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Are Silicon Valley Workers Abandoning Libertarianism For Socialism? (salon.com)
Salon writes that Silicon Valley tech workers are "defying their overlords," arguing that recent unionization attempts by Kickstarter employees may be only the beginning:
The workers' Kickstarter campaign is not the first attempt, though, or even the first time rumblings of unionization, have circulated among programmers. In 2018, software engineers at the startup Lanetix announced their intent to unionize -- and were promptly fired by management (It is illegal to fire employees for trying to unionize). The National Labor Relations Board intervened, and ultimately forced Lanetix to pay the 15 fired engineers a total of $775,000. The show of worker power at Lanetix may have paved the way for Kickstarter's workers. Similarly, workers across the video game industry -- generally among the most overworked, underpaid workers within the tech industry -- have been making steps towards unionization. Game Workers Unite, profiled by Salon last year, is building a grassroots movement to organize the ranks of video game makers.
Together, this suggests that a small but visible movement for white-collar software engineers unionizing has been gaining steam in the Valley over the past few years -- suggesting that the people who make up the tech industry, once a bastion of libertarianism, are starting to understand the often subtle ways that their employers exploit them... For decades, libertarianism was part and parcel to the tech industry. Despite a grueling work culture and a high-profile collusion scandal among major tech corporations to suppress software engineers' wages, tech workers were more likely to see themselves as future founders than an exploited underclass -- a point of view encouraged by employers through high wages and generous, often absurd office perks. Recent developments suggest such endearing tactics are no longer working.
Together, this suggests that a small but visible movement for white-collar software engineers unionizing has been gaining steam in the Valley over the past few years -- suggesting that the people who make up the tech industry, once a bastion of libertarianism, are starting to understand the often subtle ways that their employers exploit them... For decades, libertarianism was part and parcel to the tech industry. Despite a grueling work culture and a high-profile collusion scandal among major tech corporations to suppress software engineers' wages, tech workers were more likely to see themselves as future founders than an exploited underclass -- a point of view encouraged by employers through high wages and generous, often absurd office perks. Recent developments suggest such endearing tactics are no longer working.
Suggestion : Before we yell at each other in the comments about this possible ideological shift, perhaps we should have a meeting of the minds as to what libertarianism, liberalism, socialism, conservatism, fascism, et all mean (or have multiple meanings) before moving on to the topic at hand.
Is it a surprise that people want to be able to live somewhere, maybe have a family they can provide for, and otherwise not need visit food banks to live off the snacks available at work? The valley is so horrifically expensive, the salaries are not great compared to the cost of living elsewhere, and yet they make these companies billions of dollars. The idea of take this shit work and after 5 years you will get some stock that will only matter if the company still exists, actually has a liquidity event, is not reverse acquired, or that you are not fired for not being as productive as you used to be is a tall order.
Thirty four characters live here.
Who cares?
Slashdot's owners, apparently, as they are quickly throwing that "socalism" label onto unionization. Trying to pounce on this grenade early and make sure the serfs remain libertarian, are you Slashdot?
Salon is a far left opinion source. I don't know why anyone but the far left takes them seriously. They can't even define socialism correctly. It doesn't mean labor unions. Socialism is government control of the means of production. No more, no less.You'd think the far left would read Marx, but I guess not.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
to fill out the workforce in Silicon Valley and put in 60+ hour weeks every week.
Batan death march (look it up) projects were for the first 10 years after college. The following years were for 40 to 45 hour workweeks and kids.
Switching later to consulting paid by the hour fixed the unpaid overtime problem.
It'd be just when the minimum salary you could pay per fed regulation is $250,000 or above will the unpaid overtime and other problems fall away. The current fed regulated minimum salary is $50k.
A 80% federal excise tax on pay paid to h1b would also fix many labor issues in the technology and engineering fields. H1B is for someone the company "can't just find anyone qualified" to work at the job at the price the company is willing to under pay. If it's a labor shortage and a H1B is the only answer, then cost should not be a high consideration and the company should be fortunate to pay salary + 80% tax on top.
H1B, fake skills shortage, failure to train existing employees in the desired skill area should not all fall on and be detrimental to the workers.
First rampant Libertarianism and Tech Utopianism, then Socialism and ... Progressive Tech Utopianism.
I think everyone in the Bay Area would do well to spend time in the rest of the country -- like, several years of time -- where it's blindingly obvious in day-to-day life that neither approach will work.
We've spent so much time and energy in this industry catering to the residents of, and solving problems that basically only exist in, the Bay Area. Imagine if some of this had been crafted by those with more sense.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
"Libertarianism" and "Socialism" mean what?
Whatever you want them to mean. Watch how many comments will define them for us. There will be hundreds of variations. It's like those old ladies that make quilts, but at least they end up with a quilt.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...introduced govt. support for unionisation as a way to save capitalism from itself. Without some form of constraint from the govt. or the workers or both, corporations were set to start a Bolshevik revolution. In other words, unions are what keep the Bolsheviks at bay.
It seems that every new generation of capitalists have to learn this the hard way: In the longer term, unions are the least bad option they have.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
I'm a socialist so I'll have a go at defining it.
Socialism is "democratic ownership of the means of production". What that would look like in reality is a pretty radical departure to corporate governance.
Corporations wouldn't be allowed to be dictatorships like they are today. Workers would be like temporary shareholders, gaining voting rights while joining a company, and losing those votes once they leave.Democracy would fill not only the political sphere but be fully infused into the economic sphere. Nothing would be shielded from democratic forces. Capital does not give anyone the right to dominate and enslave anyone else.
While worker co-ops exist on a small scale, they can't compete with massive tax-dodging transnationals that shit their externalities all over people in poorer countries damaging their health and environment. That makes socialism by definition an international project.
Socialism is not "social democratic policies", which are tax funded state-projects used to soften capitalism. To a socialist, welfare spending is not a solution, but the indication that a fundamental problem exists in society.
Immigrants, yes. Now do illegal aliens.
"You don't understand. Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters."
- Rom, responding to Bashir's suggestion that he form a union
#DeleteFacebook
I understand the historical connection of unions to leftist politics, but I've always wondered why no one tried to re-engineer and rebrand them as something that really embodies the free market stuff that the right-wingers are always going on about.
There's no particular reason to think of a union as fundamentally any different from the corporation that employs its members. In other words, just make it one corporation employing another corporation to do a job. More than a contractor, with the framework laid out so that it's effectively as if the union members (which is also the union's employees--the union's name would be on all of the paychecks) are working for the original employer. I've actually worked at a company that did this trick for liability reasons (not unionization), so I'm pretty sure it's legally possible.
So why don't union organizers use this technique as a loophole in "right to work" states that forbid membership dues? This bypasses those laws entirely. Your old employer pays the union and the union cuts the check to you with pass-through taxation (LLC or nonprofit or something.) You show up for work at the same place, the employees are all owners the union-corporation and the union-corporation negotiates with the employer for all of the things unions traditionally negotiate for, with all of the bargaining power that unions typically have, even if it's a right to work state.
That's interesting on its own to think about. But then I wonder about taking it a step further... first, you imagine for a moment if telecommuting can be more widely accepted, so that you could have a union of white collar workers who all telecommuted. Just for the sake of this thought experiment, imagine that. Then, imagine there are guildlike union-corporations built on meritocracy and whatever other shared values and positive vibes that you think makes workers effective and pleasant to be around. If one employer starts giving you too much shit, well, the union starts shopping its collective resume around at other employers. Obviously it isn't feasible without telecommuting (you can't expect the whole union to pick up and physically move around), but just imagine for a moment if that was a given. Imagine if you had an identity as a union-corporation, as a collection of self-selected workers. You provide a certain set of skills, you have a certain kind of people working there with a certain kind of workflow and workplace vibe, and as a union-corporation you have a certain reputation in the marketplace. And if you have a good reputation and your employer starts screwing you over, you have the option of moving to greener pastures, taking all of your coworkers with you without having to slog through the interview process yourself. Or the union can simply threaten to do this as part of the bargaining process. This all could be as cutthroat or as reasonable as you want it to be--different unions could have different philosophies. A union might have a reputation for stability and loyalty to its employer even in tough times (some of that loyalty might be written into the contracts as well), and some prospective employers might find that loyal stability attractive. Larger unions might have multiple partners they provide workers for.
It probably sounds like I'm describing a consulting firm or something, but this would be for real long term employment purposes, with "pass through" benefits paid for by the employer (and also hopefully pass through taxation via nonprofit or LLC status) and you'd interact with the employer's supervisors as you normally would. Employers would still have the ability to fire specific individuals, subject to whatever dispute resolution stuff the union has agreed to with them.
I know there are major hurdles preventing this from ever happening but as far as pipe dreams go, it feels like a pretty nice one. And I like it as a thought experiment because it really puts the question to anti-union conservatives: how is this hybrid corporate-union-firm setup in any way u
Yes, that is socialism. But when young people say they want "socialism" that is not what they mean. They mean they want to be like Denmark: Capitalism with universal healthcare.
Well, perhaps if the GOP stopped demonizing a social safety net, perhaps the term wouldn't be so muddled.
That sounds great until the company has a bad quarter and your paycheck is $0. Ownership has a negative side as well.
The suits get a base pay plus options and bonuses, why not the workers? Ownership is not a novel idea, even in the US:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives
* https://hbr.org/2018/08/why-the-u-s-needs-more-worker-owned-companies
Or at least having workers represented on boards:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
Ask six libertarians for their answer on something, get at least a dozen answers. Or even six socialists for that matter, much the same.
Hell, as me for something and I can generally come up with at least three myself. The philosophically ideal answer, the real world answer, the practical answer, the "corrective" answer, and the achievable answer. ;)
Ideal: The way it would be in my ideal libertarian society
Real World: Not everybody are libertarian gods. This adds controls for failings
Practical: No longer starting from a magical libertarian starting point. Even more failings, trends from the past
Corrective: Society has taken a very wrong turn. In order to reach a more libertarian ideal, corrective measures are needed for a time(fixing the welfare state. No, I'm not a madman who'd cut everybody off all at once)
Achievable: Libertarians are a minority. We'll take what we can get, like lowered amounts of regulation, legalized marijuana as opposed to all drugs, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Ultimately all systems die in the face of human failings. Capitalism dies for the obvious reason that there are capitalists far-and-above all capital...the multi-billionaires that can distort the economy and politics alike. Socialism dies when society stops believing in its own good, or because of external governance that's not really considerate to society as a whole. Communism dies because it splits society into the haves and the have-nots, with the haves being government. It's just like capitalism but with a veneer of "it's good for everyone".
Every system will fail. Invent a new system and it will fail. They fail because of human failure, and that's intrinsic.
Immigrants, yes. Now do illegal aliens.
Most of the people in question aren't illegals, regardless of what Trump calls them. They're following the legally-defined process for seeking asylum.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It is not so much that every generation has to learn unions are a good thing, it is every few generations has to learn that unions are ALSO a bad thing.
Left unchecked, capitalism leads to worker oppression and mismanagement of natural resources and disruption of the stable governments that provide stability that allowed them to foster in the first place. This many on slashdot know and understand deep in their bones.
Left unchecked, unions cause wages to grow to unsustainable levels. They do not seek balance or fair compensation in negations. They are forces to always get more. This is also unsustainable. Furthermore, unions tend to protect incompetence, since they make no distinction between good employee and bad. Management never has a fair point in the eyes of a union. This is something many on slashdot do not seem to know
The answer, I think like many issues of our day, lies in acknowledging the valid parts of both arguments. We need to get back to listening to each other, and understanding the truths that lie within. This constant demonizing is helping no one.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Re " Capitalism has failed"
Thats what's makes US capitalism so good at producing the products and services the world wants.
The freedom to try something, see if it works, sell and make a profit. The try someone th new again. Fail and start again.
Its not like the UK with strong regulation and laws about who can try what.
A France and Germany where once the "brand"/"company" is approved and established it "has" to look after its full time workers.
Nations outside the USA keep regulations on starting a company, what can be done once a company is approved. Thats huge costs before making any profit.
The truth for the EU is awakening. People want the freedom, prices and quality of the USA. Not the gov control and costs of a UK, EU nation.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I will refer you to this fragment which argues against the notion that stock ownership is equivalent to democratic ownership of the means of production:
http://www.carlbeijer.com/2017...
For an example of worker ownership which has saved factories that would have otherwise been shut down (not for being unprofitable, but for not being profitable *enough*), look into Argentina's "recovered factory" movement, specifically FaSinPat ("Factory Without Bosses", formerly Zanon). In the latter case, the factory and the jobs were about to disappear, but the workers refused to stop coming to work; the factory is now more productive than ever, its worker-owners are better compensated, and enough surplus product is produced to be given freely to local community development projects.
There are many ways to run a co-op. As with any innovation, there is more risk when you have few templates from history to work from. But even a worker-owned enterprise must contend with the ordinary concerns of business cycles. It's not as though a worker-owned enterprise spends every dime of surplus on paychecks and other benefits. Surplus can be reserved to keep everyone fed during hard times. The thing is, workers have a say in what is done with the surplus. To contrast, the typical way a private (or publicly-traded but with decision-making power effectively concentrated in the hands of a CEO or board) enterprise handles recessions is to lay off huge numbers of workers. So yes, there are certainly trade-offs between the arrangements.
>"Are Silicon Valley Workers Abandoning Libertarianism For Socialism? Silicon Valley tech workers are "defying their overlords," arguing that recent unionization attempts by Kickstarter employees..."
Voluntary unionization is neither Socialism nor "abandoning Libertarianism." It would only be a move towards Socialism if they were calling for compulsory unionization and/or government control.
The Libertarian philosophy supports voluntary unions and right to work.
The Libertarians Party support unions even more strongly:
http://www.dehnbase.org/lpus/l...
It shows how far the US has gone that attempting to dial back from insane working hours and illegal hourly rates might be seen as socialism! I guess those ingrates will be asking for 'weekends' next!
> Communism would work just fine if it were run by a benevolent A.I.
Might as well say libertarianism could work if humans were perfect and altruistic.
Communism will never work because the perfect AI will never exist.
The only reason I can freely change jobs is because unions have made that possible. Otherwise, company stores and forced purchases would still have enslaved many workers, making a change of jobs impossible. Collusion between employers to not hire uppity folk would not be something they would try to avoid because of fines, but standard practice.
A good union (and not the guild-type of union the US is riddled with) defends the legitimate interest of all workers in a branch or sector. Even the "smart" ones that think they can handle lawyers and corporations on their own - while not realizing that that only works because there is an overheating economy and a labour shortage.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
How fucking detached from reality are you?
You're competing for work with people earning $8k/year. Even in the US over half of households have less than $60k/year income. That's households, not individual salaries.
$100-200k/year is a great salary. If you can't afford to live on that the issue is not the fucking salary.
Those things only make sense for people who are replaceable.
So for the majority of people it makes sense to unionize :)
Also, collusion in Silicon Valley makes a lot of sense: the opportunity loss of not gaining a new employee you really wanted is much lower than the cost of paying all those other people a lot more than you otherwise have to under no-poaching agreements. Remember: people find it extremely hard to judge competence when someone is more competent than they are themselves. Are they 2x as competent or 10x, or just 1%? They have no basis to judge this. So collusion keeps costs down, and they'll take the risk of losing a desirable software engineer because it works both ways (they also get to keep someone that would otherwise pack up and move).
In other words, the potential for collusion is a huge and certain cost saving, while not doing it is risky and uncertain. Guess what managers like and don't like?
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
If these workers' coops are really so wonderfully productive, then why can't they compete with capitalist companies? Why do they always seem to fail and fade away, rather than prospering?
Because you can't "compete" against someone who had your kneecaps broken before the race even started.
Start to get close to cutting into their business and suddenly capitalist companies become distinctly mafia oriented. You get buried under lawsuits, their agents inside the government start auditing/investigating you, they buy up all the raw materials so none is available to you or they give away their product until you collapse.
Really? You're using the spectacularly dysfunctional American healthcare system as an example of capitalism _working well_? Really?!
I think the concentration of wealth is where libertarians diverge with one another. Some see, as I do, the concentration of wealth in the extreme as being the equivalent of concentration of government power. And therefore something that society has a legitimate concern to regulate against.
Unions are just corporations. People associating and pooling resources towards greater benefit to themselves.
Not really.
On principle, the goal of libertarianism is simply to preserve individual choice wherever possible. Smaller government that provides less direct interference or control over people's lives is the result, but it's certainly not a call for no government and there's no point at which it ceases to work...because it's simply a goal to preserve where possible. Any hint of "purism" would remove the "where possible" with "everywhere"...which is closer to anarchy.
Simple examples:
Schools. Preservation of choice would allow parents to decide that a particular school is a better fit for their child than another and have the choice to send them there. The schools can still be public schools, accessible to everyone...but the individual or the family has a choice rather than the location being forced on them.
Basic Income. Rather than welfare, food stamps and many different programs that have specific restrictions on what you can and can't do with the money a basic income actually fits libertarian philosophy because it puts the money in the hands of the individual and allows them to choose how to use it themselves.
Government. Federal laws essentially remove individuals from having any say in how they are governed. Having the law exist primarily at more localized levels (state, county and city) rather than federally allows for the maximum degree of freedom of governance for individuals. They have the ability to choose to move when legal objections are strong and the ability to contact politicians, run for local seats, etc to influence things directly. The state of California has a higher population than Canada...there's very little reason that California should primarily be legislating itself. There's also very little reason that California policy should be pushed in Nebraska.
These are clear, simple and straightforward principles that work in literally all scenarios because they are goals and not hard lines. Sometimes those things will not be possible, but as long as the respect for individual choices is a core tenant the results become better for everyone. The only place where these ideals don't work is for people who quite literally want to determine how other people should be forced to live their lives.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Or, you can beat the shit out of the contingent workers and burn down the plant. That was how labor progress was won. Oh, and mobs showing up at the owner's house.
It's insane that you believe the right to self defense is dystopian.
I see, again, hot discussion about the similarities, or not, between socialism/communism and the nazis.
Here is something to think about.
The first democratically elected president of my country after the fall of the wall was a philosopher and a dissident. Why was he a dissident?
Well, back in the 60-ies he wrote a book. Called “The Fascism”. The communists were very vocal about the fact that we were with the germans during the war and claimed that all those people they killed, tortured and send to camps (all the way until the 80-ies, mind you) were fascist, helping the fascist government. So, I guess at the beginning they liked the subject of the book.
However, when the author characterizes the fascist state, listing all those features (economic, social, religious, racial ect.) that we discuss in this tread it turned out that our society, the one we knew so well, the one we lived in every day checks all the boxes that the fascist checked!!! Without saying one direct word against the communist regime, the author exposed them fully, for anyone with more than 2 brain cells to see. It was poetic, truly poetic!
Well, the communists did not miss this. The book was banned and taken away from shops and libraries. Of course, they never stated a reason, just in case they don’t point the obvious to those with less than 2 brain cells. And they did not really prosecute the author; did not kill him or threw him in a Gulag. Just quietly kept him under wraps. After all, that book was elucidating what horrible criminals the fascists were; how inhuman their doctrine was. Oh, the delicious irony!
Look chaps, it does not matter that nominally both ideologies begin from supposedly the opposite ends of the political spectrum. They both end up in the SAME PLACE! And both have been tried all over the globe, so we can’t pin it on a particular person (Stalin was bad, but Brezhnev was good!) or particular culture (all continents participated).
I am still not sure why this is, although when it comes to the communism I think it is the equality of outcome doctrine that fucks up everything. After all, nothing in nature has equal outcome, not even the stupidly named “spectrum” of human sexuality. Every spectrum expresses different frequencies with different intensities. If they are all expressed equally that is called “noise” and it is not very helpful. The other state with equal outcome is the heat dead of the Universe (maximum entropy). In short, if there is no difference, there is no potential. No potential, no driving force. No driving force, no nothingoh, and just to make matters more perverse, the commies encourage us to perform. Yes, they did! I got numerous awards in front of the whole school for excellent marks. However, they used the doctrine to remove inconvenient people. If I became inconvenient, all of a sudden, all my successes would be due to my “privileges”, for instance my “bourgeois family”, which I did not have but that does not really matter, they’d find something to hang me for. Isn’t that funny! Doesn’t it remind you of what is happening every day in our society? Where people, like those techies, who got there by being better than others, working harder than others, competing with other, all of sudden find all kind of “privileges” in others who are successful, forgetting they are also in the 1%. I mean 90% of the conversations between my parents about their work had to do with yet another incompetent ass who rose to prominence due to loyalty to the party line and uses the system to remove the competent, the conscientious and the knowledgeable.
When it comes to the fascist it seems that racial superiority is the alarm word, after which we should stop listening to whoever is advocating italso, since that doctrine does not try mimicking itself behind “universal brotherhood” or any number of seemingly good ideas, it is easier to identify and dismiss.
Just my 20 cents (wrote a bit too much for 2)
The new slashdot handlers need to come up with better headlines.
The answer is No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No.
"in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means 'don't bother reading this bit'"
** Marr, Andrew (2004). My Trade: a short history of British journalism. London: Macmillan. p. 253. ISBN 978-1-4050-0536-4.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Seems to me it's an example of what happens when you take the worst bits of socialism - unrestrained government funding - and combine them with the worst bits of capitalism - unrestrained free markets applied where consumers are not free. With that combination, no wonder it's a mess.
Centrists by their nature aren't inclined to think that screaming their lungs out with fellow believers changes anything. But if there was such a rally, I'm pretty sure their chant would be more like "Stop pandering with your transparently utopian bullshit". Or maybe, "No, if the one opposition politician that you've decided to hate beyond all rationality disappears tomorrow, the world's problems won't be solved instantly."
Or maybe just, "Grow the-fuck Up".
When you reach a certain age, you start to realize that mountains aren't climbed by leaping off a cliff and hoping you can fly; they're climbed by taking tens of thousands of little steps, each of which don't seem like they're accomplishing anything.