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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.......
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!
Hey, it worked for Enron!
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
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 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.
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.
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.
No you don't make your own, you have to bargain for it, and that's where collective bargaining comes in.
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."
Those would not have happened without the labor movement and, specifically, unionized labor. I don't know if you value any of those, but I do. You can certainly argue that trade unions are causing harm today and have reached the end of their usefullness, but I'm not going to stand by while you spit on the men who -- often quite literally -- died for those rights which you now seem to dismiss so readily.
Of course, some "Right to Work" states in the US have revoked some of these worker rights (yes, it was a misnomer to trick people into voting for it). I'm not even going to touch the stupidity of that one.
[Note: Yes, I posted a similar list elsewhere.]
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
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
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.
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
And when you lose that war, do we get to kill you, or will we have to settle for enslaving you?
Here's the beauty of economics. If the Chinese and the Indians truly do have a comparative advantage at creating software then that means that everyone that uses software will benefit as more software production is moved overseas. Sure, you'll have to find something else to do, but everyone that buys software will benefit. No one is going to go to war to preserve your job because chances are good that they will actually benefit from the shift.
Hooray for economics!
You can try and fight economics if you want, but its not likely to help. Free markets are as old as mankind, and even in places like the former Soviet Union, where the government tried to limit the power of the market, markets still had a very powerful influence on the economy. So declare war on India and China if you wish, just don't be surprised when your army turns out to be pathetically small, and full of deranged lunatics.
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. */
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
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.