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Ask Slashdot: What Would It Take For Developers To Start Their Own Union?
juicegg writes "TechCrunch contributor Klint Finley writes that developers have shunned unions because traditional workplace demands like higher pay are not important to us while traditional unions are incapable of advocating for what developers care about most while at work: autonomy and self-management. Is this how most developers feel? What about overtime, benefits, conditions for contractors and outsourcing concerns? Are there any issues big enough to get developers and techies to make collective demands or is it not worth the risk? Do existing unions offer advantages or is it better to start from scratch?"
In my lifetime, I don't recall a single industry that that has started a successful union in the U.S. (not in ANY field). All the unions that still have any real power are the ones still around from the Roosevelt New Deal and postwar days (the Teamsters, UAW, etc.).
So it's hardly fair to single out developers. There are very few fields that are significantly unionized anymore, and most of the ones that are are represented by older unions that go way back. When you look around and see that there are no unions with any real power that have been founded in your lifetime, it's pretty easy to be skeptical and pretty hard to volunteer to be the sacrificial lamb (by being the first voice in your field supporting a union) and endanger your career in the process.
It probably also doesn't help that political support for unions, even among many Democrats, pretty much dried up a long time ago.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
"because traditional workplace demands like higher pay are not important to us"
Since when is higher pay simply "not important"?
TK
The second a union starts, the company closes the local shop and outsources all development to a place where unions are illegal.
Manufacturers at least have a direct cost associated with moving a factory; most costs attributed to outsourcing are intangible in development and are thus usually ignored by PHBs.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Before the Internet, and before the common man had access to rally others, communicate to the masses, and see others' opinions, unions had value.
They kept child labor in the mines but made more money for the children's parents and for the union bosses.
Today unions are obsolete. The only people who advocate unions are the unions themselves, and those who've already joined that now want to "haze" everyone else because "they got hazed."
Sorry, jack. No unions.
E
Why would you want a Union? My observation is that Unions drag everything to the mediocre. It drags down the top performers and brings up the dead wood. If i'm a top performer I can do better for myself on my own. I guess if I'm a bottom feeder I'm interested, but probably too lazy to to care.
It would be a hard sell to the development community these days. Especially when we're facing overseas competition, and domestic competition from overseas labor. A union would make American developers un-competitive, and force businesses over the edge of insisting they can't afford american labor, even further. Sure, it would be nice if congress fixed that, but they haven't in the twelve years I've been watching. So, it's probably not feasible any time soon.
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What about overtime, benefits, conditions for contractors and outsourcing concerns?
Disclaimer: I am pro unions for services that are needed but cannot operate in the manner of a traditional capitalistic model like teaching and nursing. I am anti-union when it comes to goods and services that are not a critical need for society and should survive by their own objective merit and quality.
As a software developer myself, wouldn't unions exacerbate outsourcing concerns? I mean the whole point of what a picket line and a scab was centered around the fact that unionized workers that went on strike would have to physically stop workers from accessing the factory floor to work for less than the unionized workers. I would think that if developers did this, the picket line would be virtual and foreign or even out of state developers would find it easy to work remotely to fulfill the customer's needs. So could someone explain to me how a union could address outsourcing concerns? I think a union would make a potential development house shy away from going local for fear that they would have to deal with a union and then once in that position would not be able to go elsewhere for development work.
My work here is dung.
while traditional unions are incapable of advocating for what developers care about most while at work: autonomy and self-management
They missed one other one: Unions are also incapable of supporting performance-based rewards and promotion, something tech sector workers appreciate. The notion that seniority trumps all else would not go over well in my workplace, nor former workplaces.
I can't think of a faster way to send more development jobs to China/India than to unionize. Globalization largely blocks the benefit of unionizing in our industry, whether you are for or against unions is beside the point.
Companies that hire here value a level of service and language skill as a cost of doing business. You start reducing the cost-benefit of that relationship, and they will start shipping more jobs overseas.
Unions have been attempted in the past for IT personel. There is a reason they always fail. That reason is the general Union mentality that a degree is required to do anything high level. Many high level people in IT currently have no degree, or got the degree while already in the workplace.
That is just one reason. There are many others. Myself, yes I know I am posting anonymous, I do not support unions in IT. As the only degree I have is a G.E.D. and 21 years experience.
I know programmers who work for my county that are unionized. Imagine a process where seniority and not coding ability determines who works on a project.
Imagine a union that helped get the best workers on a project and making the most. A union that helped weed out the lazy, the incompetent, and the criminals. That would be a union that most people would not oppose.. unfortunately the opposite is true: seniority rules, criminals are coddled, lawsuits are filed, work slowdowns are part of the union bag of tricks.
Unions have no place for the programming industry.. except in government where we expect cost overruns and shoddy results. To start a programming union would be to hasten the outsourcing of your job. Besides, programming jobs are one of the most in-demand careers out there. If you can't make good money without a union, you should bone up on your skills.
In C, it's pretty simple, though of course if you want a discriminated union you'll probably end up stuffing it into a struct along with a field that tells you how to interpret the union.
Why would I want to belong to a union when the most of the power is on the developer's side? There's not enough developers to go around and thus plenty of job availability. Unions are meant to solidify workers rights in a situation where labor is plentiful, but that's nowhere near the case. Companies fight over us. I just made a decision between 3 offers this week to accept a new job. The power was in my hand.
Think software has a larger block of Libertarians than most other office workers. /. had a poll last week showing Dems and Libertarians in a neck-and-neck race for the biggest political block. Libertarians and Unions don't line up terribly neatly. That's going to be a quick roadblock to any attempt to unionize.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
Today, unions exist to protect jobs - meaning that a poorly performing worker is protected and cannot be fired.
Technical people admire knowledge, ability and competence above anything else. And they are disgusted by incompetence, which makes everybody's work more difficult.
The idea of actually protecting incompetence (via unions) goes against the whole technical culture. No, unions are not coming to the development community.
I haven't heard of any either, but I could clearly see a white collar information technology union. The need for one is quite apparent.
Odd, I have not seen a need to have my paycheck garnished in order to pay the wages of a bunch of executives who do nothing for me. You already get enough of that with company management as it is.
As financial conditions deteriorate, and simultaneously the need for more IT labor increases, the more management is pressured to "get more for less."
As the need for IT labor increases so does the amount you can ask to be paid, and the greater the opportunity to switch jobs for higher pay.
Eventually there has to be a breaking point.
We reached it a while ago. Unions are broken, and developers are way too rational to bring long term harm on themselves for short term gain.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unions exist in situations where management is negotiating from a place of power and replacement workers are easy to find. They allow the collective workforce to get a better deal than they would individually.
Meanwhile, there is a shortage of capable developers and we have the power in most negotiations. Why do we need a union if we can just demand what we want and get it? In our industry, companies have even been caught uniting against workers.
Unions are a tool and developers are taught to us the right tool for the job. When the situation demands a union, we'll unionize, but there's no point in doing that until there are a ton more capable developers to compete with for jobs.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Home schooling, charter schools, private schools - all these things operate well and better than public schools, all without unions.
Unions are decimating the performance and respect for public schools. Time to get them out of the way if you want to really improve educations for the millions that cannot afford private school, or live an an area too backwards to support charter schools.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Communism may have failed, but class warfare is alive and well. A worldwide depression, or even that of a few nations like the USA, India China or Europe would probably kick start a move to unions. I have no doubt that even if wages were to drop to Bangladesh levels, that prices on most items in these countries wouldn't budge downward very much. Price structure and wage structure are increasingly out of sync. At a certain point, when nobody in IT is making enough to live on, unionization will occur, along with a the sharpening of some makerbot printed guillotines. The speed with which "libertarians" become socialists will be quite amusing.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Well, Anonymous Coward is on board. Great.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Disclaimer: I'm live and work in Europe
...where you already have 4+ weeks vacation, sane working hours, protection from dismissal without cause, guaranteed health care if you do lose your job, and so on and so forth. Understandable that you don't see the appeal of a better contract.
0 1 - just my two bits
We need a better set of qualifications for the job. Engineers don't have a union but they won't let you design a bridge unless you are an engineer. The current "Computer Science" major does not make a qualified developer. Reading c++ or java in a weekend does not make a good developer. Yet companies hire these people and allow them to create big balls of mud that don't work. We need apprenticeships and a way to communicate what level a developer is to the "lay" community. Sr Developer and Web Guru are not the same thing to you and I, but from the outside it sounds like that Guru is the guy to go with. I'm not sure how we do this, but the profession really needs it. As a consultant I've worked with a number of companies that when I got there didn't even have reasonable source control, and the developers were didn't have any knowledge of "SOP" in the industry. We need a way to differentiate in the business community between professional programmer and somebody who can type into an IDE.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Some baseball bats, ice picks, the occasional incendiary device.
And it will be all for naught, because as soon as you unionize, you will be outsourced. And the people still doing the job who are still in this country will be the ones who have programming, organization, and communication skills not found in offshore development. And don't belong to a union. In the current business environment, unions only work for people who must be on-site, or are adequately politically connected. Or both.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What tech talent needs are agents, not unions. That is people to represent them in negotiations who are skilled at negotiating, and motivated to get a good deal. Very much like entertainers (actors, singers, sports stars). The agents focus on the "business" while the talent focuses on delivering value. This is especially true in job interviewing situations, especially when interviewing with a company that has a HR department. They have advantages in that interaction that are unbalanced. I personally would love to have an agent. The idea has it's hurdles, but no more so than the idea of starting a union.
It's VERY difficult to READ YOUR posts WHEN you CAPITALIZE random words AND PHRASES. PLEASE stop.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The fact GGP's post makes no sense at all tells all.
There might be some companies who can't identify good (or 'rock star') programmers. But programmers that vent like the GGP are always air thieves who are convinced they are unrecognized rock stars themselves.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Unions are worker organizations, developers would IMHO be better to have a professional organization. As mentioned previously this would start with some type of professional certification. As a group you could arrange group insurances/benefits administered through the group. The first goal I see would be to start certifying software "Developed by certified professionals (name of organization)". If you can create brand recognition for this certification you will gain some leverage against outsourcing etc. since those developers would not be certified. The organization would also share job and working condition information which would help in individual negotiation and relocation if necessary. The biggest hurdle I see would be if the 1%ers founded a competeing organization that they could control.
In pursuing school and deciding on which direction to go, I had decided to choose accounting as it seems to provide a stable field, while still allowing me the personal time to follow my interests with technology. I've been reading here at /. for a few years, and with the many complaints I see about the way the software industry or field of systems administration are treated and abused, along with the non-industry related troubles, has been a big turn off from choosing either of those fields as my primary skill.
However, I do love computers and networks and exploring code and programming and intend to follow with an education in one of the related fields. But whether or not I choose that for my employment is another issue. So during the day I shall be Justin the programmer-accountant and by night I shall defend the universe of light from the forces of darkness.
The OTHER big problem with white collar workers is that your job performance and satisfaction are far more likely to be influenced by the performance of your coworkers.
If a guy on the factory floor is slacking, the company's production goes down.
If a guy on your software team is slacking, it can quickly become a pain in your ass.
A tech union would just open the door for workers who can't perform to vote themselves protections that limit the compensation and satisfaction of the workers who do perform well.
paintball
Most labor unions are led by whoever wins a majority vote in the union elections.
They might be communists, they might not be. But whoever it is has to keep the support of at least half the union membership.
I am officially gone from
This question about unions for IT people comes up about once a year on Slashdot. Every single time you see the same damn bullshit from people who have no fucking clue what a union is or how it works.
1) The members (workers) have to vote on the contract. Don't like it? Don't vote for it. And you don't pay any dues until the first contract is negotiated.
2) Think performance bonuses are a good idea? Fine. Keep 'em. It's your contract. You can make the contract read whatever you'd like.
3) All the contract is is a legally binding document that spells out the work rules so management can't arbitrarily change them. If they do break the rules, you've got a legally binding contract to back you up. Imagine, you can keep all the same rules and procedures you have in place now except they could actually be enforced.
Take deep breaths people. If unions get the support and input from their members, they can be one of the best ways to empower workers and and make the company a better and more profitable place.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
And show us how awesome they would be if they were run the way unions think they should be run.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It seems there are two camps of people that are anti-union:
1) Those who currently make a lot of money and have other jobs lined up for them
2) Those who work for companies that would immediately outsource at the sign of unionization
If I was working at workplace 2, I would defiantly be looking for a job offered to the people at workplace 1, because its only a matter of time before the job outsourced. Union wages aren't what's driving outsourcing, its American wages.
A hole in my head.
Competent software developers are a rare commodity. Companies are the ones competing to attract the talent. We are not the dime-a-dozen crowd that can be treated poorly and compensated minimally. If we're not happy with our employer there are 50 waiting in the wings to snatch us up. If we leave our employer they lose the significant investment in both time and money that they made in us to be productive with their environment.
In 2011 software developers ranked number one for having the "best" job in both 2011 and 2012. Why the hell would any of us want to slap our employers in the face for treating us well? To suggest that we should form a union is about as stupid and counter productive as trying to suggest that every pub in Ireland should replace the Guinness taps with Bud Lite.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
The Screen Actor's Guild clearly allows spectacular pay for outstanding actors.
The Boeing Company's engineers, programmers and IT specialists in the Seattle region have been unionized since 1946 (SPEEA - IFPTE Local 2001). However, the notable difference is that this is a large engineering base (~22,000 members) dealing with a single employer; there's no way Boeing would be able to replace that many engineers in the event of a strike. So yes, unionization is possible for large companies where the sheer size and specialization prohibits easy replacement. However, if I'm understanding what the OP is arguing, it would be much harder to set something up in a geographical region like Silicon Valley; unlike a factory, a startup or small development shop could easily pick up and move to another area like Austin or RTP in North Carolina. You would also have to be extremely aggressive in breaking a lot of different parties that normally pride themselves on their independence to ensure that ONLY unionized developers are hired: new college hires, startup companies, venture capitalists, etc. I'm not sure if the tech industry is ready to turn on itself like that. You may be able to do it for highly specialized skillsets, say, a union of senior database administrators or something, but again, this would require a complete culture change that would essentially box out and even blacklist anyone who tries to take up a "union" job without being a member. Not sure if the tech world can handle that.
Check out The Animation Guild, IATSE Local 839, AFL-CIO. The Animation Guild represents artists and computer graphics workers in Southern California. Computer graphics people at Cartoon Network, Dreamworks, Fox, Hasbro, Marvel, Nicolodeon, Sony, Disney, and Warner are all in that union local.
What do they get for it? Here's a summary of current contracts. First, there's a union wage scale, but it's a minimum. Most workers are paid more than "scale". Second, hours worked and overtime pay are strictly enforced. More than 8 hours per day, overtime pay. More than 40 hours per week, overtime pay. More than 5 days per week, overtime pay. These multiply, so that if you work 14 hours on a Sunday, the hourly rate is huge. Movie projects have "crunches" too, and when they do, the employees get paid a lot of money. This is why production scheduling and budgeting are taken very seriously in Hollywood. So seriously that there are completion bond companies which, if a project gets too far behind, have the authority to fire the director and producer and put in their own people.
The Animation Guild also runs a pension fund. They point out that the Guild has been around longer than all but two animation studios. Hanna-Barbera (Flintstones, Jetsons, etc. and Walter Lanz (Woody Woodpecker), once big names in animation, are long gone; the Animation Guild is still there.
I've run into an IATSE organizer at SIGGRAPH meetings. They've tried to organize the video game industry, but so far, without success. In Redwood City, Electronic Arts and Dreamworks have adjacent buildings. Dreamworks is union; EA is not. The working conditions at EA are much worse.
While everyone would love to run their own business, there are profound inefficiencies associated with having a large numbers of small businesses, mainly losses caused by competition and misallocations of labor. Having a large proportion of small businesses is actually a symptom of a backward or developing economy; Egypt has more self-employed per capita than the US, for example.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Petroleum Engineer here, working with research.
I can tell for myself, engineers don't have much reason to strike. Why? Because it's usually pointless, there's no short-term damage to the employer. If an engineer doesn't show up, work simply goes on.
An engineer on the field has to strike for a few weeks/months to even begin to be noticed. In my case, working with research, I would have to strike for at least one year to do some real harm to my employer.
Engineers aren't useless; the most I know are well worth what they earn. But they influence mainly the future profits of the company, while blue-collar works have a direct influence on the daily profits, not to mention the quarter results.
Striking just isn't a nice strategy for white-collar workers. Threatening to go to a competitor is.
Now if people could threaten to move entire work groups to a competitor... that would be a negotiation I would like to see.
We're talking about programmers, aren't we? Very few programmers "deal retail", e.g. writing a Java applet for Mrs Scroggins down the road. They generally work for medium to big companies.
Thus I don't see how you've addressed any of starworks5's concerns.
I can be as self-employed & personally-incorporated as I like, but that's going to make zero difference if Sanjeet in Bongobongoland will work all week for less than the cost of my morning coffee.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"What Would It Take For Developers To Start Their Own Union?"
Abject stupidity.
Speaking as a musician, the union is considerably more in the way of musicians than it is helpful. I don't want anything to do with it; but you'd be amazed at how my avoiding the union negatively affects what jobs I can get, etc. "We only hire union bands" (because if they DO hire a non-union band, they may never get another union band in there.) And I'm perfectly capable of setting my own wage limits.
Extending that to the programming world... oh, brother. I think I'd take up something else, much as I love programming.
Looking at it from the other side: One time my company was setting up a display at a Chicago show. We had a burned out light bulb along the top; a matter of unscrewing the old bulb and replacing it with the new one by screwing it in. We had the spare bulb. I reached for it, and the "floor steward" was there, he informed me the replacement had to be done by a licensed electrician -- at a cost of $60/hour (this was in the late 1980's) with a one-hour minimum. I expressed my opinion that this was ridiculous (which it of course is), and he informed me that my options were either have the licensed electrician do it, or have our company ejected from the show. So we paid the extortion, but I *never* forgot that, and I will *never* join or otherwise encourage these gangsters.
Stop agreeing so hard with GP. Small businesses tend to be less rationalized and hyperefficient than megacorps, so they need more labor to make less profit. That doesn't make them the "backbone of the economy", that makes them the inefficient backbone of employment.
Most industrialized nations can manage to provide healthcare of very similar quality to what insured Americans enjoy to their entire populace, and the total bill comes in at ~40% less than what Americans pay. Under single-payer, it is entirely plausible your bills will go *down* (and I can prove that possibility with more than a dozen real world examples).
I hold that America does not need to be uniquely incompetent at providing affordable healthcare forever.
Or in other words, you need to acquiesce to labor arbitrage being used to beat down your wages.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011 @ 5:42PM |60,178 views
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that this goes
against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.
At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/tale-two-systems
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.
Different industries have different economies of scale.
Remember tungsten-filament light bulbs? I once read a study of the world's light-bulb industry. They are/were made by integrated systems called ribbon machines. They were very expensive and produced light bulbs very quickly and cheaply.
One ribbon machine could produce the entire output of 60- and 100-watt consumer bulbs for an entire country. There was one or two ribbon machines in the U.S. (owned by GE, I recall). There was one in Hungary that supplied most of the Eastern bloc, and GE eventually bought that company.
A light bulb factory was a high-capital, high-volume low-cost facility. You couldn't compete against them without a huge capital investment. (GE also a distribution network. It's not that easy to transport light bulbs -- for example if you wanted to import them from Hungary.) The only competitive market was in specialty bulbs.
The Soviets loved economies of scale. They had one monster cotton processing plant in the Ukraine that processed the entire cotton production of the Soviet Union.
The steel industry also had big economies of scale. They had big fucking crucibles of molten iron. The Japanese beat us with continuous casting. The other way to make things cheaper is to change a batch process into a continuous process. That requires even more capital. After the Japanese beat the big steel US companies, there was a resurgence in the US of "mini-mills" which made specialized steels.
So it all depends. I'll leave it to you to think of industries that do and don't have economies of scale.
Then, you need to target your skills and continuing growth towards something worth more $$ here in the US than rote coding which has become a commodity in the past decades.
You gotta learn to go with the flow and move to something more profitable.
There are an awful lot of pretty smart people that haven't been able to find skills worth more $$ here.
One of the nice things about the German economy is that it's the responsibility of the employer, and the government, to teach people new valuable skills. There was a story in I think the Wall Street Journal about a German welder who was laid off because his company's sales were slowing down. He got unemployment insurance that gave him about the same income he was getting when he was employed. And he was taking classes in advanced welding that would be valuable when the economy came back. The expectation was that his employer would hire him back when the market picked up, and he would stay with his new employer, using his new skills, until he retired.