I'm not against unions in general or in principle, but some implementations are not great.

I suspect like some folks here, my personal (negative) interactions with unions have turned me off of unions in general. I worked at an unionized shop when I first graduated and while I recognize some of the positives the union brought, there were also many downsides.

Some examples:

- Nepotism. We had an open position we couldn't fill for over a year because one of the union leader's son was graduating soon and that position was reserved for him.

- General complacency. Raises and promotions for the most part weren't based on performance, but rather tenure. Many people start off ambitious but end up just doing the minimum over time because there is no reward in trying too much.

- Strange (from my perspective) rules. I couldn't have more than one CAD going at one time, and because CAD is backlogged the turn around time was super long. This meant for long stretches of time I couldn't do any work. But I also couldn't leave. I read a lot of wikipedia pages during this time.

Eventually I got super bored, didn't see any growth potential and wasn't learning much so I left.

I assume not all unions are like this, but I do hear things similar to this from others (many on this thread) quite often as well.

> Nepotism. We had an open position we couldn't fill for over a year because one of the union leader's son was graduating soon and that position was reserved for him.

I don't know of any industry where this doesn't happen. Certainly in tech there's plenty of anecdata about nepotism in hiring, no unions required.

> General complacency. Raises and promotions for the most part weren't based on performance, but rather tenure. Many people start off ambitious but end up just doing the minimum over time because there is no reward in trying too much.

Again, this doesn't differ much from non-union industry. Anecdotally (I know) almost every silicon valley tech company seems to have poor ratings in their internal polls for "we fire/retrain low performers". This isn't a problem that is unique to unions, nor can I see any evidence that it's worse in unionized workplaces.

Here's a fact about unions: Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages. [1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf

> Here's a fact about unions: Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages.

According to the paper you referenced, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in private industries and under the category "Management, professional, and related occupations" employees earned more actually – $35.70/h – compared to workers represented by unions, who earned an average of $32.95/h.

I would assume the majority of software engineers work in private industries, thus would fall under the aforementioned category, and as a result would actually earn more by not joining a union. Am I missing something here?

Furthermore, it's unclear whether those wages include other types of compensation, such as stock grants and bonuses for example, in which case the difference would be even greater.

Here's the relevant paragraph.

> In private industry, there is a different pattern among workers in this occupational group: those represented by unions earned an average of $32.95 per hour, while those not represented by unions earned $35.70 per hour. The wage advantage for nonunion workers in this occupational group reflects the concentration of union workers in certain relatively low-paying occupations in business and financial operations, such as claims adjusters, accountants, and training specialists.

Thank for pointing this out. The 18% figure is from the global average and that analysis of the private industry number certainly suggests that as unions become more prevalent in higher-paying occupations the trend there will reverse.

Indeed, but in the private industry there is also a different pattern in compensation, as in addition to a base salary, private employers offer bonuses and stock awards, situation which is not accounted for in the study, as far as I can tell [1]. Do unions also negotiate bonuses and stock awards? I'm unfamiliar to how they operate.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ncbr0002.pdf

As other commenters have said, the paper continues on to include an analysis that suggests the descrepancy is not due to some unique characteristic of the private sector but rather the concentration of union jobs in relatively low paying occupations in private industry. This and other BLS published reports suggest, therefor, that unions like the kickstarter union will ultimately put upward pressure on wages in professional occupations.

I think the paper as it stands is deficient. As I've mentioned in my previous comment, in the tech sector particularly, compensation is a combination of salary, stocks, bonuses, etc.

Unless it adopts a more rigorous methodology, the paper paints a limited picture. [1]

For example, according to PayScale, Google pays on average $15,030 in annual employee bonuses (anywhere from $1,000 to $80,000), and for comparison, Facebook pays $12,860. These numbers will have a significant effect on hourly compensation.

Unfortunately, statistical analysis is tricky to get right, and plenty of papers contain errors and omissions, and I'm not necessarily saying that's the case here, but one ought to be aware. More on this topic, in case anyone is interested – Statistics Done Wrong [2]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ncbr0002.pdf

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593276206

I don't know what those numbers mean. As a programmer, I am a salaried employee whose compensation doesn't fluctuate with the amount of time I spend working. Working fewer hours and working from home are direct improvements to my compensation which don't get quantified in my earnings.

Nepotism and complacency both exist in non-union work places sure. Just from my own experience, and hearing stories from those around me, they seem to be both more prevalent and more severe with unions.

Of course this is anecdotal and I don't have data to prove one way or the other. All I can say is, given the choice I'd rather not be in an union for my next job.

I think if we want unions to be more common place and more embraced, a good place to improve are some of the ones we currently have.

Which is what kickstarter employees are doing by joining an established union local. If you want to improve the unions we have then join them and run for positions in your local chapter. Advocate for the changes you want to see in unions.

> Average union wages are 18% higher than non-union wages.

Couldn't this be because you raise the wages of all the underperformers and lower the wages of the top performers?

If you have a team where a few rockstars make $100K and the average and underperformers make $60K, the average pay could be said to increase if you simply make everyone's wage $72K. But that sucks for the top performers and really is only a good deal if you are at or below average.

It could also be because everybody got an 18% raise across the board. This is an under-researched topic in employment statistics and I would love to see a better understanding of cause and effect behind wage discrepancies in union and non-union positions.

> a few rockstars make $100k

My problem with this narrative is that I have never worked somewhere where the "10x rockstar" was actually that, or wasn't also toxic in some other way. All we have here are competing versions of anecdata about high-vs-low performers.

I also take issue with the reverse causation you seem to imply - that somebody making 60k is a low performer. That seems to assume that companies are good at actually identifying performance and compensating fairly for it.

> I also take issue with the reverse causation you seem to imply - that somebody making 60k is a low performer.

I never implied that. The only information I gave you were the respective salaries of the high and low performers. I as a developer know who the average and low performers are but I can only guess at their salaries. I don't want a union boosting their pay while reducing mine in order to raise the "average" pay.

Except my point is exactly this - if you can only guess at the salaries of average and low performers than you have nothing to suggest that they aren't, in fact, paid more than you, and a union coming in would boost your salary and not theirs.

This does not sound like what (little, I admit) I know about unions. If the union is in charge of hiring, promotion and even the content of your work, it seems the union is effectively running the company.

Dutch unions, as far as I know, negotiate employment contracts, employment standards and general working conditions with employers and the government. A lot of Dutch economic decisions are made in a committee with representatives of the government, employer organisations, and the unions. In many industries there are standards about what someone in a certain position should get paid, but hiring, promotions and bonuses are based on performance.

Union membership is also not mandatory, but some employers encourage it, and unions provide services for their members.

This seems to me like the right way to do unions, but stories about unions in other countries (the US in particular) often come across as completely nuts.

I'm not sure where you see the big difference. Dutch unions negotiate employment contracts, so it's easy to see how unions end up 'in charge of hiring, promotion and the content of your work'. Union power is ultimately rooted in the threat of striking to bring down the firm: there's no particular area of company policy such an organisation can't take control of.

Thus the powers unions obtain not only in the US but also for instance the UK, is entirely predictable - nothing stops them taking over the firm and unions are very frequently run by open communists who see it as a moral imperative to do so.

A good example is Unite in the UK, run by Len McCluskey:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Len_McCluskey

In a speech at the 2010 Durham Miners' Gala he said political developments in Cuba and Venezuela should be better known, and suggested the reason they were not was because of "the fear of the good example".

Not surprisingly when major unions are led by people who think Venezuela is a "good example", people learn that unions are bad news!

You don’t need unions to se nepotism, complacency and arbitrary rules ubiquitous in a corporate environment.

You do need a union if you want to have a voice in those issues though

To make this discussion maybe a little bit more solution oriented, what would be your solution to problems of labor mistreatment? Or do you suggest that nothing like that exists?

I recently came across an interesting talk by Richard Wolff at Google [1] which suggests that a great solution would be the democratization of the work place in the form of worker coops. It’s actually a tried and true model that works well in a variety of contexts. It would probably solve the problem you outline as well as make labor mistreatment a lot less common.

1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc

Start a "consulting" business that provides really good pay and benefits to all of the workers. Be very selective about who you let in.

You're now in the business of providing workers for companies that produce stuff. If they want access to your workers, they sign a contract with your company. If some workers don't like working for some particular company, transfer them to places where they like to work.

You've now created a private union that operates on a consensual basis rather than a coercive / adversarial basis.

Some of my peers have thrown around the idea of team hires. Interviewing as a team and working as a team. The team is hired and quits together and is generally a collective that works within itself.

Isn't that now essentially a company that work gets subcontracted out to? or am i missing the joke?

I really like this idea.

Love it. I'd be interested in hiring such a team.

Just to point out the obvious, that doesn't serve the main purpose of the union at all: collective negotiation with the employer.

You haven't described a private union. You've described a co-op - a solution to an entirely different problem - how to deploy capital and labor in an egalitarian way.

Unions exist to counter an existing adversarial and coercive economic relationship with counter-coercion.

It's kind of like saying that instead of using tanks to fight a war you should use really persuasive arguments because then you don't have to use "coercion".

Sure that was the whole point, to broaden the discussion beyond tending the symptoms and trying to get at the causes.

An interesting idea could be to use a union or similar vehicle to start a co-op. Or start to strive for more democratic practices in companies. I actually like the comparisons to consulting companies in the sibling comments which seem to be an attempt at doing something like the outlined, however, with more of a traditional paint on top and probably more vulnerable to coercion in the long run.

Co-ops don't address the causes of coercive economic relations though. If they did they'd be much more common - Walmart and John Lewis both exist but they simply can't compete effectively in the same market. The only way to counter a Walmart is with a union - and a really aggressive one, too.

If you look at the video I posted at least one professor seems to think otherwise and I kind of find his arguments at least worthy to consider. Corporations will by nature have place an emphasis on pleasing owners, which in the case of coops are the workers. So, it doesn’t dispense with competition in general but aligns interests better with workers which should have a profound effect on “coercive economic relations”.

If you just mean that coops just cannot really compete, I would say that’s a myth. Look at Mondragon for example [1] or some large German coops. They also run successful competitors to walmart at leasr in europe. I think that one reason that they are just not as common is a general need to raise capital quickly, general availability of capital and a lack of education. But you are right that none of that is likely to counter an existing monopoly with access to huge capital baring some kind of legislative changes. There is certainly a place for unions.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

You just described a body shop.

Heck this is what is done in India and other countries as well, to get around worker protection rules.

Keep several rota of workers, employ them at firm X. When the 9.999 years of work are up, “switch” the workers to a new firm.

Thus dodging the legal test which states that any worker who has worked at a role for more than 10 years at a single company, is a de facto employee and should be given pension and other recognitions.

Your design degenerates to this situation. The same way Uber degenerated from ride sharing and using surplus resources to people barely squeezing by.

But I mean, how different is that really from any normal corporation that offers its services to other corporations? The issue is still how the workers protect themselves from you (the employer).

This is actually called a PEO (professional employment organization) and is often used for small companies looking to hire workers in foreign countries. The PEO becomes the employer of record and the employee is assigned 100% of the time to the foreign company. It’s pretty neat.

And suddenly you've created Accenture

They literally provide ‘stuff’. Not sure whether it’s actual solutions.

You are basically describing ThoughtWorks.

Except afaict the big agile consultancies underpay relative to tech industry big names.

Source: fmr pivotal labs

Sure - there are overheads in running a company where people like to work, and there's only so much that can come from the top line in a consulting business.

Parent to my comment was responding to somebody suggesting that consultancies provide "really good pay and benefits" and I was suggesting that this isn't true, currently, in the tech industry.

Yeah, I missed that the parent was suggesting good pay and benefits. My point is that the consultancies generally pick one or the other, because otherwise they'd be priced out of the market - even for really good staff that are hard to find elsewhere.

Wasn't this the way the Guilds were operating in the Medieval era?

My friend from Europe explained that this is how companies get around labor laws (for example, laws that restrict the number of hours a given employee can work). Companies essentially hire contractors who are paid higher wages which results in fewer actual positions hired by the company. Now there are fewer positions hired directly by the employer so in-effect, the labor laws haven't impacted much. At least that's how he explained it to me.

I don't understand. What you're describing is individual contracting, no?

The comment above described contracting a company with employees. These employees would than drop be bound by the labor laws.

To my understanding it happens with both individual as well as company based contracting. Unsure which is more prevalant though.

The problem of course is if you give your employees really good pay and benefits you price yourself out of winning any jobs.

This model already exists and does really well in practice. Both clients and employees love it.

That's all fine and good, but now you have to find contracts and compete/bid competitively on RFP's for work.

Why would you pay workers above what they are willing to work for you?

To be able to hire them for a particular unit of work and then let them go once the project is over, without having to worry about labor laws. This kind of flexibility and optionality can be very valuable.

And expensive.

Firm theory has studied this subject in the field of economics. There's a reason there are employees in the world, and not everyone is a contractor.

For tech workers specifically a organization like the AMA that can fight for certain contractual safeguards against death marches, non competes, and abusive IP practices.

For workers in general a UBI that decreases the supply of workers thus increasing their bargaining power.

Yeah, thank you for bringing up UBI! I think UBI is an interesting development and seems like a good part of the solution given our current situation. However, it adresses inequality mostly in terms of redistribution of resources and not really in terms of power.

For example, to finance a UBI large companies like would maybe be taxed more but that money would be evenly distributed across the company, thus, only marginally affecting Sergeys and Larrys position relative to their workers or society. They still remain in control, even though the population at large may have a little more wiggle room. Thus, UBI seems like a great way to make the status quo more tolerable but it wouldn’t really threaten accumulated power. That’s why basically everone in silicon valley is for it. Something like co-ops on the other hand bake in a lot more accountability and checks and balances into companies. This would also affect the distribution of power. But I wouldn’t say that this would be the obvious thing to push for or any kind of silver bullet. As I wrote in another comment, there are multiple sides to these problems (e.g., company and society level).

Thank you for engaging with this question, hope you find some value in my response!

There was an article that I can't find right now about European union practices. Create a union for an entire industry and then leverage union scale to push for government regulation that impacts the entire industry. I'm sure it would be imperfect, but you have to do a solution like that because if you don't, companies will see unions as a competitive disadvantage and prevent them.

The biggest problem is that I and many others see unions as short-sightedly protecting workers while their companies and industries die around them. The last real bastion of union workers in the US is the government and no one is calling their employment model effective.

I totally agree that there are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, you need to involve or support people who are negatively affected by changes (e.g., unions, co-ops, etc.) and, on the other hand, there needs to be effective regulation and decision making in the interest of the overall system of people (e.g., countries or the world).

It’s important to look at both of these sides when considering solutions, I guess I didn’t really do this in my comment. So thank you for this important insight!

To offer some additional thoughts on this, I can recommend the thought provink book Radical Markets by Eric Posner and Glen Weyl. They present quadratic voting (next to some other ideas) as one means of arriving at better regulatory outcomes. To me it’s not a complete or perfect solution but certainly interesting and maybe one piece of the puzzle :)

The solution to problems of lablor mistreatment is to quit and get a job at another company that treats their employees better.

I would argue that today there are many oligopoly type situations where there is actually not too much choice to go around, especially if you are limited in terms of moving about. In these cases unionization or other types of collective action seem more appropriate.

In general, I would argue for more diversity in company structures and better education about alternative organizational models (i.e., talk more openly about the pros and cons of all forms of organization - not only from a profit making but a societal perspective). It seems to me that there is a strong dogma of how things need to be done in start ups. But maybe I am wrong, I am still working at a German University so maybe I am misrepresenting the situation in your country.

Kickstarter is a software firm based in New York. There's no shortage of firms hiring in New York. Kickstarter employees who are unhappy would be able to easily get jobs elsewhere.

However, observe that their goal is not to tackle abusive working practices but apparently to take over the firm and impose a "social justice" agenda on it:

enrich Kickstarter’s charter commitments to creativity, equity, and a positive impact on society

promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table,”

"equity" means equal outcomes e.g. 50% of all jobs being reserved for certain genders, races, etc. "Inclusion" is a codeword for the same thing.

Obviously the goal of forcibly converting Kickstarter into using identity politics based management isn't something they can achieve by just going to work elsewhere, as would be the case if they were being mistreated, because Kickstarter would just hire replacement employees.

>problems of labor mistreatment

i don't think there have been times in tech when employees were paid and overall treated better than today (maybe the boom 20 years ago comes somewhat close). Even more, I think tech employees situation today beats any other mass employment situation in the history of humankind.

This is generally true for full-time engineers. It isn't true for the vast legions of contract workers that stoke the fires of large tech companies.

See, for example https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-apple-contract-wor...

yes, the companies are happy to shaft anybody they can (it is just right now they cant do that to tech employees). And i'm all for rising tide for everybody, for [significant] minimum wage increase, for more protections for contractors, for single payer, safety net and universal college education (and for higher taxes to cover all of it), etc. What i'm saying is that tech employees complaining should understand how much better they are off than everybody else, otherwise it becomes just a self-entitled whining.

Tell it to the tech employees in the game industry.

There’s the issue of TVCs.

As a EU citizen, it always surprise me how the popular retoric about unions is to associate it with lazyness. I think is just undermining of what union actually really are.

I personally found this as a first step toward a perception shift about tech from which we can all benefit.

Unions for instance can help fight this constant non extra paid "after-hours" working culture that force you to do all-nighters and all this kind of crazy shits just because the industry is seen as a bunch of nerds that are that passionate about programming that stay long hours just for the sake of love/passion for the job itself.

My sister worked at a charter school. Because of previous labor violations teachers were not allowed to show up before class started (they could only be there for the official class hours). They also were not allowed to stay late after class.

My sister thought this was ridiculous, how was she supposed to setup her classroom and answer questions afterwards? Unfortunately her boss warned her that coming early and staying late was not allowed.

Once unions start adding work rules like this you'll see a push to disable after-hours emails, banning weekend work, etc. So while the trope of the lazy union worker is deeply flawed, there are some problems for workers who want to go above and beyond (and while most non-tech workers don't get extra compensation for unpaid overtime, tech workers who go above and beyond actually are rewarded with equity)

> Because of previous labor violations teachers were not allowed to show up before class started

So the school was expecting teachers to come in early to setup, not paying them for those hours and punishing those that didn't. This isn't a problem created by labor unions, it is a problem created by exploitative companies. And when the company decided how they would address the issue they decided that pre-class preparation wasn't worth paying for.

Would a potential solution to this be to negotiate with the Unions to raise pay but increase hours worked to include the before/after class setup times? I don't know the particulars, but these sort of disputes can often arise due to a perceived slight on pay increases or similar, which leads to things going a bit batty.

This seems like a punishment inflicted by management, not a concession negotiated by the union.

If Kickstarter can do it, the game industry can do it! Come on, game industry, it's your time to unionize!

Came up at GDC last year.[1] There's Game Workers Unite, but they haven't accomplished much.[2] The biggest success remains The Animation Guild, IATSE local 839.[3] They represent most of the Hollywood studio animators. Much of what their members do is very similar to what game industry employees do.

But they get overtime. From the IATSE contract with Disney:

"... all time worked in excess of eight (8) hours per day or forty (40) hours per week shall be paid at one and one-half (1½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Except as otherwise herein provided: Time worked on the employee’s sixth (6th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at one and one-half (1 ½) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification. Time worked on the employee’s seventh (7th) workday of the workweek shall be paid at two (2) times the hourly rate provided herein for such employee’s classification."

"Crunch time" gets very expensive for employers.

[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/22/17149822/gdc-2018-igda-rou... [2] https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ [3] https://animationguild.org/

Paid overtime is an excellent tool to get some time management discipline into an organization.

Yeah.. Who needs time management when you have crunch time!

For comparison in Japan where the animators union is non-existent or not as strong, the working condition is usually pretty rough to downright horrible.

[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2017-06-07/nhk-pro...

[2] https://kotaku.com/an-insider-s-look-at-working-in-the-anime...

The problem is being treated poorly in gaming is an equilibrium market clearing outcome.

People who want to make games (or discover dinosaur bones, or paint, or do other professions that are correlated with a deep, almost-aesthetic, passion) are competing with other people just like them. Since they tend to be so passionate about these things, they bid each other down. They work just a few more hours a week without pay then the next guy, just because they would so much rather build video games than standard dev work.

And before you know it, the field is treated worse. But it's an equilibrium worse, brought about by rational agents trading off work-life balance for work-passion.

I'm highly skeptical of US style unions, but if any tech industry seems to need unions... it's the game industry.

if any part of the tech industry needs unions, it's content screeners: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

I'm not sure what could be done. I kinda suspect it is the kind of job that is just inherently unhealthy.

> I kinda suspect it is the kind of job that is just inherently unhealthy

that doesn't mean you can't try to mitigate the worst aspects of it. here are some suggestions to start:

* saner hours

  * better pay, so that you can live on 40 hours a week or less of this work.

* saner goals as far as throughput for amount of content screened

* comprehensive medical insurance including good mental health care

  * free on-site confidential psychological counseling

the market's not doing a good job of taking care of these people. i understand why they get paid poorly in the sense that i understand why they will accept these jobs for this pay, and why companies pay that much for the job: it's because companies can get away with it. either through unionization or legislation, we need to fix that. FB etc don't function without these people, but these people are used by that system with no regard for their welfare.

programmers and other usually direct employees of software companies can have it bad, but they usually don't have it nearly as bad as the content screeners.

> I'm not sure what could be done.

me either, really, but there are some reasonable things we can try. i don't think we should just abdicate responsibility on this because it's hard and those people don't have much power.

How would you qualify US style vs non-US style unions? The prevalence of business unionism here?

One of the big problems in the US is that they're organized at the shop level and consituted to represent the interests of their present membership rather than the interests of the workers in the industry more broadly. This leads to some perverse, short-sighted incentives.

For example the IBEW, which organizes electrical workers, decided to come out against the Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power, in developing distributed smart grids, and generally overhauling all sorts of infrastructure to come in line with new energy efficiency regulations. But most of the IBEW members are from the incument energy companies rather than part of the new energy companies that would come to life if we kicked off a Green industrial policy. They have no interest in growing the field of electrical workers as a profession, they're focused specifically on protecting the interests of the people currently employed as electrical workers.

This feeds into a lot of criticisms people have about unions preferentially focusing on creating benefits for seniority and incumbency over actually protecting the rights and status of workers more broadly.

Yeah there very much is a preserve the status quo in US unions.

I've seen a lot of "Feel free to learn new skills" / "But no way are we going to let them be a requirement / judged for advancment because that would be bad for those with seniority who don't want to learn it...." type policies.

And if you're in a related field outside the union... you're just hosed, and unions are surprisingly not interested in growing in to closely related areas at times even if their PR says otherwise. I suspect those areas are dealt away with in the negotiations.

Well done, one of the more succinct and accurate explanations of the shortcomings of the unions I've experienced and have relayed to me (Teamsters, NEA, CWA) in the US.

Thank you. I will say though, that as a shortcoming I think this is largely a consequence of the American labor movement being so small and neutered. If they encompassed a larger share of the workforce I think the pressure from the membership would push them towards being more representative of industrial interests as a whole. But they've been on the back foot over multiple generations of retrenchment now, so the leadership has kind of been captured by insular and reflexively change-averse factions.

The unions that have actually been successful at growing their membership during this era of reaction, such as the SEIU, tend to be a lot more progressive and forward looking.

There is also an aesthetic thing at play here and the older dudes just don't like the idea of tech workers, professional workers, and "pink collar" jobs unionizing because they're not "real" workers. If we made hard-hats and tool-belts part of the standard nurse's uniform we could probably make some real strides. . .

Well you seem to have a good handle on some of the pain points with unions in the US. Hopefully the folks taking this up at Kickstarter will find a way to make up for the overall shortcomings of collective labor in this country and build a system that takes the long view. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, i learned a bit!

>Green New Deal even though most of what the GND does would create tons of new jobs for electrical workers in the fields of solar and wind power

Very possibly at the destruction of as many jobs in established industries. That's not really a clear win for electrical workers. This is especially true if new employers living off of the GND subsidies decides not to use the senior union members or the union at all.

Most US unions have been heavily neutered and de-politicized, and rarely have the ability to force management to change course. Outside the US, its not uncommon for unions to own a good share of the company, holding board seats which let it affect who manages the company, and in some cases with the business becoming entirely worker owned.

This is what I was thinking. I know a big complaint especially of the larger US unions is that they just end up mirroring the bureaucracy & power structure of management anyway

That’s not how unions get board seats in countries where they’re on the board; they don’t own significant parts of the company. They have board seats because that’s legally mandated. This can help with short and long term planning but it’s not a free lunch.

A worker owned business is either a partnership or a co-op. The forms have been around for centuries. They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.

> They’re not generally competitive with firms where ownership and employment are separated or they’d be far more common.

That logic doesn't actually follow; even if they performed equally, capital owners get more return in conventional firms (because they get all the returns, not just partial returns from lending capital), so they will favor conventional firms. So, all other things being equal, employee-owned firms have a disadvantage in access to capital and so can be expected to be less common than traditional firm unless they outperform enough to negate the return disadvantage for capital providers.

That’s a consequence of the fact that diversification is good. You don’t want your investments and your employment in the same place unless the greater productivity is enough to offset the added risk.

I don’t see any disagreement between what you wrote and I did outside of companies with explosive growth trying to dominate an industry, i.e. VC.

If your aim is to build a cooperative supermarket chain like the Coop in the U.K. banks will happily lend once you have a proven business plan. So someone does need to put up the initial capital but once you have a proven business model you’ll be able to borrow from banks and capital markets in the same way as conventional firms.

Your argument fails to address the sectors where partnerships and cooperatives dominate, law, accounting and management consulting. I’m sure there are others but the fact that every twenty years or so the Big 4 all spit out a giant services company but they don’t change their own corporate structure is suggestive that a partnership model works. And McKinsey, Bain or BCG would have no trouble accessing capital if they wanted to stop being a partnership.

Previously I've expressed my skepticism of US unions that rely heavily on seniority to determine pay and opportunity and work out very... overarching type deals that leave little room for personal advancement or even change beyond the prescribed path. The senior folks who have their seniority and refuse to change / don't have to is a real thing.

I've heard European trade unions are more flexible and are as far as technical aspects allow for more more individual progress outside of say a union / employer agreement.

To be clear, this is just what I've heard about European unions. I've had no personal experience with them.

> How would you qualify US style vs non-US style unions? The prevalence of business unionism here?

The big difference, which nobody seems to have mentioned here, is that unions in the US are guaranteed exclusivity by law over representing people within a bargaining unit, as well as unilateral and retroactive control over defining the bargaining unit. In practice, this means that all employees at a given company are required to be represented by the same union; they have no choice in the matter. Once the union is established, it is almost impossible to decertify it, so the union corporate structure will never feel any real pressure from the employees.

In almost every other country, employees can choose alternative representation, which means the unions are forced to compete with each other for membership, and they are not guaranteed to represent employees at that company in perpetuity. This creates a healthier and less exploitative dynamic.

Sure, but if you didn't force an exploitative monopoly by the existing unions, how would you build anti-union sentiment and drive union membership lower and lower year over year? /s

The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.

I agree that some competition could help in this matter since so many unions at this point no longer need to fairly represent their members as a whole due to their ubiquity in the industry. Also I feel that many of them are so large that they would have too many conflicting interests within the union and could be harming as many people as they help with a choice.

> The difficulty is that it feels like the current labor organization laws in the US has supporters on both sides. The existing unions enjoy their strength and wouldn't want to have to fight off upstarts and the capital class keeps seeing less and less union representation under our current system and can just keep feeding anti-union sentiment.

Exactly - it's a stable equilibrium, where unions and employers are actually content with the status quo and don't want to cede power, but ultimately it produces a clearly suboptimal result for workers.

Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to fix this, as you said, for political reasons.

Yeah, my first thought on reading the headline was "That was not where I expected this to precipitate out first."

It'll never happen so long as there are "gamers" who want to work in the industry they "love", unfortunately.

Part of the problem is it's too easy to just leave the industry altogether to get better working conditions, and then after a few years out you don't have the skills (or the willingness to be screwed over) to go back in.

The all too common path seems to be enter the industry for a few years, endure crap that none of your friends that do similar jobs outside of the industry endure for a lot less money, actually want to plan for the future at some point, then get a job outside of the industry, and even though you love games, you just can't go back to getting mistreated.

That was what I did, and lots of other coworkers I had, and is why the industry seems to have a huge dearth of senior talent.

So the people who would be most willing to unionize are no longer in the industry to do so.

Why not? The US film industry is mostly unionized, and there's tons of people who love movies, too.

And there are way more actors than acting jobs.

Yet they have the SAG-AFTRA union which had a strike to force better working conditions from games companies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016–17_video_game_voice_act...

>Further acting is older than gaming, and those unions were given space to form during a period of time that was very different from today.

In the 1930s back when union organizing was likely to get you beaten by goons or assassinated by hitmen/the mob? Or in the 1940s and '50s, when active membership in the union put you at risk of getting brought up in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee and blacklisted from ever working again?

If you think they were "given space", read up on the history of the labor movement in the US.

IATSE Local 728 has an article about their own history that doesn't gloss over the bad stuff.[1]

[1] https://www.iatse728.org/about-us/history/the-war-for-warner...

See the link, which is entirely about the film industry union movement.

There's a lot more kids who grow up wanting to be animators than there are animation jobs, and yet they have a successful union.

"A lot" is not nearly as many as there are competent programmers who want to break into the games industry.

The concept is similar, the volume of people is vastly different, however.

Don't know why you're downvoted; that is exactly right.

There's nothing particularly unusual about game dev jobs or companies compared to other areas of tech (especially including startups); it's just that there are a lot of people who want to work on games. It's been that way for at least a couple of decades now.

I suspect not. My family hosted a couple aspiring actors in LA as boarders. They left because they couldn't get enough work. There's a lot of people out there trying to break in to Hollywood.

>It'll never happen so long as there are "gamers" who want to work in the industry they "love", unfortunately.

Judging by the gamer-centric media, it seems like most of them hate the industry and most of the major companies in it. They love small developers, they love making games, they love their Twitch streamers, but they hate the companies with a burning passion.

Unfortunately, that passion often gets channeled into harassing women and minorities instead of going anywhere productive.

I haven’t had a large number of interactions with unions but I have seen some things that definitely turn me off of them, e.g. requiring two or three people from as many different unions to set up a booth at a conference because multiple skills are required and the unions negotiated with the venue to have each step done by union employees with those specific skills. So eg the people assembling the structure couldn’t plug in computers and the people who plugged in computers couldn’t assemble the booth structure.

What I have heard a couple times now from relatives of union members is that senior people who know union leadership sometimes end up on “disability”, meaning there is nothing wrong with them but they don’t work and get paid. They have doctors in the loop to certify the disability. I have no idea if this is actually widespread.

My own personal reluctance with joining a union is that I feel like I do pretty well negotiating for myself.

Having said that, perhaps a tech worker’s union could result in 30-hour four-day workweeks with reasonable minimum vacation, and that would be worthwhile if it became the industry norm.

The rules certainly drive me up the wall. An event I attend annually in a conference hall has an ongoing joke about being sure you know which chairs in the venue are union chairs, and which aren't.

As an attendee, nobody minds if you move the non-union chair, but if you so much as move a union chair a few feet to join an adjacent table, expect to be reprimanded.

I think a tech workers association similar to the AMA would be helpful. I think the best work it could do would be to push for standardized contracts around intellectual property(company doesn't own everything you touch even in your free time) and non-competes(for instance must be paid some % of salary while non-compete is enforced). And the second best work it could do would be to push for standardized on-call/overtime multipliers.

These things are harder to negotiate for than salary and would be healthy for the industry.

> I think a tech workers association similar to the AMA would be helpful.

A voluntary organization that less than 25% of people in the industry are members of, and which doesn't seek recognition by the NLRB?

That's very different from a union.

You can already achieve rest and vest at some of the big companies. I hear stories of 20 hour weeks if you’re good at managing perceptions. Salaries aren’t bad either.

It will be interesting to see what this does for developer salaries at Kickstarter. If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me. For unions in our industry to work they are going to have to be very explicit about how they are going to raise developer salaries.

As a top performer:

1. I do my best work when my colleagues are also doing their best work. It doesn't matter how good I am at my job if I can't use the leverage of having teammates. I will be happier if the company can compensate all of my coworkers well and make them happy and hire good coworkers - both in terms of intrinsic motivation / happiness and in terms of whether the company is profitable enough to compensate me as my performance deserves.

2. I'm a lot better at doing the work than negotiating for the salary I deserve. There are plenty of people in this industry who are the other way around.

You do best when your colleagues do the best, for sure. Do you think the union is going to help or hurt when you have underperforming or disruptive colleagues?

There's a wide spectrum in "a union" just like in "management". I've had good management and bad management. There are good unions and bad unions. So, a priori, I don't have an expectation of whether "the union" - some arbitrarily picked union - will definitely help or hurt, any more than I have an expectation that arbitrary "management" will definitely help or hurt. But there are a few things:

- Just like I evaluate management when finding a new job (in my most recent job hunt I quite explicitly asked my interviewers what they thought about their management and how they thought it differed from other places they've worked, and hearing poor answers from one famous company was a reason I turned them down), I can evaluate the union when finding a new job. If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.

- I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.

- Management often prioritizes their own needs as individual employees, and is willing to overlook failures or mistakes if it's in the interest of their own career paths. It's hard to crack down on people failing up into management if you yourself are a manager because you failed up.

> If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.

The issue is not that the management will defends the bad employee, it's that the union will.

How can you know if the union will?

I got a friend that right now have to deal (ask re-do the work of someone else constantly) because they can't fire her because the union don't want to do anything about it. How could she have known that the union would be ready to not protect one of their member?

The same way you learn if a job has bad management when considering taking a job there - reputation, sites like Glassdoor, asking friends in the industry, etc. This problem doesn't seem unique to unions, nor does it seem that not having unions solves it. Management can still refuse to fire a bad employee in a non-unionzed shop. I've seen it countless times.

> I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.

In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities. I prefer that system over a straight democracy for changing management priorities.

"The best ideas" is a pretty unclear phrase. The ideas that make the individual lives of managers the best will win. That's usually strongly correlated with profit for the company (on purpose, using mechanisms like stock grants). Depending on how things are structured, it may or may not be correlated with long-term profit for the company. And it's very likely to be poorly correlated with long-term happiness of workers. As a worker, an idea that increases my long-term happiness is "better" than one that increases the company's profitability. But that same idea is unlikely to appear "best" from management's point of view. You can quantify the cost to the company (and thus to the personal payout of management) from giving all workers a raise of X% or an office with a door instead instead of an open-plan desk or increased PTO or whatever, and it's harder to quantify the benefit to profitability.

But in the end, the "best" ideas in the sense of the most profitable ones will still win, because companies with truly bad ideas from populism (e.g., "empty the company's cash reserves into end-of-year bonuses") will just not survive. Unions don't change the fact that companies themselves participate in a market.

And if you prefer that system, you and others who agree with you can absolutely participate in the market too and compete as part of your own business. You can choose not to join unionized companies. But I don't prefer that system. That's all.

>In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities.

I don't want to deny you your experiences, but this has not been mine. Not by a long-shot. Tons of time and effort get spent at my company trying to work around the idiosyncrasies of our capricious and out of touch management. And we're in a fast growing industry and our management seems to become more out-of-touch about the state of the technology and the market every year.

Their cognitive biases, pickled in their experiences from 8-10 years ago when they were last in touch with the real work, have a much bigger role in their priorities than any rational or dispassionate evaluation of what the "best ideas" are. The one saving grace they have is hiring subordinates who are good at manipulating them for their own benefit. Very VERY few tech companies can find that many people with the necessary soft skills to do it.

> I've had good management and bad management. There are good unions and bad unions.

One downside of this is it sounds like we get to roll the "good bureaucracy / bad bureaucracy" dice twice instead of once, if either roll comes up "bad" we're in trouble.

I don't think that's quite right: the idea is that a good union can insulate you from bad management. So you're using a different dice roll, but it's just one roll. (It is true that things are strictly worse under good management + a bad union than under good management + no union.)

Also, you usually have more influence in what your union does than what your management does. If I have to pick one of two dice to roll, I'll pick the one that's weighted in my favor, even if it sometimes comes up 1.

Union will help. Unions usually have probationary times before they start representing a new employee. For a year of probationary time, it's plenty to know if the employee is a good fit. If not, the employee can be let go and doesn't get the help of the union.

And union is by the employees, for the employees. If the person is truly disruptive and slipped through the 1 year mark, unions don't just back you up regardless.

In my second hand experience (friends and family, IBEW and automotive workers) this is not at all the case. Admittedly, second hand information and only two locals, but the amount of incompetence and ineptitude that they tell me about is astounding.

I think the problem gets out of hand when the represented employees become too large. If you have a nationalized union for many types of professions all under one umbrella, I can see your issue. There are those cases today as we speak. But if you have a focused union for a specific profession in a specific region, it can be easily managed and be a representative.

For example, a national union of software engineers would not be a great idea. (Even with local branches) Too many factors to consider to come to agreement. I guess a lot more sacrifice on the employees part nationally when mou negotiations are happening.

But if you have a California union for software engineers who are in a media industry, you have really focused the goals to a set of people. They can negotiate by looking at a union formed by google employees. Same thing with google. Vice versa, Just a union for google employees. They negotiate on their own or look at the benefits of a union provided by, say, Facebook.

I think these two questions can be separated

Regarding disruptive employees: Why would a union restrict a company's ability to fire disruptive employees? (excepting the corrupted union that has irrational favorites)

Regarding under-performing employees: Are you talking about the person who is just a bit slower than others or the person who's lack of aptitude causes other employees to lose unreasonable amounts of time to assisting that employee? I'd count the second type in the same class as being disruptive.

Also, at your current workplace is everyone equal in terms salary when when normalized by performance? Is it a problem if you're a bit more efficient than a co-worker and earning the same salary as them?

Will the union help or hurt when you have colleagues being treated unfairly by management?

From my anecdotal experience working 2 months in construction one summer.. there is nothing you or management can do about a toxic coworker.

Salaries aren't the only thing unions are good for. I'd be very interested in a job that had cast-iron guarantees about working hours, on-duty overtime, no open offices, stuff like that.

> If, as a top performer, I get penalized by joining the union then obviously Kickstarter looks less attractive to me.

I think this statement is used as an anti-union argument here a lot, and it speaks to the ego that many engineers/developers have. "Top performers" are single-digits in a lot of even medium sized organizations, and chances are that an individual employee falls outside of this "top performer" category even if they think they are one. The unions work for the majority. This means that the unions probably work for you.

Everyone wants to say they hire the top 1% of top 1% but in reality that's not possible, and most of them are sucked up in some pretty strange places or by big companies with lots and lots of incentives to throw at them.

Companies in general are crappy at recognizing top contributors anyway. Tech companies are no exception.

Contributors in general are pretty crappy at recognizing top contributors.

How many people in this thread honestly DON'T see themselves as a "top" contributor? Tech is like Lake Woebegone... all the kids are above average.

raises hand I see my job to be a human-shield whose sole purpose is to try to ensure something worthwhile gets done by the collective. No shortage of smart-people. Tricky bit is keeping them pointing vaguely in the right direction and ensuring nobody upsets/interrupts them. I'll fight my/their corner, but accept I may be wrong/out-of-my-depth if you can tell me why. Until then, I just soak up the grief. Biggest turn-off - people who think personal excellence in one area is infinitely transferable.

Please stop contributing to my impostor syndrome.

You're absolutely right though, it can be very difficult to have enough self knowledge and awareness to even place one's self sometimes.

I wouldn't consider myself a top performer. Though I'd expect I'd become one at a place that had a union ensuring low performers got accumulated at the company.

This is a problem everywhere, but it is worse when you are stuck with unionized employees. Compare public school teachers to private school teachers. Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).

I'm up in Canada where the teaching unions are actually pretty strong and the teachers are well compensated, but in the US teacher salaries are legendarily poor given the expectations placed on them and the importance of their job.

In fact, due to the extremely low salaries in either private or public schools many people who would consider teaching end up in different fields... _that_ is what is driving down the quality.

>and lower quality (thanks to unions).

You sure it's the unions and not the fact that private schools get to cream-skim children from families with means who want to prioritize their education rather than being forced to take all comers?

> Higher pay (thanks to unions) for public schools, and lower quality (thanks to unions).

Mandated by government and paid for with taxes seems to be part of the equation too. I'm not commenting on whether that's a good or bad thing.

However, if a regular business ended up being forced into a situation where they had to overpay underperformers, they'd go out of business, probably for the better(?).

I’ve had excellent public school teachers, and have also heard horror stories about private school teachers from my friends.

> (thanks to unions)

Is there additional information about how unions lower the quality of public education inside the United States?

I'm interested in that also. I don't really see how you can compare public and private education without looking at class and the ability for the private school to select students. At the very least private school students have parents who can and will spend a significant amount of money on their kids education.

Look up rubber rooming in NY schools. Basically, they can't fire teachers with tenure (which they get relatively quickly compared to eg college professor tenure) for even gross misconduct, so they end up paying them to sit in a room doing nothing. If there isn't enough budget, they have to lay off newer teachers, even if they're doing well.

I'm not blaming them for the number of people in those rubber rooms or for the terrible administration of that school district. I am blaming them for how hard it is to fire a teacher the administration doesn't want, for whatever reason, to the point where new, exceptional teachers are being let go because they have to keep around older teachers with tenure who are phoning it in. That drags down the average quality of teaching in the US.

That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.

EDIT: I should also note that NYC public schools are an incredibly challenging teaching environment, a lot of false accusations fly around, and I don't mean that all the teachers in the rubber rooms should be let go. I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.

> I am blaming them for how hard it is to fire a teacher the administration doesn't want, for whatever reason, to the point where new, exceptional teachers are being let go because they have to keep around older teachers with tenure who are phoning it in.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but is there any evidence that it is a huge problem and not isolated cases?

> That said, I also think that good teachers should be paid much more to attract more talent, and make it a viable alternative to more careers for people who aren't willing to sacrifice their finances to teach.

The problem is not having a way to quantify what a good teacher is. Is it the one that imparts a love of learning on there students or the one that gets better test results? Is it the one in the wealthy area or the one in the poor area where kids aren't even being fed? If the students do poorly is it the teachers fault or did a teacher in a previous year skip crucial topics?

Paying good teachers more isn't possible until you can identify good teachers.

> I just disagree that teaching should be a tenured position.

Well there I agree, it should at least be very rare. It does sound strange to me, I don't think it's a thing in my country and even in academia tenure isn't as strong.

Sadly, I've only heard anecdotal evidence from young teachers I know, and maybe some reading I've done in the past, so I don't have any sources on hand to point to, and maybe it's isolated rather than endemic.

You're right that it's hard to quantify whether someone is a good teacher or not, but I don't think it's impossible to judge. It's probably impossible to make it a simple succinct rubric, though. Maybe it's a challenge for a universal function approximator like a neural net :-)

And on the rare occasions they do recognize an above-average contributor, they're likley to overburden them with all the stressful and difficult work until they burn out.

Salary isn't the only point of negotiation. Unions can protect people against safety concerns, long hours or lack of vacation etc. or whatever issues are a problem at a company. A union is a group of people organizing to define how they want to work and salary structure doesn't have to part of the contract if it's not an issue to the workers. The union members get to define what is important to them.

Not sure why this is being downvoted beyond just not liking unions? It's literally a fact. Members decide what their collective goals are. In cases like nursing in California under staffing and long hours are the issues they are most concerned about above salary.

Agreed. I think Kickstarter employees jumping out and trying this is a good thing for the overall industry.

The majority of information I see online about software unions tends to be either anecdotal, or generalized across every industry rather than focused on a specific one (ie, on average, unions across all industries get X% higher pay).

This is being applied to a single company, so people who think it's terrible have no shortage of other places to go. It's high profile enough that Kickstarter trying to shut it down will get public blowback, so there's a better than average chance that they end up taking its demands seriously. It'll give at least one very tangible data point of, "here's what a software union in a software company looks like." And even if it does crash and burn, maybe we'll get some Kickstarter competitors out of it from prior employees.

I see very little downside. Let's have at least one trial somewhere, even if it's not perfect, that gives us at least some preview about what a US-based software union will look like.

What about unions do you think magically makes it impossible to fire someone who isn't doing the required work? The only thing that changes is you have to actually do the requisite paperwork and monitoring to validate that you're firing them with cause instead of for arbitrary reasons and pretending it's with cause. The "we can't fire someone who is honestly slacking" is just as much a consequence of bad bookkeeping and administration from the management.

It is exceptionally hard to measure work done by knowledge workers. Which makes is extremely hard to get enough hard documentation to fire them. In the vast majority of cases, you slowly realize they are no good and then you have to sink a bunch of time into organizing their work in a way that makes their underperformance measurable.

Just a quick question... But do you have any personal experience with the UAW (United Auto Workers Union)? Because while on it's face, I'd agree with your comment... but in experience I've seen things closer to what the other guy was implying.

You think United Auto Workers work on side projects?

Top performers already have that choice.

If this works out, this has the potential to be huge for the industry. I would love to see more unionization in tech, and this could be a first step in that direction.

It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech. Companies are going to embrace distributed teams/remote teams very fast and unionizing will just be a reason to close up shop in that location. That's what I imagine happening, predicting the future is hard tho.

I think it would be comparable, but not equal, to a factory walkout. Without active bug-squashing, DevOps and server maintenance, there is an increased risk of a major outage, which would even affect previous customers as well. Also, most tech companies collect revenue incrementally, via subscriptions, ads and the like, rather than up-front like most factories would. And getting a scab developer up to speed would likely take a lot longer than getting scab factory workers up to speed.

There are some differences as you said. If you're an auto factory that goes on strike, the management is likely still making money—they have all the cars made yesterday and the day before to sell. Of course, the pressure would rise much quicker in a factory vs a tech company; where the latter could presumably float itself for a few weeks, the former would start losing money within days.

A programmer walk-out is way worse. The Bus Factor is a real thing. Hire a new team to replace the old one on a complex project and it'll be months or years before they start doing anything productive. Making things worse, bit-rot is real and threatens existing software with failure if complaints aren't addressed.

If everyone in my department walked out and a new team had to be hired, they'd just be screwed. There's not enough documentation and the system is pretty complicated, with bits of it hiding everywhere and a bunch of ancient code that we never got around to refactoring (especially after they laid off half our department and another half quit afterwards, without replacement).

I'm sure whenever I get a new job and resign they're going to be like 'oh shit', because there's just not anyone left to replace what I do, really (I'm the last person in the department with a good amount of knowledge on their proprietary and stupid complicated phone systems, and they've kept me too swamped to be able to do any knowledge transfer worth a damn).

And in phone systems, there's always something going wrong or down, it seems like, often network related.

>It's going to end badly, unlike factories where a walkout would but a strain on production. A walkout necessarily doesn't put a strain on tech.

Certain types of work-to-rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) would bring most tech companies to their knees in a matter of minutes. It wouldn't just gum up the works as it would in industry, it could literally put systems into failure states.

The amount of crap I've had to do outside of my contract to keep the business running, I totally believe it. People in the right positions doing this and you're going to have swarms of angry clients and customers in minutes.

You're right that distributed/remote teams present challenges to collective labor organizing.

You're mistaken in thinking that a walkout is the only, or even primary, method of direct action organized collectives can employ.

Here are 197 others: https://www.aeinstein.org/nonviolentaction/198-methods-of-no...

This is fantastic news.

I'm one of the software engineers who was fired for organizing a union at a SF/DC based startup last year. The National Labor Relations Board found in our favor and we won a large cash settlement. But what we wanted was a union. Seeing others pick up the torch is extremely gratifying. Below are some links to news coverage of our case.

https://gist.github.com/bwestergard/a77744dc6f3095fd3fb769dd...

If anyone has questions about the process, I'm happy to answer what I can.

I’m not really pro-union (though I used to be unabashedly anti-union), but wanted to let you know that I appreciate your courage to fight for what you believe is right.

I’m a little annoyed that using the word courage made me twitch for a second because of how much “bravery” and “courage” everyone is getting commended for these days, but I think you’re an example of what every day courage can look like.

You knew what the repercussions could be, I doubt you were so independently wealthy that losing your salary meant little, and you publicly stood for what you believe in for the greater good of those around you.

Even after all the crap you’ve probably had to deal with, I hope you feel positively about your efforts.

Time and perspective are a funny thing... Coming up as young adult and professional engineer I saw unions as a relic that definitely served for positive change (way back in dinosaur times), grew fat and complacent (if not even complicit), and did more harm to the market in general than they did to benefit their members today.

Now I site here (still relatively young, thank you) at 37 with young family, having co-founded a company that employs dozens, losing sleep over how much things like health insurance cost for my employees, and my stance on unions has softened up quite a bit.

Markets and investors have perverted corporate incentives to a degree that moral leadership can be considered downright mismanagement. I’ve heard managers and other founders complain that “if I pay to train them, they’re just going to walk out the door”, etc. My little sister is in year 3 of her software development career and I can’t believe some of the crap I have had to tell her to watch out for, or worse, how to handle as it’s happening to her.

I read about things like the IBM layoffs of “old” workers, then see people I used to work with struggle to get hired (totally not because of their age, of course!) when I know how capable they are and my blood boils.

I still don’t know if unions are the answer. Maybe they’re part of it, but I believe we’ve got a generation (or two) of spineless and/or immoral corporate leadership to survive before things get back on the right track.

Two questions: Why are tech company staff wanting to unionize? For the most part, aren't tech staff reasonably to well paid - with good working conditions and moderate hour expectations (say 40-50)?

Management has the right at a workplace to make any decisions, whether someone in non-management sees fit. Can't people who are frustrated with the company just go pursue a position elsewhere?

"You mentioned that the letter to management listed your grievances. Some people find the idea of a tech workers union implausible, because they find it hard to believe that tech workers could have grievances in the first place. After all, software engineers are relatively well paid. What’s your perspective on that?"

"People didn’t even want that much more time off, or that much more time not on call. They just wanted to know where they stood. They didn’t want to have to engage in highly personalized bargaining all the time. It wasn’t that there were rules that favored management — there were simply no rules, and this ambiguity worked in management’s favor."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unio...

The key is "relatively"

In the uk its relatively well paid but much less than say a train driver is the average dev in London earns less than a train driver gets for a four day week an they have over time and a DB pension.

This is so important. Just because you're being paid well, doesn't mean you're being paid what you deserve. As stupid as it might sound, there are underpaid multi-millionaire pro athletes relative to the value they create for their company. I bring this up because the sports unions are a great example of what white collar unions could look like. Setting minimums, handling grievances, and specifying what things can and cannot be foisted on their members. These guys still sign their own contracts and superstar performers (the "rock star coders" of the sports world) are still able to get the money they feel they deserve by negotiating independently.

> Management has the right at a workplace to make any decisions, whether someone in non-management sees fit.

What?

There is no constitutional right for management to make decisions. Management are people with certain forms of influence over the company; workers are other people with other forms of influence over the company.

The only way in which there's a "right" is "might makes right" - that management, when they want to make a decision, can force that decision to happen, and workers can't. The point of a union is to change this calculus. If the workers say, do what we want or we'll leave, there's no question of whether they have the "right" to say that. They have the power. The question is whether it's socially acceptable for workers to say they have that power.

Why not take power that is available to you? Management certainly exercises every bit of power that they are able to.

The relationship between a company's stockholders and a company's employees is part competitive and part collaborative. Ignore either at your own peril.

>Why not take power that is available to you?

I see your point but at the same time this can create an adversarial dynamic between managers and junior employees, which is toxic even if junior employees get what they want.

>Management certainly exercises every bit of power that they are able to.

I'm a manager and my proudest moments have been those of restraint, not force. Regardless of whether or not unions can and should be formed, organizations with employees feeling compelled to unionize should be hiring better managers.

"organizations with employees feeling compelled to unionize should be hiring better managers."

This is a fantastic observation - and I believe it holds true. I've been in some very demanding technology roles, long hours, with competitive peers. A great leader is worth much more than some Union would have been (anecdotally).

This is true, but my personal support for collective organizing stems from a belief that there's a material constraint on the "quality" of managers, and we can effectively surpass that upper limit only through collective action.

> Why not take power that is available to you? Management certainly exercises every bit of power that they are able to.

This isn't true. Management only exercises every bit of power once the relationship becomes hostile. There are tons of things management could do to me to make their jobs easier (e.g. standups twice a day at 8am and 4:45pm with mandatory, in-person attendance) that they don't leverage.

Unionizing when there isn't already a hostile relationship is sure a way to bring hostility into it.

Management may feel that they do not have the power to schedule standup at that time, because they would lose key employees.

Right this minute? Yes, tech employees are better off in a lot of areas than say Amazon warehouse employees, but there's nothing saying that in 10 years the market won't be saturated and people won't be pressured into working 60-80 hours a week (which they already are at a lot of the huge firms).

It would be better to solidify these things before the industry takes a nose dive.

Because work conditions are not as you describe universally, and management’s rights are what we grant them through regulation. Management has excessive power in the US, hence efforts to rein it in.

Historically, management (factory owners) was dragged into the streets and beaten to death (yikes) when excessive inequality was reached. This is an improvement (and hopefully management would see the benefit of treating labor as a partner, not a resource to be consumed).

> aren't tech staff reasonably to well paid

Some are. You're probably imagining some Python engineer who is making $140k and can work normal hours, drink craft beer and take advantage of "unlimited time off" policies and such.

Think about operations staff who are doing mission critical work, like discovering and removing spam clusters. People like that often make an hourly wage, often are expected to pick up extra volume as a company grows, and are often the target of layoffs and wage controls because they are considered "variable cost" not "overhead".

Also think about people doing traditionally woman's jobs, like customer support or office support. These people make or break customer relationships, make or break team dynamics, or set the bar for content quality. But senior people on those teams often make less than junior engineers right out of school, because companies can exploit the popular idea that these kinds of workers are just less important.

Even coders, especially in production-based industries like video games or special effects, can work under semi-abusive conditions. Many of these firms dramatically staff up and down cyclically which gives employees little bargaining power.

The official reason listed is to "promote our collective values: inclusion and solidarity, transparency and accountability; a seat at the table" and Kickstarter describes itself as a "Public-benefit corporation".

So it comes off as just the usual lefty political signalling, not the start of a real movement.

It's a ton of work to start a union, one that can and has absolutely cost people their jobs, both historically and recently. It seems unlikely that it's just "lefty political signalling". Perhaps you can point to specific reasons why you think this is the case?

Furthermore, articles published on this topic indicate that their motivations included well-established and reasonable on-call hours, slightly more vacation days, and more collaborative decision making with management. All of those are real, tangible benefits that most of us would value and enjoy.

>I see folks outside the Bay asking why shouldn't they get paid the same as Bay area folks

Pay has nothing to do with cost of living. That's a lie told by companies as a negotiating tactic. You don't magically make the company more money by being in the bay area.

Pay has a ton to do with the cost of living, because salary is the lowest amount you can offer while still enticing people to work for you - I'm not saying penny pinch every dollar, but business is not charity. You don't magically make the company more money by being in the bay area, but hiring in the bay area gives the company an advantage (or else they wouldn't do it) and they are willing to pay extra for that advantage.

>>salary is the lowest amount you can offer while still enticing people to work for you >> business is not charity

And this is why unions exist. Even if managers try to be nice, even if the company gives out buckets of benefits and pays a living wage, this is the adversarial thought that exists in business currently. Management wants to pay the lowest they can, because that helps the business the most. They want to spend the least amount possible because that's the correct business choice.

Management/Ownership and Employees are frequently at odds when it comes to their goals, and changing the math from "me vs the company" to "the union vs the company" is a huge boon for employees.

> I see folks outside the Bay asking why shouldn't they get paid the same as Bay area folks, when they want to remote from somewhere that has 1/3rd the cost of living.

Well, why shouldn't they? It's not like the company magically has more money available when they hire a non-remote employee, is it?

Supply and demand? There are tens of millions of programmers in the world.

You have any first hand experience with the "basic CRUD wanting FANG level salary" types?

Unionization has nothing to do with wages reflecting skills or living costs. Also, your anti-entitlement rant, ironically, gives off a strong scent of entitlement.

Has being in the news as an organizer significantly harmed your job search?

We were all fired in late January. I was the only worker to go on record with my real name before finding another job. I had several offers in February an was sitting at a new desk for a job that paid about $10k more by mid-March. Those who had had less experience prior to the job we were fired from had a harder time getting re-employed.

Software employers are not yet collaborating to avoid unions, as employers associations in other sectors have historically. There is not yet an organized blacklist for outspoken activists.

Unions are certified by card check or secret ballot. In either case, no future employer will ever know whether you supported unionization in a former job. You will always have plausible deniability, and its illegal to ask outright.

> There is not yet an organized blacklist for outspoken activists.

I hope you're right, but it's probably hard to know for sure.

My skepticism stems from the no-poach cartel discovered a few years ago.

Wiki article on the "no-poach" cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Here's an interesting question: The NLRB says you can't fire someone for union organizing, but does it say you can't refuse to hire someone for union organizing?

Yes, under section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations act. The NLRB publishes a helpful guide to your rights: https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/basic-p...

Yes. A friend of mine in college (who had the highest LSAT score of anyone I knew, and went on to become a lawyer) joked that his strategy would be to announce during an interview that he planned to organize, and if he didn't get the job that he would sue them on the grounds that they rejected him for this.

Good luck proving that though

Right, but that's on the same grounds as refusing to hire someone because they're black/Muslim/some other minority of some sorts. Becomes very hard to prove.

From the gist found the article: http://www.newsguild.org/mediaguild3/software-company-learns...

$775k for 15 people especially SF based I wouldn't exactly call that a large cash settlement considering what happened, rep damage, time to find new work, etc.

Just had expectations of at least a year salary per person.

It was approximately $20k per person and the difference between the wages they earned after being fired and the wages they would have earned had they not been fired. Some of my coworkers did end up getting substantial amounts of backpay.

But your point stands: this is a weak remedy, and completely out of line with international norms.

So that means people who had more trouble getting a new job get paid more? Nice :)

> The 15 former employees of Lanetix comprised the firm’s entire non-management programming staff.

Doesn't this kill a company?

It must have set them back months, if not years. Strange culture where unionization is viewed as a worse alternative than letting go of the majority of your technical know-how.

Yes. The founder rebooted it: https://www.lanetix.com and abandoned the Twitter account https://twitter.com/lanetix?lang=en

They were planning to open (opened?) an offshore coding center in Eastern Europe.

"Thought Leadership" on the front page. I'm not surprised they wanted a union.

How did you get started? Did you just google "how to organize a union" and go from there?

Well, there goes the high salaries, flexible working hours, and generous RSU grants for tech employees. Have fun fighting and scraping for 2% raises, paying exorbitant union fees for questionable benefits, and dealing with the nepotism and personal politics of your union leaders. And thanks in advance for adding to the unfunded pension liability crisis.

It would be valuable to provide some sources for your claim, because as-is this reads like propaganda.

Perhaps the causation is reversed, and industries with terrible working conditions and low raises tend to attract unions to empower the workers to change those conditions?

You know unionizing isn't something people do lightheartedly. A lot of planning and working goes into it, planning and working done by the folks who want to unionize. The idea that you only get benefits if you don't agitate your boss too much sounds pretty sad.

People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.

>People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.

Tell that to anyone whose workplace unionizes against their wishes and lives in a "closed shop" state. (Yes, closed shops are illegal, but agency fees lead to essentially the same thing).

Being forced to pay a fee to a union that does not represent you and that you did not vote to join is absolute bullshit.

You can say that about any job, union or non union. You don't join a job not knowing it's a union job. But in a non union workplace, if you don't like how things are you can change them. Good luck doing that without a union.

I am talking about places that turn into union jobs after you have been there a few years.

>People don't join unions if they are going to be worse off materially.

Of course they do. The difference is that they are tricked into thinking they won't be worse off by the union organizers pretending that it's unlikely everyone will completely lose their job.

So the logic goes, don't join a union or you'll lose you job?

How does that not sound coercive? A company saying "If you collectively bargain against us, we will punish you" sounds ok to you? You've been tricked out of collective bargaining by decades of anti-union propaganda, and now you're carrying water for capital.

All of which were, what, privileges bestowed upon workers by management in exchange for their not unionizing? Seems like they were pretty fragile, then.

Unions in tech companies is a very interesting idea. A lot of people never speculate this idea because lets be honest most of them get paid really well or visa workers are simply too scared to join such "abominable" unions etc etc. If any one can start materialize unions would be the workers at FAANG companies. And I am pretty sure rest will follow suit. As a tech worker, I see this as a positive change. As a CTO, this should scare me. As an honest CTO, I would see this as a balanced change for my subordinates and slightly shifting the power dynamics towards them.

I wish them well, but having family members and friends work in unionized workplaces, it's not something I would ever do.

It always seems to degenerate into an "us vs them" sort of thing whenever I talk to them about where they work. Why would I ever work some place where things are so adversarial?

You also end up with this 3rd party involved in everything, creating all kinds of "rules" to make things "fair". Want to go on vacation? To make things "fair", the most senior people get to pick their times first, and the new guys get the not-so-good times. Don't care about the union's bullshit "industrial action" and just want to work and earn some money? Get used to being called a "scab". You get the point - it becomes more about knuckling under to what the union wants than getting work done or having a career.