in the company?
I want to take part in ridiculos strike actions to have my wages increased by 0.0001% when ununionized companies grow so much faster that their employees soon earn twice as much as me.
Lastly, I really don't feel comfortable being treated as a human being that can negotiate his own contracts.
I'm a sheep so it would please me if the union would be my shepherd (not without getting rich w/o doing squat shit, of course). You may also violate me once in a while.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Over time, you just end up supporting another layer of self serving bureaucrats.
Eat the rich. It's faster
Hackwrench's extremely simple point was missed completely.
If Labour Unions - as in groups of similiar people banding together to protect their individual (money) rights - is communistic(?), then how is a company - as in a group of people banding together to protect their individual (money) rights - not?
Seems to me that you don't get more capitalistic(?) than Labour unions (lawyers, doctors and employers unions included).
But then the ironically communism has become the opium of the people. People will take any amount of shit, as long as you tell them that the only other choice is to be a red-blooded marxist.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
http://www.allied-physicians.com/salary_surveys/ph ysician-salaries.htm
Maybe I was a little off, but I doubt I was radically off. According to the above link, the median salary for a pediatrician (without further specialization) for >3 years in practice is $175K. And pediatrics offers some of the lowest compensation in that chart. For instance, Dermatologists (ostensibly not a super stressful job, since the likelyhood of actually killing someone should be pretty low) has median salary of $308,000.
"I got mine, fuck the rest of you."
First of all:
1) You are a fool if you think you can or ever will prevail by yourself against a whole management team. Union representation evens the odds.
2) Corporations are allowed to violate contracts (see: pensions), pollute the environment, and a whole host of other things that you as a common man cannot do.
3) Businesses owe a responsibility to the society that made them great, just like you do.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Facts:
;-)
Been in the technology business 30 years.
Had a job in a union as a teen. - bad experience.
Worked in right to work states, and in unionized shops since (although as the original poster (quoting Wired) notes the IT was never unionized.)
Sister and her husband (now deceased) were from GM (a union shop)
Opinion:
I guess the feeling that I've gotten from my experience is that folks in a union feel like they need to be taken care of, and that somehow the brilliant union leadership will give them something they cannot get for themselves either by hard work, judicious choices in employment, education and other forms of self improvement, or some combination of the above. I find that depending on some collective (bargaining or otherwise) to take care of you is the best way to be disenchanted, depression about your state, and eventually panic about the results when the "union" proves itself unworthy of trust. I could (but choose not to) go on a long tangent about the particulars in my experience, but they all conclude in one simple statement.
Let the buyer beware.
When you willingly join (or are forced to pay into) a union, you notionally get the benefits (and disadvantages) associated with membership. You are actually the buyer of a pig in a polk. On the surface unions make a good effort trying to negotiate on your behalf, but the vision of their representation is always colored by the unions management who may not be as motivated by the long term future of their constituents as much as their compensation packages. As an example ; a strategy which says I am going to negotiate (on your behalf) 100% covered PPO style healthcare for life at zero cost to the employee, despite the stratospheric increases in healthcare costs over an employees life. Now realizing that this is GREAT for "LABOR" if I negotiate this, and my bonus for doing so is LARGE, it sounds like a great idea... EXCEPT when considering the chances that something this economically bankrupt can ever be delievered. Same kind of thing happens when negotiating for job security "benefits". The collective bargaining unit negotiates something which sounds good, until the company files for chapter 11, or 13 and the judge throws the "benefit" out the window because it sounds so absurd given economic realities for a company which will go out of business stranding everyone because of the ridiculous promises made to employees (past and present) by the collective bargaining unit (collective... sounds like a farm in the old soviet union.... see where they are now)
I could cite lots more simple examples. Makes me mad as hell that my sisters retirement healthcare from GM is being cut unilaterally. But then I look at the benefits she was "given" by the "collective" bargaining unit. Yeah they look great on the surface, and I would probably have looked at them as a corporate promise which they should have a legal obligation to meet.... until they go into chapter 11/13 and the choice is less healthcare for more money, or NO HEALTHCARE for any amount of money.....
Interesting as I look at this. I was in the military and was promised free healthcare for life @ 20 years. I had no collective bargaining unit, but I guarantee I was told a number of times this was a benefit of employment. Sure enough now I have to pay for my healthcare. So.... what does a collective bargaining unit do for ya....
Let the buyer beware.
I may become old, I may become infirm and unable to someday to take care of myself the way I do today.... but I do not want anyone to take care of me on any basis, especially to take my money in exchange for a false sense of security that the future will be taken care of. NOT!!!!
Your mileage may vary
mdw
The loss of earned income in the lowest quintile, while gaining huge amounts of income from social services, tells me a lot of people need to be helped (or forced, sadly) to obtain solid employment more than employers need to be straddled with more government regulations and unions.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Something in your statement bothers me. Either the continuing fact of his salary or the fact that you are right. If I want to make his money, I have to learn from him. Ethics are costing me major coin.
He who confuses his religion with his science knows neither.
When companies were rampantly abusing their workers (i.e. 7 days a week 12+ hours a day), unions were a good thing. In the US, they got us the 40 hour work week with two days off and many other benefits that we enjoy today.
IMHO, they have outlived their usefulness.
Have unions stopped steel production from moving to other countries
- No, they got the government to impose higher tariffs on foreign steel
which in turn hurt the industry even more... (it was stated somewhere
that instead of imposing higher protectionist tariffs, we could have
simply given each worker that got laid off their yearly salary and
purchased the cheaper steel and STILL SAVED MONEY!!! don't ask, I don't
have the source handy, use google...)
Where were you when it happened (okay, for most slashdot readers, you
probably weren't even born...)
Have unions stopped automobile manufacturers from sending jobs elsewhere?
- No, and where were you when they did? You were standing in line to buy
the car made less expensively somewhere else...
How about other manufacturing? Have unions stopped those jobs from going
overseas?
- No, and again, we were all in Walmart/Target/some other discount store
happily paying less for stuff we want...
For the most part, we didn't complain that any jobs moved overseas as
long as the stuff we want was cheaper... Until it affected us.
For the most part the one thing that caused those products to made somewhere else and be cheaper are the unions... They are self serving.
Members pay them money to do one thing, stir up the members into thinking
they are getting screwed by their employers. They walk off the job costing
them money in lost production and force them to settle (much like the legal industry in the US, but I digress)
To put it bluntly, the free market just works. It gives the consumer
(who has the majority of the power) the choice. And time and again we
vote for the cheaper product, whether it is the best or not. By the time
it breaks, we can buy a newer, bettter model for less. So who cares where
it is made.
The same thing applies to IT workers. We are supposed to be smart, agile,
able to leap tall hurdles in a single CLI command... If we can't prove
ourselves to be better than the other options, we deserve to lose our jobs
and everything they empower us to do.
Does it suck? Yes.
Will it change? Only in a Utopian society, and don't count on that
happening anytime soon. It's been tried time and again. The free market
beats it to a bloody pulp everytime. People don't work for the benefit
of others, they work for the betterment of themselves. (Anyone who
says otherwise, well....) If as a result bettering yourself helps someone, great, excellent, good for you.
Basic economics will win out every time and no amount of legislation can
ever fix that... EVER
That's only true when labor is interchangeable. When one employee can do a significantly better job than another, there is likely to be an employer somewhere who recognizes that and rewards the employee. Thus, talented workers in a field that provides differentiation between the good the bad and the indifferent can benefit from leaving an employer who doesn't recognize and reward their abilities. I believe that IT is such a field, and the fact that some companies don't acknowledge that just means that those are the companies that will tend to attract and retain the slackers over time.
Also, keep in mind that the numbers you're citing are physicians 3 years into practice. At a minimum, these physicians have 7 years of post-graduate training. Sub-specialists generally have at least 10 years post-graduate training. Most carry substantial educational debt, pay substantial malpractice premiums, and residency pay is generally between 35-45K per year with significant lifestyle impairment. I am subspecializing and am in my 5th year of residency training. I am currently making $10K less than several of my business/engineering friends made straight out of college 11 years ago. Let's assume for a moment that I wasn't subspecializing and instead became a general pediatrician. Take $45K per year as the average salary for a business/engineering grad x 4 years and $10K per year x 3 years (the minimum difference between residency salary and a business/engineering grad salary 4-5 years out). If these numbers are accurate, the average engineering/business undergrad going straight into the workforce made at least $210K more than the typical general pediatrician before they were eligible to make starting pediatrician money. If you factor in the time value of money and the average medical school graduate educational debt of $120K, the gap is even greater (closer to $300-400K).
That said, again, physicians are paid well. There is no doubt about it, and I am not complaining. But the physician salary and job security is not achieved without substantial opportunity cost and it isn't because we're in a union. No professional physician organization can/will call a strike. We don't negotiate collectively for salary or benefits (I'm 33 and have never been eligible for a 401k with employer matching). Any physician can do any procedure/test so long as they are properly trained. Unions effectively attempt to "monopolize" the workforce. This gives them power when negotiating with management. Physicians are clearly not "unionized" into an economic monopoly.
If anything, there is a monopsony in health care and not a monopoly (i.e. one buyer, not one seller). Medicare and Medicaid are enormous government programs (over 50% of all dollars spent in health care flow from Medicare and Medicaid), and third party payers very often base thier own reimbursement off of these government programs. Because Medicare and Medicaid often reimburse (especially hospitals) at a rate that is below cost, providers must make back their costs from other patients. Once you realize that private third-party payers are consolidating and basing reimbursement off of government, it's not hard to see why prices are rising in health care. The difference from most other industries is that few "customers" in health care are actually affected by what the provider charges. Medicare, Medicaid, and most third-party payers care very little about the price charged for care. The government calculates what they'll pay (in a price insensitive manner) and third-party payers base much of their reimbursement off that number. Consequently, the
Diagnosis: you are paranoid. As luck would have it, you're also being followed.
Putting the squeeze on employees exposes your own company to competitors (potential and actual) who will not put the squeeze on. Same goes for a group of companies who collude to lower working conditions. The more valuable and less plentiful the labor, the greater the motivation to provide better working conditions to get an edge in hiring labor. Companies compete for the best workers just as employees compete for the best jobs.
Collective bargaining - violates the freedom of workers. Workers should organize and act as individuals, not being represented by some vanguard of the proletariat that presents itself whenever a majority vote occurs.
Laws that set minimum wage or working condition standards violate the rights of workers who would tolerate a lower wage or "worse" working conditions. Minimum wage laws inflate the cost of labor, which discourages companies from creating jobs.
Socially-conscious companies that find it in their self-interest to provide generous benefits and excellent working conditions (whether to gain a labor advantage or otherwise) are free to do so. But if they don't find it in their self-interest, then they are not required to do so.
The most important thing to remember is that it is the company that is providing the wage for a job because they expect some benefit for themselves. Workers do not receive jobs because they are human beings or because they are entitled to a job, but because of a mutually-agreed transaction of wages for labor. This free and mutual interaction between two rational self-interested parties can only be fair by definition. Thus, government invention into such a relationship can only degrade freedom.
Wow - that's got to be one of the most pathetic and sad things I have ever read. So, what's it like being pwned by your sex organs?
"Unions always end up more corrupted than the problem(s) they were put in place to fix."
This claim is prima facae bullshit. In order to prove it, you will have to demonstrate that wages, working hours and working conditions were actually worsened by unions. Again, much like your typical slashnerd, you have no historical perspective. We're living in a hundred year long bubble of relatively universal prosperity, driven in large part by the labor movement. You think your business is independent of that? What happens to your business when wages are driven back into the ground, the middle class dries up, and nobody can afford your services any more?
Until the companies realize that they can agree that none will pay more than $n/hour to any employee. Basically, they'll form an employment cartel to limit competition. It works exactly the same as a price cartel - stop competition and you can bring prices up without the consumers having anywhere else to go. And while price cartels are illegal, pay cartels are (AFAIK) not.
Fascinating. Please explain how voluntarily joining an organization and giving it a permission to negotiate on your behalf violates your freedom ? And, even if you don't belong to the union, the union and the employer are certainly free to agree that the employer will only offer deals to you that fullfill certain requirements, no ? After all, neither of them directly limits your freedom of action, only the freedom of action of the negotiating parties - the union and the employer. Surely, if freedom is so important to you, you don't want to deprive the union members from their right of voluntarily associating with each other, and the union members and the employer from their right of voluntarily entering a contract, even when allowing such freedoms has nasty consequences to you personally ?
Unless, of course, you don't really believe in these ideals, and only want freedom for yourself while depriving it from others ?
That's the true test: do you still believe in freedom when you suffer from someone else using his freedom ?
Of course, if you are talking about mandatory membership (required by law, not just employment policy based on a deal between the union and the employer), then you are right.
Without these laws free market does what it's designed to do, namely, it drives the price of a commodity - work - towards zero; after all, most jobs can be either automated or outsourced to India. However, human beings have a lower limit on income under which they can't get enough food to survive. Now, what happens when you have a lot of desperate people who can choose between rebellion and death from starvation ?
Social safety nets, in all their many forms, exist since the alternative is constant civil unrest which can turn into violence at any moment. Quite a few people died getting those nets in place, you know.
Apart from this, no, the employers don't have any right to endanger other peoples health or lives for their monetary gain, even if those other people are in a desperate enough situation to accept such a thing.
No. Since a corporation holds much more power than any individual, it can quite easily skew the contracts to its favor to a horribly unfair degree. That's why the unions were formed in the first place - th
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Is that why you leftist socialists want to legalize "gay" marriage?
No, that's the homosexual movement. You really have a problem differentiating the different groups that you see as "left" don't you?
I guess that's why you leftist socialist democrats want all the cheap mexican labor here,
Uh, no, that's your boy "W" and the democrats. I'm in the American First party because I want closed borders- no trade with other countries at all. You really are an idiot aren't you? Don't even know who your enemies are.
I know enough to do better financially in the IT business than 99.98% of all the other people who post here, of which obviously you are one.
Likely by being a traitor and offshoring, or using H-1b slaves.
If you mean by "civilization" a place where other people are going to (or be forced to) sacrifice their standard of living to compensate for someone else's shortcomings or misfortunes, then you're right.
Since the intent of living in a city, or being civilized, is to band together to compensate for individual shortcomings and misfortunes, correct. Now here's the $1,000,000 question: Why the hell should I buy from you if the only thing you're for is yourself?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Either that- or the loser will become the quiet guy in the office that one day blows his top and shoots 57 people.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
In that case, I see a growth market for companies that steal from the rich that aren't their shareholders to give to the rich that are their shareholders, since profitable is not the same as legal.
Yes, and this has been so since the 1970s- Microsoft built their entire business on that model (buying/stealing technology from the companies that developed it to resell under their brand at a huge profit).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.