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Should IT Unionize?
snydeq writes "Sixty-hour work weeks with no overtime or comp time, a BlackBerry hitched to your belt 24/7, mandates from managers who have no clue what you actually do — all for a job that could be outsourced tomorrow. 'Is it finally time for technology workers to form a union and demand better working conditions?' InfoWorld's Dan Tynan asks. To some, the odds against IT unions are long, in large part because the 'lone gunman' culture is pervasive. Diversity of skills and job objectives is another hurdle for rallying around common goals. But that has not dissuaded several union-minded groups from cropping up across the industry as of late, Tynan reports. In the end, the best bet for IT may be a professional organization modeled after the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association, one that could give IT professionals a single voice for speaking out on issues that affect everyone — such as H-1B visa limits or tax incentives to keep IT jobs onshore."
need to become a bit more business savvy. contract workers tend to get tacitly screwed (speaking from experience) in that if management says "we dont do overtime," they tend to hope we believe them.
unpaid overtime for hourly workers is bad in IT, because youre usually on call when a blackberry even when youre not in the office.
or flat out asked to be on call in that "keep your phone on you/near you" sort of way.
blackberry during your off hours=billable hours for each call/page/message you check. no exceptions.
i was burned once by a fortune 500, but never again.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm in IT and in the public sector represented by the CWA. The pay is crap but I work 5 days a week seven hours a day (plus an hour lunch) and get paid OT or time and a half back for extra work hours. I make more than enough to live.
Unions aren't a good idea any more. When they first started up, employee's had very few rights. Now the rights unions fought for are enshrined in law.
A union won't save your job, and to be frank, if you're job is at a high risk of being outsourced, or management is being retarded then you need to get a new job, because just as you have the 'right' to walk out in protest, an employee has the right to save their business by dropping you as an employee for any reason and going elsewhere.
Unfair dismissal doesn't work if you put their business at risk by striking, even if you have a union telling you to do it, not any more.
There is also the fact that employers need not employ anyone who is in a union. Join/form one if you like, but after the first time you 'punish' a company, I'd bet actual English pounds that none of your members will work in the IT industry again.
I was a member of a union when I was a teenager. The damn thing nearly fucked me by saying we had to go on strike. I didn't want to, I had rent and a bike to pay for, and the last thing I needed was no pay for a week, or even a few days.
Luckily the strike was averted because the management pretty much said 'sure, go ahead and leave, but you won't get the pay rise anyway, and you put your jobs at risk if the factory closes for long'. Seemed fair to me.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
superb post. People always associate unions with some cartoon like stereotype from 'I'm all right jack', but the reality doesn't have to be like that.
When your employer sexually harrases you, bullies you, asks you to lie for him, asks you to do something illegal etc etc, THAT is when you realise that having a union on your side is a good thing.
As for people saying that unionising makes your work more expensive and will mean outsourcing. wise up. As a company owner, if I think I can outsource you to indie to make me more money I will. The few percentage points involved in unionising are trivial. IT jobs not in India are not in India for technical, cultural or practical reasons. The salary gap is already huge.
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Day 1: Really excited by my new development job, even though I have no seniority. Was trained by the person with second-least seniority, who told me my job was to access the bug database and make a graph in powerpoint of "severity x days open."
After about 5 minutes of this, I said You know, I could write a perl program to do this in less time than it would take to do it by hand.
He smiled, and said that's what he thought on the his first day. However, we were programmers and the IT people had the responsibility for the bug database and they were in a different union. Ergo, we weren't allowed to build programmatic interfaces to their tools.
Day 10: I've got building the chart down to taking only six hours a day, and have spent my other 30 minutes (minus union-mandated lunch and coffee breaks) a day looking at the code in read-only mode, trying to familiarize myself with it. Having worked on open-source projects, I knew how to use the SVN web-viewer.
Day 20: I noticed a quite-obvious buffer overflow in the code, and went to the developer who wrote it to point it out. She was quite upset that I had been looking at the code, and filed a union grievance about me exceeding my job responsibilities.
Day 22: Grievance day. The shop steward yelled at me for a while. Afterwards, Management took me aside and told me it was nice to see someone who had some initiative, and they'd see if they could find me something interesting to do...
Day 41: Time to build PPT charts now 7 hours. I had gotten it down to 5, but there have been a rash of bugs and features over the past few weeks.
Day 52: Management tells me there's a small feature they've wanted developed for years, but it never seems to get done. It's completely self-contained and sounds pretty simple. They give me the bug # for the requirements list, and caution that I can only work on it in my spare time, and not generate overtime.
Day 56: I've done a bit of looking into it, and now understand how to do the side project. The problem is, I'm already at 15 minutes of overtime a day because of making those stupid charts. I think I'll work on it at home.
Day 57: Tired at work today, since I stayed up until 3 AM working on the side project.
Day 58: Gave the completed side project to Management, along with all the source code. They thanked me profusely, saying it's nice to see people who can get things done.
Day 59: Called into a meeting with the shop steward and one of the senior developers. Apparently, the task that I did had done was assigned to the senior developer, and Management had given him my source and said "We got something off your plate for you." It turns out the task had been on his plate for a year, and he had never done it. I asked "I know it wasn't my responsibility, but isn't it good to have something off your plate so you don't have to deal with it?" He exploded and said he was saving it because it was a simple task, and if he ever had to raise his productivity to meet a quota, he could have done that.
The shop steward said that it didn't look as if I was going to fit in, and they terminated me on the last day of my probationary period.
...the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) already does lots of lobbying on behalf of IT and CS professionals. There's also the AITP (Association of Information Technology Professionals) which has more of an applied/business slant to it than the ACM.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Which is exactly why electrical engineers most certainly DO NOT write electrical codes. They're written by electrians. Really.
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What does the American Bar Association do? Primarily it sets standards for it's members, and enforces them.
As a member of the American Bar Association, I can assure you that it has absolutely no enforcement powers over me other than being able to theoretically revoke my membership. The ABA accredits law schools, acts as a lobbying arm for the legal profession, and provides advice to politicians regarding judicial candidates, but it is not equivalent to a state Bar and does not regulate lawyers.
Joining a union is optional in the US -- land of the free, and all that crap -- but in certain fields, you just don't get work without it. And if you did, you'd have union members treating you like a picket-line-crossing scab, which can mean anything from jeers to property vandalism to bodily harm.
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That should have been obvious by the asshole getting the Defcon scale backwards.
Anywho, I bring it up to Deffcon 5. I slam the gas and pass the woman, then cut her off.
Defcon 5 is peacetime readiness. Defcon 1 is maximum readiness. Watch Wargames at least, you're on /. for fuck's sake.
Exactly. The only things in a code which the electrical engineer wouldn't be able to work out are things put there arbitrarily by state officials. Do we really need a new lot of self-important busybodies to protect us from another?
IAAEE.
I'm fully capable of figuring out how to safely wire my house up and, knowing about my somewhat unusual power demands, may do a much better job than a certified electrician. But, for major jobs, I'll certainly contract out. I do not know what the code specifications are about gas-line spacing, conduit demands, etc. And, even though I'd do a good, safe job, I want to be able to sell my house some day and want to be sure that I'm not violating any building codes.
Are some of those codes BS? Maybe. Are some of the hoops that the certified electrician has to jump through BS? Maybe. But when I look at a house that I'm considering buying and I ask who did the electrical work, I'd much rather hear "A certified electrician whose work has been inspected to ensure that it meets local building codes" than "I did it myself - I'm an EE and know what I'm doing - I'm not sure whether it meets code, but I assure you it's safe".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
It's the National Fire Protection Association who writes things like the national electrical code. It's all about avoiding things that have caused fires.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Ah, yes-- the siren song of unionization, born out of the early 20th century labor struggles where socialism was still an idyllic future utopia
(citation needed)
-Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (emphasis mine)
Allen was a bona-fide historian, the document that debunks your argument is hosted at an American university. So, do you have someone with better credentials than Rush Limbaugh to back your assertion that "socialism was still an idyllic future utopia"?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I work for a large state university. All full-time professional jobs have the option of being part of the union. If you're not part of the union, you're required to pay them a fee for doing all your contract negotiation -- dues turn out to be about $15 a month higher, but they buy you great dental insurance and discounts on things like museum admission (actually, most are free), travel arrangments, cell phone service, and all sorts of other things.
Working under a union-negotiated contract, I'm also guaranteed a 40 hour work-week, reasonable vacation and sick leave, decent pay (I work for the state, so it'll never be great, but it's decent), and I can't easily be fired without cause.
Now, that said, I think the union has too much power here. There are people who can't be fired, even though everyone knows they're incompetent, simply because the paperwork is a pain. The amount of administrative overhead for dealing with the union is horrific; it mostly comes down on the university administration, so I don't have to deal with much, but there's a tremendous amount of it. There are a lot of other issues, as well. The examples other people have come up with -- states where union workers are required by law, where no one can do anything without the union's approval -- are all good examples. They're rediculous. The point of the union is to keep the company from taking advantage of the workers, not to allow the union to take advantage of everyone else.
But overall? I'm glad to be working a lower-paid union job. I've been offered higher pay in industry jobs (more than doubling my pay, actually), but you know what? I think it's unreasonable to be expected to work 80 hours a week and be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year. I'll take my moderate pay and pleasant working environment any day.
Not all unions are the same, you know.
Professional baseball players have a union. You think they're getting paid based on seniority?
Actors and writers have unions. You think they're not getting paid based on their performances?
A union is whatever the workers who form it make it. Those workers know the facts of their industries and form their unions accordingly. Just because some unions stress seniority doesn't mean yours has to.
Read my blog.
Sounds like you only have experience with american unions.
Here (in Sweden) unions don't bleed companies dry, they just make sure companies aren't underpaying their employees and exploiting them in regards to the hours worked (making company- och industry-wide deals with regards to overtime payment and such).
And the union doesn't tell us what jobs we can perform, but it is advisable to join the "right" union for your trade as a union for something like say, coal miners, wouldn't be much use for an IT worker since all of their deals with employers are likely to be with various mining companies.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Yes there is.
Read my blog.
Joining a union is optional in the US -- land of the free, and all that crap -- but in certain fields, you just don't get work without it. And if you did, you'd have union members treating you like a picket-line-crossing scab, which can mean anything from jeers to property vandalism to bodily harm.
It depends on the state. If it is a "right to work" state, you can opt out of the union and its dues completely if its a union shop. If its not "right to work", you can decline union membership, but you will be required to pay a minimum cover cost for collective bargaining. If you take this option, you will pay less then the full union dues, but loose the right to participate in any union voting or meetings. The flip side is you still get all the benefits the union collectively bargained for if you aren't a member.
My dad was an electrician in a union shop. He would get called in to work a lot to change a light bulb, because no one else was allowed to.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Most people forget that in the East and Mid East of North America (Here in Canada during the 1920's) unions used to travel around with bats and mobs "Recruiting" miners and loggers. If you didn't join they took your knees.
Unions exists for one purpose and one purpose alone, to extort a second tax from you under the guise of protecting you from big bad business.
If your job sucks and anyone can do it than it's not very valuable; if you feel like your being extorted, abused or underpaid then find a new job! (or sue your employer for said abuse under local employment law)
if it took you 10 years of school and 3 years of practice then your making a killing.
The truth of the matter is labour will always go where it's cheapest & efficient logistical supports exist to make that distance (from product to market) viable.
By it's very Nature Information Technology is "Anti-Union" due to the fact that as a whole we are an industry of problem solvers; and as such we see all the problems unions cause with companies like GM, American Airlines and others that are facing bankruptcy as the result of labor costing more than the raw materials or services of the market.
Also as a result; the crappy IT jobs get outsourced, when was the last time a new call center opened up in your area? Is programming really a necessary skill in the modern and forth coming industry? (since emerging nations will do it at 1/10 the cost?)
I'm a union member and a Sys Admin in Canada. People belong to two different unions, CUPE and USWA.
Nobody has ever said what qualifications I need. The only time I've said I won't do a job is when it involves electrical in the building. Anything computer related goes.
My wage is in fact lower than the free market wage. What I do get is more job security.
I must remind everybody that there is a very different attitude towards unions in the US compared to Canada and Europe. The US has typically has lower union rates than both. Wikipedia states that private sector unionization is the lowest since 1932 at 9%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States
Bullshit. We're talking IT workers, not blue collar workers.
Bullshit. In the last 10 years, I've worked 2 jobs and have just gotten a new job. All three of them have very flat organization and they range in size from small, medium and extremely large. They were hierarchical yes, but the structure was developer, project manager, and then CEO. Very flat. In the case of the extremely large corp, there is 1 more management layer. That's it; still reasonably flat.
Bullshit and a very retarded comment. Most homes have high-speed connections, nearly everyone is connected with PDA phones, and USA is clearly a major source of new technology.
Only your other points, 3 and 5, have any merit.
/me suspects you're just another prissy euro-wanker spouting off again about those damned Americans
Camping on quad since 1996.
Technically you can install PVC in noncommercial buildings less than 3 stories in Chicago. They still require lead and oakum joints, you won't find that in any building outside of Chicago built later than 1970.
I'm not not licking toads.
No, in fact, thanks in large part to weak-willed, spineless apologists such as yourself, it's quickly becoming an ironclad promise you'll have a miserable life. That is, a place that's ridiculously expensive to live in where you'll be lucky if you can get a job and scrape together enough money to afford the rent on a refrigerator box. For additional points, every other country protects it's own citizens and severely restricts immigration so that Americans have nowhere else to go even while our government encourages even more immigration!
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I'm a software engineer. Back in the early 90's My boss sent me on loan to a GE Aerospace facililty (Now Lockheed Martin) in Camden, NJ where all the engineers were unionized. That included my fellow software engineers.
All the scare scenarios I'm reading here are complete BS. They had pretty much the same working environment as me, the same procedures and methods, etc. The only differences between them and me (as a non-unionized engineer) that I can remember were:
Oh, and I worked there on loan as a non-union person for two years. I was never treated any differently than anyone else by my co-workers. No harrassment, no attacks on my car, nothing.
This is just one person's story of course. But perhaps we should look at the actual real-world experience of unionized software shops before we start listening to scare stories about totally different industries.