Slashdot Mirror
NYT on High Tech Unions
Rob sent us a New York
Times article (this means you need a free registration) that talks about something we've addressed here in the past. Its tech unions. It talks about the struggle of the MS Temps,
as well as the fact that techies are often paid well (cash, stock options and benefits) that the 70 hour work weeks just don't seem so
bad.
When you're young and in a booming sector of the economy, it's easier to just pack up for better prospects, true. But neither will always be. A lot of software jobs will relocate to the third world in the next decade. If you're not a star programmer yourself, will you just relocate too?
(Related: you might enjoy a new book "Corrosion of Character" by Richard Sennett about the effects on people's personal lives of 'non-committal' work environments. How does one practice trust/committment with friends and family, while doing the opposite with work?...)
I'm not saying unions are the only answer to this -- just that I think the 'simply move' argument is chickenshit crap.
I work in the South at a non union manufacturing plant. I enjoy twice the average family wage, the company pays for health insurance, provides 100% vesting in profit sharing, and is a good company to work for. I continue working at my place of employment, because they are good employers. If I didn't like my job, I'd quit!
We did have a union (IBEW) try to hijack the plant again last year and it took us a year to kick them back out. I do not want the violence that they showed at one of our smelters to come to our plant and cause us grief in the workplace. Over 70% of us signed a petition *twice* to remove them and finally the company listened to kick them out.
Unions might be good in places, but not where I work. I sure would like to see them represent fast food workers, but we pay more and they want a cut. They want to offer us protection, you see.
Some people do choose to work 70+ hours a week and enjoy their job. My step dad is a teacher. He is now also the associate dean. He enjoys his career and could have been perfectly happy with his tenure, but stays up late to advance the sciences.
I prefer longer hours at my job and a shorter work week and have chosen an employer who has such a program in place. I work three or four nights a week on 12 hour shifts. This allows me sufficient time to complete projects in one day. The days off allow me to go on vacation anywhere in the country.
If you don't like your job, quit. An old boss told me that. Good advice. That was almost 15 years ago at Burger King. Now I make about 10 times as much and have great job satisfaction.
As long as there are more technology jobs then there are people to fill them, there won't be cries for unionization, but if the tables begin to turn, then I wouldn't be surprised if unions are brought in.
Being good won't matter anymore, it may even be discouraged because it makes the other union members look bad. The only thing that will matter is how much seniority you have.
All I can say is, I hope it doesn't happen in my working lifetime.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
That is what's known as a closed shop, if unions had their way every union shop would be a closed shop.
In college, I worked at a supermarket that was a closed shop. For a $4.50/hour job with 12hrs/week, I had to pay the union $17/ week, $7 dues, and $10 initiation. After Taxes and Union dues I had maybe $25 spending money. I guess I was supposed to be grateful that I didn't make minimum wage (4.25/hour at the time).
To make things worse, one day a union rep showed, and tried to get us to donate money to their preferred political candidate. I told him, "Thanks, now I know who NOT to vote for."
I didn't stay at that job long
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
You obviously don't understand unions, either that or you're a union thug spreading misinformation. It is quite common for union membership to be manditory as a condition of employment. If we had universal "right to work" laws in place (laws that ban closed shops) then you'd have a point.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
What happened to the post that this was attached to?
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
What is needed are laws saying that if you do 70-hours of work, then you get paid for 70-hours of work. When you are hired, your employer should have to be clear how many hours you are expected to put in.
What I suspect is that the people stuck in the 70hour+ jobs have management who are oblivious to the fact, and set unrealistic deadlines and expectations. They may not even realize that the employees are working that hard.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Yes, and I could just imagine the same in tech unions. A network or sysadmin writes some perl scripts to aid his/her job, and gets in trouble because his/her job description doesn't say "programmer", and this goes against Union rules.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Of course the Union is going to claim that, true or otherwise. I suspect that the McDonalds employees discovered that the Union was costing them more in dues than it was benefitting them.
In another message I related how I worked at Supermarket that forced my to join UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) local 1776, for a job that only paid $0.25 more than the minimum wage. I worked 12-14 hours/week part time while going to college. The Union took $17/week in dues and initiation! That worked out to be more than all taxes combined! I wanted to decertify, but it was to big a task (as I understand, you need better than 50% vote chainwide). I just quit after a few weeks of that nonsense
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
My father was a union man, My grandfather is a union man, My stepfather was a union man until he started his own construction business.
Unions are great for protecting the people from assholes in management, however when they end up doing is protecting asshole IN labor.
My grandfather works with a guy who caused an accident because he smoked crack before work and the union SAVED HIS JOB!
Unions also reward seniority over ability. If I've got twice the ability of someone who has been there 15 years longer than I have, I get fscked.
Unions get contracts written is such a way as to benefit those who've been there the longest. The new guys have to "pay their dues" in order for the union to represent them fully.
Unions have contributed to their own downfall. I'm from Pittsburgh, and I watched the Steel Industry die here because the unions were too demanding.
At the Westinghouse Air Brake Company (WABCO) a guy fell asleep at his station and when his boss sent him home the other union guys WALKED OUT!
Because some cretin fell asleep at his station the union shut WABCO down for a day.
During the 70's the union men at the steel mills would break the windows out of foreign cars that they found parked in their lots.
Unions can be good under certain circumstances, but let's not delude ourselves, they have just as much potential to go bad.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Gee, NYT runs a story on how unions are irrelevant to (some) high-tech workers. Well, duh. Consider the source. Ya think there just might be a bit of a slant?
I dont deny that the temps at MS are getting shafted in some way, but something makes them stay. Whether it's the paychecks or the environment or whatever, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. If you dont like it, quit. If you dont want to quit, there must be something that makes it worth it to you. Feel free to vent and bitch and moan and complain, but remember that you're the one who is staying there for one reason or another, and in the end you have to remember that working long hours for good money and then complaining about it is not going to endear you to the majority of the wage earning public.
I worked construction when I was younger and I can tell you now, You're not going to get pity from these guys when you're making 60 large a year.
-Rich
Ok, guilty confession time. I used to work on the main MS campus. It sucked. I made $19.38/hr doing the same work that full time MS employees made 50K + stock doing, and other temps made $30-$40/hr. So I was one of them poor exploited underpaid temps. But wait... I was 20 years old and making more $$$ than my father ever did. That's pretty good. And it took me a week to make as much $$$ as the average hatian makes in a year. Even better. Then I quit and got a job with a different company for lots more money. Funny, I don't seem to be able to convince anyone that I was exploited.
--Shoeboy
These days, coders are doing fine in leveraging management for high pay. What they don't necessarily have a lot of leverage in is product design, code quality, the ability to refuse to release an imperfect program, et cetera. This *is* because of a rift between labor and management -- we all know that PHBs tend to care less about quality than they ought to.
Now, what powers does a union have? Unions can strike. So a tech worker union's power would stem from its popularity -- whether the union had a pervasive enough membership to effectively blacklist a company from hiring coders.
What powers does a professional organization like the Bar Association have? The Bar Association has the legal authority to select which people may practice law. Those who practice law incorrectly lose their privilege to practice law, under penalty of fine or imprisonment.
This second model strikes me as more appropriate for the programming industry. We don't really have labor problems in this industry. Most problems in the industry stem from (for example) dopes in the marketing department dictating the design of programs. A professional association's backing would be damned helpful in these sorts of disputes. ("Put automagically-executed macros into the email documents? I could be disbarred for that!") Coders need the same legally-protected autonomy that doctors, lawyers, and other such professionals have; this would be a lot more powerful than the socially-protected autonomy of labor unions.
(Labor disputes could fall under this Bar-association-equivalent as well, but I doubt that labor disputes come up in the tech industry as much as the would in, say, the mining industry, where whole town are/were owned by single corporations. Most of the labor griping here seems to center around working a long number of consecutive hours; in theory, this could be regulated for programmers the same way it is for pilots.)
In conclusion, I think that an industry-wide organization is needed to unite programmers, but a union is not the right model for that organization.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Getting a degree _REALLY_ means that you're willing to spend 18 Grand of your parents money learning something that you could have picked up much more quickly and cheaply by taking a little initiative.
Well, it can also mean you're willing to spend 18 grand (actually much more) of your OWN money as well... I'm still paying back some of my student loans.
I have a degree, but a lot of the usefulness to me comes from my spending years playing around on the Sun workstations in school. I agree, I don't think you need to have a degree to be good in a technical role, any skills you need (technical or non-technical) can be picked up outside of a formal education.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sure, I might not be in a need of a unions at the moment. But I'm here for the people that might not be as lucky as I am right now. And so I can count on them being there for me should I ever need their help!
Being backed by a union can be of great value, that I now from what friends of mine have told me.
Think of it as an IRC channel for Linux support! I might hang out there all day hoping to be of help to someone. Even though I do not myself need any help, at the moment, I know I will be very glad the channel is there should I run into trouble.
If everybody thought "A linux support channel? I don't need no goddamn help, I'm a hacker!" there would be no such channels.
So if you're not doing it to help other people out, do it to help yourself!
One day you will be glad you did.
Don't hate the media, become the media.
"Our systems administrators have been notified and are working to fix the problem."
Maybe their Sysadmins are on strike!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Even though strikes are rare they remain the bargaining power of unions. Take away that power and you have a toothless union. Worse, you have a union that has no real bargaining leverage on behalf of its members but is capable of bargaining away benefits!
I've actually seen this in practice. I am a member of a non-striking union that, some years ago, bargained for moving our COLA raise up from January to November. We gained two months of raise but the union accepted a lower amount, having no other leverage to apply toward their goal. I calculated the break-even point to be April or May... and we've lost money ever since as a result of this "union" action on our behalf. A union that cannot strike is not a union. Management will never confuse such a "union" with a real one that has the power to strike but doesn't use it often.
Similarly, a company must retain the right to fire striking union members or it loses its leverage -- and, ultimately, its competitive advantage. If a company fires its striking workforce it is either making a big mistake or it has calculated that they can be replaced at lower cost. This latter option must be allowed in order to keep the economic house in order.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Sure, that's the most publicized thing that some unions can do. But believe it or not, strikes (and lockouts for that matter) are rare and are used as a last resort in a contract dispute.
For that matter, many unions (the one my father was president of, and the unions associated with the university I used to work for are two examples) specifically do not allow their employees to strike. It is part of their contract.
In the case of my father's union, one of the major things they had to do was take the cluebat to management on various technological subjects. The people who were actually having to work with the stuff were in a position to make the decisions, or at least to point out when something made no logical sense.
Case in point: management was trying to get away with not paying extra for a course that is simultaneously taught in a classroom and broadcast via distance-learning technology. Um, right. Never mind that you'll have double the tests to give, papers to grade, etc; you're only teaching the course once, ergo you should only get paid for it once. Nice logic, that.
I do understand that unionizing programmers will be akin to trying to herd cats, and I do understand that there can be severe problems with union management. However, whether or not what gets together is a union per se, these unwilling-to-be-herded cats are going to have to learn to work together eventually, or employers' expectations are going to get less and less realistic.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
OK, so it doesn't have the work-stopping impact of an actual strike, but what college president wants to have himself and his policies painted in an embarassing light by the local media? That, and picketing the aforementioned prez's house on Christmas Eve ... *grin*
....
There are plenty of ways to be disruptive and call attention to the problems without stopping work. I remember when I was younger and my father wore his "MVCC: Not a Happy Family" button to work every day for most of a YEAR, and was only too happy to explain it to anyone who asked
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
If the situation on a job site gets bad enough, then unions start to look like a good idea. When people are used and exploited, basically treated no better than interchangeable parts, then you have a good environment for unions to take hold.
Often times it is less a matter of pay than a matter of respect and working conditions. 70 hours a week is excessive, it will people. I have been there and even though I was getting good rewards it wasn't worth. I ended up spending most of my money on convience (e.g. fast food) because I did not have any free time at all.
Excessive work weeks are also a sign of poor management. It means:
1) under staffed
and/or
2) your processes are so hosed that people are not working at 100% possible effectiveness (e.g. solving the problem the first time)
and/or
3) you are not hiring the right people for the job
and/or
4) The people managing the situation don't have a clue how to organize it.
All 3 of these feed off of each other: being understaffed increases over-time which increases turnover, often just as people are learning their job. Since you are scrambling for people you often will hire anybody and end up with just a bunch of warm bodies, which causes training difficulties and insures that you have to fix things 3 times over etc.
In the tech support game, tech support is a cost shifting situation. Instead of taking extra time and money for tesing and developement, you are ending up spending more money on tech support.
The only way MS and other companies are pulling it off right now is the eonomy is hot and people will spend lavishly on technology. Anybody can make mone in a booming economy, the question is who can make money in a slow economy. And the way we are organizing software support right now is extremely wasteful.
If a company is plauged by unions, it is management's fault. as Demming put it "The woker works IN the system, the manager works ON the system." And if you are out there working 60+
hours a week, stop it immediately. You are only rewarding companies for poor management and ruining your health to boot.
(rant/rave....)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
As a former contract worker and former temp, I can identify with the lack of health insurance, time off and sick days, but I never blamed the company where I worked.
When I was a contract worker for a defense contractor I found out what the agency's billing rate for my time was. At the time I was making $7/hr with no benefits. The rate the agency was charging was $19/hr. Had the agency cared about keeping its people, they could have found a way to set aside some of the $12/hr they were taking off the top to pay for health care. The agency offered health care, but they didn't contribute, and the monthly premium for me and my wife was close to $500. Hmm, $6000 insurance from a $14,000 salary or $3,300 from a $60,000 salary. It doesn't require the services of a financial analyst to figure out which I'd pick (but I'm not bitter).
In some areas, like Central New York, the job market is very weak, especially for people with technical skills who don't care to assemble transfer cases or bottle beer (and you can't get into those jobs anyway because the unions have closed them out by allowing the employees to put their children **as young as 9** on the waiting list for jobs). It seems to me that the "MS Temps" live in an area where their skills would be at a premium.
Yes, I understand that you enjoy your job and like your managers, but it's not exactly a closed job market. If benefits are so important to you, go somewhere that offers them.