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Does Silicon Valley Need More Labor Unions? (salon.com)
Salon recently talked to Jeffrey Buchanan, who two years ago co-founded a labor rights group "that highlights the plight of security officers, food-service workers, janitors and shuttle-bus drivers in the region." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
The situation among Silicon Valley's low-wage contract workers has become so perilous that in January, thousands of security guards working at immensely profitable companies like Facebook and Cisco followed the shuttle-bus drivers and voted to unionize in an effort to collectively bargain for higher wages and better benefits. The upcoming labor contract negotiations between the roughly 3,000 security guards (represented by SEIU United Service Workers West) and their employers is one of the biggest developments in Silicon Valley labor organizing to happen this year. Buchanan says there's also a broader push this year to get tech companies to be proactive in ensuring these workers can make ends meet, even if these companies have to pay more for the services they procure...
A paper published last year by University of California at Santa Cruz researchers Chris Brenner and Kyle Neering estimates between 19,000 and 39,000 contracted service workers are employed in the Valley at any given time... An additional 78,000 workers are at risk of becoming contract employees, according to the study, a number which includes administrative assistants, sales representatives and medium-wage computer programmers. This is part of a larger societal shift in which salaried workers are converted to contractors -- a transition that benefits business owners, in that they don't have to pay benefits and can hire and fire contractors at will.
Buchanan's group represents contractors typically earning "as little as $20,000 a year." But Salon's headline argues that "programmers may be next" in the drive to organize contractors.
A paper published last year by University of California at Santa Cruz researchers Chris Brenner and Kyle Neering estimates between 19,000 and 39,000 contracted service workers are employed in the Valley at any given time... An additional 78,000 workers are at risk of becoming contract employees, according to the study, a number which includes administrative assistants, sales representatives and medium-wage computer programmers. This is part of a larger societal shift in which salaried workers are converted to contractors -- a transition that benefits business owners, in that they don't have to pay benefits and can hire and fire contractors at will.
Buchanan's group represents contractors typically earning "as little as $20,000 a year." But Salon's headline argues that "programmers may be next" in the drive to organize contractors.
As someone who was a union member about a decade ago, you sure couldn't tell it by my union's actions.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
It's too bad the conventional union system has nearly all the rot and inefficiency of government. It gives it such a bad name that it's easy to see why so many IT workers see it as a turn for the worse.
Union management got its culture from the nature of the businesses whose workers it organized in its days of growth and greatness: steelmakers, cab drivers, longshoremen, and mostly in large Eastern cities where graft is a way of life. Today's tech workers see this as old-fashioned and irrelevant.
A Silicon Valley union would have to arise from its own culture and be run in a way that appeals to local workers. Give it some California name like Bargaining Coop, and you're off and running.
1) Low pay/benefits.
In some situations, Silicon Valley will offer low pay and no benefits, but only to new hires. This is particularly common in start ups. Competent, Experienced people get god pay and can demand their own benefits. But new people have the right to reasonable pay.
2) Dangerous working conditions.
Silicon Valley does not do this.
3) Ridiculous hours/work.
Silicon Valley is known to do this consistently.
That is two out of three for new/bad workers. Yes, Silicon Valley needs Labor Unions.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
if shareholders are allowed to form a co-op in order to retain workers; why shouldn't workers form a co-op in order to negotiate?