A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn't(computerworld.com) |
A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn't(computerworld.com) |
Happy to answer questions about how it all works - there are only about ~6000 dev/product/design/qa employees in the U.S., so there is very little first hand experience to go around.
Among other things that my coworkers and I secured by bargaining collectively are:
- Guaranteed remote work.
- Guaranteed forty hour work week, with compensatory time within two weeks if management asks us to work overtime.
- Not on call 24/7/365. Everyone is in a defined rotation, and you are guaranteed three hours off just for being on call for a week, and a whole day if you receive a call. I believe that partly because of this policy, after hours incidents are extremely infrequent now.
- Guaranteed floor on wage increases every year.
- Just cause for discipline. People still get terminated if they don't do the work, but if you want it (and almost everyone does) there is an elected coworker in your corner to guide you through a PIP and make sure standards are enforced evenly. You can't suddenly be terminated for no reason. - Extra time off each year through self-directed times between sprints and quarterly increments.
- Right to review all code done by outside contractors if you're going to have to maintain it in the future.
You can see the wage brackets in our collective bargaining agreement here: https://tinyurl.com/dmucontract
The problem is that the people that DO want them, want to force it on those that don't, usually by labor law.
Yet, ~50% of Americans voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to them; a paradox.
That said, with only about ~10% of Americans being employed in a union role, it's more like the grass is greener on the other side than an actual understanding of the pros and cons of union membership.
Many of us have worked in $MEGACORPS with substantial union representation among the employees, have seen what it does and how it works in practice, and as a result want nothing to do with it. I wasn't represented due to my job classification, but now due to my firsthand exposure to unions I absolutely never will be by choice.
No way, no how, not ever.
Less than half of the US population voted in the last election. ~50% of Americans _who voted_ voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to unions, but that group is only ~23% of _Americans_.
This also matches what Democratic-leaning pollsters like David Shor have said in their own analyses.
The reason I consider it a threat is that it allows either party to meta-game the fact that many voters can be persuaded to vote against their own interests.
Collective bargaining vis-a-vis unionization allows workers to more effectively push back against bullshit like RTO mandates and mass layoffs. They help reign in the massive pay packages to executives who directly benefit from laying folks off. And there's a reason why companies monitor internal communications and engage in retaliatory actions against employees for even discussing organizing. Yes, that's technically illegal under US labor law. But corporations do not care and will accept the risk of a non-guaranteed fine to make an example and enforce a chilling effect for other workers.
The fact that unions aren't a perfect solution to the overwhelming might of capitalist interests at each and every workplace does not mean that unions are bad, worthless, or not on the side of the individual worker. They are designed to make the tilt of power more equitable.
To me, it is simply an organization by workers to collectively bargain with capital (who have their own equivalent to unions). The unions also typically offer unemployment insurance as well as income replacement in case of strikes, which are a possible measure that can be organized by the unions to force capital to come to the negotiation table. An employer has no right to know if you're in a union or not, so it would be quite impractical to try to hire only non-union members, and most companies don't mind either way, because the collective bargain agreements go both ways and can make it simpler than negotiating individual agreements with each employee.
In the US, it seems like unions are what I would call a guild - very highly coupled to a particular profession. Where I'm from they typically accept anyone who works in a general sector (say medical, government, transportation, etc.), as typically most workers in the same sector would have similar challenges and goals.
Besides the legal protections, the primary leverage a union has is the fact that in manufacturing, agriculture, etc., companies start hemorrhaging money if work stops. So a relatively short strike (and thus more easily weathered by the members) can have a massive impact. This worked even before there were legal protections for unions, because the union can strike faster than the company can hire scabs. Of course, prior to the protections, companies could decide that taking the hit was acceptable, and then just hire a bunch of scabs to replace the workers. Or they could threaten the union leaders with violence. Which of course lead to the unions using threats of violence against management and the scabs.
After a couple decades of increasing hostilities, accelerated by the re-introduction of a bunch of combat trained WWI vets back into the workforce, the US established a robust set of worker protections to eliminate the necessity of violence.
About as unevenly as every other human social tribe.
Was part of SEIU at one point. At least where I worked SEIU reps were fucking useless. My team was stuck in a basement with mold growing in the corners. There are so many other layers of by-laws, local, state, federal laws the union was essentially useless.
But people in SEIU elsewhere said they were great. So as always YMMV
Grocers union members where I live, while on strike, tried to block people going in a grocery store to use the pharmacy which was technically on a different labor contract; the grocers union members were to leave pharmacy customers alone. They hassled them anyway. In the end neighbors and community at large ended up being against the grocers union due to a handful of cringe, edgelord members in utilikits over-stepping with their "uh ackshully" shit.
Unions are just more social tribe bullshit for people to leverage as magical words of power.
Google it; there's union success story's and union members suing unions/reps after members claim they were forced into just acquiescing to the rich ownership class anyway.
So much of the western way of life is just the same old rhetorical tribal bullshit, social darwinism no different than how it works among some random clusters of nomadic groups in Africa. Any sort of differentiation is merely semantics and rhetoric.
Bird song and banner logo, whether they bleed for prophet or prophecy are the only things humans can claim to make them different. Roughly same old human meat suits end of the day.
I am 100% all in on letting the robots, monitored by subject matter experts, make sure shit gets made and ending this forced obligation to kowtow and prostrate ourselves to other clearly normal and ultimately forgettable meat suits like most middle managers and union leaders, etc etc
This reflects poorly on the neighbors more than the union members, IMO.
I don't know enough about the history and structure to understand if the current tech union movement is more of the same or if there is some reform included.
My fear is that union leadership will just attract someone from another completely different industry, who has no passion for computing, no experience, but wield tremendous power in how employees and employers conduct business. I'm not OK with that. I don't want some 65 year old curmudgeon MBA type politically connected bozo telling everyone what they can and cannot do. These types of committees and decision making are a killjoy and harm creativity.
There's just no way to guarantee that union leaders are regular folks like us who aren't power hungry but want to truly help the people. It rarely ever ends up attracting clean, nice, good personalities and then end up in cahoots with other nefarious players.
Having said all that, I would like to see a few changes in the industry:
- Interviews. The process is a complete mess right now. If we could standardize on a few things, that would go a long way. Guaranteed yes or no feedback immediately after the last step. Capping the process to just 2 days. You phone call, initial screen. Come in, meet the team, problem solve something real. Lunch. Some more team sessions to solve real problems, and then done at 2PM. Feedback at 4PM. No ghosting, no "oh we hired someone internally", no week long writing assignments and coding sessions to reverse a linked list.
- Salary. Just post the exact salary on the listing, without ranges. And then just tell the candidate up front, this is the salary. That's it. Stop with the tremendous waste of time on the back and forth. RSUs, etc. also posted full transparency. And just say "no negotiations, this is it".
- Layoffs. Provide a good cushion for the person to find a new role, health insurance. We're not asking for much here, just give the young folk less time and older folk more time since ageism is real.
Notice the story has cubicals, how nice! Most these stories are pretty old. I suspect because there are less jobs in some big F500 campus with colocated engineering, accounting, etc and a unionized manufacturing plant all in the same place.
1. Get people to change sides. This is difficult: people who already vote in a particular way are unlikely to change because of external pressures (and in fact, are more likely to dig their heels in if challenged on their views); or
2. Get more people to vote. This can be challenging in its own way, but can also just boil down to logistics problems.
Whether or not 100% voter turnout would have the same results is neither here nor there. If you accept that premise + the premise that the vast majority of American voters vote down the party line for one of the major two, then you have potentially 2x the number of voters for your desired outcome. All you have to do is go find them and get them to vote.