Before Woz designed the Apple, he designed blue boxes, and he and Steve Jobs used to go around selling them to people, with Woz even using some of the design tricks he learned from making blue boxes to build the Apple I and II. I seem to recall either him or Jobs once saying that if they never had built blue boxes, they might have never have built the first Apple (which would mean IBM may have never built a PC, and who knows if any of us would be using PC's right now?), but I forget which one of them said that, when and where.
This is quite an astute observation. In fact, a recent Nation article talks about disappearing manufacturing jobs, IT jobs and so forth and makes the point that, yes, some of them are being lost to Asia, but some of them are simply being lost to mechanization.
Business's claim is that when someone is automate out of a job, another job magically pops up with the same hourly wage and so forth, although they may need some training for the job shift. This is the claim, though looking at it it doesn't always seem to be the case.
"Unions aren't designed for the benefit of the whole only the benefit of their members."
This doesn't make too much sense to me, it goes against logic. Let's say half of an industry is unionized. First off, people in a union are organized enough to knock down things like this overtime thing. So they can prevent laws from being passes which screw over everybody in the industry. Secondly, let's say half of the people in the industry suddenly start working 40 hours a week and get paid $5-10 more an hour than before. That they're working 40 instead of 50 hours creates more jobs, as someone has to do those jobs now. And their wage increase has a magnet effect on everyone if you believe in the economic theory of supply and demand. If half of the supply of a commodity (an hour of IT labor time) suddenly decreases in size (hours worked) and increases in price ($5-10), will that effect the half of workers not organized? You bet it will.
"I may be presuming too much but I would think that a computer professional is likely smart enough to negotiate their own contract. If you aren't getting paid enough or you haven't negotiated an overtime scale than that's your fault. Why would you want to abdicate responsibility to a union anyway?"
If you look at financial charts, in industry after industry after industry, unionized workers get paid more for normal wages and overtime wages than non-union workers in the same industry. I don't really care who's smart enough or who's fault what is, just look at the charts and these are the facts - why do you think companies fight unions so much? They'd rather have that money going to wages because of the union going to their profits.
"Already I see people here complaining about off-shoring. Just wait until you have a union, the jobs will bolt like there's no tomorrow."
Tell that to the North Carolina textile workers. North Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, yet jobs are leaving there in droves to China. Their industries are not organized, at all, and yet they're still leaving. At least the Midwestern union worker made enough money to send his kid to college and become a doctor or something while his job still existed. The North Carolina textile workers were told if they kept the unions out their jobs would be saved. So they kept the unions out. And then, sure enough, they lost their jobs.
"The best way to fight an over supply in your field is to train for a different field!"
That's one possibility. Reducing timed work per week from 50-55 hours a week to 40 hours is another. Or even 35 hours a week. If people still want to hack in that time, they can hack the Linux kernel or something. IT is the field everyone was telling workers TO train for. The job of the future and so forth. What exactly do you propose all the IT workers train for? People blowing hot air like you usually don't supply an answer.
"Or simply be the best in your field."
I can picture the majority shareholders of Microsoft and so forth laughing at you as you type this. Elaine Chao just kicked you in the face, and you grin like a sniveling sycophant. Ironically, hubris is what combines with your sycophancy to bring about this general attitude. They must be laughing about what a fool you are, saying you don't need overtime pay because you have the hubris to think you're the "best in your field".
In fact this is where this very thing, free time and the lack of it, and your hubris combine in a tragic denouement. I have met many IT workers who have no social lives, who are completely alienated from other people aside from perhaps a few other maladroit co-workers who they watch the Sci-Fi channel with from time to time. They do not interact with the opposite sex and their entire sense of self-worth gets wrapped up in their hubris of being the best programmer in the world. Who needs free time from work when life is work? The bankrollers of Elaine Chao of the world are profiting from your misery, heirs like Paris Hilt
I'd say there are a few trends here at work. One is that to some extent a lot of the IT work done nowadays was done piror to 1994 by a much smaller number of people, many of whom had CS or EE degrees. They formed organizations like the ACM and the IEEE. In the late 1990s a huge influx of people came into the profession, not all of whom had a Phd in EE from MIT. So to some extent you could say this is a new profession - there certainly doesn't seem to be much institutional memory anyhow. I'm fixing this new wave onto the Internet boom, although one could argue it's a second wave, the first being the PC boom.
The second aspect would be US labor history, something those of us who work are all part of, like it or not. I think there is enormous benefit to IT workers organizing together, bargaining collectively, striking if necessary and so forth. On the other hand, the official AFL-CIO unions like the CWA have in my view have had a role of dampening some of the power of this energy. The CWA bureaucrats will lay much of this off on US government restrictions on unions (which are probably the most draconian in the industrialized world), which is true to a large extent, but they share some of the blame.
Anyhow, just go to alt.computer.consultants on Usenet (or Google) to join in communication with other IT workers about various issues. Or mailing lists like Techs Unite. And the Programmers Guild has meetings in various cities, as do the CWA. If you're in the Bay Area, you might want to check out the IWW - they have put out some interesting things. They are also very militant, which is always good for jumpstarting things. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither are worker organizations, including skilled worker organizations.
Give me a break. I don't even believe that you are an IT worker, you're probably a boss and lying about it. Yaa, "tell the government to keep their damn hands off of it". Off of what, me getting paid for the time I work? Me having a social life instead of working all of the time? Chao is trying to change the rules which is government putting its damn hands all over it, putting it for the IT companies which are bankrolling the Bush campaign.
There are a million rules tying the hands of unions - Taft-Hartley, secondary strikes. Bush ordered the ILWU longershoremen on the west coast not to strike not long ago. You can bet your ass that the Bush administration is not going to keep its damn hands off of that power.
The American political economy is run the way it is because that's the way people allow it to be run. And in my view it's being run pretty shabbily. This kind of view that no matter how bad economic decisions are made by the people running things, that you'll leave all the decisions to them and simply think of how you yourself can as an individual "add the kinds of value for employers that will make...it worthwhile for them to keep these jobs in the US" sounds kind of sycophantic to me. Perhaps you get off on going to these people and pleading with them to let you valorize their capital in stead of some Indian, but I don't.
This sounds like the point of view of someone spending high school asking bullies what he can do for them to stop them from beating him up - now he's in the workforce, and after working 60 hour weeks with 24/7/365 reachability by pager during a boom, he is laid off or facing downward pressure on wages due to the owners desire for things to be that way, and his question is - what can I do to make myself more valuable to you?
Well from that pathetic vantage point there are the standard two answers. One is if you were working sixty hour weeks for a set salary, start working seventy hour weeks for the same salary. Your boss will get ten free hours of you creating wealth for him which will make him happier. That's the one generally less favored as workers obviously don't like it, and being only 24 hours a day, bosses can only push it so far. Which leaves the second option of productivity. This is the only thing that people can really see a positive thing about in our (and most of the world's) economy - productivity increases. And they were a lot more impressive from the 1940's to the 1960's. Toward the end of the 1960's productivity growth has been pretty stagnant, except for a bump here and there. But anyhow, this has been the drumbeat answer of course - train, train, train. Bush, one to stand in front of signs displaying pseudo-subliminal messages has been on a big "training" sign background recently. I recall him answering a question recently someone asked about jobs moving out of the country, and he stuttered and said "Well, people should train..." Well, people working manufacturing were told to train for high-tech jobs, but now the high-tech jobs are disappearing. So what the hell does he suggest people train for? Bush is a Republican, but the Democrats are in some respects even worse with regards to this. They're all reading off the same page more or less.
Anyhow, all of this kind of points to what I think. I don't feel like being a rat in a maze running around looking for cheese. There is a business propaganda book called "Who Moved my Cheese?" which tells workers who were laid off or whatever that they should not be affected by it, they should just collect their full six months of American unemployment (note: the length of unemployment in America is pathetic compared to an equivalently sized economy like the EU - German unemployment can last forever, technically), and not worry about why their cheese was moved, but simply adapt without complaints to go off and find wherever the so-called invisible hands have placed the new cheese. To go forward with this analogy, the real problem is the jobs are disappearing, not only from IT but from manufacturing as well. That's because the system is based on the profits of the capital owners (more or less the richest 1-2% of the US), not the wages of the workers (more or less the poorest 90-98% of Americans). I often here people say that the boom was followed by the bust due to "incompetence". In a sense this is correct, but it can imply that unemployment, what the government calls "NAIRU", booms followed by busts followed by booms and the like are not structural problems, but simply errors due to the incompetence of the managers of the economy. Considering that we can see this cycle in this century, in the 20th century, in the 19th century and so forth, as time goes on it becomes more obvious that these are not temporary
There's already an Indymedia family p2p news-sharing site in existence. Indymedia sites are great for text articles and pictures, but pile audio interviews and videos on top of that and the bandwidth starts to pile up. Enter something like v2v, where the site shares the audio and video files on Bittorrent, Edonkey/Overnet, Gnutella and the like, this helps lessen the load on the servers, and I suppose helps prevents censorship as well.
"Because he has a lot more power over his labor than over his suppliers and distributors."
And his labor has a lot more power over him. It's never fun to have your entire workforce walk out and start a picket line outside your door.
"This is especially true in an economy where jobs are scarce, like the current U.S. one."
There have been reserve armies of unemployed workers forever...of course it was raised in the last few years so rentiers could have more leverage over workers...but that's the point of its existence.
"Corporations today have much more power...through the legal system...through the government directly"
Of course. As John Dewey once said, politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.
North Carolina is the least unionized state in the US. The textile industry there is not unionized. Guess where the textile plants are closing down and going? Yes, China (and Latin America). In droves. Even they can't compete with people who get paid less than a dollar per hour.
Your example of steel is rather bad as well. The US still produces as much steel as it did decades ago. It just does it with a lot less people. It's called automation. Considering that the amount of steel produced has not dropped, while the number of people working to produce that steel has, I'd say you have to blame it more on automation than foreign competition.
Anyhow, considering these jobs are disappearing to China or automation whether or not you've been in a union for decades, I'd say I'd much rather be in a union for this type of job. These steel workers made enough money to buy a house and send their kids to school. Their kids can get nice jobs as lawyers for the ITAA or whatever. What does the North Carolina textile worker get? A rented trailer, kids who can't afford to go to a nice college, and so forth.
And you're also forgetting history. Cuba was a great place for American investors - until Castro took over and nationalized everything. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people never knew when a country might have a communist revolution. How many suspected China would become communist? As Thomas Friedman once said, the hidden hand of the marketplace needs to be backed up by a hidden fist. Foreign investment always comes with risk - just look what happened to the "Asian tigers".
This is a very old game, punishing end users for something certain ISPs are screwing up. I definitely would like to see problems like spam fixed, but this is just punishing good users for something spammers and the like are doing, and the spammers are going to find a way around this anyway. OK, requiring a valid e-mail address that responds to ICANN e-mails or whatever I *might* accept, but I find a jackbooted attempt to get real names and addresses (of course, ONLY in the United States) by pseudo-governmental authority quite weak. I'm sure there are plenty of boot-licking, groveling, authority-worshiping little computer dorks on Slashdot who love the idea of lawyers and the ogrish, incompetent government now that much more successful in exerting their authority.
All of the work on the show is done by the voice actors, the animators and the writers, and the work to put the show on the air is done by technicians and engineers. So who should get the money the show makes? Rupert Murdoch? The majority owners of News Corporation shares sitting on their lazy, idle class asses? I wish I had the problems of the Paris Hiltons of the world. The voice actors at least have to work to earn their pay.
I see the AEA is quoted here as a source. If you go to their web page, it says "AeA is the nation's largest high-tech trade association. AeA represents more than 3,000 companies with 1.8 million employees."
I think IT workers have to take anything that a trade association of 3000 companies says with a grain of salt. "We want more trained workers, trained at their, or someone else's, expense" is a constant, never changing mantra of these associations. There is ALWAYS a shortage of trained people in their eyes, there are ALWAYS a huge amount of high skilled jobs that are going unfilled (unfilled at the wages THEY want to offer). The ITAA was apoplectic in the late 1990s about the shortage of trained people there were for careers that would be around forever. And this is the line they continued to play for the past few years, saying people need to come in on H1-B visas with skills Americans don't have and so forth. Meanwhile, I know people here on H1-B visas who told me they never touched a computer before they stepped foot in the US.
So take all of this with a grain of salt. I would trust information from other IT people then some of the doo-doo that comes out of the AEA and ITAA. Check out Washtech.org or TechsUnite. If anything, they help IT workers communicate with one another about various things.
mp3's, movies and the like are safe to grab on p2p, warez of course always carry the possible threat of virus or something like this. But it's always like that with warez.
I don't care about warez too much one way or the other, but I would like people to feel safe downloading software that no so-called authority has unauthorized download of.
One solution of sorts is all of the major p2p programs have hashes for different files (the best being tigertree hashes). So all you need then is have a group with a good reputation give a list of hashes and then PGP sign it or whatnot. There are web sites like Bitzi that list hashes for a file in the different hash formats (Gnutella, Kazaa, EDonkey), along with user comments and the like. So there are definitely mechanisms where you can easily get a hash to compare the files against the OK of a trusted person or group, be the software "authorized" or "unauthorized".
I went to college around the time the movie "The Freshman" with Matthew Broderick (remember WarGames?) came out. One of the jokes in the movie is his professor makes everyone buy a 7 book series on film which costs something like $700 and Broderick wonders where he's going to get the money from. The funny part is that the professor is the author of this series, and thus has an automatic customer for the books in his hundreds of students every semester, in other words, he's forcing his students to line his pockets with money.
I noticed this in college as well. If you are (un)fortunate enough to get a big-name professor instead of a TA for one of your classes, he may have written his own expensive textbook, and will usually require you to buy it for his class. And if he is a big-name professor, he usually has many students every semester, and thus has a built-in audience.
All this panic and paranoia about jobs moving overseas doesn't even make sense when we consider the real economics of it. The "entire employment of the US" can't possibly be outsourced. Even if your argument wasn't a textbook example of the slippery slope fallacy [datanation.com], you'd still be wrong on an economic basis. If the USA loses a sufficient number of jobs, i.e. unemployment rises, the consumers will have less capital with which to buy foreign-made products. Domestic workers who are out of work will be willing to work for less, thus driving down the cost of locally made goods. When the cost of local goods and services drops below the cost of foreign made goods and services, then jobs will start to flow back into the USA. Adam Smith's invisible hand at work.
"Domestic workers who are out of work will be willing to work for less" - so this is what you're trying to sell us with. Hey, don't worry about unemployment being high, it's going to be falling soon along with your wages!
Adam Smith's hand is only invisible to those so transfixed with the point where commodities are exchanged that they can not see the production processes that created those commodities and the relations behind them. Besides, half of the theories of Smith and the other classical economists have been thrown out by modern economists since Smith and his cohorts were a lot more honest about what was going on then the economists employed by institutions nowadays. As Smith once said- "But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons."
Higher productivity is the only way to lower prices and increase wealth across the whole economy. Outsourcing helps companies to lower prices and improve the standard of living across the board.
Well this is the standard mantra of the capitalists. The economic production decisions in a capitalist society are made by capitalists, thus, productivity is there responsibility. How was US productivity from the late 1940's to say 1970? And did it increase wealth across the whole economy in the US? The answer is productivity increased greatly, and the growth was shared among all sectors pretty much evenly.
So how about since the early 1970's? Since then productivity growth has been pretty pathetic. Decades of government spending on ARPAnet until the Internet was handed over to the private sector in the mid 1990's caused a good growth of productivity for a few years, which caused such euphoria and over-production in a system that had been running sluggishly for decades that, as Paul Krugman, the economist who writes for the New York Times put it, it led to the longest crisis (recession) since the Depression. And as far as standards of living - the average inflation adjusted US hourly wage is below what it was thirty years ago. The hours worked by the average American worker is now #1 among industrial countries, bypassing Japan. In fact, the hourly productivity of the average American worker is below that of French workers and workers from smaller European countries - the US worker only makes up for productivity by working much longer, less productive hours than the French.
And so on and so forth. Higher productivity is the mantra of the capitalists. In fact, nowadays it is the mantle of the American Democrats - the Republicans seem more interested in ways of increasing profit other than productivity (longer hours, lower wages, larger labor pool). But they have been doing a dreadful job of increasing productivity since the early 1970's, with the only short bump coming from the supposedly dreaded decades-long taxpayer funding of Internet research and development, e.g. government spending.
Global trade volume has been increasing for centuries. So has wealth and employment, both globally and in the US. If trade is bad for us, it's taking an awfully long time to show it.
The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is below what it was in the US 30 years ago.
Smart consumers and smart bosses never by on cost alone; what they buy on is value, which is benefit divided by cost. American workers may cost more, but they're also very productive compared to many countries.
If you're worried about your job being outsourced, put your energies into making sure you're giving your boss the best value he can get, and make sure he knows it. Continuing professional education is one good way, and I'm sure people here can suggest others.
"Smart consumers and smart bosses never by (sic) on cost alone; what they buy on is value, which is benefit divided by cost." You are comparing a consumer (someone trading money for a commodity) with a boss (someone trading money for labor-time). You are equivocating me buying a car with a boss buying someone's labor time. The problem with that is the value of a commodity is constant, while the value of labor-time can vary. If I pay for someone to work a day's worth of work, say $100, and this person is making me $20 an hour, if I make him work 8 hours I will make $60. If I make him work 9 hours I will make $30. Value is created by the worker during labor time. A commodity sitting idly does not create value. What bosses want to buy is surplus value, not value. They want the 3 hours (or 4 hours, or 5 hours...) of time where you are creating wealth, but the wealth is not coming back to you as wages, but is rather going into the pockets of the boss as profit. After all, why else would he hire you as a wage worker? You're "giving your boss the best value he can get" by working hours of surplus that go to him as profits, instead of to you in wages.
I see that numerous people saying ownership of equities is widespread are modded up to 5, which I guess will result in multiple replies to the same answer over and over again. I don't really understand this argument - it's like a room full of people, 50 of whom have nothing, 40 of whom have a dollar, 9 of whom have hundred dollars, and one of whom has a billion dollars, and saying "half of the people here own currency" as if that means something.
According to the Federal Reserve, the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 42.2% of the stock market, while the 90% of Americans not within the wealthiest 10% own only 15.6% of the stock market. And in every study, the percentage owned by the top 1% has been increasing (and thus, that owned by the bottom 99% has been decreasing). Something to keep in mind with these Panglossian factoids about widespread stock ownership.
Right, like Paris Hilton, the Walton heirs, the Mars heirs, George W. Bush, Andrew Luster...they are "enlightened ones" for being born with silver spoons in their mouths and not having to work (because they are forcefully expropriating surplus labor from those who do work), while wage slaves are the "unenlightened" ones. This is akin to saying Haitian slaves were unenlightened for working for their masters. Of course, they solved that with quite a bloody revolution. As did the French people against their feudal lords. In fact, I can recall numerous instances of worker revolt against capitalism, and although I know the wealthy are saying their prayers that this will end I have a feeling that the millennias-long struggle by workers against their masters, from Pisistratus and Spartacus, to Durruti and Makhno, has not ended
Someone asked Bush recently about outsourcing and he said something like "Well, jobs we don't want to do any more are leaving, but we can train and do the more high skilled jobs". The problem is this is the line used for decades while manufacturing was being sent overseas - now not only are blue collar jobs being sent overseas, white collar jobs are being sent to India and other places. Yet he keeps repeating the same mantra. People were told to train for IT instead of manufacturing jobs, and they did, yet now IT, as well as lots of other white collar jobs are being shipped overseas, yet they keep repeating the same old mantra.
When the US unemployment rate is spoken of, it's spoken as if there is one rate. There are actually
several unemployment rates, the one usually spoken of, as here, is the U-3 unemployment rate. Currently the U-6 unemployment rate is 9.9%. The government defines U-6 as "total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers".
This is where comparison with American unemployment rates with European unemployment rates break down. For one thing, unemployment payments in the US lasts only six months (where I live anyway). In Germany you can stay on unemployment forever theoretically, as long as you're really applying for jobs. I'm sure if the US did away with unemployment payments altogether, unemployment rates would go down even more as people laid off from white-collar jobs would be applying to work at McDonalds and whatnot that much quicker. Whether this is good or bad depends on whether you are a worker, or a member of the idle class like Paris Hilton who benefits from the misery of people who work for a living.
Let me parrot from the democrat liberal mantra bs lines from the Federal Reserve, run by democrat liberal Alan Greenspan - US Distribution of wealth.
In the last survey of this type done (Bush cancelled these reports), the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 42.2% of the stock market, while the 90% of Americans not within the wealthiest 10% own only 15.6% of the stock market. As far as the dynamics of how they're owned it varies - directly, through mutual funds, trusts, whatever. This is what the distribution ultimately is however. If you look at the surveys, wealth distribution has been drifting upward to the top 1% increasingly in each survey done. The bond market is even more lopsided. Anyhow, it is quite correct that multimillionaires benefit mostly from owning rentier items to expropriate rent, dividends and interest from; while workers rely mostly on wages. It's interesting to look at the statistics regarding inheritance pertaining to this as well.
Yaa, God forbid some kid logs onto a computer that some corporate stooge has forbidden access to is compared to Steve Wozniak. Steve Wozniak used to go around selling blue boxes by the way, and he says he would have never created the Apple if he hadn't done that, he is a hacker in every sense in the word.
The reality is virtually every profession has some degree of organization - except ours. Doctors? Yes, the AMA. Dentists? ADA. Lawyers? ABA. And so forth. Then there are unions which contain some highly skilled workers - like SAG, the Screen Actors Guild, where some of the members make tens of millions a year. And there are engineering unions, or unions which contain engineers as well, like the SPEEA/IFPE, CWA, and so forth, many under the umbrella of the CESO council. Thus, our jobs, administrators and programmers, ARE union organized to some extent in aerospace, government and telecommunications, but not much beyond there. One of the CWA locals, WashTech, has been doing a lot of organizing in the greater Seattle area of the broader IT industry, like Microsoft permatemps and so forth.
Anyhow, there's no one solution for each person in my mind. Whether you at your job or some other guy at another job would benefit from collective bargaining (e.g. joining a union) is a decision best made by the individual. Then there's the professional organizations like the Programmers Guild as well. But it's obvious to me that SOME type of professional organization is needed - I mean every other profession, except maybe McDonalds workers, have some type of professional organization, be it a union or more like the AMA/ADA/ABA. And our bosses sure as hell have Chamber of Commerce like guys in Washington DC making sure H1-Bs visa caps rise, or at least are not lowered and things like this. The ITAA is the main association that does this, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and so forth give them millions a year to mostly screw IT workers in Washington DC. Plus they have a PR department that gets news media articles written that said there was a massive shortage of IT workers in the late 1990's and H1-B visas needed to be raised. In fact that's a standard line they are paid to push like tobacco lobbyists who say smoking is not bad for you, these people are still saying there's a shortage or will be soon, they always say that, they're paid to say that.
Finally I should point out that there is a lot of corporate funding for organizations like the IEEE, USENIX (SAGE), ACM and so forth. In some respects it's kind of ridiculous, it would be like having HMO's pay for and to some extent control the AMA. But anyhow, if you're in these organizations it's good to talk to other people and educate and agitate about it, but there has been internal politic problems in the past, and while doing some of that is good, you should also keep in mind that there are avenues and organizations available to you outside of them, like the Programmers Guild and other organizations. And if you don't like any of them, and know others who are dissatisfied, you can always start your own organization, web site, whatever.
Were you able to join labor unions? That's a funny "free America" versus "unfree Eastern Bloc" comparison. About a year ago, Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley law forcing ILWU workers back to work. Taft-Hartley has been invoked in the past, along with other laws, forcing striking union workers back to work with the authority of law. Being as a strike is the only weapon a union ultimately has, you might as well say the US has no unions. It's like saying someone can have a car, but they can't put any gas in it. Normal hypocrisy, Reagan was praising Solidarnosc in Poland at the same time he was firing PATCO air line traffic controllers and replacing them with scabs (which cost the taxpayer more than if the union had been given what it wanted).
Slashdot Mirror
Before Woz designed the Apple, he designed blue boxes, and he and Steve Jobs used to go around selling them to people, with Woz even using some of the design tricks he learned from making blue boxes to build the Apple I and II. I seem to recall either him or Jobs once saying that if they never had built blue boxes, they might have never have built the first Apple (which would mean IBM may have never built a PC, and who knows if any of us would be using PC's right now?), but I forget which one of them said that, when and where.
Business's claim is that when someone is automate out of a job, another job magically pops up with the same hourly wage and so forth, although they may need some training for the job shift. This is the claim, though looking at it it doesn't always seem to be the case.
"Unions aren't designed for the benefit of the whole only the benefit of their members."
This doesn't make too much sense to me, it goes against logic. Let's say half of an industry is unionized. First off, people in a union are organized enough to knock down things like this overtime thing. So they can prevent laws from being passes which screw over everybody in the industry. Secondly, let's say half of the people in the industry suddenly start working 40 hours a week and get paid $5-10 more an hour than before. That they're working 40 instead of 50 hours creates more jobs, as someone has to do those jobs now. And their wage increase has a magnet effect on everyone if you believe in the economic theory of supply and demand. If half of the supply of a commodity (an hour of IT labor time) suddenly decreases in size (hours worked) and increases in price ($5-10), will that effect the half of workers not organized? You bet it will.
"I may be presuming too much but I would think that a computer professional is likely smart enough to negotiate their own contract. If you aren't getting paid enough or you haven't negotiated an overtime scale than that's your fault. Why would you want to abdicate responsibility to a union anyway?"
If you look at financial charts, in industry after industry after industry, unionized workers get paid more for normal wages and overtime wages than non-union workers in the same industry. I don't really care who's smart enough or who's fault what is, just look at the charts and these are the facts - why do you think companies fight unions so much? They'd rather have that money going to wages because of the union going to their profits.
"Already I see people here complaining about off-shoring. Just wait until you have a union, the jobs will bolt like there's no tomorrow."
Tell that to the North Carolina textile workers. North Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, yet jobs are leaving there in droves to China. Their industries are not organized, at all, and yet they're still leaving. At least the Midwestern union worker made enough money to send his kid to college and become a doctor or something while his job still existed. The North Carolina textile workers were told if they kept the unions out their jobs would be saved. So they kept the unions out. And then, sure enough, they lost their jobs.
"The best way to fight an over supply in your field is to train for a different field!"
That's one possibility. Reducing timed work per week from 50-55 hours a week to 40 hours is another. Or even 35 hours a week. If people still want to hack in that time, they can hack the Linux kernel or something. IT is the field everyone was telling workers TO train for. The job of the future and so forth. What exactly do you propose all the IT workers train for? People blowing hot air like you usually don't supply an answer.
"Or simply be the best in your field."
I can picture the majority shareholders of Microsoft and so forth laughing at you as you type this. Elaine Chao just kicked you in the face, and you grin like a sniveling sycophant. Ironically, hubris is what combines with your sycophancy to bring about this general attitude. They must be laughing about what a fool you are, saying you don't need overtime pay because you have the hubris to think you're the "best in your field".
In fact this is where this very thing, free time and the lack of it, and your hubris combine in a tragic denouement. I have met many IT workers who have no social lives, who are completely alienated from other people aside from perhaps a few other maladroit co-workers who they watch the Sci-Fi channel with from time to time. They do not interact with the opposite sex and their entire sense of self-worth gets wrapped up in their hubris of being the best programmer in the world. Who needs free time from work when life is work? The bankrollers of Elaine Chao of the world are profiting from your misery, heirs like Paris Hilt
The second aspect would be US labor history, something those of us who work are all part of, like it or not. I think there is enormous benefit to IT workers organizing together, bargaining collectively, striking if necessary and so forth. On the other hand, the official AFL-CIO unions like the CWA have in my view have had a role of dampening some of the power of this energy. The CWA bureaucrats will lay much of this off on US government restrictions on unions (which are probably the most draconian in the industrialized world), which is true to a large extent, but they share some of the blame.
Anyhow, just go to alt.computer.consultants on Usenet (or Google) to join in communication with other IT workers about various issues. Or mailing lists like Techs Unite. And the Programmers Guild has meetings in various cities, as do the CWA. If you're in the Bay Area, you might want to check out the IWW - they have put out some interesting things. They are also very militant, which is always good for jumpstarting things. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither are worker organizations, including skilled worker organizations.
There are a million rules tying the hands of unions - Taft-Hartley, secondary strikes. Bush ordered the ILWU longershoremen on the west coast not to strike not long ago. You can bet your ass that the Bush administration is not going to keep its damn hands off of that power.
This sounds like the point of view of someone spending high school asking bullies what he can do for them to stop them from beating him up - now he's in the workforce, and after working 60 hour weeks with 24/7/365 reachability by pager during a boom, he is laid off or facing downward pressure on wages due to the owners desire for things to be that way, and his question is - what can I do to make myself more valuable to you?
Well from that pathetic vantage point there are the standard two answers. One is if you were working sixty hour weeks for a set salary, start working seventy hour weeks for the same salary. Your boss will get ten free hours of you creating wealth for him which will make him happier. That's the one generally less favored as workers obviously don't like it, and being only 24 hours a day, bosses can only push it so far. Which leaves the second option of productivity. This is the only thing that people can really see a positive thing about in our (and most of the world's) economy - productivity increases. And they were a lot more impressive from the 1940's to the 1960's. Toward the end of the 1960's productivity growth has been pretty stagnant, except for a bump here and there. But anyhow, this has been the drumbeat answer of course - train, train, train. Bush, one to stand in front of signs displaying pseudo-subliminal messages has been on a big "training" sign background recently. I recall him answering a question recently someone asked about jobs moving out of the country, and he stuttered and said "Well, people should train..." Well, people working manufacturing were told to train for high-tech jobs, but now the high-tech jobs are disappearing. So what the hell does he suggest people train for? Bush is a Republican, but the Democrats are in some respects even worse with regards to this. They're all reading off the same page more or less.
Anyhow, all of this kind of points to what I think. I don't feel like being a rat in a maze running around looking for cheese. There is a business propaganda book called "Who Moved my Cheese?" which tells workers who were laid off or whatever that they should not be affected by it, they should just collect their full six months of American unemployment (note: the length of unemployment in America is pathetic compared to an equivalently sized economy like the EU - German unemployment can last forever, technically), and not worry about why their cheese was moved, but simply adapt without complaints to go off and find wherever the so-called invisible hands have placed the new cheese. To go forward with this analogy, the real problem is the jobs are disappearing, not only from IT but from manufacturing as well. That's because the system is based on the profits of the capital owners (more or less the richest 1-2% of the US), not the wages of the workers (more or less the poorest 90-98% of Americans). I often here people say that the boom was followed by the bust due to "incompetence". In a sense this is correct, but it can imply that unemployment, what the government calls "NAIRU", booms followed by busts followed by booms and the like are not structural problems, but simply errors due to the incompetence of the managers of the economy. Considering that we can see this cycle in this century, in the 20th century, in the 19th century and so forth, as time goes on it becomes more obvious that these are not temporary
There's already an Indymedia family p2p news-sharing site in existence. Indymedia sites are great for text articles and pictures, but pile audio interviews and videos on top of that and the bandwidth starts to pile up. Enter something like v2v, where the site shares the audio and video files on Bittorrent, Edonkey/Overnet, Gnutella and the like, this helps lessen the load on the servers, and I suppose helps prevents censorship as well.
"Because he has a lot more power over his labor than over his suppliers and distributors."
And his labor has a lot more power over him. It's never fun to have your entire workforce walk out and start a picket line outside your door.
"This is especially true in an economy where jobs are scarce, like the current U.S. one."
There have been reserve armies of unemployed workers forever...of course it was raised in the last few years so rentiers could have more leverage over workers...but that's the point of its existence.
"Corporations today have much more power...through the legal system...through the government directly"
Of course. As John Dewey once said, politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.
Your example of steel is rather bad as well. The US still produces as much steel as it did decades ago. It just does it with a lot less people. It's called automation. Considering that the amount of steel produced has not dropped, while the number of people working to produce that steel has, I'd say you have to blame it more on automation than foreign competition.
Anyhow, considering these jobs are disappearing to China or automation whether or not you've been in a union for decades, I'd say I'd much rather be in a union for this type of job. These steel workers made enough money to buy a house and send their kids to school. Their kids can get nice jobs as lawyers for the ITAA or whatever. What does the North Carolina textile worker get? A rented trailer, kids who can't afford to go to a nice college, and so forth.
And you're also forgetting history. Cuba was a great place for American investors - until Castro took over and nationalized everything. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, people never knew when a country might have a communist revolution. How many suspected China would become communist? As Thomas Friedman once said, the hidden hand of the marketplace needs to be backed up by a hidden fist. Foreign investment always comes with risk - just look what happened to the "Asian tigers".
This is a very old game, punishing end users for something certain ISPs are screwing up. I definitely would like to see problems like spam fixed, but this is just punishing good users for something spammers and the like are doing, and the spammers are going to find a way around this anyway. OK, requiring a valid e-mail address that responds to ICANN e-mails or whatever I *might* accept, but I find a jackbooted attempt to get real names and addresses (of course, ONLY in the United States) by pseudo-governmental authority quite weak. I'm sure there are plenty of boot-licking, groveling, authority-worshiping little computer dorks on Slashdot who love the idea of lawyers and the ogrish, incompetent government now that much more successful in exerting their authority.
All of the work on the show is done by the voice actors, the animators and the writers, and the work to put the show on the air is done by technicians and engineers. So who should get the money the show makes? Rupert Murdoch? The majority owners of News Corporation shares sitting on their lazy, idle class asses? I wish I had the problems of the Paris Hiltons of the world. The voice actors at least have to work to earn their pay.
I think IT workers have to take anything that a trade association of 3000 companies says with a grain of salt. "We want more trained workers, trained at their, or someone else's, expense" is a constant, never changing mantra of these associations. There is ALWAYS a shortage of trained people in their eyes, there are ALWAYS a huge amount of high skilled jobs that are going unfilled (unfilled at the wages THEY want to offer). The ITAA was apoplectic in the late 1990s about the shortage of trained people there were for careers that would be around forever. And this is the line they continued to play for the past few years, saying people need to come in on H1-B visas with skills Americans don't have and so forth. Meanwhile, I know people here on H1-B visas who told me they never touched a computer before they stepped foot in the US.
So take all of this with a grain of salt. I would trust information from other IT people then some of the doo-doo that comes out of the AEA and ITAA. Check out Washtech.org or TechsUnite. If anything, they help IT workers communicate with one another about various things.
I don't care about warez too much one way or the other, but I would like people to feel safe downloading software that no so-called authority has unauthorized download of.
One solution of sorts is all of the major p2p programs have hashes for different files (the best being tigertree hashes). So all you need then is have a group with a good reputation give a list of hashes and then PGP sign it or whatnot. There are web sites like Bitzi that list hashes for a file in the different hash formats (Gnutella, Kazaa, EDonkey), along with user comments and the like. So there are definitely mechanisms where you can easily get a hash to compare the files against the OK of a trusted person or group, be the software "authorized" or "unauthorized".
I noticed this in college as well. If you are (un)fortunate enough to get a big-name professor instead of a TA for one of your classes, he may have written his own expensive textbook, and will usually require you to buy it for his class. And if he is a big-name professor, he usually has many students every semester, and thus has a built-in audience.
"Domestic workers who are out of work will be willing to work for less" - so this is what you're trying to sell us with. Hey, don't worry about unemployment being high, it's going to be falling soon along with your wages!
Adam Smith's hand is only invisible to those so transfixed with the point where commodities are exchanged that they can not see the production processes that created those commodities and the relations behind them. Besides, half of the theories of Smith and the other classical economists have been thrown out by modern economists since Smith and his cohorts were a lot more honest about what was going on then the economists employed by institutions nowadays. As Smith once said- "But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons."
Well this is the standard mantra of the capitalists. The economic production decisions in a capitalist society are made by capitalists, thus, productivity is there responsibility. How was US productivity from the late 1940's to say 1970? And did it increase wealth across the whole economy in the US? The answer is productivity increased greatly, and the growth was shared among all sectors pretty much evenly.
So how about since the early 1970's? Since then productivity growth has been pretty pathetic. Decades of government spending on ARPAnet until the Internet was handed over to the private sector in the mid 1990's caused a good growth of productivity for a few years, which caused such euphoria and over-production in a system that had been running sluggishly for decades that, as Paul Krugman, the economist who writes for the New York Times put it, it led to the longest crisis (recession) since the Depression. And as far as standards of living - the average inflation adjusted US hourly wage is below what it was thirty years ago. The hours worked by the average American worker is now #1 among industrial countries, bypassing Japan. In fact, the hourly productivity of the average American worker is below that of French workers and workers from smaller European countries - the US worker only makes up for productivity by working much longer, less productive hours than the French.
And so on and so forth. Higher productivity is the mantra of the capitalists. In fact, nowadays it is the mantle of the American Democrats - the Republicans seem more interested in ways of increasing profit other than productivity (longer hours, lower wages, larger labor pool). But they have been doing a dreadful job of increasing productivity since the early 1970's, with the only short bump coming from the supposedly dreaded decades-long taxpayer funding of Internet research and development, e.g. government spending.
The average inflation adjusted hourly wage is below what it was in the US 30 years ago.
Smart consumers and smart bosses never by on cost alone; what they buy on is value, which is benefit divided by cost. American workers may cost more, but they're also very productive compared to many countries. If you're worried about your job being outsourced, put your energies into making sure you're giving your boss the best value he can get, and make sure he knows it. Continuing professional education is one good way, and I'm sure people here can suggest others. "Smart consumers and smart bosses never by (sic) on cost alone; what they buy on is value, which is benefit divided by cost." You are comparing a consumer (someone trading money for a commodity) with a boss (someone trading money for labor-time). You are equivocating me buying a car with a boss buying someone's labor time. The problem with that is the value of a commodity is constant, while the value of labor-time can vary. If I pay for someone to work a day's worth of work, say $100, and this person is making me $20 an hour, if I make him work 8 hours I will make $60. If I make him work 9 hours I will make $30. Value is created by the worker during labor time. A commodity sitting idly does not create value. What bosses want to buy is surplus value, not value. They want the 3 hours (or 4 hours, or 5 hours...) of time where you are creating wealth, but the wealth is not coming back to you as wages, but is rather going into the pockets of the boss as profit. After all, why else would he hire you as a wage worker? You're "giving your boss the best value he can get" by working hours of surplus that go to him as profits, instead of to you in wages.
According to the Federal Reserve, the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 42.2% of the stock market, while the 90% of Americans not within the wealthiest 10% own only 15.6% of the stock market. And in every study, the percentage owned by the top 1% has been increasing (and thus, that owned by the bottom 99% has been decreasing). Something to keep in mind with these Panglossian factoids about widespread stock ownership.
Right, like Paris Hilton, the Walton heirs, the Mars heirs, George W. Bush, Andrew Luster...they are "enlightened ones" for being born with silver spoons in their mouths and not having to work (because they are forcefully expropriating surplus labor from those who do work), while wage slaves are the "unenlightened" ones. This is akin to saying Haitian slaves were unenlightened for working for their masters. Of course, they solved that with quite a bloody revolution. As did the French people against their feudal lords. In fact, I can recall numerous instances of worker revolt against capitalism, and although I know the wealthy are saying their prayers that this will end I have a feeling that the millennias-long struggle by workers against their masters, from Pisistratus and Spartacus, to Durruti and Makhno, has not ended
Someone asked Bush recently about outsourcing and he said something like "Well, jobs we don't want to do any more are leaving, but we can train and do the more high skilled jobs". The problem is this is the line used for decades while manufacturing was being sent overseas - now not only are blue collar jobs being sent overseas, white collar jobs are being sent to India and other places. Yet he keeps repeating the same mantra. People were told to train for IT instead of manufacturing jobs, and they did, yet now IT, as well as lots of other white collar jobs are being shipped overseas, yet they keep repeating the same old mantra.
This is where comparison with American unemployment rates with European unemployment rates break down. For one thing, unemployment payments in the US lasts only six months (where I live anyway). In Germany you can stay on unemployment forever theoretically, as long as you're really applying for jobs. I'm sure if the US did away with unemployment payments altogether, unemployment rates would go down even more as people laid off from white-collar jobs would be applying to work at McDonalds and whatnot that much quicker. Whether this is good or bad depends on whether you are a worker, or a member of the idle class like Paris Hilton who benefits from the misery of people who work for a living.
In the last survey of this type done (Bush cancelled these reports), the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 42.2% of the stock market, while the 90% of Americans not within the wealthiest 10% own only 15.6% of the stock market. As far as the dynamics of how they're owned it varies - directly, through mutual funds, trusts, whatever. This is what the distribution ultimately is however. If you look at the surveys, wealth distribution has been drifting upward to the top 1% increasingly in each survey done. The bond market is even more lopsided. Anyhow, it is quite correct that multimillionaires benefit mostly from owning rentier items to expropriate rent, dividends and interest from; while workers rely mostly on wages. It's interesting to look at the statistics regarding inheritance pertaining to this as well.
Yaa, God forbid some kid logs onto a computer that some corporate stooge has forbidden access to is compared to Steve Wozniak. Steve Wozniak used to go around selling blue boxes by the way, and he says he would have never created the Apple if he hadn't done that, he is a hacker in every sense in the word.
Anyhow, there's no one solution for each person in my mind. Whether you at your job or some other guy at another job would benefit from collective bargaining (e.g. joining a union) is a decision best made by the individual. Then there's the professional organizations like the Programmers Guild as well. But it's obvious to me that SOME type of professional organization is needed - I mean every other profession, except maybe McDonalds workers, have some type of professional organization, be it a union or more like the AMA/ADA/ABA. And our bosses sure as hell have Chamber of Commerce like guys in Washington DC making sure H1-Bs visa caps rise, or at least are not lowered and things like this. The ITAA is the main association that does this, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and so forth give them millions a year to mostly screw IT workers in Washington DC. Plus they have a PR department that gets news media articles written that said there was a massive shortage of IT workers in the late 1990's and H1-B visas needed to be raised. In fact that's a standard line they are paid to push like tobacco lobbyists who say smoking is not bad for you, these people are still saying there's a shortage or will be soon, they always say that, they're paid to say that.
Finally I should point out that there is a lot of corporate funding for organizations like the IEEE, USENIX (SAGE), ACM and so forth. In some respects it's kind of ridiculous, it would be like having HMO's pay for and to some extent control the AMA. But anyhow, if you're in these organizations it's good to talk to other people and educate and agitate about it, but there has been internal politic problems in the past, and while doing some of that is good, you should also keep in mind that there are avenues and organizations available to you outside of them, like the Programmers Guild and other organizations. And if you don't like any of them, and know others who are dissatisfied, you can always start your own organization, web site, whatever.
Were you able to join labor unions? That's a funny "free America" versus "unfree Eastern Bloc" comparison. About a year ago, Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley law forcing ILWU workers back to work. Taft-Hartley has been invoked in the past, along with other laws, forcing striking union workers back to work with the authority of law. Being as a strike is the only weapon a union ultimately has, you might as well say the US has no unions. It's like saying someone can have a car, but they can't put any gas in it. Normal hypocrisy, Reagan was praising Solidarnosc in Poland at the same time he was firing PATCO air line traffic controllers and replacing them with scabs (which cost the taxpayer more than if the union had been given what it wanted).