Ask Slashdot: What Would It Take For Developers To Start Their Own Union? 761
juicegg writes "TechCrunch contributor Klint Finley writes that developers have shunned unions because traditional workplace demands like higher pay are not important to us while traditional unions are incapable of advocating for what developers care about most while at work: autonomy and self-management. Is this how most developers feel? What about overtime, benefits, conditions for contractors and outsourcing concerns? Are there any issues big enough to get developers and techies to make collective demands or is it not worth the risk? Do existing unions offer advantages or is it better to start from scratch?"
Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my lifetime, I don't recall a single industry that that has started a successful union in the U.S. (not in ANY field). All the unions that still have any real power are the ones still around from the Roosevelt New Deal and postwar days (the Teamsters, UAW, etc.).
So it's hardly fair to single out developers. There are very few fields that are significantly unionized anymore, and most of the ones that are are represented by older unions that go way back. When you look around and see that there are no unions with any real power that have been founded in your lifetime, it's pretty easy to be skeptical and pretty hard to volunteer to be the sacrificial lamb (by being the first voice in your field supporting a union) and endanger your career in the process.
It probably also doesn't help that political support for unions, even among many Democrats, pretty much dried up a long time ago.
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Maybe, just maybe, you're confusing cause and effect there? Government workers aren't mistreated quite as much as, say, people working in an Amazon warehouse because they are unionised. Among other things, obviously: the government has a harder time mistreating people because there is some sort of political and democratic oversight. For the same reason, the government can't appear to be suppressing worker organisation. And of course government workers are usually more highly trained and less replaceable tha
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Government worker unions are the only sector where union membership has increased over the past 10 years. Witness the explosive growth of SEIU, now the largest union in the country. Unions couldn't grow in the private sector after their jobs were outsourced offshore, so the only place they could find any support was in the government, where they bought influence by using their member's dues to donate to political compaigns. They endorsed politicians who helped negotiate favorable contracts guaranteeing them lavish pension plans and health benefits paid by taxpayers. Until the economic crash of 2008, very few government workers had to pay any portion of their retirement benefits, and now they are fighting tooth and nail to keep that status quo.
I can speak from a position of knowledge, since I am now an IT worker for a state government agency. The only reason I am in the union is because the union voided the contract under which I used to work, threatened me and told me I had to join the union or I would lose my job (this was in 2010, when the unemployment rate was well over 9% in my state). So rather than face unemployment, foreclosure and poverty, I accepted the union job and immediately took a $1,800/month pay cut. Now, the union takes $86 out of every paycheck for my dues and I enjoy NONE of the benefits I expected to get (I work overtime two weekends out of every month, but am not eligible for ovetime pay). They spend millions of dollars of my dues to bankroll political campaigns to maintain their power in the capitol, offer to bus me to carefully choreographed protest rallys wherever they are scheduled, and gave me a horrible tacky purple SEIU tee-shirt to wear to these staged rallies. On top of this, the president of the union is paid far more than any rank and file member (http://blogs.sacbee.com/the_state_worker/2011/09/seiu-local-1000-council-to-con.html).
Labor unions had a purpose long ago during the industrial revolution, but have outlived their usefulness and have evolved into organized crime organizations plundering the nation's taxpayers and threatening them with bankruptcy to provide a lavish lifestyle for the "community organizers" at the top of the food chain.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Labor unions had a purpose long ago during the industrial revolution, but have outlived their usefulness and have evolved into organized crime organizations plundering the nation's taxpayers and threatening them with bankruptcy to provide a lavish lifestyle for the "community organizers" at the top of the food chain.
Sorry, but this is absurd. Do you really think corporate power has diminished in any permanent way, "just because"? I've personally received health insurance, pensions, and other benefits because there existed a union in an industry where I can guarantee you, without the union I would have been screwed.
To think that corporations are happy to give employees rights and benefits without being compelled to do so is insane. You can't have a situation where employers hold the purse strings and the power, and the workers are unable to answer them with the collective strength of all their members. The weakened unions in the past 30 years and the simultaneous decline of the middle class are no coincidence. You think getting rid of unions completely would be a good idea? Maybe, if you think the work standards of the 19th century were a good idea too.
I'd love to get a detailed analysis of what union you' were 'forced' to join, what work you were doing before joining the union, what benefits you were getting from the union even though you weren't a part of it (were you getting paid a salary that just undercut the standard salaries that were negotiated by unions, for example? Were you guaranteed a safe working environment? Weekends off? Overtime? A minimum wage?) and what benefits you say you aren't receiving and why.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:4, Interesting)
So rather than face unemployment, foreclosure and poverty, I accepted the union job and immediately took a $1,800/month pay cut. Now, the union takes $86 out of every paycheck for my dues and I enjoy NONE of the benefits I expected to get
This, this is why we don't have IT unions. Anyone making over the average income for their position will be facing a pay cut. Anyone new to the shop will face years of waiting behind those with seniority, as promotions will no longer be based on ability. Everyone will have a good chunk of their monthly wage taken to feed the union bosses.
Senior staff would face large pay cuts, junior staff would face a future of waiting for those in front of them to retire before being promoted/advances. Who exactly would be left to vote FOR having a union?
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
I keep hearing this "with unions everyone will get the same salary" thing from Americans and I've been getting the impression that there's a lot of irrational hatred of unions based on this misconception.
This is not some fundamental consequence of unions, it's simply a side-effect of some of the American unions. Here in Sweden, where we have a lot of strong unions in all sorts of industries, most just demand that there's a reasonable minimum salary, that you can't be forced to work as a "temporary" employee for years on end, that when layoffs happen they do so in a fair way, that local labor laws regarding overtime pay and things like that.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, union GROWTH isn't happening in government. They're just the big obvious target because SO MUCH OF EVERYTHING ELSE HAS BEEN GUTTED.
By the way, SEIU is the fastest growing union. They're service workers: hotel housekeepers, commercial bldg janitors and etc. No, they're not governmental.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't we try to strengthen laws for individuals....and make things easier for people to self employ, self incorporate and contract themselves.
Let each person be responsible for negotiating their own pay rates, etc.
Make it easier for people to do their own healthcare, and retirement.....have co-ops out there, etc?
Why do we keep going down the path of group-think, and putting everyone into the same bowl and treating everyone the same.
Why not make it easier for people to be in charge of, and manage their own destiny?
Give the individual more rights, and put more teeth in laws protecting the individual....not the unions.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Funny)
Excuse me but your corporate over lords are over here laughing about your individual rights.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because abusing an individual is easy?
Because you cannot afford your own healthcare unless you support something like single-payer.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because abusing an individual is easy?
Because you cannot afford your own healthcare unless you support something like single-payer.
People seem to forget that employer-provided healthcare is a product of the 20th Century. It works best when you have a large enough company to provide a distinct insurance pool and the employees are mostly there for the duration of their careers. Just like pensions, as a matter of fact.
Circa 1985, however, that idea broke down. We went to "perma-temping" and other transient forms of employment and our former corporate health and retirement infrastructures don't work well in that environment. Pensions mostly got replaced by 401-Ks, but health care didn't switch over so well. Instead, it simply got more and more broken, because a political football, and generally became a mess.
Ironically, one of the biggest arguments for employer-provided healthcare was that it was unfair to "steal" people's incomes to pay for a state-sponsored system. People seem to think that when the employer provides it that it's "free". The main difference, in fact, is where (and if) the "theft" prints on the paycheck.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
People seem to forget that effective healthcare is a product of the 20th Century. People used to pay 100% of their own way for healthcare, when they were buying mustard poultices and lizard fat oil, and soaking in epson salt baths four hours a day. It was all worthless and elective, for entertainment purposes only, and thus the market worked.
It's when people started actually surviving fatal conditions, and not having money became a death sentence, that the actual moral and ethical problems with pay-as-you-go started to become salient.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a load of twattle!
All payment for health care comes from people, whether directly, indirectly via insurance using premiums paid by people, or even more inefficiently via government which uses taxes paid by people.
It is no secret that government is an incredibly inefficient redistributor. Therefore it is obvious to any thinking person that insurance companies could handle the same level of health care and charge less to do it.
It is no secret to anybody who has looked at the numbers that the government is more efficient at distributing health care than the private insurance industry.
When you pay a dollar in health care premiums, the insurance company takes at least 15 cents off the top for profits and administrative expenses. (Talk about inefficient.) They give 85 cents or less to your doctor or hospital, who spend at least another 15 cents managing the administrative expenses of private insurance. Overall, each dollar you pay for your premium buys you 50-70 cents in health care.
Social Security, in contrast, pays about 2-3% in administrative costs.
As a reality check, look at the real world. The Canadian government provides health care as good as ours for about half the cost in taxes than we pay in taxes and insurance. Look around the world, and every country spends less money than we do. (The closest, second most expensive is Switzerland, which has the system most like ours.)
There is no country in the world that you would want to live in that has a free market health care system.
Oh, you say, that's because we have an imperfect free market. If only the government would stop interfering with the health care system, we would have the best of all possible worlds.
That reminds me of what my Communist friends used to tell me -- Russia doesn't have real socialism. Under real socialism, life would be perfect.
The answer to you is that we will never have a free market. A free market is like one of those trans-uranium particles that exists for a tiny fraction of a second, and then transmutes into something else. In the US, the free market, to the extent it existed, has been taken over by the wealthy, and even if you could get rid of all the liberals and unions, the wealthy 1% would still run the country.
I challenge you to name one country in the world that you would like to live in that has a free market by your definition. Afghanistan? Somalia?
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You're already paying for that. You don't think it really costs thousands of dollars a day to stay in a hospital, do you? Of course not. Your insurance pays that so that the hospital can afford to treat everyone without insurance who walks in the door, which they are forced to do by the government.
Single-payer could save you a lot of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Most industrialized nations can manage to provide healthcare of very similar quality to what insured Americans enjoy to their entire populace, and the total bill comes in at ~40% less than what Americans pay. Under single-payer, it is entirely plausible your bills will go *down* (and I can prove that possibility with more than a dozen real world examples).
I hold that America does not need to be uniquely incompetent at providing affordable healthcare forever.
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Absolutely untrue.
I've incorporated myself..."S" corp. I've worked through it contracting myself out...and have done well with that on gigs.
I'm currently W2 right now, but looking to get back to 1099 gigs.
When doing the indie thing, I factored into my bill rate enough money to take off 3 weeks or so a year (vacation and sick time), enough to put back into retirement, AND..
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I wonder how old you are.
Health care expenses are something that are insignificant for most of us when we're young, but eventually become unaffordable for most of us when we get old. (The incidence of most major medical conditions increases exponentially with age.)
At the age of 30, unless you have a chronic condition, you don't really have serious health care costs. But if you start to develop diabetes or heart failure, or an autoimmune disease at 60 or 70, then $20,000 or $30,000 worth of health care can m
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. Choosing to stick with a job in an abusive environment is a person sucking it up and enduring a shitty tradeoff, not 'ceasing to be abuse'.
We all make tradeoffs. Abuse is a spectrum. Your absurd Randian hyperlibertarianism is showing.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cool, so just sell the house you are underwater on, and move your kids to a new school and find your wife another job too. Sounds so easy, doesn't it?
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The whole point of a union is that you have more economic power when you negotiate with your boss together with the other workers than you do when you negotiate as an individual.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
The company controls the collective capital and labor of the business, and a few companies can control the collective capital and labor of an entire market, how would you think that individuals will be able to bargain against such asymmetrical power structures?
Somehow, I think you misunderstood why collective bargaining began, and need to read up on the history late 19th century early 20th century.
Re:Entrepreneurs vs. mega-corps (Score:5, Interesting)
While everyone would love to run their own business, there are profound inefficiencies associated with having a large numbers of small businesses, mainly losses caused by competition and misallocations of labor. Having a large proportion of small businesses is actually a symptom of a backward or developing economy; Egypt has more self-employed per capita than the US, for example.
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Stop agreeing so hard with GP. Small businesses tend to be less rationalized and hyperefficient than megacorps, so they need more labor to make less profit. That doesn't make them the "backbone of the economy", that makes them the inefficient backbone of employment.
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Different industries have different economies of scale.
Remember tungsten-filament light bulbs? I once read a study of the world's light-bulb industry. They are/were made by integrated systems called ribbon machines. They were very expensive and produced light bulbs very quickly and cheaply.
One ribbon machine could produce the entire output of 60- and 100-watt consumer bulbs for an entire country. There was one or two ribbon machines in the U.S. (owned by GE, I recall). There was one in Hungary that supplied
Re:Entrepreneurs vs. mega-corps (Score:4, Insightful)
We're talking about programmers, aren't we? Very few programmers "deal retail", e.g. writing a Java applet for Mrs Scroggins down the road. They generally work for medium to big companies.
Thus I don't see how you've addressed any of starworks5's concerns.
I can be as self-employed & personally-incorporated as I like, but that's going to make zero difference if Sanjeet in Bongobongoland will work all week for less than the cost of my morning coffee.
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Or in other words, you need to acquiesce to labor arbitrage being used to beat down your wages.
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Then, you need to target your skills and continuing growth towards something worth more $$ here in the US than rote coding which has become a commodity in the past decades.
You gotta learn to go with the flow and move to something more profitable.
There are an awful lot of pretty smart people that haven't been able to find skills worth more $$ here.
One of the nice things about the German economy is that it's the responsibility of the employer, and the government, to teach people new valuable skills. There was a story in I think the Wall Street Journal about a German welder who was laid off because his company's sales were slowing down. He got unemployment insurance that gave him about the same income he was getting when he was employed. And he was ta
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Funny)
What a brilliant idea; I completely agree! But... how to make it happen? I mean, this is just two people on Slashdot, we can't do much.
Maybe, and bear with me here, maybe we could get other people to join in. We could all push together for these rights. Not just people we know or are in contact with though, that wouldn't be enough. We'd need a whole organisation, country (or even world) wide. People could join to have a say in our policies and how we apply pressure to get our aims! (For a small cost, of course... I don't know about you, but I certainly don't have the resources to run something like this for free.)
With enough people on board, all demanding the same thing, we could truly be heard! Some employers may not wish people to join, but we could offer our resources to protect people, ensure that they are free to be represented, protected from mistreatment, and that when we are able to get these laws changed, that the new systems we fought for are actually followed.
If only there was some kind of system for uniting people in this way... Alas, it's just a pipedream.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh. I'm getting old, but the first and last time I had a chance to get a pension was decades ago. A retirement date with a pension is no longer offered at most companies. Given the whipsaw of the economy, I've seen people's lives upended by crashes of their ESOP or 401k's -- so defined-contribution hasn't panned out as promised, either.
Banksters raided those funds with impunity; some got rich, nobody got prosecuted for screwing some old machinist out of his pension. The few remaining pension mechanisms are raided or underfunded until pensioners can go 20+ years without ever seeing a cost of living increase as big as inflation, meaning they're spiralling downward annually.
Healthcare in the US is the number one bankrupter of people. Not so over there.
Here, we obsess with saving our jobs. There, life balance is better whenever it's measured.
We skip vacations, work thru lunch. They do neither. And get more holidays and vacation time. Some have shorter work weeks.
How exactly do you measure that it sucks to be them, because from what I'm seeing, it's not too shabby.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Here, we obsess with saving our jobs. There, life balance is better whenever it's measured."
I've been there I would never say its better, in fact I feel sad for them, there is no exceptional-ism, most of time I've stayed always left with a feeling they are just existing, not for the worse but not fort he best either.
"We skip vacations, work thru lunch. They do neither. And get more holidays and vacation time. Some have shorter work weeks"
That's a choice people make, I can't say for others. I enjoy my work so I do extraordinary well at it. IMHO go there if you like that stuff, no one would stop you unless they they have a harder stance on immigration than the U.S which oddly enough they do.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because doing everything yourself is inherently inefficient. And it's contrary to the crux benefit of society: efficiencies of specialization.
I **CAN** do all these things. I really don't want to, and it wastes time I could spend focusing on my strengths and enjoying my life outside of work.
First, renegotiating my pay rarely (at best, once a year) puts me at a disadvantage to my employer who hires someone who focuses on negotiation nonstop. I'm also weakened because they can lie / leverage me against other employees or contractors. They know what everyone makes, I may not. They can be experts at the communication aspects of pay negotiation -- a colleague who is mildly autistic ends up getting screwed as a result.
Making good healthcare decisions? Nice sideline, but I don't want to need an MD to dig into the deep nuances of whether my specific medical condition means I need a CAT scan or an MRI or just a few minutes with a doctor listening to me breathe. I want a regulated agent acting on my behalf.
This whole thing is doublespeak: when people stand together, employees benefit at the expense of shareholders. There is no people vs. union dichotomy here, there's just intense value to winning the debate over splitting the profits among the interested parties: a company has a professional staff paid incredibly well to focus on profits to shareholders. Employees need the same, whether it is a guild, a union, or your hinted-at ideas on protections for individuals (who will hopefully get this information out of their employer so that their rights are better protected).
I'm getting really tired of reading of how a social worker or teacher or factory employee is overpaid, but investment bankers make 1000x as much 'but it's earned'. Ditto on big bad union rants. I don't see it as coincidence that union-busting parallels the downturn in inflation-adjusted incomes in the USA.
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and in case you're totally brain dead, strengthening the rights of individuals is EXACTLY what unions do.
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Maybe co-ops would be a better idea...
Apparent to who?? (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't heard of any either, but I could clearly see a white collar information technology union. The need for one is quite apparent.
Odd, I have not seen a need to have my paycheck garnished in order to pay the wages of a bunch of executives who do nothing for me. You already get enough of that with company management as it is.
As financial conditions deteriorate, and simultaneously the need for more IT labor increases, the more management is pressured to "get more for less."
As the need for IT labor increases so does the amount you can ask to be paid, and the greater the opportunity to switch jobs for higher pay.
Eventually there has to be a breaking point.
We reached it a while ago. Unions are broken, and developers are way too rational to bring long term harm on themselves for short term gain.
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Re:Apparent to who?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unions are especially broken for software development. It's not like something like driving a bus, where no matter how good you are at it, you're roughly at the same level of productivity. There have been studies that have shown that a good software developer can be twenty times as productive as a poor one. I'm currently working for an organization that has a union. Current project tracking shows be between 6 and 10 times the output of the next person, yet we get paid the same (and I also have several other responsibilities). With the union, we get paid the same. When it's time for a raise, we get the same. It batters your incentive a bit on occasion. You frequently run into people are so bad that they actually have negative productivity (also paid the same) and managers tolerate a lot because there's a lot of work to do to get rid of someone. The only real way out of it is to do the same thing you would do without a union ... leave, and find something better. Ideally, you would negotiate your own salary and benefits.
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There are unions that don't force employers to treat everybody the same, such as the Major League Baseball Players' Association. The AMA and ABA also serve some of the functions of unions, but I haven't looked at them as carefully.
In most places, being 6 or 10 times as productive as the next developer will get you no more than double the pay. Nothing to sneeze at, but top MLB players make far more than their more average counterparts.
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Except for the fact that you're totally wrong, you're exactly right. Unions may do something this stupid but it goes against experiecne. But the fact is, when unions represent people of vastly disparate skills and values, they increase the income of the top performers at the cost of the mediocre ones.
What example you ask? Look at the player's unions for professional sports. They have minimum wages in the hundreds of thous
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Enjoy seeing your job go overseas because they actually give a damn there.
Re:Does *any* industry start a new union anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
A big problem that I see with white collar office workers is that, traditionally, unions have had to be willing to bust the heads of scabs and besiege workplaces with picket lines to survive (among other things). That's fine if you're Teamsters or other blue-collar workers not afraid to break out bricks and baseball bats when needed in a strike. It's not so easy when you're dealing with office drones who hesitate to say an unkind word.
If your union is going to succeed, you have to be willing to go all the way. And I seriously doubt that you'll ever get than from any professional field. If your employers know that they can just replace you or outsource you with no repercussions (or, more accurately, with no concussions), then you will never have any real bargaining power.
That's not the only big problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
The OTHER big problem with white collar workers is that your job performance and satisfaction are far more likely to be influenced by the performance of your coworkers.
If a guy on the factory floor is slacking, the company's production goes down.
If a guy on your software team is slacking, it can quickly become a pain in your ass.
A tech union would just open the door for workers who can't perform to vote themselves protections that limit the compensation and satisfaction of the workers who do perform well.
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> IT workers can be especially painful to people financially, when motivated to do so. Black hats aren't people to take lightly.
"If you smash my other knee with that baseball ball, I *SWEAR* to God I will change your password and sign you up for more spam than you can possibly imagine!"
NEWS: Higher pay no longer important. (Score:5, Insightful)
"because traditional workplace demands like higher pay are not important to us"
Since when is higher pay simply "not important"?
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Since when is higher pay simply "not important"?
Since many software developers make far more money than they need to survive.
I could accept a pay cut of $20K - $30K without significantly affecting my life. And I would consider that a reasonable tradeoff for a job that was significantly better in non-monetary ways.
Re:NEWS: Higher pay no longer important. (Score:4, Insightful)
*said the single guy with no kids.
Re:NEWS: Higher pay no longer important. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:NEWS: Higher pay no longer important. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the main reason developers don't need a union. Unions are for supporting interchangeable employees. Devlopers have very specific skill sets. Generally speaking, most high end professions don't have unions: doctors, lawyers, engineers.
You might be able to unionize at a particluarly large shop (Google, Microsoft, etc.), but most of them are already paying top dollar for top talent. No, about the only place I could see unionizing happen is at some place like Zynga.
Re:NEWS: Higher pay no longer important. (Score:4, Informative)
Except for AMA, ABA, and NSPE, you're exactly right.
And those totally interchangeable cogs, like screenwriters, actors, and professional athletes all have unions as well.
Re:NEWS: Higher pay no longer important. (Score:5, Informative)
Since when is higher pay simply "not important"?
Tech workers, engineers, etc. usually negotiate salary on a one-on-one basis. Based on skills, commitments, etc.
:)
Traditional unions (the ones with red flags) would crack down hard on performance based bonus systems.
However, I'm a student member of a union in Denmark, for engineers, etc. They are not like traditional unions but are mostly here to help, if you need guidance, or want to sue your employer for wrongful conduct, discrimination or whatever...
Futhermore, they also offer a fairly good unemployment insurance
But mostly, it's benefits, job training, networking, etc. and not so much salary negotiations, although they can help with that.
Not Going to Happen (Score:5, Insightful)
The second a union starts, the company closes the local shop and outsources all development to a place where unions are illegal.
Manufacturers at least have a direct cost associated with moving a factory; most costs attributed to outsourcing are intangible in development and are thus usually ignored by PHBs.
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It's time for a tariff on foreign labor.
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Re:Not Going to Happen (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why developers are typically hired in "at-will" jurisdictions. If California wasn't at-will, Silicon Valley would be elsewhere.
Re:Not Going to Happen (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that developers do not have unions has nothing to do with the idealized geek fantasy. It has to do with developers being able to change jobs as needed and increase salary over time. It has to do with so many on H1B visa programs that would be terminated if unions were to be an issue.
Unions, like corporations, provide value through stability and well known brands and point of contact. For instance, if one needs a crane operator, a union can insure a business acquires a skilled person who will be accepted by the insurance company. The union provides predictability in budgeting. Some workers complain about paying fees, and some employers complain about paying living wages, but like Governor Christie, are appreciative of the service when disaster strikes.
So I am not surprised that developers are looking at unions. More developers have families, so they want to be judged on efficiency rather than hours at the office. Many don't want the inefficiencies caused by frequent job moves, in which much of the costs are shifted to the employee, so want to know that job stability is a possibility. Many are getting to retirement age, and realize the party is over.
Unions are archaic (Score:4, Insightful)
Before the Internet, and before the common man had access to rally others, communicate to the masses, and see others' opinions, unions had value.
They kept child labor in the mines but made more money for the children's parents and for the union bosses.
Today unions are obsolete. The only people who advocate unions are the unions themselves, and those who've already joined that now want to "haze" everyone else because "they got hazed."
Sorry, jack. No unions.
E
Re:Unions are archaic (Score:5, Interesting)
Unions are archaic because workers can trust employers to treat them decently.
The video game industry is a perfect example.
ORGANIZE!
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You can "demand" it all you want, but it's far easier to actually get it when you band together with your fellow co-workers. Management is organized and bands together; why shouldn't the employees?
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It's quite nice to have professionals negotiating on your behalf when the company you work for decides to sack a lot of people, or when a company decides to not follow the law. Strength in numbers is still valid.
Re:Unions are archaic (Score:5, Insightful)
If this is what unions did in practice, I'd agree. My (limited) experience with unions and my wife's much more extensive experience shows that they spend most of their energies defending the weakest people in their membership roles. People who, by any objective standard, should be fired. They shift the whole focus of the workforce from "are we achieving the goal?" to "are we following the rules?". Further, they tend to be run by long-time union members and not by people with a professional background in business, finance, etc. Finally, they poison our political atmosphere - we have very weak rules in the US about who can throw money around. Government unions are a total scam, and private unions often get public officials involved in what should be a private business matter. I won't get into physical intimidation, since I'm sure you'd agree that is a black eye that unions are notorious for. To be fair, employers were the ones who were notorious for this in the past.
I think the concept of the union is sound and I think they should be commended for some of their past achievements. I just think we need serious reform of the current practice, which is self-defeating.
Re: (Score:3)
My gut reaction is that you are right. That said, usually these situations call for some regulation... after all, a corporation is a government fabrications, so it makes sense to have a labor equivalent.
Re: (Score:3)
So if I and most of my coworkers decide to voluntarily exercise our individual right to freedom of association, and form a group to negotiate on our behalf, I take it that's OK. And if the company voluntarily negotiates a deal with us according to mutually acceptable terms, that's all good. And if one of the terms of that deal is that the company agrees not to hire people who aren't members of our group...
Unions, and "union shops" are an emergent result of people exercising their individual rights collect
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you work for a company that treats its employees badly and or doesn't follow the law, then it's time to look for a new company to work for. Companies that don't do the right thing, don't last long. You have more power acting on your own behalf than you ever will following a union.
Re:Unions are archaic (Score:4, Insightful)
Facilitating communication is, at best, a secondary (if necessary) function of unions. Unions serve as collective bargaining platforms to somewhat level an otherwise inherently unbalanced power relationship. I don't know about the specific unions you're talking about, and I don't care. There are many kinds of unions, and they don't share many attributes regarding their internal structure. I do know that fundamentally nothing has changed regarding the imbalance of power.
Unions may be archaic, but so is human society.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Organized labor is the only way to ensure a balance of power. Unfortunately, its authority is just as corruptible as all other authority. No more, no less.
Re:Unions are archaic (Score:5, Insightful)
Unions may seem useless in the USA, but in Europe they actually matter, which is probably why my country has a union for developers. In Europe, unions represent employees when negotiating working rules.
For instance, this means that very few European countries actually have minimum wage laws, because the minimum wag 'laws' are agreements between unions and employers. The idea is to keep government out of working rules (I am beginning to feel this is not the actual term in English), but rather let it remain between the employees (unions) and employers (corporations). However, unions have some rights (e.g. strikes) to protect their negotiation position. Employers too have rights.
I do not see a problem with this system.
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They kept child labor in the mines but made more money for the children's parents and for the union bosses.
Unions in the US started denouncing child labor as far back as 1832 and continued to push for banning of child labor until they got it banned nationally over a century later in 1938 (source [uiowa.edu]).
The purpose of a union is that if pay and/or working conditions are intolerable, workers have something of value to bargain with. If 1 guy quits, the company is just a bit shorthanded until they can hire somebody else, while that employee starves. If 10,000 guys quit all at once, it's harder for the company to deal wit
Who wants one (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would you want a Union? My observation is that Unions drag everything to the mediocre. It drags down the top performers and brings up the dead wood. If i'm a top performer I can do better for myself on my own. I guess if I'm a bottom feeder I'm interested, but probably too lazy to to care.
Well, I suppose developers would have to want one. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't This Exacerbate Outsourcing Concerns? (Score:3)
What about overtime, benefits, conditions for contractors and outsourcing concerns?
Disclaimer: I am pro unions for services that are needed but cannot operate in the manner of a traditional capitalistic model like teaching and nursing. I am anti-union when it comes to goods and services that are not a critical need for society and should survive by their own objective merit and quality.
As a software developer myself, wouldn't unions exacerbate outsourcing concerns? I mean the whole point of what a picket line and a scab was centered around the fact that unionized workers that went on strike would have to physically stop workers from accessing the factory floor to work for less than the unionized workers. I would think that if developers did this, the picket line would be virtual and foreign or even out of state developers would find it easy to work remotely to fulfill the customer's needs. So could someone explain to me how a union could address outsourcing concerns? I think a union would make a potential development house shy away from going local for fear that they would have to deal with a union and then once in that position would not be able to go elsewhere for development work.
Missed one... (Score:5, Insightful)
while traditional unions are incapable of advocating for what developers care about most while at work: autonomy and self-management
They missed one other one: Unions are also incapable of supporting performance-based rewards and promotion, something tech sector workers appreciate. The notion that seniority trumps all else would not go over well in my workplace, nor former workplaces.
Counterexample (Score:3)
The Screen Actor's Guild clearly allows spectacular pay for outstanding actors.
Outsourced (Score:2)
I can't think of a faster way to send more development jobs to China/India than to unionize. Globalization largely blocks the benefit of unionizing in our industry, whether you are for or against unions is beside the point.
Companies that hire here value a level of service and language skill as a cost of doing business. You start reducing the cost-benefit of that relationship, and they will start shipping more jobs overseas.
Union Attempts in the Past (Score:2, Insightful)
Unions have been attempted in the past for IT personel. There is a reason they always fail. That reason is the general Union mentality that a degree is required to do anything high level. Many high level people in IT currently have no degree, or got the degree while already in the workplace.
That is just one reason. There are many others. Myself, yes I know I am posting anonymous, I do not support unions in IT. As the only degree I have is a G.E.D. and 21 years experience.
Union Programmers (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine a union that helped get the best workers on a project and making the most. A union that helped weed out the lazy, the incompetent, and the criminals. That would be a union that most people would not oppose.. unfortunately the opposite is true: seniority rules, criminals are coddled, lawsuits are filed, work slowdowns are part of the union bag of tricks.
Unions have no place for the programming industry.. except in government where we expect cost overruns and shoddy results. To start a programming union would be to hasten the outsourcing of your job. Besides, programming jobs are one of the most in-demand careers out there. If you can't make good money without a union, you should bone up on your skills.
Councils not Unions (Score:2)
I reject the idea of unions for IT professionals. I wholeheartedly agree with belonging to professional groups (they seem to be pretty rare) for sharing information and organizing informally. I don't see lawyer's unions or doctor's unions and don't see the need for IT unions.
It depends on the programming language (Score:5, Funny)
In C, it's pretty simple, though of course if you want a discriminated union you'll probably end up stuffing it into a struct along with a field that tells you how to interpret the union.
High Job Availability = no need for a union. (Score:3)
Why would I want to belong to a union when the most of the power is on the developer's side? There's not enough developers to go around and thus plenty of job availability. Unions are meant to solidify workers rights in a situation where labor is plentiful, but that's nowhere near the case. Companies fight over us. I just made a decision between 3 offers this week to accept a new job. The power was in my hand.
Barriers to entry (Score:2)
Software development has almost no barriers to entry. You need a computer, some development tools, and network access. These are easily within reach of any developer (and in fact any developer who loves what they do will already own these for "recreational c
Large Libertarian Contingent (Score:3)
Technical unions? I don't think so! (Score:5, Interesting)
Today, unions exist to protect jobs - meaning that a poorly performing worker is protected and cannot be fired.
Technical people admire knowledge, ability and competence above anything else. And they are disgusted by incompetence, which makes everybody's work more difficult.
The idea of actually protecting incompetence (via unions) goes against the whole technical culture. No, unions are not coming to the development community.
A lot more able developers (Score:4, Insightful)
Unions exist in situations where management is negotiating from a place of power and replacement workers are easy to find. They allow the collective workforce to get a better deal than they would individually.
Meanwhile, there is a shortage of capable developers and we have the power in most negotiations. Why do we need a union if we can just demand what we want and get it? In our industry, companies have even been caught uniting against workers [techcrunch.com].
Unions are a tool and developers are taught to us the right tool for the job. When the situation demands a union, we'll unionize, but there's no point in doing that until there are a ton more capable developers to compete with for jobs.
It will happen when conditions get bad enough. (Score:4, Interesting)
Communism may have failed, but class warfare is alive and well. A worldwide depression, or even that of a few nations like the USA, India China or Europe would probably kick start a move to unions. I have no doubt that even if wages were to drop to Bangladesh levels, that prices on most items in these countries wouldn't budge downward very much. Price structure and wage structure are increasingly out of sync. At a certain point, when nobody in IT is making enough to live on, unionization will occur, along with a the sharpening of some makerbot printed guillotines. The speed with which "libertarians" become socialists will be quite amusing.
Re: (Score:3)
Apparently, you thought I was making a political statement. In fact, I was noting human behavior. Hungry people don't give a rat's ass about "liberty" or "rights" or the constitution or other points of theology. When you can't pay the heating bill, and your children are hungry, the first organization that comes along and solves those problems wins. If unions succeed in this, that's what people will support. If the government does it, then more government is people will clamor for.
In no case that I can see w
We don't need a union (Score:3)
The snarky answer is... (Score:3)
Some baseball bats, ice picks, the occasional incendiary device.
And it will be all for naught, because as soon as you unionize, you will be outsourced. And the people still doing the job who are still in this country will be the ones who have programming, organization, and communication skills not found in offshore development. And don't belong to a union. In the current business environment, unions only work for people who must be on-site, or are adequately politically connected. Or both.
Tech is my hobby, I've chosen another field. (Score:3)
In pursuing school and deciding on which direction to go, I had decided to choose accounting as it seems to provide a stable field, while still allowing me the personal time to follow my interests with technology. I've been reading here at /. for a few years, and with the many complaints I see about the way the software industry or field of systems administration are treated and abused, along with the non-industry related troubles, has been a big turn off from choosing either of those fields as my primary skill.
However, I do love computers and networks and exploring code and programming and intend to follow with an education in one of the related fields. But whether or not I choose that for my employment is another issue. So during the day I shall be Justin the programmer-accountant and by night I shall defend the universe of light from the forces of darkness.
Never saw so much ignorance about unions (Score:3)
This question about unions for IT people comes up about once a year on Slashdot. Every single time you see the same damn bullshit from people who have no fucking clue what a union is or how it works.
1) The members (workers) have to vote on the contract. Don't like it? Don't vote for it. And you don't pay any dues until the first contract is negotiated.
2) Think performance bonuses are a good idea? Fine. Keep 'em. It's your contract. You can make the contract read whatever you'd like.
3) All the contract is is a legally binding document that spells out the work rules so management can't arbitrarily change them. If they do break the rules, you've got a legally binding contract to back you up. Imagine, you can keep all the same rules and procedures you have in place now except they could actually be enforced.
Take deep breaths people. If unions get the support and input from their members, they can be one of the best ways to empower workers and and make the company a better and more profitable place.
Comment removed (Score:3)
What would it take? (Score:3)
A hole in my head.
Competent software developers are a rare commodity. Companies are the ones competing to attract the talent. We are not the dime-a-dozen crowd that can be treated poorly and compensated minimally. If we're not happy with our employer there are 50 waiting in the wings to snatch us up. If we leave our employer they lose the significant investment in both time and money that they made in us to be productive with their environment.
In 2011 software developers ranked number one for having the "best" job in both 2011 [careercast.com] and 2012 [careercast.com]. Why the hell would any of us want to slap our employers in the face for treating us well? To suggest that we should form a union is about as stupid and counter productive as trying to suggest that every pub in Ireland should replace the Guinness taps with Bud Lite.
There are Engineering/IT Unions in the US (Score:3)
A good union: The Animation Guild (Score:3)
Check out The Animation Guild [animationguild.org], IATSE Local 839, AFL-CIO. The Animation Guild represents artists and computer graphics workers in Southern California. Computer graphics people at Cartoon Network, Dreamworks, Fox, Hasbro, Marvel, Nicolodeon, Sony, Disney, and Warner are all in that union local.
What do they get for it? Here's a summary of current contracts. [animationguild.org] First, there's a union wage scale, but it's a minimum. Most workers are paid more than "scale". Second, hours worked and overtime pay are strictly enforced. More than 8 hours per day, overtime pay. More than 40 hours per week, overtime pay. More than 5 days per week, overtime pay. These multiply, so that if you work 14 hours on a Sunday, the hourly rate is huge. Movie projects have "crunches" too, and when they do, the employees get paid a lot of money. This is why production scheduling and budgeting are taken very seriously in Hollywood. So seriously that there are completion bond companies [filmfinances.com] which, if a project gets too far behind, have the authority to fire the director and producer and put in their own people.
The Animation Guild also runs a pension fund. They point out that the Guild has been around longer than all but two animation studios. Hanna-Barbera (Flintstones, Jetsons, etc. and Walter Lanz (Woody Woodpecker), once big names in animation, are long gone; the Animation Guild is still there.
I've run into an IATSE organizer at SIGGRAPH meetings. They've tried to organize the video game industry, but so far, without success. In Redwood City, Electronic Arts and Dreamworks have adjacent buildings. Dreamworks is union; EA is not. The working conditions at EA are much worse.
Feasibility of Strikes (Score:3)
Petroleum Engineer here, working with research.
I can tell for myself, engineers don't have much reason to strike. Why? Because it's usually pointless, there's no short-term damage to the employer. If an engineer doesn't show up, work simply goes on.
An engineer on the field has to strike for a few weeks/months to even begin to be noticed. In my case, working with research, I would have to strike for at least one year to do some real harm to my employer.
Engineers aren't useless; the most I know are well worth what they earn. But they influence mainly the future profits of the company, while blue-collar works have a direct influence on the daily profits, not to mention the quarter results.
Striking just isn't a nice strategy for white-collar workers. Threatening to go to a competitor is.
Now if people could threaten to move entire work groups to a competitor... that would be a negotiation I would like to see.
Facts about union jobs (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/ [forbes.com]
Frederick E. Allen
12/21/2011 @ 5:42PM |60,178 views
How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much
In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.
How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”
There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that this goes
against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.
At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/tale-two-systems [remappingdebate.org]
A tale of two systems
By Kevin C. Brown
Remapping Debate
Dec. 21, 2011
American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive....
But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, Anonymous Coward is on board. Great.
Re:contradictio in terminis: Union for more autono (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm live and work in Europe
...where you already have 4+ weeks vacation, sane working hours, protection from dismissal without cause, guaranteed health care if you do lose your job, and so on and so forth. Understandable that you don't see the appeal of a better contract.
Re: (Score:3)
It's VERY difficult to READ YOUR posts WHEN you CAPITALIZE random words AND PHRASES. PLEASE stop.
Re: (Score:3)
The fact GGP's post makes no sense at all tells all.
There might be some companies who can't identify good (or 'rock star') programmers. But programmers that vent like the GGP are always air thieves who are convinced they are unrecognized rock stars themselves.
Re: (Score:3)
Most labor unions are led by whoever wins a majority vote in the union elections.
They might be communists, they might not be. But whoever it is has to keep the support of at least half the union membership.