The Jungle 133
asterisk5 writes: "The New Republic has an article from Seattle about the unions moving into new economy companies. Good stuff about the rise and fall of the Bezos cult of personality." When the illusions are stripped away, it's not pretty...
Re:You ignore talent. (Score:1)
> supply
The same was said about aerospace engineers too.
You can pick any of the 'professional' positions
and pretty much every one of them went thru
a boom similar to programmers.
I really don't think our profession is somehow
intrinsically resistant to supply/demand.
Re:Typical Slashdot (Score:1)
that the typical
They have only seen the upside of the boom
and have never had to experience the eventual
fall. Supply/demand will catch up with us.
Re:Maybe an old school union isn't the answer (Score:1)
Re:You ignore talent. (Score:1)
It's going to take years, if not a decade, for our CS programs to improve and the graduates to improve. Post-graduate technical programs will also have to proliferate since universities aren't going to teach applied technologies like how to administer Windows NT, Oracle, or how to program an enterprise system with EJB.
Re:Utopiast politics (Score:2)
Ok I'll let this one go because it's idiotic and it's a blatant lie
"I don't believe it is in any employee's best interest to organize when it's self-defeating -- i.e. it will cripple or destroy the company."
So what? People should have the right to extract their revenge on their employers especially if the employers are acting like morons. Revenge is a perfectly good motivation for doing something. If the company is cutting costs then it's dying anyways. All the people who work there (except the management) will get screwed over when the bigwigs cash out. Once the telltale signs of inept management start the employees should immediately organize and start fighting to get any piece of the carcass they can. It's either that or get shafted. The employees of any company do not owe that company anything. No allegience, no loyalty, no mercy. If you don't like your bosses or if they are treating you like you don't want to be treated you SHOULD fight back as hard as you can. Simply quitting does no good because they will get their jollies beating up whoever replaces you. It's better to organize and fight back because it makes their lives harder and it's only fair to give them headaches. Quitting simply encourages them to treat other people like shit too.
"I think you're tremendously simplifying the situation to state that management at Amazon don't have a clue to run a business. They obviously do know how to run a business -- they've taken what was in 1994 an insane idea, and turned themselves into the leading online retailer. They're also far from going under. No I'm not an investor in Amazon, but I am a satisfied customer. "
In the entire history of the company it has never turned a profit. It's prospects for turning a profit are dimmer then ever. It has basically spent the investors money to try and establish themselves and has failed miserably. If a company is unable to make a profit in six years it's fair to call the management inept and stupid. They have not only failed their employees they have failed their stockholders as well. This company is going to die pretty soon now and hundreds of people are going to be out of jobs except of course the top level management. They have already cashed out. At this stage they have nothing to lose.
Re:Cry me a river..... (Score:1)
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Well, if some random anonymous person on Slashdot "knows" it's true, that's all the proof I need.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
"...'Twas I who did arrange/To pay my union dues so I'd/Not have to learn or change..." --Todd Rundgren, "Honest Work"
Article in The Independent (UK) - 3rd of Feb (Score:1)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/Digital/Update/2 001-02/amazon030201.shtml [independent.co.uk]
Animator's Union (Score:1)
I don't recall her ever complaining about it being expensive or hard entering the union.
The work itself was harder to get than the union membership.
In Animation you frequently get laid off at the end of the film. Then your off for several months.
Then you might be working for a different studio next time.
You get your benefits through the union.
Being in the union does not prevent you from taking non-union work.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:2)
However in tech work I refuse to pay any stupid fees to a union that may or may not work to my best interest. I am smart enough to make my own demands to my employee and if they don't meet my demands to my satisfaction I'm sure I can find someone else who will. Every day I increase my knowledge and experience which increases my value and career options. If I get to a point where my worth isn't clear enough to my employer for them to keep me happy and I can't find a better job elsewhere then to me that is a clear indication that I need to get myself in gear and find out what I'm doing wrong. Laziness is my own fault.
Rather than have a union I'd be interested in seeing not for profit groups take hold to help techies train and find jobs as well as helping people from other backgrounds revamp their careers by adding techie skills. Possibly a workers union for foreign workers at US tech companies would be useful as I've seen them exploited sometimes due to the fact they have a lot fewer options to jump to someone elses train if desired.
I guess IF the unions were available on an opt-in basis only then I'd be cool with it. If I was forced to join to work in the tech industry I'd be rather pissed and probably spend a great amount of time trying to waste the resources of the union and otherwise poisoning it.
Re:Utopiast politics (Score:1)
No, it's not. Read the article.
Beyond the rest of it, I disagree with you, and I think you're tremendously off base with your opinions and perception of reality. I think you're tremendously simplifying the situation by saying they should fight over the remains of the carcass, when no carcass exists. Obviously you've written Amazon off, but I think this is a trigger-happy conclusion. Top management has not cashed out. I don't know where you get your ideas from, but they're not of this world.
I think amazon's prospects for turning a profit are above average, considering its recent quarterly results and conservative plans that point to profitability in 2002. Some analysts agree, some don't. But to have as resolute an opinion as yours is tantamount to teenage naivity.
Good day.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Maybe you should have read the article you linked to:
"It's going to cost them a great deal in the short term to put the savings through," said Michael Dean, analyst with Merrill Lynch in London. "They still have to pay blue collar workers they lay off 95 percent of their wages."
How many places pay you 95% of your wages until the end of your contract if you are laid off?
Re:You ignore talent. (Score:1)
> a trickle of good ones
amen brother.
> It's going to take years, if not a decade, for
> our CS programs to improve
I'll give it 2 or 3 years. Last year when
I was looking in to grad schools, I noticed that
a lot of the undergraduate MIS programs (well,
3 schools in Oklahoma) were teaching courses like
"MS Visual C++", "Visual Programming" (ie vb),
"DBMS" (oracle & sql server).
Job placement courses rather than comp. sci.
Re:Cry me a river..... (Score:1)
Re:All unions do is make businesses inflexible. (Score:1)
You are assuming that business will always do what is right. Time and time again business has proven when left to themselves they will not do what is right either for their employees or their customers. Minimun wage, child labor laws and work place safty regulations were all implemented because business proved they could not be trusted to do what was right for their employees. The $70,000 a year engineer doesn't need much protection, he can probably get a job anywhere. But the poor sucker working down in the shipping department making $16,000 a year does, because he can be replaced easily, regardless of how well he does his job. Same goes for that Customer Service representive who makes $28,000 a year, whose job can be done by someone in India for $2,000 a year. Do you think the CEO cares whether the he is good at his job or not, no all he knows is he is saving $26,000 a year.
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:2)
The United Auto Workers union, which represents hourly workers in the United States, had no immediate comment on the closings and staffing cuts.
No comment, eh? Wow, there's a powerful statement. Gotta have those guys on my side, I tell ya. I keep seeing all this pro-union schtick, but it's awfully silent about how ineffective unions seem to be these days in the places they're already in effect.
Unions are such parasites (Score:4)
As a person who's started up companies before, I know that it takes a tremendous amount of cooperation and drive to make that company a success. If everyone isn't playing on the same team, even great prospects can quickly sour. Unions act only to divide the company up between "us" and "them".
Just take the primary subject of that article, Alan Barclay. He was planning things, talking with people, firing off emails, and generally focusing himself upon setting up a union. Hey, here's a tip, Alan: Maybe if you had spent all that energy on making Amazon more of a success, you wouldn't have gotten laid off. Odds are, you and a couple malcontents were starting to make yourselves dispensable. Next time, throw some of that energy into your job.
Especially in this day and age when anyone with technical skills is highly valued throughout the market, unions are evil parasites.
This isn't surprising. (Score:1)
Re:Utopiast politics (Score:2)
The bigwigs at amazon got stock options and sold off stock at $400.00. They got cold hard cash for that. Maybe they bought a million dollar house maybe they bought a bentley maybe they spent it in las vegas it does not matter. They got their cash out fo the company. The poor slobs stuffing boxes got jack shit. All they got was their near minimum wage job. If they feel like company is about to go under it's in their best intetest to form a union and fight for whatever they can get. No it won't be a million dollar house but maybe it will be enough money to pay the bills for a month while they look for another job.
In our capitalist society it's every man for himself. Unfortunately the lowly worker has no weapons to fight the management unless they organize. Once the ship starts sinking nobody will try to haul the drowning people into their lifeboats. Not one manager or major stockholder will offer to put an employee up for a couple of weeks because they are broke and can't feed their kids. You either get organized and fight like hell or drown in the wake of the yacths the management is using to flee the wreckage.
Ask any corporation CEO (or a liberterian) and they'll tell you the same thing. The company owes you jack shit. You only get what you can negotiate. They don't like unions because it empowers the workers to negotiate better deals.
They don't need to unionise, but unioins are neces (Score:1)
Unions aren't generally good, or generally bad; neither are corporations. So the argument over whether we need unions or not is pointless. We need them just as much as we need corporations and as much as we need computers, or any other product of our civilization.
I think that unions do the best job when they are not part of a company. A company is then free to organise working conditions so that workers do not need or want to unionise.
I'm fairly far along getting my Computer Engineering degree now, but I have worked as a cashier in the past. I worked for Zellers Inc in Ontario, Canada, which was a fine example of what a company does to productively fend off a union. This is a discount department store of the "old economy", and they're not as backward as you may think.
The employees had monthly meetings with management where their opinions were heard and addressed. The atmosphere was relaxed, yet schedules were made by management so that all the shift time would be appropriately covered. The store offered health coverage plans rivaling that of unionised establishments (in Canada this entails a dental plan and a drug puchase reimbursement plan - basic health coverage is "free"). They organised employee social events, and generally were nice to the employees.
This courteous and professional way of dealing with employees paid off when a union approached the employees. In Ontario it is illegal for management to attack a union even by rhetoric. All the manager could say was, "In the next few weeks you are going to see a lot of flyers and you are going to be approached by union recruiters who are going to try to unionise this store, we are not allowed to interfere with that or to discourage you from listening to them. Obviously we think that a union is not necessary, but you choose to unionise we can do nothing about it."
And so the recruiters went to work. The employees were told that they are getting paid less than their peers in unionised stores. And seniority would count more. But that's as far as the argument seemed to go.. The health benefits were great, the work environment was pleasant. The full time employees voted against unionizing in the poll.
The fact that there was a threat of a union was enough for the management of the department store to adapt appropriate workplace conditions to make a polarized union-management ensemble unnecessary. Without this threat, management would be much less inclined to compete with unionized (read diseased) companies.
The UAW, for example, does offer enormous pay to the employees. A friend of mine got $21 CAD an hour for a summer job at Toyota with no experience on the job.. But this kind of windfall is only possible because somehow the UAW became a monopoly. No car manufacturer may exist without its labour being in the UAW. Parts suppliers are also forced to belong to the UAW or else the employer may not buy parts. The only reason that the American auto makers are still in business is because somehow it is unlawful to compete with a UAW member plant.
The situation is no better - and possibly worse - than the M$ monopoly. This is because the UAW monopoly is legislated.
So unions can be just as bad, or worse, than bad corporations.
Janimal
Re:Utopiast politics (Score:2)
It's a two way street. Corporation has to survive but so do the employees. The amazon.com employees know the business is going to fail any day now and they will all be on the street. This is not because they failed to pack enough books in an hour it's because the management didn't have a clue of how to run a business that can turn a profit. They have all been living high on the hog using investors money. They have already cashed out, they have their million dollar houses and bmws the employees OTOH will get jack shit when the company finally goes under.
A union represents the best (maybe only) chance they have to try and make best out of a crappy situation.
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:2)
Good. I'm glad to hear that you've discovered an important principle of our economy. People tend to act out of self-interest, and the competing interests drive things. Do you think that Jeff Bezos would be as interested in Amazon if he weren't making money hand over fist? (with the possibility of more money to come) I doubt it.
People have the right to associate freely. And if they want to bargain collectively they have that right too. The only thing that I don't like about unions is when they tend to acquire too much power (I don't like really massive accumulations of power) and can force businesses to not hire outside of the union. But that's the choice of the business; if they're willing to lose all of their experienced employees, and lose credibility among workers they can do that.
After all, Amazon has no obligation to retain any of their employees right now. They could show the biggest profit in history if their workers slept in their offices, worked for free, etc. Then they could fire them all. And the employees would get the shaft.
Just as Amazon should generally try to do things that are in it's best interest as a company, so should the individual people working there do the same. Once in a while I have to work extra hours at my job, but I accepted that when the contract was negotiated. That's quite different from working every weekend, or skipping my non-accumulatable vacation time (which my boss has encouraged from time to time) and I'll be damned if I give my company that for free. They can EARN things; they're not entitled, and it's a piss-poor company that relies on getting free work from it's workers.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:2)
As long as corporations organize to keep workers wages as low as possible unions will be needed to organize workers to keep wages as high as possible.
Re:Unions are bad, mmmkay? (Score:2)
Shouldn't one of those choices be to form or join a union?
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
To find out what the left and Unions are up to (when not rigging elections, stealing dues and splitting to Brazil, selling missile and nuclear technology to the Chinese for Campaign cash or stealing everything not nailed down in the Whitehouse):
read Horowitz's "Politics of Bad Faith"
or
Jonah Goldberg's recent column
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg
Re:AMA not UAW (Score:1)
Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Ever since the Satanic Mills of 19th century Lancashire, which were so wonderfully described in the literature of the period, companies and corporations have tried to stop their workers from unionising and gaining their rights to protect themselves from abuse by their employer. It is thanks to their struggles, and the efforts of people such as Keir Hardie, that we enjoy the freedoms we do today.
So why are people so complacent about the unions these days in the tech industry? A modern technological company has just as much motivation to deny the rights of its workers as did the coal mines and weaving mills of 1820's Britain.
Even if you have no intention of ever using your union, it is best to join it anyway, so as to provide it some support. You may need it one day, after all.
I know that many here on Slashdot consider unions to be beyond the pale, and be instruments of socialism, but in reality they are the devices of a free nation and a free minded people. This is why governments and corporations try and stamp them out.
In many ways, the modern workers union is like the 'well armed militia' described in the constitution, and we should protect it as such.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
Re:The Freedom to Work (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Cry me a river..... (Score:5)
RIGHT ON! My girlfriend works for a unionized company, but I don't. My company just got taken over by a bigger one, and when I told my boss I wanted a 100% pay raise to go along to the new company, he had to scrape his jaw off the floor. I got it, because he knew I was worth it, and he didn't have a choice, because other people were jumping ship rather than relocate.
But if I'd have been a member of a union, I'd have been screwed, because my pay rates would have been locked down. I would have had to go through a chain of people to get any negotiating done, and everybody else would have wanted a piece of the same action I got. No way, folks, I work hard for ME, not for anybody else. If you want to get ahead, you just work hard. Amazing how people will take care of you if you're actually worth something to the company.
Besides, all these companies that are laying people off just plain wouldn't have hired so many if they had unions, anyway. My girlfriend is overworked to death, because her bosses would rather pay union overtime than risk hiring more union staff - people they can't lay off when times get thin. Does she like the overtime? No. Can she do anything about it? No, because her union bosses tell her that's the way the contract got negotiated, and it protects her job. Whoop-dee-doo. In the free market, she could bend her boss over the table, but not with a union.
Don't get me wrong, unions are great in certain circumstances. If you're an unskilled worker, and you want to protect your job, it's awesome. If you don't have the ability to go out and get another job easily, they're the best. But for tech people, who can find another job at the drop of a hat, they're a pain in the butt and a barrier to better wages.
Unions are a Two-Edged Sword (Score:4)
I've been a computer geek for over decades, and until recently have felt that labor unions have no place in the tech industry.
The reason I felt this way was largely a result of my (admittedly superficial) encounters with unions thus far. For example, if you are exhibiting at a computer show, you're not allowed to touch your own stuff. You are required to hire Teamsters to carry your stuff in and out of the building. Once your equipment is in your booth, you are not allowed to plug it in; you have to hire a member of the electrician's union to do that for you. Depending on the city in which your exhibiting, this process can be anywhere between a minor hassle and a sadistic nightmare only hinted at in Terry Gilliam's Brazil. You're busy, you're trying to get stuff done. But if you even think about doing something that's Somebody Else's Job, they'll jump down your throat.
Another fine example of excessive union activity is in the motion picture industry. This little excerpt from the film, The Wizard of Speed and Time [imdb.com] should give you an idea of what it's like:
Director's Union Office:
"Hello, hi."
"Can I help you?"
"Uh. yeah, how do I join the Director's Union?"
"You need bring a copy of the D-O-mumble signed by your studio producer before you can pay your initiation fees and be cleared by union council, thank you..."
"Uh, excuse me, what's the initiation fee?"
"Seven thousand dollars, with a hundred dollar application fee, two hundred dollars every quarter, and ten percent of your salary."
"Seven thousand dollars! What is that for?"
"That's the amount you pay to get into our union."
"Well, what is it, like Social Security? I get it back when I retire?"
"Absolutely not! What is your classification?"
"Well, I'm directing special effects with a small crew."
"Well, then you must have an Assistant Director, a Second AD, and a UPM, all signed with the DUA."
"All I'm directing is animation!"
"Well, then discuss that with the Animator's Union."
Animator's Union Office:
"So, uh, what's your animation classification, huh?"
"Well, a lot of everything. Cartooning, kinestasis, rotoscoping, stop-motion..."
"WOAH! Well, cartoon animation alone is twenty-one hundred dollars, plus a fifty dollar entry fee, and a hundred dollar quarterly dues."
"Well, what about filming animation?"
"Well, then ya go to the Camera Union."
Camera Union Offices:
"No sir, the studio hires the next man on the roster."
"Well, how do I get on the roster?"
"You have to be in the union."
"Well, how do I get in the union?"
"When you're on the roster."
"You mean I can't join unless I'm already a member?"
"That's correct. Then you need thirty consecutive days camera operation, a complete physical exam, the producer sends a letter, and you pay your fees"
"Well, fine, I've done ten years of camera work!"
"Then you've worked in violation of seniority! You'll have to start all over as a film loader."
"Look, I'm just building a small set and filming it!"
"That's entirely another union! Set and Modelmakers. Next door."
I see software engineering as a primarily creative exercise. I don't especially want some self-appointed organization telling me what kind of work I can and can't do, and for whom.
However, I've recently come to the opinion that unions may well have a place in the tech industry, most particularly in the support sector. Some months ago, there was a Slashdot story about a guy's experience as a phone tech support person [slashdot.org]. I found the environment described utterly horrible. Individuality is forbidden; lying to customers ("Are you a supervisor?") is encouraged, the company has no loyalty toward its employees, the system is setup assuming people are going to be used up, burned out, and tossed aside. And if the quality of service sucks, that doesn't matter. Call volume is what matters; let's churn those calls through, people. Hang up in the middle if you have to, helping the customer is not the object of the game here, it's cranking those numbers...
I think that's reprehensible. This is not Dickensian England, this is 21st century America. I think a labor union representing phone tech support people would not only improve their working conditions, but also improve the quality of customer support. I'm sure there are several other low-level areas in the tech industry that could benefit from collective bargaining.
Schwab
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Yes, Unions are Socialistic in nature.
Socalism is the opposite of freedom.
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:1)
That's the strength of a union, and we can both see how it's useful for unskilled workers. For guys turning wrenches in a Detroit auto line, it's good. I'm fully aware that if the automakers could, they'd move all their production to cheaper plants, like VW does with Brazil and Mexico. If it wasn't for unions, tons of Americans would be just plain out of jobs, and I can respect that. Automakers would close plants more often when business got sour, and sure, automakers would be more profitable, but less people would have jobs. I can see how that's a good thing for the workers.
But with tech workers, we don't worry about that, because frankly, there's nowhere else to go. Amazon could indeed pack up the books and head for Mexico, but they'd still have to hire their programmers from the good old U S of A. With all the hype surrounding overseas programming outfits, there's still plenty of problems: bad communication skills, horrible user interfaces, lack of team development, and more. Tech workers are still secure enough that they're not eating Ramen noodles for dinner. Granted, lots more of them are coming up the pipeline, but the demand isn't diminishing or even holding stable. It's skyrocketing. Our company hired a couple of people not because we needed their specific skills: we just needed more programmers, and two Java guys are better than nobody. (I know, it's a duct-tape fix, but that's the way it goes.)
If we'd have had a union, though, those two fellas wouldn't be on the payroll, because we couldn't have afforded the risk that they'd catch on to our systems. As it is now, we took that gamble, and it's paying off.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:2)
And herein lies the irony. I've lived in Britain most of my life, and seen unions there and in the US, and was watching the world in the 80s when the eastern block and Russia were still Communist. I've never come across a country, no matter how "socialist" in the eyes of the redneck slashdotter, that tolerates "real" Unions.
Wait, you jumped from socialism to communism rather quickly there. That's called a non-sequitur.
Most *socialist* countries, like those in Europe, have unions in most all fields of employment. Communism, although it shares a lot of philosophies with socialism, is a different enough animal that you can't just swap the two terms at will.
Unions feed off capitalism. Capitalism feeds off working people. Working people feed off unions. I can't see it working in any other context.
Unions were necessary a century or so ago, when we didn't have the tremendous opportunity of mobility and communication that we do in our present society. Today, unions are as anachronistic to a good economy as homeopathy is to good medicine.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:2)
I pretty much agree with this. Even Ayn Rand agrees with you (read 'The Fountainhead', in which Ayn Rand mentions unions and what she sees as their proper role (which is NOT no role)).
The main problem is that Unions have had a history of being corrupt and promoting the interests of their management above the interests of their members. There has to be some recourse against behavior like that. For this reason, I think open shop laws are a good thing.
Re:The Freedom to Work (Score:2)
Why should I have to pay for the righ to work?
-russ
A thought experiment (Score:1)
I know it's a stretch. Most of us have never seen a bear market before, let alone a deep recession, and so it is hard to imagine one.
Suppose now that a firm is contracting, and laying off tech workers. Do you know which ones will be the first to go? I'll tell you this much-- it won't be based on ability. It will be based on price and seniority, where price is base pay, and seniority is the degree to which an employee has ingratiated himself to his superiors. Does your boss like you?
Programming, for all of its fascinations, is not brain surgery. An average person can, in a year or less, learn enough programming to acomplish 80% of the tasks that corporations assign to programmers. For the rest of the work, graduate students are sought.
In a deep recession, and without unions, the programmers with jobs will be the ones who majored in communications (aka "advertising" or "self promotion") and then learned VB from a book or at the local community college.
Re:These are customer service types (Score:1)
I'm sure that the level of technical skill involved in customer service work at Amazon varied. However, from a classification perspective, because they worked in a technical field, almost certainly performing much of their job with the assistance of computers, and probably answering at least some questions about the technology -- web-site issues, etc -- they're knowledge workers. They're using their brains, not their hands. Get it?
What concerns me more is the underlying contempt for technical support and customer service workers that seems endemic to the industry, as indicated by your post and the responses to it. It's because of such contempt that so many of the workers at this level feel under-appreciated. The fact is, most of the very people who whine about customer service being unskilled don't have the very skills that make a good customer service tech -- they may be able to hack code, but they can't hack people, or social situations.
While you could say that amounts to stereotyping geeky techboys, I can promise you the smooth, comfortable-with-customers-and-people programmers are outnumbered by the socially-inept by at least 50 to 1.
So, what does this mean? It demonstrates that the programming and IT elite have lost the courtesy of respect that has traditionally been the appropriate response tradespeople give each other. The stonemason and the glassmaker have different skills, but both can be respectful of the other. Yes, there are inept, stupid customer service folk; there are also inept, stupid programmers writing bloated inelegant code, too. However, there are wizards and gurus in both fields. The elite customer service folk deserve reciprocal respect from their programming counterparts.
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:5)
No, it's YOU that doesn't get it. The fight is not against the corporation. It's not against the bosses or the big-money bigwigs. The fight is FOR individualism and AGAINST stagnation, so that we can all succeed and grow. The problem is that, in this regard, unions are just as bad as corporations. The collectivist push of union organizers is the complete opposite of the individualist attitudes that many Slashdotters share, because "promoting fairness" often means repressing those who truly ARE superior at their jobs. And stagnation? Nothing is worse than union bureaucracy. Union demands that force companies into adopting seniority based promotion and raise schedules, and make it difficult to drop deadwood and crappy workers from the system are the epitomy of what's WRONG with the old economy ways of doing business. I am not a sheep, and I don't need some damned union boss protecting me.
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:2)
The ignorance and bigotry around slashdot about unions is really astounding. For a place that otherwise seems to celebrate the cause of the "little guy" against the corporation, an awful lot of people around here, I think, just don't get it.
Don't you dare tell me I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I've worked in several union shops and trust me, the idyllic "unions help us all" tripe you spew is just so much shit.
That the union represents lazy or unskilled workers is exactly what the PR firms of corporations want you to believe. You want to believe that Amazon.com is a different kind of company that doesn't need unions? If it's a different kind of company, why is it hiring corporate execs from some of the largest companies in America?
Have you ever worked in a union shop in any capacity at all? Ever see 50 guys drop whatever the fuck it was they were doing when the clock struck 12:00:00 excatly to leave for lunch? And robotically refuse to answer even the most passing of question regarding work? Ever see 50 guys sneer and verbally/physically abuse people who walk past the picket lines because those going to work are thinking for themselves insead of blindly towing the line? Have you ever seen unions completely price a company out of the marketplace because the union members (or rather union heads) demanded wages or benefits completely out of the company's ability? Ever see a company try to downsize to stay alive and have the union end up shutting them down because they refuse to allow the company to remain competitive? Ever see some 20-year-seniority welder get a raise even though he's an alcoholic and does shit work even though some new guy is busting his ass and can't move ahead because raises are based solely on seniority?
Personally I don't give a shit about Amazon.com. I care about the companies I work for (actually the people) and my coworkers and their families. If a company is being bad/treating its workers badly/etc. that company should be spanked. Hard. Unions don't seem to achieve this, though. Maybe they try but I really haven't seen anything but striking and bitching and moaning. After all is said and done there really isn't anything to show for it. You maybe get some more cake or a few more benefits but usually your dues go up when they're next due. I see union reps teaming together in completely unrelated sectors (medical and eudcation) and "joint-strike" in order to put more pressure on a company. Is this right? I see union reps teaming up with Friends of the Environment or Baby Ducks for Jesus and wasting my dues on things I don't even get to vote for. Unions are the equivalent to a kind of legal organized crime. In fact there are often strong ties to between the two.
Technical and other skilled workers all over the country are unionizing and looking to collective action to improve their conditions.
I believe that technical workers are too valuable to fuck off. I know that personally I am worth quite a bit and the company I work for keeps me relatively happy. If I'm unhappy do I try and bring in a union? Fuck no, I leave. If you're worth anything there is no need to have a band of thugs represent you. If I were an unskilled laborer who could be replaced by the WhizBang2000 then yeah I might be in for tough times. The tech sector seems like one of the silliest places to try to unionize. Skilled staff are expensive. They're expensive to train and the knowlege they bring to a company is expensive to replace. It's not my fault you want to work 90 hour weeks. If you haven't got the balls to say no then that's your own problem.
Note that saying no isn't enough. You've got to have the balls to follow-through if you need to. A single person leaving won't have much impact unless they were important, like most skilled labour is. Even three people leaving key areas over voiced concerns will wake up someone, though.
The neat part about the tech sector (or any skilled labour) is that, being skilled, you usually have the knowledge, experience and/or smarts to get yourself another job without a problem. It makes me laugh to see people bitch and whine about working conditions when they're doing something like software development in Silicon Valley. They could literally walk next door and get a job but instead of standing up and being heard, they quietly bitch and moan and pen documents about organizing a union.
Remember a year or so ago when Boeing's entire cadre of engineers went on strike?
Actually I don't remember it but I would guess that Boeing either told them to go fuck themselves and hired in new staff (which would leave if the conditions were really that bad) or gave them what they wanted. Which is my whole point: Skilled labour is insanely expensive to replace and if you're worth something you automatically have a voice of your own. You don't need hired goons.
How about research and teaching assistants at large universities. Where I'm in grad school, RA/TAs work lots of hours for a wage that is publically accepted by the school as being sub-par for both our peer institutions and for the community in which we live; they acknowledge that they don't pay us enough to live here.
Good example; I have several friends who are TAs. They echo this exact sentiment: they are paid below what they're worth. Guess what the problem is though: some money is better than none, and they accept these positions instead of refusing to be paid chicken feed and flipping burgers for more money. They're making their situation worse by giving in. You don't need a union to do this for you: ad-hoc "gangs" of students refusing to take the jobs and making known what they're doing and why would be far more effective than a formal union, IMO.
Please keep in mind (I know I'm coming off really anti-union here) that I'm not 100% against unions. My post here should hint at that. What I am really against is the large unions like the auto workers, teacher's unions and social workers. Too much power in the hands of too few and the all-too-true adage which states "Power Corrupts." -- When you have 100k union members the leaders are just so out of touch and have so much money and pull that they're no longer representing the people; they're representing themselves with the money of the masses and that is dangerous.
The hackneyed anti-union argument regarding skilled workers is to say "they're skilled; they must be dumbasses if they just don't leave their jobs and go somewhere else." Well I'd propose two things: That works great when the economy is booming, but that won't always be the case;
I am married with three kids. I own a mortgage and two car loans. I also own a line of credit and a credit card. My income is fairly high for my locality but then again my cash flow is right up there too. My wife buys the odd lottery ticket because hell even a chance in a gazillion is still better than no chance at all and even $50k will help out more than you may believe.
I know that getting up and leaving for greener pastures is scary as hell, especially if your savings aren't up there because of the high cashflow problem. I am, however, quite skilled and know that even in a recession my skills are valuable and can keep my family fed, if maybe on a lesser scale. I work damn hard to keep my skills up and keep myself in enough of a niche to make me stand out from the crowd but also general enough to apply my skills in a variety of situations and job markets. I'm not afraid to voice my opinion, popular or not. I'm not afraid to back my opinion with action, either. If you're being treated unfairly, you have the option to leave. As far as I'm concerned you do not have the option to drag me into your dispute and disrupt my way of life.
second, why do so many slashdotters think there's something wrong with wanting to be treated fairly by your employer, whoever that is?
What's wrong with standing up for yourself? Do you stay in a relationship if the other person is treating you badly and talk about forming some kind of troubled spouse union or do you get out?
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:1)
I think that's an outmoded perception of the way unions can work. High-tech and white-collar unions have made great strides in terms of moving beyond bureaucratic structures. They're not about the union boss and protecting deadwood. Since when does one have to forgoe individualism--and personal merit--in order to believe in the strength of collectivity? That's a knee-jerk rejection of unions based on past, but not present, realities.
-schussat
Re:These are customer service types (Score:2)
I didn't get that at all from his post. All he's saying is that the "high-tech union" movement we've been hearing about recently generally involves employees in positions that correspond directly to positions in traditional industries. He didn't say those people were stupid or incopetent, just that referring to them as "high tech workers" is somewhat misleading. By your definition, everyone who is not a physcial laborer is a "knowledge worker", making the term meaningless.
I can promise you the smooth, comfortable-with-customers-and-people programmers are outnumbered by the socially-inept by at least 50 to 1.
And I'm sure you have evidence to back that up. Your complaints about alleged lack of respect would be much more effective if they were not filled with ad hominem attacks and blatant stereotyping.
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:1)
What I am really against is the large unions like the auto workers, teacher's unions and social workers. Too much power in the hands of too few and the all-too-true adage which states "Power Corrupts." -- When you have 100k union members the leaders are just so out of touch and have so much money and pull that they're no longer representing the people; they're representing themselves with the money of the masses and that is dangerous.
I completely agree with that, and I think it's unfortunate that the practice of unions has often been warped to that point. Too often that kind of power hasn't been used responsibly.
even $50k will help out more than you may believe.
As one of those overworked, underpaid RA/TAs I mentioned, I sure do believe it. Hell, a few hundred bucks a month makes a big difference. I have trouble seeing how "ad-hoc gangs" of workers can really effect change in their institution, however. This school is a gigantic bureaucracy, and even if my entire department ganged up on the graduate college, we might get a meeting with a dean, but we sure wouldn't get better benefits for our trouble. Other departments have tried it; no dice.
I don't have so much union experience as you--though I do have plenty of high tech experience--but my seemingly intractable position here vis-a-vis the university makes the idea of having collective voice to bargain with seem like a pretty good idea. I'm sure none of the union activists around here want to see the unions-gone-bad as you describe them, and I remain optimistic that a union, properly administrated, could remain in control of the RA/TAs who built it, rather than in the hands of an out-of-control bureaucracy.
Maybe just pipe dreams. We'll see.
-schussat
Re:These are customer service types (Score:3)
How could he be *shocked* at the layoff? (Score:1)
Price had assured nervous employees just six weeks earlier that the company had no immediate plans for layoffs.
Should've asked him to define "Immediate"...
Having been through four mergers/takeovers, you stop believing anything management has to say, particularly when the company's going down the crapper.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:5)
Case in point, in Ford one cannot move a monitor on ones own desk (move it over a foot to adjust for glare, etc) you have to have one of the "union" guys do it. If you do move your monitor, you get written up and the company pays the union worker for the "work" that you did... just to justify that some dumbass actually requires a job. The tech guys are not allowed to put the $50k cad workstation they built on an engineers desk they have to get a "union electrician" to plug the cables in. How completely idiotic is this? They build it, installed it, but they can't plug it into a 110 volt outlet in the wall. What they would actually do is, tell the union guy how much the workstation cost (do you want to be responsible for it, scares most union guys), and if he would let them do the work, the union guy could take credit and the pay for it. Useless absolutely useless, all from the outgrowth of unions, and the belief that because you hired a dumbass, you should never get rid of dumbass screwoffs. (Don't even get me started on the union seniority bullshit, how old you are, not your performance determines how much you get paid... ugh).
Spelling and grammar checker off because I don't care
Utopiast politics (Score:3)
This guy is angry at Amazon because it couldn't create utopia. Doesn't this strike anyone at a tad bit unfair? There were massive political movements, much bigger and larger in historical importance than Amazon, whose purpose it was to create utopia.
Utopian politics has failed. "Salvation" will not come from society, or from a for-profit company.
What's more, the doomed Seattle division included some of Amazon's most senior employees--people like Barclay, a company old-timer at 33 months--whose institutional knowledge and superior skills supposedly made them indispensable to Amazon's mission of becoming the "earth's most customer-centric company."
This article has nothing to do with customers. It has everything to do with the opinions and grumblings of the Seattle employees.
Look, there are no *right* answers when it comes to cutting costs. Clearly the Seattle center had very qualified and talented people, but they were a DRAIN on company resources both in money and politics, from my understanding. Perhaps there's more to it than that, but clearly management had to make a trade off. Was it the right one? Probably too early to say. I usually don't support layoffs unless it means the company's existence is in jeopardy. Perhaps this was true in Amazon's case.
"As an employee," he wrote me, "any illusions I might have had about the nobility of Amazon.com have been shattered."
Companies definitely should have a higher goal beyond making money -- a goal that justifies their existence in terms of what they *do* beyond making money. Companies that are in business only to "make money" will have a difficult time of things (see GM since the 1970's -- still the world's biggest company, but still slowly dying.)
And profit is the measurement of the effectiveness of that work. A bankrupt company does no one any good. Wall Street gave Amazon a long time to operate in the red, but it slapped it with a ruler to say "get profitable -- now".
The nature of the corporation is that it is very rare be a pillar for "noble" causes. One can only be noble only if one is, and has traditionally been, a continually profitable company.
So yes, Alan Barclay & co. were hopelessly naive. So too, apparently, is Jonathan Cohn, the author of this piece.
The new, information-age economy required workers with greater skills than, say, your typical stock boy or secretary. To attract such people, companies would offer lavish benefits and unparalleled creative freedom. The regimented, top-down management structure of yesteryear would disappear, replaced by a new paradigm of fluid, democratic workplaces where even frontline workers received autonomy, high wages, and partial ownership of the company via stock options.
No, Jon, that's the romantic view of the new economy. People got really carried away with themselves. A lot of these issues really need to be thought through still.
We know the economy is changing. It's becoming more knowledge-based, which places emphasis on the brain instead of "making and moving things". Indeed, the real "scarcity" in the digital age is going to be talent and creativity.
The trick is that it's going to take time to figure out how to operate under these changes. Increasing the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the biggest problems we have right now -- and we're trying lots of ways to accomplish it, including workplace democracy, etc.
The trouble is, there are always downsides to these solutions. Workplace democracy, for instance, assumes that one can just vote managerial responsibility out of existence. This doesn't work in the real world -- there needs to be an entity in the organization that is responsible for performance.
Galli, who had spent the last 19 years at Black & Decker, wasted no time in imposing business discipline.
Certainly, Amazon has made major mistakes: bringing Galli on board was tantamount to placing a revolver against the head of the company's culture.
But at the same time, one needs to balance that with the need to be profitable. Galli probably was one of the few who knew how to impose cost conscious procedures on a company that needed them fast. What would have preserved the company's culture more would probably have been an internal movement towards cost consciousness.. but this would have taken a tremendous amount of time over hiring someone with the skills to do this -now-. Which would have been better? I think Wall Street had lost patience with Amazon's desire to be "different" and just wanted to see results, so Galli probably was the proper choice for the time.
As for his tactics, were they really that bad? Is there something particularily wrong with allowing people in New Delhi to answer email? This is providing workers in a third world country *much needed jobs* and giving Amazon a relief value for their skyrocketing costs. It's a win/win situation, with a tradeoff that it can screw over some employees. But how else does one get profitable unless it makes difficult tradeoffs?
Also, one must temper the union apologist rhetoric with the fact that the majority of workers @ Amazon.com were *NOT* in support of a union. This was an "enlightened" (ahem) minority that was supporting it.
If Michelle Gray never grew disillusioned, it's partly because she never developed illusions in the first place. She understood that capitalism can be cold, even in the new economy. A pretty jaded perspective? You bet. And it happens to be right.
Oh, please. This is one of those "Jerry Springer" moments, the ones at the end of the show where he looks at the camera and tries to make sense of the whole situation. Jonathan Cohn is blatantly trying belittle this person because she doesn't agree with his views that a union is a Good Thing. He's making light of the fact that the world is a complex place that requires complex and difficult decisions and trade-offs, with sometimes *no right answer*. A union wouldn't change that, it would merely provide an illusion.
Perhaps that's the whole point of his article -- it's somehow more intelligent and noble to have an romantic illusion of what the new economy is than to deal in reality. I don't know why, but I perfer dealing in reality -- it leads to fewer letdowns.
It's about power (Score:1)
If you understand that those who hold power usually abuse it, you will be pro-union. If you think that the individual can have as much power as institutional authority, you believe there is no need for unions.
All I know is that this country was built on a balance of power and checks and balances. A balance of power cannot be a bad thing. Unions are good.
Wow- Commie Relevancy! Who knew? (Score:2)
I mean, who _else_ would be so likely to accept the notion that Free Trade means, "Ever lose your job to a guy in Korea who works 18 hours a day in leg shackles for a bowl of rice, because he's cheaper to hire than you? YOU WILL!"
One thing Marx missed, however- he's assuming an _industrial_ proletariat. This is railroad-era thinking: this is a condemnation of capitalism in which the barriers for entry are as high as, say, a software company wanting to sell a new word processor. When Marx was writing this stuff, access to industrialisation was severely limited, networking was severely restricted, and your marketing was entirely a matter of brick-and-mortar installations, a whole network that had to be supported. This is why small craftsmen were ground under the wheels.
2001 turns out to have eBay and UPS and Napster and Slashdot and Linux (as examples of these _types_ of services). Marx would've loved Linux: it's controlled by the proletariat and gives all the tools of virtual industrialization to the proletariat. This is a really big difference from the industrial-age world Marx knew. How big, remains to be seen. Clearly, the bourgeoisie still retains a lot of power to put up barriers to entry- we see this most easily with Microsoft trying to technically produce obstacles for Linux, because they are unusually aggressive for bourgeoisie. But it's also seen in the consolidation of vast media empires that control what we hear and see for news and entertainment. Yet, at the same time, the foundations are crumbling, and individuals, artisans, craftsmen such as Marx talks about, begin to have an unprecedented ability to network with clients, customers, helpers across the globe, and the ability to interact AS IF they were industrial titans, in some cases.
An example: suppose you make cars, and you need a certain steel bracket. Traditionally, you need to order 100,000 of these brackets from somebody, or invest in the heavy machinery to fabricate them yourself. Either way, someone makes lots of brackets and keeps them in warehouses and they sell, or not. But with computerised order fulfillment systems (not to mention computerised fabricate-to-order systems!) you can order 100. Possibly in the future you can order 10- or 1- without nasty price hikes. Compare the history of record and CD pressing with mp3.com's pioneering 'DAM' CD system, which is now widely imitated and improved upon, and which allows fabrication of _single_ CDs for order fulfillment- or the history of T-shirt and mug printing with CafePress, which likewise allows fabrication of _single_ items for order fulfillment.
These issues _are_ the foundation of the industrial age: both ability and necessity to mass produce. Now the ability is still there- but due to the ever-increasing sophistication of the machinery, the necessity is not- which is enormously significant.
If you want the world forced into a Communist Revolution for good or ill, keep on encouraging barriers to entry, 'free trade' and the ability of large corporations to exert economic leverage against smaller players and/or individuals. Down with Napster, down with eBay, down with libraries, and everybody aboard the corporate ferryboat- which will not wait, and has no stops because you've no business choosing where you want to go!
If you want Marx to be a footnote to history, support every form of decentralisation and breaking of the barriers to entry that you can. Consider the right of a crappy garage musician to put mp3s on Napster for free as MORE important than the right of Britney Spears to earn record companies billions. Support Linux and open source and fight Microsoft's efforts to create a world where Windows is required for most internet tasks (Active Directory, etc ad infinitum). If Apple tries the same stuff, fight them too!
The only way to _make_ Marx irrelevant and useless is to _remove_ the problems he identifies, or at least have a good hard try at it. If you decide he's a creep and do everything opposite to what he demands, you are only creating the pressing need for just such a revolution as he agitates for- and that might not be the best thing. It's better to say 'No revolution here today, thank you- now here's what we'll do instead' and GO AFTER the problems he correctly identifies. Do that and all the ranting about bourgeoisie starts to look foolish. Marx is like Linux, fighting him and what he believes in only makes him stronger...
Re:Government intervention is the SOLUTION to thes (Score:1)
I agree - but I think we've moved into a new era where the US Government isnt even pretending to be a Free Democratic Government. "They" have abandoned the 'facade' of trying to run the country to improve the community/society.
Instead the US Gov. only concerns itself with dividing the spoils of capatalist exploitation.
I would be happy to see an end to Corporate Welfare (and end of 'Corporate Rights') and a *VERY* dramatic increase in 'Citizen Protection' Legislation (to protect environment, workers rights, etc) and a *DRAMATIC* increase in the power and scope of Anti-Trust laws.
The IWW (Score:1)
Check out the IWW [iww.org]. Unions are social constructs that are beneficial to workers as corporations are social constructs that are beneficial to owner/managers. They can embody the characteristics, goals and values that those who form them have. Unions like all constructs can be useful or detrimental. I happen to believe that the existance of unions has advanced society a great deal. This is evidenced by our acceptance of 2 days off a week, payment for overtime, 40 hour work weeks and the fact that child labor is no longer accepted in developed nations.
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:4)
You show me a union that agrees with those positions, and I'll think about changing mine. Until then...
Re:Read "Intellectuals" (Score:1)
Re:The Freedom to Work (Score:2)
Because the phrase "freedom to work" is really just a rhetorical device -- no such freedom exists -- if it did nobody would ever be allowed to be fired because this would violate their freedom. Instead the device must be understood in terms of what it really means: enjoying the benefits of a unionized environment without actually paying for them. This is exactly like not paying taxes but enjoying the benefits of roads, police protection, and so forth.
Why should I have to pay for the righ to work?
You don't. You can always work in a non-unionized company just as you are free to move to a third world country with minimal (or no) taxes. However, taxes and dues are what provide a safer and fairer place to live or work in.
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:1)
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:1)
Amazon could indeed pack up the books and head for Mexico, but they'd still have to hire their programmers from the good old U S of A. With all the hype surrounding overseas programming outfits, there's still plenty of problems: bad communication skills, horrible user interfaces, lack of team development, and more.
None of these problems are only seen outside the U.S. I've seen plenty of poor communicating, shit-spewing software houses right here in North America. Get off your "Good ole Ewe Ess of Eh" horse and smell the shit in your own backyard.
There are plenty of good programmers and excellent software houses all over the planet. Amazon could move their shop anywhere and get the technical staffing it needs.
If it wasn't for unions, tons of Americans would be just plain out of jobs, and I can respect that.
Why can you respect that? If you're unskilled you can get a job pretty much anywhere sweeping floors, turning wrenches, packing boxes, whatever... you just have to accept what they offer because you have nothing to offer in return. Unions don't protect the unskilled labourer, they protect the lazy worker and the stupid worker. They protect the ones who want to do the least amount of work and complain the loudest. If I'm working my ass off, unions don't do shit for me. I dare you to prove otherwise. And let's keep this in the present time and tech industry, not in the coal mines of the early twentieth.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
"I know that many here on Slashdot consider unions to be beyond the pale, and be instruments of socialism, but in reality they are the devices of a free nation and a free minded people. This is why governments and corporations try and stamp them out."
No, many of us look at it from a standpoint of reality and common sense. Many new economy companies have razor thin profit margins if they have any at all. A union quickly becomes moot if a company goes under. A union could help hasten a young company's demise.
My suggestion to the laid off workers is to start their own company that incorporates their values. They can do it a la Ben & Jerry's. Of course, even Ben & Jerry's has had to face reality and give up some values in order to survive. Starting their own comapny will mean a lot of sacrifice to long days and the hard work of raising capital.
you also wrote:
"Even if you have no intention of ever using your union, it is best to join it anyway, so as to provide it some support. You may need it one day, after all."
Personally, I will never join a union as it goes against my own beliefs. I do not want someone else making decisions for me. This should be respected by unions and its members. Also their are many people who have never needed a union in their lifetime.
Re: (Score:2)
Government intervention is the SOLUTION to these? (Score:1)
I agree with you 100% on that. But the problem here isn't that the government doesn't interfere enough, it's that the government IS interfering on the behalf of the profits. Jon Johansen was arrested by a GOVERNMENT, not a corporation that should have been stopped by the government.
I hate big corporations, and I love the little guy, et cetera, but bigger government is not the way to go. Government power always ends up serving the powerful.
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Maybe an old school union isn't the answer (Score:1)
(Keeping in mind that IANAW), maybe a new kind of union would be the solution to the tech industry. Agreed, most true knowledge jobs don't involve alot of hazardous work and usually prefer to work hours that would make the traditional 9-5 man vomit.
However, in the history of unionization, it traditionally was the more skilled jobs that unionized first. In the beginning of the century, the AFL refused to unionize unskilled workers (whom unions are most closely identified with today).
A tech union which was run by tech workers would probably respect the demands of a tech job, such as long flex hours and wavering lunch breaks. Just because it's a union doesn't mean it will turn tech jobs into unskilled jobs. They would probably be more likely to fight for things such as unlimited LAN game time and increased stock options as opposed to a set work schedule. So long as the workers can manage to curtail a union and get it to represent them (as opposed to ittself), a union would be a valueable tool in any industry.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Re:Cry me a river..... (Score:2)
A majority of the employees in such a business as Amazon are not technology workers. They are phone support, packing, shipping, billing. Hard labor and/or mundane clerical operations. Individually, they are powerless; however, they do have the power to communicate with their fellow workers and join together to protect their rights. They should have the right to do so, read the declaration of independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
Notice that governments are formed primarly to secure these unalienable Rights. Why? United we stand and divided we fall. There is no reason why Amazon should afford to pay it's top execs millions in stock options while the line workers are working in poor conditions. When you negotiate as an individual with a company, you are negotiating against a united management. It is only just and fair that individuals have the right to negotiate with management as a whole, so that the barganing power is more evenly distributed among the parties.
The author of this article is spot on. As for the author for this comment, I say, grow up.Re:It's about power (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Unions suck (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
AMA not UAW (Score:1)
If high tech workers are going to organize, the objective should be to become professionals like doctors rather than union members like autoworkers. Professionals are paid more, get more respect from society, and are more independent.
OpenSourcerers [opensourcerers.com]
Re:Unions are a Two-Edged Sword (Score:2)
It is also much easier to join the unions than it once was, and the decision on whether to join or not comes down largely to a matter of where you live -- if you live in New York or LA and you want to work on productions with a decent budget, you'd better join the union.
This is also an industry where being in the union brings significant benefits beyond the pension. Movie making is a dangerous profession, with working days of 14 hours not uncommon. Union rules about hours and turn-around time (the number of hours required between wrapping one day and starting again the next) save lives.
Re:Cry me a river..... (Score:1)
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:1)
Amazon is struggling to even stay in business. Do the unions care at all about that? No.
Here's the counterargument:
Alan Barclay want to keep his job so that he can, you know, eat and stuff. Does Amazon care about that? No. Does the union? Yes.
(Yes, I know he's probably highly employable and has another job by now. But the point still stands.)
Re:Unions were needed because of the work monopoly (Score:1)
The biggest union movement in the USA started with the great depression in the 1930's. Hiring bosses would go out in the morning and offer a wage to the lined up workers. Those that thought it too low could leave. If there were still too many people, the boss lowered the wage again and again until the work force was the right size for the day. Wages of a dollar a day, and less, were pretty common. Many hiring bosses also expected a kickback if they hired you. A job could and would be yanked at any time during the day, and there was always someone available for replacement. There were no side benefits, and injuries were the worker's problem. Safe practices were expensive, and usually ignored. Sure, being an owner or boss kept you out of this, but becoming either was no picnic. This was the province of people that had the money, and they did not welcome outsiders. They preferred passing openings to family members. Child labor was common, because some families needed every available penny to survive.
The Socialist Party, in the person of their leader, Norman Mattoon Thomas, fought these practices tooth and nail. Mr. Thomas was jailed for speaking about such radical things as a limited work week, retirement insurance for workers, no child labor, and health insurance. This extremely dangerous radical lived long enough to see every plank in his political platform become the law of the land. As an aside, he understood the evils of Russian communism, and fought it vigorously after a short visit to look at slave labor in the Russia of Stalin in 1937.
Per Mr. Thomas, Franklin Delano Roosevelt adopted all the right ideas for all the wrong reasons. The ideas worked, the depression finally broke, and unions had some legal backing. Under Harry Truman, unions were limited by the Taft-Hartley Act. The closed shop is illegal. The union shop is legal in some states. Closed shops require union membership before hiring. Union shops require membership thirty days after hiring. Unions members who do not benefit from their union have only themselves to blame. I have been as high as Shop Steward in a local, and had one of the International representatives relocated when he did not support me during a dispute.
On to the differences between companies and unions. Companies invest money and talent, and operate to make a profit. Employees invest themselves and their skills, and wish to maintain a decent standard of living. The unions organize the employees to prevent the abuses used by employers to maximize profits. This is greatly oversimplified, but basically true. Any union worth its dues will tell employees that the company must make a profit to survive. It is in the employees interest to make this profit, but see to it that it is done within the limits of the law and will allow the individual worker to make a living wage. Both sides are guilty of excess and abuses, that is why negotiations take place. Overclassification of jobs and featherbedding are known union abuses. Divide and conquer is a favorite company tactic. One ploy used by companies is,"I would pay you more, but the union won't let me." Don't listen to this. The union sets minimum wages. Any company can pay an individual more, give bonuses, and give out-of-cycle pay raises. These would cut into profits, and are quite rare. Union benefits are minimal during boom times, and priceless when the going is tough. The one point unions feel they must stand on is seniority. Other things being equal, seniority must rule. Read that sentence. Some people only read the last three words. Companies have found that establishing that things are not equal can be a legal bag of worms, and most do not try. If you are in a union, be active, and you can prosper. If you are not in a union, be very nice to the boss.
Re:Unions are such parasites (Score:1)
why dont you use that expensive dsl that your huge geek salary pays for and listen to something valuable, like anything from the noam chomsky archive:
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/multimedia.cfm
or read this:
http://www.mcad.edu/classrooms/POLITPROP/palace
"The first trial was one year later, in 1936. There was a major strike, the Bethlehem Steel strike in western Pennsylvania at Johnstown, in the Mohawk Valley. Business tried out a new technique of labor destruction, which worked very well. Not through goon squads and breaking knees. That wasn't working very well any more, but through the more subtle and effective means of propaganda. The idea was to figure out ways to turn the public against the strikers, to present the strikers as disruptive, harmful to the public and against the common interests. The common interests are those of "us," the businessman, the worker, the housewife. That's all "us." We want to be together and have things like harmony and Americanism and working together. Then there's those bad strikers out there who are disruptive and causing trouble and breaking harmony and violating Americanism. We've got to stop them so we can all live together. The corporate executive and the guy who cleans the floors all have the same interests. We can all work together and work for Americanism in harmony, liking each other. That was essentially the message. A huge amount of effort was put into presenting it. This is, after all, the business community, so they control the media and have massive resources. And it worked, very effectively. In fact, it was later called the "Mohawk Valley formula" and applied over and over again to break strikes. They were called "scientific methods of strike breaking," and worked very effectively by mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like Americanism. "
___________________________
http://www.hyperpoem.net [hyperpoem.net]
Keep the unions out. (Score:2)
If I want to work 80 hours a week knowing that the experience and stock options MIGHT someday make me successful, then thats my choice and not the choice of a union. If someone doesn't like it, they can switch careers. There are no illusions in the technology industry. I know that not everyone who goes into it turns out to be a millionaire after 3 years. If the fact that the average passerby thinks this and finds its not all glamour as they had expected, well SORRY. Go back to whatever it was you were doing before you made that tragic mistake. SORRY if you didn't know you might have to spend 10 years of your life sitting in your bedroom hacking on your computer into the middle of the night, forgoing a social life, to achieve what some of us have. Thats the price for some of our "overnight" successes. You should accept nothing less. And no union better tell you otherwise.
-Restil
It's symbiosis, not parasitism. :-) (Score:1)
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
They can also have (and have had)a lot of
positive effects. I would rather work on
eliminating the negative and benefitting from the
positive versus decrying unions outright for a
few isolated incidents.
Zero Sum Games, etc (Score:2)
Unions tend to function in an US vs THEM atmosphere. Many small companies function in a team atmosphere, where most everyone is working more or less as an "US". Note that I did not say all small companies, because you see many variations, including the family business, and the pointy haired boss in his/her own small business. Some of these make you wonder how they survive. And if you look around, many businesses do not survive their first year.
The problem (of us vs them) can come in when the group gets sufficiently large that you do not have a chance to know everyone. It can also come in when you have people schooled exclusively in the older schools of management.
One of the problems that promotes the segregation of managers is not the sheer volume of data, but the fact of people who would be clueless as managers on the general team getting all confused and spreading that confusion to everyone else with every new bit of mis-information they create in their minds as they try to understand things.
These folks naturally tend to corrupt data, adding in their own pre-existing fixed ideas and confusions, and making a splendid mess of things. You definitely have a problem when the majority of people in the company fall in this category. This is where you get companies who need to "hire an adult" to run things for the creative types.
When you have a company that has grown to be very successful, it is easy for the various branches and depts to devolve into fiefdoms, etc. At that point you are doomed to the "us vs them" atmosphere.
Unions thrive on this and promote the Us vs Them atmosphere. Unions are a cure for abuses of management, where working conditions devolve towards a state of serfdom or slavery. They are there to make sure that the rank and file have a voice of some sort.
Unfortunately, unions can be very clueless as well. I can recall a company or two that agreed to union demands, and then went bankrupt. The owners decided that it would be easier just to cash out. And then the unions said "oops, we didn't know". This is where the unions get the reputation in management circles of being parasites.
So all and all, it is a mixed bag. It cries out for a different business model.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
It's easy for tech workers to forget that not everyone has it so easy in life. But some day the number of workers will catch up with the number of jobs, and tech workers will lose their privileged position.
The Freedom to Work (Score:2)
I didn't think so.
-russ
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Yes. Razor thin profit margins and SKY HIGH executive salaries. The proof is in the puddin.
/. readers don't need unions (Score:2)
I know that in the short history of modern chipmaking there have been numerous cases of people being 'asked' to work more than their usual 12 hour shifts, or being routinely exposed to hazardous chemicals, or other abuses.
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of
Union workers teach our children, police our streets, deliver our Amazon.com orders, and build our cars. America has lost touch with the real reason unions exist, including the unions. But thats no reason to say that they aren't necessary.
These are breasts; this is source code.
Re:Unions were needed because of the work monopoly (Score:1)
Only if other employers in the same industry are better - if, for want of a better term, 'employer oppression' is endemic throughout an industry, the ability to move between jobs conveys no advantage. Employers will only offer better terms than their competitiors if there are not enough employees with the required skills to meet the demand - if labour is easily obtainable, employers will offer as poor terms as they can get away with (in this situation, employers behave as a cartel, with an effective monopoly) Currently, skilled computer professionals are in demand, so those with the skills can, to a large extent, dictate terms to their employers ... but then, the position of the skilled in the nineteenth century was much the same. The unions were created to protect the rights and improve conditions for the workers who are not able to do this - the less skilled, the less educated, or those in a declining industry where the demand for jobs is greater than the supply. In the 21st century, this situation is still with us, and the computer industry, like any other has a large number of unskilled or semi-skilled drudge workers - these people still need unions.
Unions are bad, mmmkay? (Score:1)
And on to:
I disagree. It's easy for us, the majority of which are single and highly skilled, to assume that the freedoms that apply to us apply to everyone. If I were married with children, my mobility would be hampered by a range of factors. If I were married, with children, and without the skills I have now, I'd have to accept most jobs in the locality I was offered.
But those very people are making choices about how they live. No one forces them to get married, have children, or remain skill-less. Americans are bombarded every day with opportunities for advancement, self improvement, etc. Have you watched American television in the last twenty years? Who is to blame if someone ignores all of those opportunities and settles for a simple life of simple means?
Why should I - as a person who has worked his whole life to work, improve, and succeed - embrace a system that caters to the lowest common denominator of the work force?
My argument was that in today's society, we all have an abundance of choices. If people are making the easy choices for themselves, why should those of us making the harder choices be penalized by systems that discourage ingenuity, hard work, and productivity - like unions most certainly do?
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:1)
Re:Unions were needed because of the work monopoly (Score:1)
Please keep an open mind and see if you still have this opinion when you are working 70 hours a week and have resumes floating around and noone is calling you or when the company you work for outsources your job to someone else and you can't find another one because there are none.
I'm not saying unions are perfect. They have their problems just like everything else, but they do give you options. Besides, this gives us a chance to improve on the mistakes made by the old unions.
Re:Unions were needed because of the work monopoly (Score:2)
In reality, however, many people still don't have a viable choice: they can't afford downtime between jobs, or they can't afford to move to a better job, or they can't afford to upgrade their skills, or et cetera.
And even for those people who are professionals and could leave, often can't: they love their jobs and have commitments to their clients. It's just that their employer is an ass. [I'm thinking specifically of government services, here; certainly our BC government has an appalling employer history with regards to teachers, health providers and such.]
Your points re: the downsides of unionization are pretty much on the mark. I just don't think the employment picture is as rosy as you paint.
--
Re:These are customer service types (Score:1)
Its a little like going to NASA, pointing at a janitor, and saying he works with rocket scientists in the space industry. Technically true, but not a very accurate description.
Re:$unions eq 'leftism' eq 'whiners' eq 'socialism (Score:1)
This is the problem with liberals in general; 'FREE SPEECH FOR EVERYONE!(Unless it is against us...)'
Mod this back to 'Interesting', have a real moment.
Re: (Score:2)
Read "Intellectuals" (Score:2)
Cry me a river..... (Score:5)
And all the talk of last years marketing and industry buzz. Where is the surprise that it wasn't all it would be cracked up to be? Did Barclay expect Bezos to give him a rubdown everynight after making his bed a putting a mint on his pillow?
Unions in technology area BAD idea. Tech labor is still way too valuable, and techs hold most of the power. You don't /have/ to work 70 hour weeks in this industry. The people who do usually want to because they expect a big payoff (IPO what have you).
This is nowhere near a situation similar to autoworkers where they are being treated with low wages and unsafe working environments.
This is nothing like the steelworkers who have been losing jobs by the thousand due to companies closing up shop.
Grow up, update your resume, and find a new job.
If he's as good as they told him he was in the first place, he shouldn't have a problem.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:2)
You know, I'm a union geek, and, at least where I work, this is so much horse shit. My supervisor, the safety officer, and myself all ask that any moving of hardware be done by me. This is more to keep stuff from getting broken than anything else. I plug the plugs into the walls-- our electricians are too busy doing real work to even consider being pulled off the job to put a plug in an outlet.
I work in a major state university, and no, I don't fuck off-- I'm at least as busy and harried as any sysadmin in the private sector, and, at least from what I see around, I'm quite a bit more competent than most. What being in a union means to me is, that I get paid overtime for working more than 40 hours a week, and that my pager stays on my desk when I go home at night. As I'm 44, and have a family, this is quite a benefit in itself. I get fair benefits and pension. And I can't be fired because my boss has suddenly decided that he can hire some kid fresh out of school for half of what I make.
Most of you ./ers are fairly young, and don't understand a lot of these issues. But just wait until you have a family or the job market becomes saturated with geeks (which, while being possible, isn't probable, as geekliness isn't a product of training).
Before I started geeking full-time, I did lots of history-- that's what my first degree is in. You folks who work for wages would do good to take some time out of your busy schedule (that is, if you're not working 70-hour weeks) to read a bit of labor history, to find out what the work world was like before unions. I think you would find it quite informative.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:2)
This doesn't turn out to be quite the crisis it might seem though. Ironically, many of the unionized hourly workers are only interested in working the LEAST amount of hours as possible and the more work someone else does the less they have to do, and they're not about to complain about it.
Obviously there are also exceptions. For demonstration purposes we can handle packages, or in an emergency sitution its acceptable. And this isn't something that produces a large number of complaints when half the workers are new hires who aren't completely aclimated to the workload yet and find that ANYONE helping out is a blessed relief.
-Restil
Re:The Freedom to Work (Score:2)
What you do have the right to do is vote for leaders that will reduce your taxes or dues if that is a major issue for you. Like civilized countries, unions are democracies and leaders must follow the wishes of their members or they will be replaced by others.
Re:AMA not UAW (Score:2)
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:2)
How can this be scored +4, Informative, when it's fictional?
Stories like this abound. I generally investigate when they come up in organizations I'm supposed to be helping.
Invariably, they come back to some manager who wanted to save $500 from his budget by having his secretary run to Office Depot and buy 7 or 8 power strips, when code (and common sense) required installation of additional outlets. Someone reports it as a fire hazard, the manager gets all up in a huff, makes up some ridiculous story like that quoted above, and it passes into legend.
Never yet have I seen a situation where people were not allowed to plug 110v plugs into outlets, or move things around on their desks, because of "union rules". And until you can provide concrete proof (Lord knows I've tried to find it), I'll assume you just like the sound of the fairy tales so thought you'd pass them on to the kids here.
Unions were needed because of the work monopoly (Score:2)
The average factory in 19th century employed a large part of all local workers, and they did not have a choice - they had to work for what the factory offered them or be unemployed.
Monopolies can onlybe dealt with by other monopolies, and so workforce monololists - unions were created.
Now, however, the situation is completely different - in workforce market there is free trade; You don't like one company, there are hundreds of others you can go to. This way people can NOT be oppressed by their employer; Abuse can only happen if it is hard to leave.
But, if the unions make it into the high-tech world, then the monopoly issues will start again, but from other side.
Unions will probably start protectionism (only union workers will work here), thus limiting specialists from other areas of education or world from working; And probably will make 'experience' (in years) matter far more than your capabilities, which is a Bad Thing.
We want a free market of workforce, where anyone can work for anyone he wants, and the best people get the best positions.
The only need free people might have to union, is to fight against a monopoly, otherwise it will just hurt anyone.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise. (Score:4)
The statement in the article concerning unsafe environments in Amazon's warehouses baffle me. I can't speak about the US but in Canada if I found myself in conditions where people are "fainting and vomiting from the heat" I know damn well that one call to my province's Ocupation Health and Safety office would get the company in big trouble.
I can't imagine this being any different in the US, in fact I'm 95% percent sure that if such things were to take place in a union shop, the first thing the union would do is place a call to the government types anyways.
The simple fact is that a lot of the abuses you use as an example from the industrial revolution have now been deemed unlawful and there are angencies to deal with this stuff. A union doesn't change that.
I do however, understand layoffs, I very recently got let go myself. I'll pick myself up and get something else, there's lots of companies that need my skills right now. When it gets to the point that I can't find another job then I guess I'm screwed. Probably should have gone to university when I was 18 rather than starting a corespondence degree at 25. I fail to see how a union will change that. I also fail to see how a union would have saved my last employer from sliding into a revenue shortfall, I'd still be out of a job, I would just have taken home less money the past 6 months because I was paying union dues.
Comment removed (Score:5)