The wealthy in the US have successfully lobbied for "Right to Work" legislation and have managed to pump out anti-union propaganda that is being parroted in this thread for decades. This costs money and effort. Why do you suppose they have done this? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because it benefits the individual worker? Or because it allows them to keep a larger share of the output of the economy?
Income inequality is the highest it has been since the beginning of the depression. Real wages have been flat for decades despite large gains in GDP. Is that a sign that workers have excellent leverage in negotiations?
Programmers are in a privileged position right now because there aren't enough of us to fill demand. That will not be the case forever. Look at what has happened with law - people saw the money to be made, flooded the market, and now a law degree doesn't really mean shit unless you're from a Big N school. The majority of programming work is not innovative or challenging - look at how many "I taught myself Javascript Framework 38! Look what I built" posts that flood this site. What do you think the long-term outlook for programming work is going to be like? Are you going to be the special snowflake ninja 10X rockstar in 10 years? Are you going to be happy to have no collective bargaining then?
Target shows its employees anti-union propaganda videos. It's interesting how it presents a union as a big bad "other" that would necessarily work against its members' interests, and to see many of the familiar arguments cast in a ham-handed way towards retail employees. Do we also believe in the 10x retail employee, or do we agree that retail is a sector where employees have a lot to gain from collective bargaining?
When i was putting myself thru college there was a time I worked at a job which required I join a union. I detested them very much. They were a bunch of fat cats who did nothing for the regular workers and much less for a part-timer[1]. all they cared was the organization itself. the workers were there as a necessary ingredient to keep the organization alive --rather then actually do anything for the workers.
So, to this day, I loathe unions, in practice, perhaps not in theory, but in practice I do. I also did not enjoy the 'machismo' that happens in unions.
[1] I sprained my ankle at work while doing work and yet they did nothing for me. I had to pay the xray bills myself (I don't recall how much it was, but they did nothing to make things better for me). So I have little sympathy for the institution.
Ooh, anecdotes. I worked for an abusive employer once (American corporation, funnily enough), and I joined a union, and it protected me from further abuse because my managers were scared of the union, because it was an activist union.
So yeah. My union good, your union bad, let's not make blanket assertions based on one experience...
And you believe that using the union as an enforcer or as a protection racket was a good experience for you?
Just so I have this straight, you thought that a good outcome was to have your (clearly abusive) manager(s) silently seething with rage against you, but impotent to act on it, because of the union protection?
This was a good outcome to you, over, say leaving that hostile environment as fast as humanly possible, or, I don't know, turning in the manager(s) to higher-ups (or to state agencies if the abuse warranted)?
I agree, but how might you imagine that management would find this out if the person is unwilling to speak up, instead relying on the silent fear of the union to keep it at bay?
Do you think that leaving the abusive manager in place, but impotent, is a better outcome? For whom? The company, the employees?
What makes you think that they were unaware of the abuse?
It's a better outcome for the employees. They have more leverage over their managers and are protected from abuse. If the manager is seething and impotent over his inability to mistreat his employees, maybe he can do what others have suggested the employee do and find another job.
> How might you imagine that management would find this out if the person is unwilling to speak up
The entire management structure in place was the problem. Are you seriously suggesting I should have attempted to contact my manager's boss in the USA, instead of joining a union?
Yes, I am not only suggesting that, I am baffled as to how you think not making noise about it and letting it lay in some Mexican standoff with the union was better.
With a union, he was able to stay at his job and not experience abuse.
Without a union, his likely outcomes were to leave his job, possibly winding up at another abusive organization that experienced no penalties for abusive behaviour, or report his manager to higher-ups (who may have been aware or complicit in the abuse) and suffer retaliation when his manager found out, or report his organization to authorities and likely suffer retaliation from the organization as a whole. None of these are particularly positive outcomes, which is a direct result of a large organization having more power than an individual, unorganized worker.
> And you believe that using the union as an enforcer or as a protection racket was a good experience for you?
Yes. I had entered that job from a social welfare benefit, and if I were fired or forced to leave the job, I would be subject to a 13 week stand-down.
> This was a good outcome to you, over, say leaving that hostile environment as fast as humanly possible, or, I don't know, turning in the manager(s) to higher-ups (or to state agencies if the abuse warranted)?
My recourses would have required legal action to the Employment Court, and when you're earning minimum wage, lawyers aren't easy to come by.
So yes, it was good that I could keep earning the money I needed to live, until I found a better job.
You are right that the current state won't last long. Computer science enrollments are skyrocketing, and businesses and government alike are pushing hard for even more people to flood the industry.
That happened before. The market was flooded with anyone who could pickup 'HTML for Dummies' but the market was never flooded with 'quality' programmers. They were very easy to sift out after the first round of dot-coms died. Because of the nature of the task it probably will never be, unless the USA opened their borders to other countries.
However wage imbalance isn't much of an issue as long as standard of living is maintained. Unions would not have prevented jobs moving overseas and may have actually accelerated it if not down right encouraged it.
Where unions are likely needed is in the developing world where many workers have unsafe conditions and little to no real rights.
Unions will not protect programming jobs in their resident country short of businesses being encouraged to hire local. How you do that is through various means, least of all is having a favorable employment climate.
The key to your personal success is self improvement and acknowledging when its time to move on. That last piece is the hardest. Its not fun to leave a place you have worked many years but at times it may be necessary
Doesn't it strike you as weird that there's a concept of "jobs moving overseas"? And that it's usually presented as a bad thing? Somehow even apparently reasonable people still have these blatantly discriminatory tribal attitudes and don't stop to see how unjust they are.
Back in history, white railway workers in America were unhappy about jobs going to Chinese immigrants. We even still have that but with Indians and call them "H1B"s which hides the racist undertones. Yet I've never heard anybody complain about "jobs going to local youths". Somehow a baby born near our house seems to be treated as a more deserving human being than one born somewhere else.
When jobs move overseas, that's usually a good thing, we should celebrate it! It means people overseas are getting more jobs! Very often those are even the same people most in need of more jobs so it's win-win.
Jobs move overseas because employers don't want to pay us if they can find a pool of people that do not expect rights or market compensation for their labor.
It's like applauding McDonald's for replacing its minimum wage workers with indentured servants. They're ignoring basic human expectations about compensation so they can save money.
Now we don't have jobs, but the servants get to live in America! It should be celebrated.
If those people were to receive the same basic rights or fair market compensation for their labor, it would be a positive.
Jobs tend to 'move' to areas where lower monetary compensation is required.
Would you have the same complaints about fair market compensation if an employer starts hiring software developers in low-cost of living areas like Mississippi or Louisiana instead of San Francisco or NYC.
Yep tribalism/racism is probably the major factor, but nobody wants the local youths to be income-deprived and at a loss for something productive to do, because then they turn to crime, or start ISIS. Which I guess is fine if it's on the other side of the world. /s
I recently attended a talk by Maria Klawe and she mentioned that her experience has been that if you graduate and enter into a good job market that has lots of demand for positions, in the future there will always be a demand for people with your experience and tenure.
Granted Maria definitely is one of the 10x folks, I like to think there is some sound logic behind this.
It's fascinating. Corporations and rich owners of industry already have bargaining power by... being big and having money. There's a lot of wiggle room for abuse of power and influence while staying within the confines of the law. And if they don't want to stay within the confines of the law, they have more resources and means to evade it.
But suggest that common workers should have some collective bargaining power and people are all afraid of them going too far and abusing their power. I guess they're afraid that they will have to pay 10 cents more for their coffee at Starbucks because of some greedy barrista union. The common worker banding together like that, that's too dangerous! Better have everyman and woman to themselves, and trust corporations, rich people and politicians to do the right thing.
There have been some fairly monstrous cases of unions crippling their industries (printers, watersiders). I think that might have put some people off the idea. Not to say all unions are that broken but it seems that sometimes they grow too big.
It's one thing to negotiate for more pay, but when you actively seek to prevent technological improvements which might make your job redundant, that makes you a burden on the rest of society.
Not amazing technological progress (from photographic plates thru composite color), long term decline of high margin markets (books, mags, news), and costs of production approaching zero?
Where exactly do you think print manufacturing would be today, minus unions?
Ok, but it's not like companies don't do the exact same thing. What do you call Microsoft's Windows and Office monopolies if not ways of holding society back so a firm can collect monopoly rents and avoid obsolescence?
Before anyone brings up the "I want to be paid for my skill, not my seniority," I'd just like to point out:
If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.
And a few other things I think are worth saying...
A union is a legal framework for the employees (who have no ownership stake in the business, despite putting their time and energy into the business day after day) to recast some of the power imbalance in their favor; since many of us here are employees, and not owners, we should be looking out for our interests.
Aaand...a union isn't a "let's all be lazy and wreck businesses" framework; that's a bit of nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades.
> nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades
It doesn't sound like you have any actual first-hand experience with unions. I'll admit unions played a significant role in improving the workplace for everyone, and we should all be thankful for their contributions 50+ years ago. But they are now primarily self-serving organizations that exist for the benefit of the union itself.
Before becoming a developer I worked in hotels (as a banquet manager), let me give you some examples of the types of things unions now fight for:
* a dishwasher cannot wash pots and a potwasher cannot wash dishes
* only an electrician can change the batteries in a TV remote or change a lightbulb
* when it's busy your manager(s) cannot help you
* re-hiring of employees who were terminated because they were caught stealing or physically assaulting other employees
The better an employee is the less they benefit from a union. It results in good employees not getting paid as well as they could be and bad employees sticking around because it's difficult (or impossible) to fire them.
We could certainly benefit from the types of professional association lawyers[1] and doctors[2] have, but those are quite different than unions.
I'm calling bullshit. Post a source for your examples. Also, the ABA and the AMA agree unions for lawyers and doctors. They have a government sanctioned monopoly on top level legal and medical talent. You can't even train lawyers and doctors without the approval of those organizations. The only reason those unions get a pass on the standard union rhetoric is because they are powerful while collar unions. Nobody with any credibility is saying the AMA residency matching is a detriment to the rights of workers, for example.
My "source" was in the sentence prefacing my bullets: Before becoming a developer I worked in hotels (as a banquet manager)... In response to another comment I went into a little more detail on each bullet[1].
Unions do not fight for any of the things you listed.
Frankly, you don't seem to know what a union actually does. Let's take your last example:
* re-hiring of employees who were terminated because they were caught stealing or physically assaulting other employees
If a person in the company physically assaulted another person then how could they be rehired? Were they working from prison after criminal charges were brought? Were they allowed back into the building, ignoring the restraining order that was obtained?
Ohh...what you mean is that the business didn't bother with any of those legal niceties and thought they could accuse someone of assault and fire them, without involving the law. Yeah, you don't get to do that. And most people would be glad of that if some manager decided to fire them due to a personal grudge and gave the reason as assault, with no evidence at all.
> Unions do not fight for any of the things you listed.
My first bullet is part of the union contract for stewards in NYC hotels. The second and third are part of the union contract for Boston hotels. The first part of my fourth bullet happened at a colleague's hotel who [twice] caught an employee stealing, the second part of that bullet happened at the last hotel I worked at (and perhaps "physically assaulted" was a bit strong - for accuracy purposes you can reword it to "throwing an object heavy enough to hurt someone had their aim been better").
> Were they working from prison after criminal charges were brought?
Unless you have the encounter video-taped it's not worth bringing criminal charges against someone for stealing $100 or throwing a walkie-talkie. Especially since it benefits the hotel to let the union "convince" them to re-hire the person because that cost the union in future negotiating capital (i.e. at the next contract's negotiation the union will be reminded how "forgiving" the hotel had been).
I'm going to take your word for it that you have screwed up unions and that those are the only kind likely in the USA. It's no doubt a political thing.
you say "with no evidence at all" and yet you ignore 3 of the 4 examples and construct a strawman to dismiss the other. why don't you just ask for some backup for the examples rather than fabricating narratives.
unions do get out of line, here's another example:
He presented no evidence at all for any of his examples. If you want backup, you ask for it.
I have no idea why you think your link is showing "unions getting out of hand". It shows people being hired at a certain pay for certain hours and then having this retroactively changed. Why would you think this is even remotely acceptable?
"you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that"
False. People who worked there before you decided the rules. Once you have an entrenched senior workforce the probability that they will vote themselves less power or money is remarkably low. It's basically the same problem as NIMBYism.
In a blog entry by Micheal O. Church [1], he argues that in the companies that most need unionization, the downsides like wage normalization and seniority rules are already in place, and adding unionization to the mix almost can't make things worse.
He also provides examples of unionized industries where "star performers" have no wage limits -- that the only limit is in the minimum pay for a position. And he points out the many ways a union could support programmer rights (for instance, the right to own personal projects), and kill damaging practices like stack ranking.
We need something. That much is clear. Whether it's a professional guild or a union, I'm not sure. But the status quo is awful for most of us. [2]
[2] I'm actually one of the "1%" who is quite well compensated, but I think more of us should be compensated based on our abilities. And I do want to get rid of the "we own your free time projects" rules everywhere; I consider those to be morally reprehensible.
Edit: Added "unionized" to the second paragraph to make it clear what I meant.
If you want to see how a professional guild works as a union, see The Animation Guild.[1] TAG represents the animators at several major studios - Warner, Disney, Sony, Pixar, etc. Their contracts set minimum wages, but not maximums. Most importantly, they have serious overtime provisions - 1.5x after 8 hours a day or 40 hours in a week, 2x after 6 consecutive days of work or 14 hours in 1 day. Hollywood has "crunches", but they're rare, because of that. (This is also why film scheduling is a serious discipline while game production scheduling is not.)
No offense, but I think that statement is ridiculous. You admit you're in the top 1% of income earners in the US and you choose to use the word "awful" for your predicament?
Just because he's rich doesn't mean he can't sympathise with or understand the plight of the middle class, just like most people understand and sympathize with the plight of the poor.
I'm very strongly pro-union, but this is an indisputable fact. If labor is to make a comeback in the 21st century, this is an important lesson that needs to be learned.
Interesting. How would you set up a union system that is self improving?
Normally organizations need to compete to survive, with the more ineffectual falling off. You can't necessarily have unions compete for members, because the power of the union is in how many members it has and fractioning them would diminish their authority.
There are unions in the nordic countries. They generally work quite well and don't hurt those countries competitiveness - those nations are quite competitive.
I believe Germany is also highly unionized.
So maybe we should learn from them ?
And BTW in all those countries one thing about those unions is that they are highly responsible - they understand the market realities and understand that people need to justify salries or else there would be layoffs.
no. hard working europeans leave europe to escape the system where they have little hope of bettering themselves in the european system. lots of them showed up in china working as part of outsource or manufacturing firms. talked to several myself.
In general, self-improving institutions operate by setting goals, evaluating those goals with metrics and iterating on the underlying model so as to improve those metrics. I know that's a simplistic answer, but I lack the specific understanding of how unions currently work to provide better insight.
I don't think it's the case that people will stay in the same employ for many years like they used to; unionised or not. People expect to change jobs much more often.
Unions that are well run frequently recognise the realities of business finances, and there are multiple examples of unions that have indeed voted to take a pay cut, if you care to go looking.
Doesn't voting for a board control in the Union allow for this? Like you have 4-5 people in charge but they have to be elected by the body of the Union.
It deserves the downvotes because it ignores reality.
Many of the steelworkers unions in the early 80's went out of their way to try to get people retired so that the younger people would still have jobs. They also worked very hard to get people transferred to other sites to reach the point where they could retire even if it meant sacrificing some salary.
Or, for something more recent, many of the unions involved with Hostess took several rounds of cuts before finally standing up and taking a hard line that eventually led to the bankruptcy. And, it looks like Hostess is going to be better off because of it.
The downvotes are well warranted because he spewed propaganda instead of citing real facts.
A union is a corporation for laborers. When you are a lone skilled worker negotiating with a company, the cards are in their hands every time. You are replaceable.
Divide and conquer works great if you want to depress the earnings of entire industries.
As professionals, we need to recognize that we are being given the shaft as a whole and unless we have some solidarity, negotiating truly fair market rate compensation is a pipe dream.
"The cards are in their hands every single time"- that's not true for high skill workers. If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you can often negotiate from a position of strength. That's one of the reasons IT workers get paid so well.
The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs- the factory laborer, highly scripted call center worker, the warehouse picker. They can capture a lot more through collective action because while they can easily be replaced individually losing them en masse is catastrophic.
I agree with you, but I don't for a second think unions will change that.
Unions won't eliminate the problem of non-technical people running engineering departments and deciding salaries-- they will simply put a non-technical union negotiator in there.
This will make it worse because companies do actually compete not to lose engineering talent right now... but if your only option is another union shop where you'll make exactly the same wage, you become a commodity.
That link is just terrible. It makes no intelligent argument and presents no evidence of anything. It's drivel. If you think there's an intelligent argument in there, please let me know.
Meanwhile, here's a reason that corporations in corrupt states actively try to stop unions, and it's not because they think that worker wages are too low.
Software workers are already treated as commodities, so even if one were to accept that last statement as fact it wouldn't actually have much relevance. Being a commodity worker with higher minimum compensation and even marginally better working environments is better than the status quo.
I rather prefer Smith on these matters to Hazlitt, whose own conflicts of interest with FEE are well known.
What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.
It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.
... and on for a bit (as Smith is wont to do).
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes Of the Wealth Of Nations
Chapter VIII. Of the Wages Of Labour
The produce of labour constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labour.
My point is that if you're a worker who doesn't want to be commoditized, you have to fend for yourself. The company won't protect you from it, but neither will unions. Basically, if you see yourself as part of any group, whether it's "all the employees of company X" or "all the members of union Y", you're asking to be commoditized.
The reality is that the vast majority of software developers does not stand out enough to get any benefit from fending for themselves.
It's funny to see this idea repeated throughout this thread that we're all special snowflakes that can negotiate better deals on our own.
Even more funny if you look back at the many threads about negotiating salary and see the huge number of people on HN that never even negotiate initial offers but just accepts what they're handed.
My own experience is that some of us can negotiate outstanding deals, but from managing teams for the last 20 years and being part of salary negotiations and ranking developers for most of that, in almost every company I've worked, I've seen seen software staff get lumped together in big buckets of (from the company's perception) entirely interchangeable developers and set raises across whole blocks, with the only salary differences generally being banded by narrowly by position other than for a tiny (5%-10%) portion of top performances.
Odds are you are a commodity to your employer in terms of salary and performance.
At every company I've ever worked at or gotten an offer from, salary was effectively non-negotiable, because HR set the rules of The Band and the Rules were the Rules, which the hiring managers simply had to abide by. Occasionally I've been able to extract a hiring bonus or something relatively minor like that, but the insistence with which they stick to the salary is mind-boggling.
It got really absurd at my last job, where I was co-lead on the most profitable team in the company and a "10x" developer: I got an offer for much more money elsewhere, so I regretfully (I really liked that job) sent in my resignation. They asked me why, I told them it was honestly too much money to pass up. My "people" manager, project manager, and a senior manager fought hard to get me a counteroffer. They escalated all the way to the VP of HR, a direct report of the CEO. The final response was "no, he can't have that, that would be out of band, and he can't move out of the band yet because his degree + years of experience doesn't equal x." This materially affected the company. One of our clients in particular was a little paranoid and I had developed a great working relationship with them - when I left, they effectively put in a stop work for months until they were satisfied my replacements understood the system as well as I did. (Which I don't believe was necessary; they were not as good, but they were and are good enough, but the guy was really paranoid. Perhaps understandably, since bugs would have directly led to financial mishaps.)
But in general the band system saves companies money, so they stick with it.
Of course there are plenty of exceptions - things are obviously different in startups, for example, where HR might not even exist, and plenty of companies don't give HR so much power.
> The people who lose out the most are those doing important but relatively well defined jobs
This is an extremely dangerous myth.
Markets don't care how hard it is to define a job, how hard it is to do a job, or anything else of the sort. They care about supply/demand. If the supply of a certain kind of labor is too high, pay falls until enough people leave to restore supply/demand balance. It's that simple.
Example: chemists. It's an occupation that demands tons of creativity and is very hard to pin down, but the career prospects are shit. Why? We train more of them than industry needs.
Exactly. Which becomes downright comical when you read any of the HN threads on negotiating salary, and see the stream of people who take what they are offered or are pleased with negotiating 5% more.
I've never given an offer I wouldn't have been ok with upping 30% or more, and conversely I have never taken an offer I haven't negotiated up 30% or more. And I don't see myself as a cunning negotiator - if I had been, I probably would have been far better off.
But I do negotiate, which is something, by experience from the other side of the table, nearly nobody does.
Highly skilled workers lose out too. If you bring in several million dollars in value and you are working for a large company is your pay proportional to the amount of value you bring in? This is a common reason people leave in the tech sector, you have a major breakthrough or a wildly successful project and you get a pat on the back for it while the shareholders take the lion's share. Ever tried to negotiate a raise and find you are getting less than 10% of what you bring in in revenue?
If you are the only guy who knows all the opaque rules of an important business system you have incompetent management and they should be replaced.
Single point of failure and all that. What happens when you are ill/away and a critical bug must be fixed, or a critical system goes down and must be restored?
I predict a lot of pizza's boxes around the office. And you working remotely like mad while ill or from the beach/sky resort. A lot of screaming, too. :)
If you are the only guy who knows X business process, congratulations! You've got yourself a comfortable trap and not much leverage for a higher pay raise or transfer because you're needed at X forever.
Not all of us are that lucky to have incompetent managers that allow that situation to play out.
But this still ignores the larger problem. Highly skilled workers as a class are still not receiving their fair market rate compensation because we cannot negotiate as a whole.
Your base pay should be much higher than it is and should allow you better opportunities for higher pay in negotiations.
Thats a myth. IT employees get paid in bands just like any other worker. The difference is that you hit the ceiling sooner than a similar gigs.
If you're in the Bay Area or Wall St tribal units, the numbers are higher, but they are higher for a reason... Your expenses or costs are way higher.
Everyone is replaceable. If you are the keeper of the keys of some magical system, you'll be replaced with the system when you become a liability, unless your employer is a moron.
I'd like to point out that having a moron for an employer, and in fact, a passle of morons in management is not a far fetched scenario.... I'd go so far as to say it's somewhat regular.
Oh no doubt. But as an employee, proceed with caution. Being the keeper of the keys for the magical complicated system can work out for years... until it doesn't.
Then you'll find yourself as the guy with 10 years of managing a OpenVMS legacy system in 2015!
I can weigh in on this bit about high-skill workers holding the cards, because they can supposedly just create a bidding war every time they want to make more money. It's not really true. After 30, jobs under 2 years start to look bad on your CV, and you start getting into senior positions that are rarer. You can't always overcome those issues just because you're a great programmer. If you're 40 and have had 4 jobs in the past 6 years, many companies won't even look at you.
We seem to think that, if it will cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for us to leave, we're in charge. Not really. Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces. No one is indispensable.
"Companies will cut of their noses to spite their faces."
Yeah this happens all the time.
It is always weird to me when you have people who are staunchly libertarian/free-market who seem to assume companies and consumers are perfectly rational actors (which is the only way a lot of the theory they are so fond has a chance of working without outside regulation). I just want to shake them and ask them if they are even paying attention to... anything.
Not only are some people often unreasonable, but nobody is always reasonable.
Every single one of us has flaws that can be exploited (on purpose or just by coincidence) to cause us to act unreasonably in some situations... even when we're fully aware of this fact and actively trying to correct for it.
Being reasonable even just most of the time is difficult work given all of the essentially hardwired flaws we are working against.
If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.
Yes, but I am more skilled than my colleagues.
Unions inherently negotiate on behalf of the median worker who was employed at the time that the contract negotiations took place. As other people have pointed out, the fact the unions negotiate for current employees rather than future employees contributes to the "screw the new guy" phenomenon; the fact that unions negotiate for the median worker can result in them undervaluing their high-productivity workers.
This is why unions are effective primarily in low-standard-deviation-productivity fields: If the best secretary in the office is 10% more productive than the median, but the union manages to raise the median secretary's income by 20% compared to the market clearing rate, then every secretary benefits. However, if the top software developer is 10x as productive as the median...
I do believe that top developers are 10x as productive as the median. I don't see this as an indication that top developers are particularly good, though; rather, it's a commentary on how awful the median developer is.
10x developer is very rare, but I have worked with guys like that - though of course, this depends on tasks. If task is well defined and bounded by a given tool set and rigid rulesets, etc, 10x cannot really be achieved. On the other hand, if there is just a vision of achieving goal X, and the median developer doesn't even know what tools to start with, an outstanding developer is much more than 10x productive than median.
However, in regular development jobs, I have also seen 0.1x developers, and worse. Even guys who definitely do damage if they are given access to the tools. The variation is huge.
> You can negotiate a higher pay with your employer if you excel, the union provides the bottom from which you can negotiate.
I've never heard of a unionized industry that worked this way. Unions negotiate pay for every worker that belongs to the union. The only way to negotiate for higher pay is to quit your unionized job and take another non-unionized job.
I don't know much about how most unions work, but at least TV & movie actors and writers, classical musicians, and professional athletes have unions that work as task_queue describes. It's hard for me to imagine a programmer's union that didn't work this way getting off the ground.
Matt Damon is a SAG member but he does not get paid scale. Scale is a minimum wage set by the union but if you're a big enough star, you negotiate your own wages.
Evidently this is highly industry-dependent. My experience is in the US auto industry, where all union workers' pay and benefits are fixed by what the union negotiates with the company. (At least, they were when I worked in that industry.)
Pretty much all the unions in industries where there are recognized hyper-elite workers work this way (SAG s mentioned in a sibling comment, most of the major professional sports players unions, etc.)
If they do their job, they negotiate the minimum wage and benefits. Nothing prevents you from getting more than that if you're skilled, but it does in fact prevent the new guy from being screwed over if done properly.
Yep. It has always amazed me how my peers can assume that their pay should be proportionate to their value in one breath while ranting about unions in the next.
I mean, it's one thing to realize that the supply/demand situation for programmers currently makes unions unnecessary, but it's quite another to slam people in other fields for doing what they have to in order to secure the same damn privilege (getting paid according to value).
The opportunity to make this extremely modest dream a reality is not some kind of right inherent to the free market! It's something we're going to have to fight for once supply/demand equilibrium has been reached.
> secure the same damn privilege (getting paid according to value).
I think this is the hard part: what is the value according to which people should be paid? Who should decide it? Not easy.
It gets particularly hairy when technological change has an impact on value. This is happening faster and faster.
Consider the classical example of Wapping dispute [0] where old hot-metal methods of printing, which unions sought to protect, were replaced by electronic publishing tools and printing machines. Today, it would look quite funny if papers still had to employ Linotype professionals to be able to print things in newspapers. The more acute concern is whether publishers print anything at all on paper, or if everything is in the net. If the unions could decide, of course you couldn't publish in the net, because it is destructive to jobs in the printing industry.
At some time, the commercial "value" of Linotype operators was very high. Now it is only historical; as a commercial operation, the machines have gone to obscurity. Who should have decided the value of those workers? I think the only one who really can decide is the one who owns and runs the operation. The unions mostly have an incentive to preserve the status quo - while happily accepting a change in other businesses, if it benefits them. No doubt that the modern-day Linotype operator would see it fit that he uses his union pay to buy an iPhone.
> what is the value according to which people should be paid? Who should decide it? Not easy.
On the contrary, it's economics 101. I have a feeling our disagreement is due to definitions so let me be more specific about my intended meanings.
There is a minimum price at which you are willing to not switch vocations and there is a maximum price at which you can be profitably employed. The latter is what I was calling value, as in "value to the company." Relative bargaining power determines where on that spectrum your salary will be. It's arguable that the final price is "value" but that's not the meaning I intended. What should happen is a question for the philosophers. What does happen is up to us.
The Wapping dispute is an example of a union failing to recognize that the value (same definition I was using above) of their employees had fallen below their asking price. Sure, it happens -- I have no doubt that unions increase friction, which is bad and hurts the economy. But underpaying workers "because you can" is also bad, also introduces friction (increased need for loans, decreased ability of workers to bootstrap), and also hurts the economy. So I don't buy the argument that one is better or worse. As far as I'm concerned it's a zero-sum power struggle, philosophically and morally speaking. I'd rather be on the winning side and I don't begrudge others for wanting to be on the winning side.
When the supply of programmers catch up, the weak go to slaughter. 2 people digging a hole for $5 an hour are more effective than 1 person digging for $10 an hour, almost completely irrelevant to digging ability. 2 dummies don't make 1 smartie in programming. Unions exist in fields where replaceability is high. That happens much less in educated professions. The main other reason they exist is for professions with a high risk of injuries. Carpal tunnels only takes so many programmers every year.
Ok, so how do you explain the situation for chemists? The variation in their productivity due to competence is at least comparable to that of programmers if not more -- yet their pay is uniformly low and the job security is uniformly poor. The only escape route is having the flair (!=competence) required to go into administration or attract investors (which is basically the same thing). OTOH if you assume that supply/demand is king, it all makes sense.
To assume that your competence will save you, you need both to assume that your evaluation of your own skills is correct and that others will confidently agree. Both of those propositions sound shaky. I've met a lot of overconfident programmers and I've met a lot of disinterested HR people.
I don't know anything about chemists. However, I struggle to believe an industry with a career path starting freshman year has more variance in ability than a technical field pulling poli-sci majors off the curb to fill seats.
Supply/demand of a chair takes a distance second to the value of the product of that chair. Medicine/law/finance are all oversupplied with high salaries. Try showing up to a teaching position interview and convincing them to pay you more because of econ 101.
In Europe all I have seen is wages going down over the last 10 - 15 years. Admittedly I only started taking notice during the dot com boom, but I get the impression they were better before that.
The other thing I notice is that I personally manage a database that would have taken three of four people ten years ago. We have loads more frameworks and libraries that make the task manageable. I use Django, whereas ten years ago, the stuff done by Django would likely be done with in house libraries, so needed more people. Also I think many of the problems are "solved", we have ideas about how to do things that were not as clear when the internet was staring out.
A small subset of the population even has the potential to program and that's probably not going to change. If a lot more people are encouraged to try it out then a small amount more of the people who had an aptitude for it but didn't realize it will enter the workforce. The leftover majority will still not be able to. No dramatic increase in programmers is going to happen.
Unions exist to increase the bargaining strength of the labor supply when it is very weak. The bargaining strength of developers is rather strong, and good developers can demonstrate their ability.
Good developers would not want a union, as it would likely drag down their compensation while forcing them to work with hiring mistakes.
Those who tilt at these giants mean well, but they will unhelpfully collide with windmills.
But it's not propaganda. Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits while completely ignoring the needs of the cities they serve. How police unions are key in protecting bad cops, like unions everywhere protect bad workers. They're functionally no different than the unions that destroyed GM, etc.
I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.
I note that the two unions you bring up are public-sector unions. It's worth considering that public-sector and private-sector unions are different beasts. For one thing, private-sector unions are facing off against corporations - both trying to maximize their own value, and so one might hope a balance is achieved. In the public-sector, unions are trying to maximize their own value, but the government is (hypothetically) trying to maximize public good, so it's not really a fair balance.
>Look how teachers' and police unions across the country have pushed relentlessly to collect unsustainable benefits
>I hear unions work okay in Europe. They haven't in the U.S.
The kind of benefits that teachers and the police ask for are universal in western Europe, and are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise, rather than the rates during its current fall.
> The kind of benefits that teachers and the police ask for are universal in western Europe
Not at all. The average U.K. universal pension is about $9,000 per year. The average U.K. teacher pension payment is only $15,000 per year. The average Chicago teacher pension payment is $42,000 per year.
You are cherrypicking facts by comparing the pay of a large, expensive, city to an entire country. Either do country to country or equivalent cities. While an officer in the UK might only makes 46K I'm fairly certain an officer in central London makes quite a bit more.
Chicago is 16% more expensive than the U.S. average, while consumer prices in the U.K. are about 10% higher than the U.S. So it's really a wash. Comparing country to country would be pointless, because most U.S. teachers are not unionized. The point is to demonstrate the impact of a particularly dysfunctional teachers' union. San Francisco or New York would be other examples, but the cost of living there is vastly above the U.S. average.
As for London--average police pay is 45,500 pounds ($67,000): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084505/Generous-pay.... So a Chicago police officer with just 2.5 years of service earns about as much as the average London cop does in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
"are sustainable due to taxation that is closer to the rates that the US had during its economic rise"
European taxation takes far more from low income people than taxes in the US. The US gets the highest proportion of it's take revenues from the top 10% in the OECD.
I'm not familiar with US unions generally or the ones you bring p, but if they get unreasonable concessions then their situation may be a type of survivor bias. The only unions that are left are the very tough ones?
In countries where labour is generally covered by collective bargaining frameworks and enjoys public support, there's a lot of consensus seeking about the unionization ground rules between job market players (labour unions, employer unions, legislature).
I'd like to make a subtle but critical adjustment to your statement:
"A union is a legal framework for the employees which has the ability to recast the power balance and can do it in their favour, if it so chooses."
Unions are definitely capable of doing this thing, and some do it. They do not necessarily do this thing, and some do not. The common failure mode is that an entrenched union is run by a group of people who act very much like company management, profit immensely from this arrangement, and remain in power by employing forms of the pirate ship loot splitting strategy.
(The pirate ship captain must propose a split of the loot, which the crew votes on. If they vote in favour, the loot split goes ahead, and if not then the captain is thrown overboard. The correct solution is to divide the loot equally between 51% of the crew including the captain, and allocate none to the rest.)
The worst unions are definitely not a framework for laziness, but they do tend to be bad for businesses as their primary function is to suck money out of the company and give it to union leaders. The best unions make everybody better off, including the employers. Some companies have internalised the functions of the best unions, because they realised that this makes everybody better off, so don't have any real need for unions. Some companies have internalised the functions of the worst unions and are engaged in an asset-stripping operation.
There is a tendency for older unions to be worse than newer ones. Setting up a union will almost certainly be good for the people who set it up. Joining an established union may or may not be good for you; if you're thinking about joining a union then research this union carefully and figure out if they're going to be good for you. Keep in mind that bad unions tend to be extremely political and will be surrounded by propaganda - look for clear evidence of outcomes.
If you're thinking about unionising in your workplace, please think carefully about this problem and how you're going to make sure that your union is one of the good ones. If you're thinking about running a company, please think carefully about how to be one of the companies that already does the work of the good unions.
A union will remove any ability for you to stand out. You will be paid the same as the worst or best worker, on the basis of some kind of seniority/job description parameters worked out by the union leadership and the company management. It may get you a little more than you get now, but it also removes any reward for excellence. You will be unable to negotiate a raise or promotion directly with your managers.
If you're unhappy with your compensation, move to someplace where you get a better deal. You are worth whatever you agree to work for. If you want a union, fine. I don't suggest that you shouldn't have one. But it will limit your upside, a lot. Even if it offers some minimal protection on the downside.
Hollywood actors, writers and directors all have unions. Professional baseball and football players have unions.
You really think any of those people feel like they don't have the opportunity to stand out? Or that their financial upside is too limited?
Don't generalize about what a union can be based on what unions for one particular type of workers are. When a group of workers' labor is easily replaceable, of course their union is going to focus on things like uniform pay -- that way the workers won't get trapped into a downward spiral by demands that they undercut each others' wages or lose their jobs. But unions for workers who aren't easily replaceable will have different priorities.
For some reason, this logic never seems to apply upper management salaries - irrespective of competence or achievement.
Here's the reality - the C-suite is already informally unionised. There's no explicit union structure, but there's a very cosy network of personal relationships, social signals, and ethical assumptions which relies on rhetoric like "We should pay talent what it's worth" to make sure that executive-level comp only shrinks in exceptional and rare cases.
Unionisation may not be the most perfect balance to that, but it's much better than any alternative which amounts to "Eh, let's just do nothing."
This is because upper management has an imbalance of power, agreed.
But it seems to me that unionisation ultimately gives management additional power - when the management can re-direct employees to the bureaucracy of the union structure - where the union has negotiated protection for their own upper management - rather than manage with them as individuals with individual circumstances.
But they don't already manage them as individuals as individual circumstances. They manage them as interchangeable pieces who have weakly singular leverage.
No you don't. Your union bargains away your value and your only option is to not vote yes to the contract only to have them tell you its the best you can get and the majority votes for it. Most of the time your representatives don't want to rock the vote and work to protect themselves more than you. Your just a worker to them, they see themselves on the same level with the people they negotiate with, not you.
Your hyperbole doesn't provide any real reason to form a union other than you don't like where you work. Honestly go somewhere else. Really. You won't be happy after a union gets there and likely you will be paying dues equivalent to an hour or more a month to be a member.
anecdotal part comesnext
Having been a member of a union shop before and having quite a few family in the Midwest I would switch employers or careers before creating or joining one. I cannot for the life of me equate professional and union in the same sentence.
Still anecdata but I've worked in three locals and have NEVER felt like my job steward or the union leadership aren't working to protect me. If they were, they wouldn't get re-elected. Of course, I work in an industry where the unions are strong and members actually vote.
I'm really believing we need a professional association or guild. With merit-based professional rankings.
I think a big contributor to the problem of programmers being underpaid is that there's no distinction between the clinic assistant and the brain surgeon. We're all just "programmers" or at best "software engineers". If there were an official distinction, then it might be easier to demand higher salaries for the higher skilled positions.
I am not entirely without sympathy for the idea of a union modeled after those in e.g. Hollywood; I can see reasonable arguments on both sides.
But the guild that controls the medical profession has turned out to be a disaster of such epic proportions that I am stunned any sane person would consider it anything other than a grim cautionary tale. Any other setup would be better than that. (Beware of the temptation to let the high status of medicine influence one's opinion of the institutions by which it is run.)
If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.
This is theoretically true for a lot of things such as pay by seniority but it isn't true for everything. In the bad old days some people used union requirements as a way of keeping minorities out of certain industries. Laws were passed to fix this, but those same laws sometimes mean that if your coworker is incompetent then even if management and most union members want them gone then the union is still obligated to fight to let your coworker keep their job.
It can be hard to talk about unions in general when unions in the US and Sweden and Japan end up working so differently.
I agree that many of the slogan laced perspectives are shallow. Unionisation and the whole complex that comes with it is not narrow. A lot of effort and thought has gone into it. A lot of smart people.
But it's also true that unions themselves have causes problems, often at a very macro level. Unions can have their own interests, independent of the interests of their members.
I don't know where I stand. I think there is a real problem in negotiation position of employees and employers. An employer negotiates often, their stakes are lower and they can optimize. I think we would be seeing improved "labour conditions" like working hours, holidays and other points if the negotiation process was efficient, but we are not. Generally, the less restricted the market, the longer the conventional hours, the fewer the number of days off and the lower the job security. I think it's probably inefficient.
I don't think unions have offered a perfect solution. Often it's not even good enough or better than nothing. I think we need to keep looking.
"Aaand...a union isn't a "let's all be lazy and wreck businesses" framework; that's a bit of nonsensical propaganda that we've all swum in for the last few decades.."
This sounds great in theory, but here is what I've seen in practice:
1) Very difficult to fire someone which almost always leads to a court case. Poor employees should be able to be terminated, for the benefit of everyone, not shuffled around the company wasting money and resources.
2) Unions becoming as powerful or more powerful than many large companies which leads to the same type of corruption. Most Union leaders get millions in bonuses every year, yet we don't see anyone protesting on Wallstreet.
3) Guaranteed raises for unionized employees, even if it means the company will go out of business or can't compete any longer in the market place.
4) Inflated wages. A worker doing a job that requires little education or skill can do should not be paid > $100,000/year. In the 90s, I knew mechanics making $150,000/year working 3 day work-weeks. The unions forced the companies to have 2 people working the job of 1 person.
5) You can't get raises based only on merit. If you want a raise, many other people need to get raises in your department or it just won't happen.
My previous company went to a trade show in Vegas and we rented a booth. We were required to pay $500 for a union guy to unfold a table and another couple thousand to essentially plug in a computer. Why would I want more of this inefficiency?
Ever wonder why the UFC isn't in New York? The Culinary union. When people choose not to be in a union, many unions decide to use under-handed tactics to force a company to support them.
It's just one group looking to have power over another. They generally aren't looking out for your best interest, only to use your status as an employee to have leverage and power over a company.
This is a forum for startups. Do you actually think it would be easy to start a company if you had to go through miles of red tape and essentially a court case to let a poor employee go? It would change the entire startup scene for the worst.
The glut, waste, and inefficiency is why I despise unions. You can tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I've seen it too many times in the last 20 years to believe you.
>If you formed a union at your workplace, you and your colleagues would get to decide the rules like that.
Only if someone before me hadn't decided them first. And even if I decide them, what about the people who come after me? They're forever beholden to the context that I created the rules under.
Rules and leadership get renegotiated periodically, just like a company's board of directors and shareholder ballot initiatives are voted on periodically. A rule set is not a permanent structure.
There seem to be a lot of posts that state, in one form or another, that unions are imperfect. Unions, it seems, are flawed and can indeed at times, or indeed regularly, act in the interests of senior officials rather than those of their members.
Hello!
They are organizations. They are staffed by human beings. They are not going to be perfect. They will do dumb things. Some may be outright corrupt. This however is not the point. The issue is not whether they live up to their ideals any more than whether any other organization does so. The point is whether their basic mission is such that they add value to the life of the average working stiff.
On this last point the evidence is fairly clear. For all their hideous imperfections, most people are better off with some kind of umbrella organization acting more or less in their interests.
Do you really imagine that the 'fat cats' think that their managers optimize their earnings as they would like? Do you think that they imagine that the members of congress they pay off do as good a job as they would like tweaking the laws to their liking? Of course not. They are pissed. They don't think they get value for money. They dis this lobbyist and scream at that editor and hold back funding from that congressman. Life isn't perfect.
Why should unions be any different?
I work for a large private sector union. Unions are not perfect, nothing is, but they are also completely democratic institutions. But, the decline in union membership does not tell the whole story about the decline of wages in America.
I believe the decline in wages and union membership reflects a shift in how people value themselves as human beings, and their relationship to their fellow man.
The biggest obstacle to increasing wages to more equitable levels comes from the mentality: "At least I have a job", "I will be rich someday", "I can make it on my own", "I'm only going to work here for a year". These thoughts are what has allowed wages to be pushed to their lowest levels in recent history without any push-back from the work force.
Unions at their core are nothing more than a group of workers who get together to negotiate a contract and are willing to take action to force the employer to sit down and negotiate. This used to be understood, but at some point unions became viewed as some sort of "servicing" entity that drew its powers from a mysterious legal paper. Members forgot that the union was THEM.
Thankfully, the labor movement is starting reverse course from decades of this mentality.
The truth is that, the only power which workers (unionized or not) have is to withhold labor in a coordinated manner. Contracts are meaningless without the power of a strike. Without workers being willing to all withhold labor together, union or not, wages will continue to decline until a moral crisis is reached.
Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble, but "unions" are just groups of workers who have a 501(c)(5) paper with IRS that allows them pool money together to organize.
I believe the decline in wages and union membership reflects a shift in how people value themselves as human beings, and their relationship to their fellow man.
From the data I am looking at, wages started to stagnate (I see no clear decline trend) around the year 1965, which roughly coincides with when women started to enter the workforce in a meaningful way. Could it be simply that the near-doubling of the labour pool pushed the supply beyond the demand, thus depressing prices and forcing people to take what they can get? More recently, we might say robots have helped increase the supply even further.
Like you recognized later on in your post, the power of the union comes from artificially restricting the supply of workers to make supply and demand work in their favour, so does it not stand to reason that attitude shift you have observed is a result of the same market economics, not the other way around?
> they are also completely democratic institutions
I've seen this democracy in practice first-hand in my previous career where shop stewards diligently ensured that come time for a union vote those that will vote the "right way" are provided time-off and/or transportation while the others are "stuck working" or "there's no more room in the van."
Right to work and its ilk have a very expressed intention of neutering unionization efforts.
Keep in mind, that with a proper front for labor to negotiate with firms, compensation is kept at a fair market level.
We haven't seen compensation increases in most occupations in 30 years.
You, as a worker, are owed a much larger compensation that should be what the market would bear if you were able to negotiate on a much fairer plane with your employer.
As IT workers, we are a huge revenue drain compared to other workers on the books, despite any claims to how much 'worth' we might bring to a company. Ideally, for them, those wages will go down. The industry has shown time and again that it will defy the law to keep our pay low and below its true market value.
> Keep in mind, that with a proper front for labor to negotiate with firms, compensation is kept at a fair market level.
I have only seen unions bring about a high level of pay for mediocrity, while overpaying for low-skill jobs and underpaying for high-skill jobs.
Go to many union firms and the janitors and the engineers make within a few dollars per hour of each other.
You can recruit janitors off of the street, and their pay (while I argue , should be livable) should reflect that. You can not do the same for engineers or anyone that needs any amount of expertise or training.
However, since unions run on mob mentality, if the engineers want a raise, they have to convince everyone that they all deserve more money.
Are you a rock star, saving or making the company big bucks? Too bad bitch, bonuses are out -- can't show favoritism!
Are you super lazy and only want to do the very basic minimum of your job requirements and not a bit more? Congratulations, unions are for you!
I have never been impressed with a union firm. All of the things that they truly helped with (no child labor, OSHA, minimum wage) are all law now anyway.
You have a caricature of unions in your mind that does not match reality.
If you excel, you are given the options for up negotiating your pay. You are given the option to negotiate your bonuses, supplementary pay, time off and what not.
If you're a "rockstar", congratulations! Your union has raised the bottom from which you can up negotiate your compensation. Your union will also advocate for things you, as a rockstar super employee, never will be able to. Like your benefits, working conditions and base pay.
If the engineers want to raise base pay, they're in an engineering union. They have no one to convince, but have the clout to make it happen.
If the engineers at firm X want a raise, they can negotiate with their employer for compensation with the added bonus of a higher base pay to negotiate from. They also have the added benefit of having the union advocate on their behalf if they choose.
You haven't worked with a good union. Good unions are known for their quality and skilled professionals, just like good companies are for their products.
I have worked at three companies for the Teamsters, and can say unequivocally that they all held me back professionally while keeping people that should not have a job employed.
I have never been able to, nor do I personally know any union workers that can negotiate an individual bonus.
> If you're a "rockstar", congratulations! Your union has raised the bottom from which you can up negotiate your compensation. Your union will also advocate for things you, as a rockstar super employee, never will be able to. Like your benefits, working conditions and base pay.
No they will use my "rockstar" work to negotiate better benefits for all of the employees, as those with more seniority than me enjoy the better benefits and protections even within the union, do to my "rockstar" status. Why should that be?
> You haven't worked with a good union. Good unions are known for their quality and skilled professionals, just like good companies are for their products.
You seem to know a lot about me, somehow. Show me any modern American union, and I can promise you I will show you how they are holding back their company and better employees for the sake of the mediocrity.
I live in an area of the country that still has plenty of unions, and I have witnessed it time and again, as an employee and an observer.
You're missing the point. When you are an individual negotiating with a well-lawyered, well-moneyed organization who holds power (your ability to make a living) over you, that is not a negotiation. It is reminiscent of Hobson's choice.
A negotiation happens when both sides have a fairer footing in terms of what they have to offer and lose.
When a union goes to negotiate with a corporation, their relationship is on an equal footing. This allows for better negotiations in terms of compensation, working conditions, benefits and what not.
It is the check and balance that the inequal relationship between a sole worker and a corporation needs.
You say this as if you get one shot to negotiate with one employer. There are hundreds of employers. Many are in competition with each other, directly if not indirectly. When the union negotiates, they are not representing YOUR interests. They are representing the collective interest of the union. The deal they get will be the minimally acceptible deal that a majority of the membership will accept. You are still not in control.
As tech workers, we enjoy the libations of a free market working somewhat close to its ideal, except when it doesn't.
The industry colludes to depress our wages as a whole (Apple/Google anti-poaching agreement and outsourcing).
The industry lobbies to enact legislation that brings our wages down (H1B). The entire system tries to prevent unionization through legislation.
If we look at industries that haven't experienced our continued boom, we can see what the future has in store for us as a whole. Depressed wages that haven't increased, decreased to no benefits and a transition from salaried employee to contract work, jobs dissolved by automation and not many options for finding work.
We need a front to negotiate with the industry as whole as we are already on the chopping block.
All employees from a cashier at McDonald's to the (currently) highly lucrative world of tech workers have the ability to make themselves more valuable to the company for which they work. This can be as simple as always being punctual and available to work and actively learning as much about your job and work environment as possible, to coming up with new ways to save or make the company money.
Reality, however, dictates that not everyone can be truly irreplaceable, no matter how hard they try, and that is what takes away bargaining power. The solution to this is not easy and involves learning a new (and hopefully more valuable) skills, or looking for work elsewhere, and I acknowledge that this can be hard in depressed areas of the country. Many are unable or unwilling to do that sort of thing and think that they should not have to.
However, just because there is no extra industry in your area should not mean that the existing ones should be muscled by unions to make up the difference. And it is very un-realistic to expect that.
Many of the items that you pointed out are (I would argue) directly because of union influence over the years -- automation aside.
An employment contract is an agreement between the company and the employee. If the employee is (relatively) unskilled or (relatively) easily replaceable, then the company has more negotiation power because it has the money.
I have still not heard a good argument in this entire discussion thread as to why that is evil (it is just assumed to be) and why more is not expected of the employee in the negotiation. It just seems very fashionable, right now, to think of companies as inherently evil.
There was no evil implied. I am stating facts about how the industry works against labor.
"Being irreplaceable" is a pipe dream. If you've found yourself in an irreplaceable role in a company, you've got incompetent management. If all you have to offer is your skill and time, you can be replaced.
The point is that in negotiations, you are at a disadvantage solely because you are an individual. Your class states that employers expect to pay you between X dollars and Y dollars with some wiggle room.
As a class, your median wage should be higher given the productivity increases and profits yielded by the industry in the past 30 years.
If you excel, you still have a higher base from which to negotiate from.
> However, just because there is no extra industry in your area should not mean that the existing ones should be muscled by unions to make up the difference. And it is very un-realistic to expect that.
No one is muscled into anything. Employers freely choose to enter contracts with unions. The issue is that some employers do not want to make good on the stipulations they agreed to.
It's unrealistic to think that labor should remain divided to be conquered, as the tides in the past pushed for organized labor until it was neutered by legislation.
>I have still not heard a good argument in this entire discussion thread as to why that is evil (it is just assumed to be) and why more is not expected of the employee in the negotiation. It just seems very fashionable, right now, to think of companies as inherently evil.
Things that are negotiable on a individual level are left up to the employee to suss out of their employer. Bonuses, supplementary pay, extra time off are usually up to you to negotiate.
Items that are negotiable on a class level are left to unions. Base pay for employees, working conditions, employee benefits etc are not individually negotiable. No organization is going to bend over backwards for one employee at the bottom of the totem pole.
It takes a group of people (the corporation) to provide those basic niceties and it takes a group of people (the union) to advocate and use its weight in negotiation to ensure their members are provided with them.
Agreed, I should have written "harder to replace than hiring and training a replacement". If you need a concrete example, Linus Torvalds is more difficult to replace for the Linux Foundation, than the anonymous cashier at Burger King. Do you not agree that different people can have different value to a company?
> As a class, your median wage should be higher given the productivity increases and profits yielded by the industry in the past 30 years.
If you excel, you still have a higher base from which to negotiate from.
>No one is muscled into anything. Employers freely choose to enter contracts with unions. The issue is that some employers do not want to make good on the stipulations they agreed to.
Collective bargaining is the definition of muscling, as your other alternative is losing your entire workforce, even those happy with their work and pay. Most companies are terrified of becoming unionized because of the new and often unwarranted demands that will be made as a collective, just because of that threat.
>As a class, your median wage should be higher given the productivity increases and profits yielded by the industry in the past 30 years.
Do you imagine that unions would agree to the reverse? If the total profits have declined for a sector, do you imagine they would agree to a wage deduction? The "collective bargaining" aspect of modern unions is only there as a threat to ever increase benefits to the employees whether they are warranted or not.
> Things that are negotiable on a individual level are left up to the employee to suss out of their employer. Bonuses, supplementary pay, extra time off are usually up to you to negotiate.
As they should be. You are an individual with an individual value to a company. Your pay and benefits should reflect what you are bringing to the table, not what someone else is bringing to the relationship.
Unions are the loss of that autonomy in exchange for seniority, often over ability, no chance of individual excellence within the company, instead, even though the union has raised your floor, they have created a ceiling for you as well, less collaboration, each cog can only do one function after all, holding back your company as a whole if automation or new technology is available that may replace some of the workers, etc.
> Items that are negotiable on a class level are left to unions. Base pay for employees, working conditions, employee benefits etc are not individually negotiable. No organization is going to bend over backwards for one employee at the bottom of the totem pole.
Base pay and working conditions are law now, and are not going to revert. If they did, I would be for unions, that is what they are good for.
> It takes a group of people (the corporation) to provide those basic niceties and it takes a group of people (the union) to advocate and use its weight in negotiation to ensure their members are provided with them.
Does it? You can't think of any companies that offer good salary and benefits with no union? None?
I am for more legal protection of employees. Class and regional minimum salaries (and wages) for different types of jobs, national health insurance, living wage guarantees and unemployment guarantees, retirement guarantees, etc.
Labor unions are not for those types of legislations, as it would completely remove any legitimate role they might have.
I am very for the thought of labor unions, but practically, they hold back a business and any skilled or ambitions employees, for the sake of those that might not be as skilled or ambitious or otherwise should be worried about job security.
> Do you not agree that different people can have different value to a company?
I agree with that point. My point is that to management, you are a worker. You are an expense that is to be maximized for profit. That end will always be sought. You are stuck within the bounds of what they expect to pay someone for your role + wiggle room.
>Collective bargaining is the definition of muscling, as your other alternative is losing your entire workforce, even those happy with their work and pay. Most companies are terrified of becoming unionized because of the new and often unwarranted demands that will be made as a collective, just because of that threat.
Collective bargaining is legally protected and a contract stipulation employers agree to.
Employers can just as easily engage in manager lockout and prevent employees from working if they feel the bargain isn't worth it.
>Do you imagine that unions would agree to the reverse? If the total profits have declined for a sector, do you imagine they would agree to a wage deduction? The "collective bargaining" aspect of modern unions is only there as a threat to ever increase benefits to the employees whether they are warranted or not.
To quote bsder:
"Many of the steelworkers unions in the early 80's went out of their way to try to get people retired so that the younger people would still have jobs. They also worked very hard to get people transferred to other sites to reach the point where they could retire even if it meant sacrificing some salary.
Or, for something more recent, many of the unions involved with Hostess took several rounds of cuts before finally standing up and taking a hard line that eventually led to the bankruptcy. And, it looks like Hostess is going to be better off because of it."
>Base pay and working conditions are law now, and are not going to revert. If they did, I would be for unions, that is what they are good for.
Minimum wage is law, standards are set up for most work places. Industry specific laws are in place, but they do not cover all industry specific workplace needs.
Tomorrow, if Keyboard X comes out, and is proven to prevent CTS, you can bet that unions would advocate for making them available.
> Does it? You can't think of any companies that offer good salary and benefits with no union? None?
Of course I can. Do you think those niceties will last forever and for everyone? They are an expense to be cut as soon as possible.
> I am for more legal protection of employees. Class and regional minimum salaries (and wages) for different types of jobs, national health insurance, living wage guarantees and unemployment guarantees, retirement guarantees, etc.
Unions have been the vehicle for enacting legislation to provide these things at the national level. Industry will lobby against provisions if it will affect the bottom line.
Having a dozen programmers call your representative won't change much in the face of lobbyists.
We clearly disagree on many points about unions, and can go back and forth all day with examples to support either side.
The hostess example is a good one, as they would not take a reasonable salary after the market turned, over 18,000 people lost their jobs, and now they get to re-emerge with no unions...I guess that is what you mean by better off.
However, I would just like to point out, that companies do not go to people's houses and foist unfair job offers on them. There is a reason that companies have an advantage on negotiation in general, that is because there are not many companies, but there are many potential employees. It is the burden of the potential employee to stand out and demonstrate his or her value in that situation. Why should you have a job instead of someone else? Why should you make more? Why should you make less?
In reality, they are good at getting floor-sweepers $32 an hour, while limiting other workers with ambition through seniority and contract prices for "classes" of people. They are good at getting employees to only do the minimum amount to fulfill their work obligation and be a slave to that corporation. After all, where else are you going to get those benefits and wages with no training or skills?
In my opinion, unions have destroyed industry in America and led to the wealth disparity that we now have to deal with, by encouraging industry to seek cheaper labor in other countries that do not have unions.
I already agree that unions helped American in the early part of last century, but have been an albatross since.
If unions only petitioned for labor laws to protect all employees, not just union employees, and if union used collective bargaining to set a base wage (with each person's individual wages depended on his or her ability and work ethic), I would be all for them.
Perhaps we're considering different scenarios. Hobson's choice may possibly apply to unskilled or low skilled jobs. So anything that pays less than $50,000/year in the US.
Above $50k individuals absolutely have the ability to negotiate. And to do so strongly from a position of power. Good help is hard to find. When you're in the 6 figure range negotiating with huge corporations is the best. Small shops are tight on cash. There's not a lot of wiggle room. For huge corporations there's a lot of room to negotiate. Salary, bonuses, paid time off, and more. It's not crazy to negotiate 50% more compensation than their median offer for a given position.
Doesn't scandals such as the Non-poaching case between Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, etc. reveal that even high-skilled workers aren't immune to the tricks of corporate management?
But since you can't jail a corporation, all it boils down for Apple, Google and others is a simple financial cost/benefit calculation.
And I'm not sure if the class action lawsuit tipped the scale towards not doing such things yet.
What you are worth is not an absolute measure. You would be worth more if you had more power to negotiate your value.
If you have more power when you earn more and the people hiring you are incentivized to minimize your earnings, you create a down-ward spiral of value. Why'd you pick $50,000? If I make $40K and with a union I'd make $60K, then obviously I've lost negotiating power.
You know a nearly sure-fire way to make a higher salary? Be worth more to the company!
I have never in my life seen a company tell a valuable (note: valuable to a company is a person that is saving or making the company money, not just someone alive and willing to work) employee to go suck it, if they made a reasonable request for more money.
Why in the world would anyone think that it is ok for everyone to "Just Make More Money" simply because they are in a group?
Clearly in any group of employees, some will be more valuable to the company, and others less valuable. This is not a slight against the less valuable employees, just a fact of life.
If you can accept that all employees are not perfectly identical in every way, then it stands to reason that the productive employees do have bargaining power. Their leverage is that they can leave. It would further stand to reason that less productive or easily replaceable (unskilled, untrained, etc.) employees would have less bargaining power, because of the fact that they can easily be replaced.
With discrimination, minimum wages, OSHA, child labor, etc. already on the law books, why are people even talking seriously about unions these days?
You example is a perfect demonstration of union mentality: As a group you want to bully an extra $20k out of a firm, for what reason? Just because you are a group and can?
You will notice that you actually being worth the extra $20k wasn't a prerequisite, only that you now have the power of a union to muscle it out of the employer.
>You will notice that you actually being worth the extra $20k wasn't a prerequisite, only that you now have the power of a union to muscle it out of the employer.
And having more power makes you more valuable, because having powerful people work for you is a boon. So we're full circle again.
You example is a perfect demonstration of corporate mentality: As a group you want to bully an extra $20k out of an employee, for what reason? Just because you are a corporation and you can?
>With discrimination, minimum wages, OSHA, child labor, etc. already on the law books, why are people even talking seriously about unions these days?
Maybe because unions caused those things to happen, dummy.
"With NASA putting men on the moon and building numerous technological advances, why are people even talking seriously about funding NASA these days?"
> And having more power makes you more valuable, because having powerful people work for you is a boon. So we're full circle again.
How is this true? If it were true that having a powerful group work for you (powerful in the sense of collective negotiations) why would nearly all industry move to India and China? Why not enjoy the local "boon" of unions to your company?
> You example is a perfect demonstration of corporate mentality: As a group you want to bully an extra $20k out of an employee, for what reason? Just because you are a corporation and you can?
First, I am for minimum national salaries (or hourly pay) for jobs based on description.
Second, you are again just assuming that the fact that a person walks into a company and is willing to work that they are worth maximum money available from that company.
The corporation is not "bullying" because the person can go work for another corporation (possibly today) in response to it, the union is bullying because the corporation can not hire the "other" workforce in response to it. You are falsely comparing the ability of a person to work with money, when you should be comparing that person's actual labor to money.
> Maybe because unions caused those things to happen, dummy.
> "With NASA putting men on the moon and building numerous technological advances, why are people even talking seriously about funding NASA these days?"
False equivalence. What new breakthrough in labor law might unions create comparable to the breakthroughs in science and medicine that NASA makes every week? Do you imagine that it might revert back to child labor? Shall we still have abolitionists for the USA? Do you imagine that, since we have laws against it, that we might snap back into national slavery?
Unions had a useful purpose in our history. They might even be useful still, but existing to strong-arm companies (and that is what it is) is not useful to modern United States.
Almost all software shops are not unionized. Jobs move overseas because companies are not expected to act as beneficial actors in other countries, they know they do not have to respect basic human rights or pay a fair market value wage for labor.
The corporation freely signed a contract with the union to follow certain stipulations. There is no bullying on either side.
The breakthrough unions provide is a power balance from which your profession can advocate for setting base pay, working conditions and benefits. It provides a front against mismanagement/abuse and ensures you get the protections regulation and contracts provide. These are problems that existed in the past, exist now and will exist in the future as long as organizations of people are around.
You have a mischaracterization of unions of simply existing to force money out of companies, when their purpose has been explicitly stated many times.
> Almost all software shops are not unionized. Jobs move overseas because companies are not expected to act as beneficial actors in other countries, they know they do not have to respect basic human rights or pay a fair market value wage for labor.
Jobs move over seas because it allows companies to produce something for less money. Period. Unions have the opposite effect of making production cost less money.
>Almost all software shops are not unionized. Jobs move overseas because companies are not expected to act as beneficial actors in other countries, they know they do not have to respect basic human rights or pay a fair market value wage for labor.
>The corporation freely signed a contract with the union to follow certain stipulations. There is no bullying on either side.
How many companies do you imagine "freely" signed a contract with unions without the threat of walk-outs hanging over their heads. This is the definition of bullying.
> You have a mischaracterization of unions of simply existing to force money out of companies, when their purpose has been explicitly stated many times.
I am very clear what unions do in practice, not theory.
You idea of "production" is too narrow-minded. You don't only produce products, you also produce communities of valuable, productive, happy employees. The people who work in your company are a product of your company.
Unions might force your company to spend more on something intangible, but they do not reduce production efficiency.
>How is this true? If it were true that having a powerful group work for you (powerful in the sense of collective negotiations) why would nearly all industry move to India and China?
What is your problem? Seriously. Labor WOULDN'T move overseas if unionized workers had any power. The labor moves over seas because those with the power decide where to move the labor, and it is decidedly NOT unions.
>Second, you are again just assuming that the fact that a person walks into a company and is willing to work that they are worth maximum money available from that company.
I made no such assumption. I only assumed that the worker should be able to negotiate their worth by using other employees as a resource for evaluating what that is. If all the other workers agree you are worth X, the company should pay X. The company should not be in charge of both determining what you are worth AND paying you, because they are likely to minimize both, no matter what reality has to say.
The only reason you have competitive wages anywhere without unions is because companies compete against each other. And if they collude, you lose that. It doesn't matter what you are worth, only how much collusion is legal or accepted.
>Do you imagine that, since we have laws against it, that we might snap back into national slavery?
Do you know that the laws can be repealed? And that the people who would repeal them are the same people you're asking everyone to forfeit their political and economic power to?
How do you expect a law to stay on the books if the only ones championing for it have their hands tied?
> What is your problem? Seriously. Labor WOULDN'T move overseas if unionized workers had any power. The labor moves over seas because those with the power decide where to move the labor, and it is decidedly NOT unions.
Yes seriously. You stated that having a union makes the company more productive because of it cooperative power. Corporations are economic entities, and made an economic choice, proving that this is not the case.
> I made no such assumption. I only assumed that the worker should be able to negotiate their worth by using other employees as a resource for evaluating what that is. If all the other workers agree you are worth X, the company should pay X. The company should not be in charge of both determining what you are worth AND paying you, because they are likely to minimize both, no matter what reality has to say.
Why should it be up to your coworkers to judge your worth. There is very clearly another better way. You make or save X dollars for your company, you are worth some amount of that. The bigger the X the more you are worth to the company.
>The only reason you have competitive wages anywhere without unions is because companies compete against each other. And if they collude, you lose that. It doesn't matter what you are worth, only how much collusion is legal or accepted.
I am not for company collusion, and it is illegal in most place already anyway.
>Do you know that the laws can be repealed? And that the people who would repeal them are the same people you're asking everyone to forfeit their political and economic power to?
How do you expect a law to stay on the books if the only ones championing for it have their hands tied?
I expect a law to stay on the books because people still have the right to vote in this country.
The laws that would help American workers the most (Obamacare, living wage, guaranteed retirement, guaranteed unemployment benefits, etc.) are not supported by unions. Guess why?
> Right to work and its ilk have a very expressed intention of neutering unionization efforts.
So, I know very little about Right to Work legislation (essentially I know what the topic being discussed is from the first paragraph of Wikipedia).
Without scrying after the motives of those in favor or against, what is the actual concrete problem with Right to Work legislation? What is the concrete benefit?
I think it's fair to say a good default is "people can negotiate anything they want", but negotiating monopoly supply of workers seems like it has the potential to be a useful exception (as are most monopoly situations). Like many policy issues, it seems like it'd come down to the details.
[Edit: to wit, one question I'd like answered is whether union monopoly supply effects only employers with large numbers of employees or also employers looking to hire only a couple people. I think it is the former, but if, by whatever means, it is all firms, that might be worth stopping.]
"Right to work" undermines collective bargaining -- which itself is an attempt to redress the structural imbalance of employer-employee negotiations -- by introducing free-rider incentives to employees.
In short, it's an end-run around Wagner Act protections by preventing unions from mandating "union shop" or "agency shop" conditions of employment, in which employees must either join the union (in a union shop, which is uncommon) or must contribute union dues but do not have to be members of the union (in an agency shop, which is the most common arrangement). So-called "closed shops," in which union membership was a precondition of employment, have been illegal since Taft-Hartley.
The obvious intent here by employers is to create an incentive for employees to "free ride" by enjoying the fruits of union negotiations without having to contribute dues or participate in union actions. More generally, right to work laws are part of larger parcels of anti-union legislation such as WI's Act 10 (https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/2011/related/acts/10.pdf), which basically forces unions to hold expensive elections each year in order to continue their existence, resulting in about 50% of the public sector unions in the state folding due to either an inability to afford elections or by failing the electoral test. When coupled with aggressive "union busting" tactics by law firms and security companies, state lawmakers have been extremely successful at helping companies shut down labor organization in many jurisdictions.
(Parenthetically, Governor Walker specifically exempted police and fire unions, and there is some evidence that those public-safety unions that endorsed him have had significant success in negotiating pay raises; although state workers have seen on average a greater than 10% reduction in take-home pay, the Walker-supporting Wisconsin Troopers Association negotiated a 17% pay increase.)
Genuine question: how is it possible that a union couldn't arrange an election once a year? Over here they can do it, and routinely do it annually or bi-annually (mine does bi-annual).
That's a good question. The law in question looks nasty: it requires them to hold an election annually, and if they don't get 51% of the votes of all employees "affected
general municipal employees may not be included in a substantially similar collective bargaining unit
for 12 months from the date of decertification". However, the vote is effectively only binding in one direction: even if they do get 51% of the vote, when it comes time to negotiate the employer can claim they don't represent the employees and refuse to negotiate with them until they hold another election to prove they do.
So I can't find any provision that makes it expensive to hold elections, but it does seem to be basically pointless since they've rendered unions so ineffective. Even if they do manage to jump through all the hoops the only thing public sector unions are allowed to bargain over is base wages, not overtime pay, benefits like health insurance, working conditions, or anything else.
A union negotiates a contract with an employer. The employer freely enters that contract, and by signing that contract is giving the written intention of following through with that contract.
That contract is mutually beneficial. As employer, you are provided with a pool of selected professionals. As a worker, you are provided with fairer compensation and benefits.
Right to work comes in and says those contracts do not have to be honored by the employer and they can break that contract because the law says so. Anyone they employ now enjoys the benefits of that the union spent time and money on negotiating, but the worker does not have to pay dues to enjoy that privilege. Without the union, those privileges wouldn't exist.
Any "rational actor" can see that the rational decision is to enjoy the benefits a union brings to the table, without having to pay dues.
The counter to this is the argument of freedom of association, saying employers can hire who they want. This sidesteps the fact that employers made the free decision to entire such contracts and chose to stand by its stipulations.
Unions do not hold a monopoly on workers. Workers are free to entire and exit contracts with unions or negotiate on their lonesome. Employers have a variety of unions and individuals to pick their employees from.
Yeah, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is totally wrong under US law.
According Wikipedia, in the U.S., once a union is certified at an employer that union is the only entity that can "negotiate conditions of employment." That means that employees are at best highly restricted in their ability to negotiate individually with a unionized employer.
Do you actually believe that someone like Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise is going to have the Screen Actors Guild negotiate their salary? No, SAG just sets a scale and people can be paid more than scale. The same goes for the various sports leagues where all the players are members of an a players' association of some sort. This sort of arrangement could very well work for developers.
I think unionizing is actually aiming way too low for many workers. Even lower-skill ones.
As an example, people have bandied about ideas about whether Uber drivers should unionize. But Uber drivers already own the means of production. So if you could effectively organize them, don't bother with a union, just create a worker-owned cooperate that competes directly with Uber. Get 100,000 drivers to chip in $10 a month and you can fund a really nice app plus the necessary lawyers.
The same pattern reoccurs in many parts of the modern economy. Many businesses are so capital-efficient that they only exist because they're good at coordinating workers -- not because they monopolize the working capital. So if you can organize workers, skip the union and go directly to worker ownership.
This is a really great idea, and brings something that's ironically been absent in this entire conversation: innovation. Why not "disrupt" the state of labor? So many startups are already involved in the art of social engineering and tweaking, why not create a modern equivalent to unions that could empower workers in a different way?
I'm guessing my opinion won't be popular here, but I don't see anyone saying anything similar, so I'm going to speak up.
There was once a time where unions were necessary. Personally, I think that time is long past.
Now, I think unions breed mediocrity, and set up situations where you have folks with an attitude of entitlement striking when they don't get every last bit of their way. Walking around with picket signs like as if they are owed everything.
Time to join the real world, with the rest of us. You don't always get what you want.
We had gas prices go way down in the last couple months, then they went all the way back up. I had heard it attributed to refinery workers striking, because some had been laid off. I don't know if that is true, or not, but if it is... it only proves my point.
I think it's time for you to join the real world. Union workers are not entitled. You are coming from a place of entitlement if you think that life is that good for most workers. Union workers are trying to regain some semblance of power in an exploitative relationship. Many employers (all of the most efficient and therefore successful ones) are abusive. Even the hyper-entitled, and therefore hyper-libertarian software engineers are abused by their employers - employers break the law and collude to depress wages, if you want a real example from the news. Employees as a whole in this country are currently getting screwed -- because of a very well funded and long-running campaign by business interests to destroy unions through criminal action, regulatory capture, propaganda, etc. Incidentally it's much easier to convince software engineers to turn on each other and work against their best interests, all it takes is a quick ego stroke -- claim 'no, we're only going to screw over the \bad\ engineers, and you're not one of them... are you?' Fortunately some of them trying to stop it. Complaining about gas prices changing because of those pesky entitled blue collar upstarts acting above their class and demanding to be treated like human beings doesn't particularly endear people to your cause either. There are arguments to be made against unions; none of these are them.
Before I comment, I want to clarify. I'm not trying to come across like a jerk.
I certainly think there are things about the current system of employment that can improve. But you can negotiate what you get.
I stand by the statement that you don't always get what you want, but you can compromise with an employer and meet in the middle. Digging your heels in (like unions often do) isn't very productive.
If you don't like the terms, you can look for employment elsewhere, right?
One other thing to consider... remove the gatekeeper/middleman. By that, I mean work for yourself. It's not easy, but you have more flexibility to charge what you want, and go after the things that are important to you, in your work.
In addition to working for yourself, I'd like to add that having multiple streams of income, even small, can give you a greater degree of freedom.
> Time to join the real world, with the rest of us. You don't always get what you want.
"You're right sir, I don't deserve paid vacation or maternity leave. Yes sir, I don't deserve to work the 40 hours a week you pay for me. I'll get right to it, sir. How high do you want me to jump, sir?"
Rugged individualist Americans standing up for their right to not have any leverage in negotiation with their betters, always a sight to see.
> There was once a time where unions were necessary. Personally, I think that time is long past.
Because real incomes for the majority have been flat in the US for the decades despite GDP increasing, income inequality increasing, and hours worked increasing?
you're right, those rich folks really do deserve to extract their employees' value in ever-increasing amounts, because poor people are spoiled or something
Your observation rests on a truism that, hey, people look out to maximize their self-interests. Unsurprising. The point here is that the two sides of labor and equity exerting pressure and regulating each other (in an informal sense) is not inherently bad by any means, and mostly desirable over one side becoming stagnant in its dominance.
There are obviously many arguments that can be made against labor unions, but appealing to things like "the real world" and "attitude of entitlement" is silly. Especially considering that many people who make propositions like this are then just as quick to defend rent-seeking activities, as long as it creates liquidity it's all fine in their world view.
A union that many of my friends are members of recently had a massive debate, and was near split, on whether or not it was okay for workers to take contracts that are BELOW minimum wage [0]. That's how systematic the oppression by employers upon labor is. Even members of longstanding and powerful unions find themselves believing they aren't worth fair pay, because they've been told and exploited over and over again.
When a union is used to defend rights, it is good.
When a union is used for exploitation, it is bad.
The problem is when unions grow too large, and become politically lucrative feeding grounds. The government hands out certain contracts to certain unions to gain their votes (and in some cases, their returned financial support), while squashing "fair competition" (not everyone is, or cares to be, unionized, especially when the disagree with the principles and practices of some unions).
Although the study (or summary) heavily implies that the decline in unionizing causes greater income inequality, the standard correlation-is-not-causation caveat still applies.
In particular, there's a plausible argument that greater automation is a confounding variable, insofar that (a) easy-to-automate jobs tend to be more unionized than hard-to-automate jobs and (b) automation leads to outsized rewards for relatively small groups of people (investors, owners, inventors, etc.)
That's not to say unions don't matter, but I'm curious if there's any research that attempts to distinguish between unionization and new technological developments.
It's so strange to notice that we live in a democratic society but work in authoritarian organizations (for employees at least). By getting rid of unions, we made it clear as to who owns the companies and who have rights within the company. Having some say in the direction that the company is moving towards seems like a reasonable thing to ask for.
This is especially more funny when you consider corporate influence in politics, along with the influence of money. Corporations and the rich have a disproportionate influence yet it would be audacious to ever propose workers having a vote in these matters.
Owners of corporations are of course delighted when employees are fractured, unable to coalesce to wage battles for greater equality and say in decision-making and sharing profits.
"Having some say in the direction that the company is moving towards seems like a reasonable thing to ask for" Reading comments like this make me think of the old "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" saying. Where to even start? As an extreme, I hire a kid to mow my lawn. Then he comes up to me and says he wants to have a say in the direction that my household is going. That's reasonable, right? Of course, I'd tell him to save his money to get his own house. If you want input, become a stockholder, or start your own business.
Unions do not negotiate the best deal for the employees, they negotiate the best deal for the union.
One of the terms unions love to have is a requirement that all employees be members of the union.
When you have to pay the union in order to keep your job, the union becomes a tax on your income... and the union has no incentive to treate you right-- as what are you going to do? Quit and go work for another company? That's your only option.
That modern unions attempt to force employees to be members when the employees don't want to-- shows that the unions themselves know they aren't offering an advantage to the employees that the employees would voluntarily choose.
Walmart doesn't force me to buy its hot dogs. Walmart competes with other hot dog providers for my business. (And loses because there is a very good german deli in this town.)
> That modern unions attempt to force employees to be members when the employees don't want to-- shows that the unions themselves know they aren't offering an advantage to the employees that the employees would voluntarily choose.
As an analogy: "The modern government attempt to force citizens to pay taxes when the citizens don't want to-- shows that the governments themselves know that they aren't offering an advantage to the citizens that the citizens would voluntarily choose."
It shows some someone is a screw up. It could be the union, demanding benefits when they don't deserve them; it could be the employees who don't want to pay and would still benefit from the unions negotiating for them.
I don't think that's accurate. Many democratic countries are run in a fashion that reasonably approximates what is good for their electorate. Yes, they don't match it perfectly, but compared to any other form of government that has ever been implemented on a large scale, it has worked very well.
> Many democratic countries are run in a fashion that reasonably approximates what is good for their electorate.
I think this is a judgment call (it depends on what you believe is "good" for the electorate, particularly in the long term vs. the short term), but let's assume it's true for the sake of argument. That still doesn't mean that what's good for the power structure is good for the electorate. For a democracy to do what's good for the electorate, elected representatives have to act in the electorate's interest, and the only benefit to their own interest that they can consistently expect from that is getting re-elected. They can't make backroom deals with lobbyists, they can't promise favorable legislation to corporations in exchange for cushy jobs after retirement, etc., etc. In short, they can't do all the things that politicians in democracies routinely do to further their own interests, because those things are not good for the electorate.
So if the definition of a "functioning" democracy is that what's good for the power structure is good for the electorate, then I don't think such a thing exists, has ever existed, or can exist. The interests of the power structure will always be in conflict with the interests of the electorate. Some democracies may manage that conflict better than others, but it's always going to be there.
I think the problem is that the word unionization encapsulates many different things which should not necessarily be tied together. Collective bargaining, employees having a voice on the running of the business, legal and advisory services provided by someone on your side as opposed to someone with interests diametrically opposed to yours (the CEOs, not the companies), elections of representatives, etc.
As a whole these (as the data conclusively proves) were better for workers and probably the companies as well at the expense of the C-level suits. But it is probably true that some of ideas implemented by unions did work against workers. The solution is not to throw the baby out with the bath water but to analyze and experiment with different union structures which reduce the negative effects and enhance the positive ones.
Unfortunately, Americans have decide to wholesale reject and vilify the only structure that empowers non-owners even slightly which despite all its faults was still better for most Americans, instead of trying to separate the effective ones from the ineffective ones, and are reaping the unequal society they have sowed.
Gotta give credit to our wealthy overlords who have done an impressive job of getting people to vote against their own interests by splitting people along various social dividing lines as well as magnifying limited failures of systems as endemic to them.
Consider for a second that maybe they aren't voting against their own interests.
My interest is not in having some jackhole thug whose primary skill is breaking kneecaps going around and negotiating my salary, thank you very much.
With unions you always have the principle-agent problem. The union is going to negotiate for its best interest, not necessarily the employees and certainly not a specific employees. There's a long history of these kinds of union abuses. This is why the unions in america are closely associated iwht the mob (that and the fact that the mob is what started the unions in america.)
The above two links go to the same essay by author of "The Wire" David Simon in written and video forms. He discusses specifically the problem of unions... and the problem of capital. If you have the time, please watch and/or read this essay.
A very, very brief summary:
Unions are absolutely necessary, but not because of some specific feature they might achieve. Instead, they are a check on capital. (and vice versa). Similar to our "adversarial" judicial system - where each side is expected to fight hard for their own interests - it is the struggle between labor and capital that produces a working economy. If either side actually gets what they want, the system becomes pathological.
So yes, unions are an inefficiency. That was the intended effect. There is a lot of hostility in this very thread to the idea that "those people" - in this case, "people I see as 'lower-quality engineers'" - might be getting something they "don't deserve". Or the fear might be that helping the bottom end would require taking from someone else, as if the economy was some zero-sum game. Yes, some amount of those effect was the goal.
The alternative that says some variation of "fsck you, I've got mine" may betray a lack of empathy in the speaker, but in most cases I suspect it betrays a belief in one of our most damaging cultural myths: the "just world" fallacy we call the "free market".
The question isn't really about unions. Instead, the question to ask yourself is "are we in this together?" Do you want a society with a functioning economy or not? Or do you want to let us continue our slide back into feudalism... and probably some sort of violent rebellion in the long run.
To make society work, it might require occasionally helping those that are less fortunate. Just like we do with "taxes" and "health insurance". Forming a union and participating in it might be one of the ways you can provide input on how these issues should be managed.
Thanks for the link. Terrific essay. I often look at the industry I'm in and the dominant political & economic perceptions the participants adhere to and wonder if there is an ignorance of history, or just a misguided belief that "it's different this time".
Helping the less fortunate is a good idea. The less able (or less willing) being forcibly inserted into a workplace is not a good idea and doesn't help anyone.
Unions suffer from the same problem as communist states: they are theoretically superb, but practically cumbersome and prone to abuse.
A successful union should be able to
- Guarantee minimum wages and conditions for all employees.
- Hold management to account on malpractice towards employees.
- Not limit individual employees ability to command higher wages or conditions than the minimum.
- Not limit the ability of companies to make decisions that improve the health of the company.
- Allow employees to be agile in what they need from the company, without calcifying previous agreements.
- Not privilege the employment of union representatives.
In practice good unions hit some of these, but not all. And anti-union folks tend to carp on the ones that they're poor at.
I'd love to see a model for how to unionise that provided all these qualities.
They aren't called 'unions', but there are professional organizations that act as unions and are generally respected: doctors, accountants, etc. They don't hit all my points, but I think, on balance, programmers would benefit from something similar.
Private enterprise suffers from the same problem as capitalist states: they are theoretically efficient, but in practice, a handful of people at the top become richer and richer, while everyone else is squeezed into de-facto indenture.
As they say, capitalism works in theory. Once you get out into the real world, though, you need some kind of check on that imbalance of power.
>Not limit the ability of companies to make decisions that improve the health of the company.
The only purpose of unions is to limit the ability of companies to make decisions that improve the health of the company (at the expense of the people who work for it.)
Why put the last phrase in parentheses when removing it would totally alter the meaning?
The only purpose of surgeons is to hack into peoples bodies and mess about with their internal organs (when the person's health would be worse if they did not). See? It's easy to play those games.
Employment isn't a zero sum game. Employees can benefit from a healthy company. Unions should facilitate the growth of a company in ways that do not exploit the workforce.
* Safety was 'important', every year they checked that chairs and screens are ergonomically positioned. However lab vent contamination with poison was swept under rag.
* Monthly union membership fee 50 euro. This was 'optional', but most people paid to avoid problems.
* union had huge income surplus. It was used to send union leaders to 'seminars' on exotic locations.
* in case of strike, union would not compensate first three days (except officials who were organizing the strike). All strikes very under 3 days. Basically extra holiday.
* that place had 10 HR persons on 120 personnel. My company had 1 HR for 110 people.
* People with permanent contracts were untouchable.
* 70% people worked on 6 month contracts extended for YEARS.
* This company spend fifty year budget on huge unnecessary building. There were no money left to hire people
Ah, but then one of the unions could free-ride on the sacrifices of the others, and the whole system would collapse bit by bit! No, if you have multiple unions, then obviously they need to form a union-of-unions to allow the unions to collectively bargain.
Interesting idea, its possible though that rather than unionization the issue is a lack of dividends. The efficiency of enterprises to generate value has gone up quite a bit, without significant competition, that leads to excess profits. How that extra capital is allocated can be to pay employees more, accumulate cash, or pay it out to the share holders.
In the 30's the "profit" for the non-institutional investor from owning stock was receiving dividends on a pro-rata basis, not trading the stock. In the run up of the market from the 80's trading was more valuable than holding, and technology companies, companies that increasingly made up the composition of stocks were more likely to not pay any dividends at all.
You might ask yourself why you hold stock in any company that doesn't pay you a dividend. What are they doing with the capital they generate? Your only recourse is to sell the stock when the value goes up. The status quo is good for the company, they can put money in (value goes up) and take money out (value goes down) of your pocket all day and you can't do a thing about it (except to stop playing by selling the stock) whereas with a dividend once you've received the check the worst that can happen is the next year you don't get one.
So really the companies are giving your dividend money to their top executives rather than you. As a shareholder you should work on changing that :-)
In this commentary thread, I see a lot of opinions about unions, as well as anecdata, but little in the way of actual discussion of the findings that the article is talking about.
I myself lack the economic and statistical knowledge to offer such discussion, but would very much like to read discussion from those who are knowledgeable.
this article takes a correlation and proceeds to imply causation from it. There is a correlation between recent rise of inequality in advanced economies and decline in unionization. But, global inequality has decreased over the same period. It's quite probable that the same forces are driving all 3 of these
cause and effect have been misidentified. the craptastic business environment in the US has led to fall of the system. unions can't survive because they've helped price american labor out of the market. union money has gone unilaterally to democrats who raise more taxes and levy more and more rules and regulations and entitlements driving up taxes and corruption. the union centers, like detroit and many other traditional union strongholds collapsed, businesses went to friendlier environments.
i personally despise unions. they force people into collectivism and destroy any individuality. my dad was a long time of this. he used to get letters from the union telling him he was working too hard and making other people look bad. he should have been given pay raises, not punished for working hard for his company.
People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic union organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking now? The best they can do is fall back on the default explanation of people living in fallen civilizations. Our ancestors were giants. The workers of the early twentieth century must have had a moral courage that's lacking today.
In fact there's a simpler explanation. The early twentieth century was just a fast-growing startup overpaying for infrastructure. And we in the present are not a fallen people, who have abandoned whatever mysterious high-minded principles produced the high-paying union job. We simply live in a time when the fast-growing companies overspend on different things.
I'd love to see better information on alternative collective bargaining to unions, which is a loaded word in the U.S. I've never worked as a union member, but my impression from working with them is that they undermine their own success long term by over protecting incumbent members and reducing organizational agility, but do a good job of improving the live of their averages member in the short to midterm.
I've often mused on how to make collective bargaining work better without much success. I wonder if employee owned corporations that function like contractors would be better (the employees start working for the union once the collective bargaining goes into effect.)
It's pretty ironic that the party of small government favors a policy of huge government overreach into the ability of various to enter into contracts with each other. That's all Unions really boil down to: contracts. It's supposed to be what makes this country a superior place to do business, the fact that you can enter into binding contracts which will be enforced. But hey, if you know how to operate the institutionalized bribery system known as campaign finance, you can get the government to rewrite the contract to your advantage, or even deny your counterparty the ability to enter into a binding contract at all.
the primary function of unions is to improve working conditions and increase wages for its members. the improved working conditions are welcome in developing nations, but the increased wages come at a cost, for unions can only ensure higher wages by limiting the number of jobs available. furthermore, unions must define a set of criteria for the acceptance of new union members that discriminates for reasons wholly irrelevant to employers.
I feel ambivalent about unions, but here's what I see.
Lots of people are criticising unions, because sometimes they are inefficient or corrupt.
Equally, I could write a rant about how employers are inefficient and corrupt.
So, my question is, what's the alternative to unionisation? Because currently, these arguments seem to say "let's get rid of the unions, and just let people be powerless and exploited."
Criticism is easy. Constructive criticism is something different.
I think an interesting Union would be one that lets employees decide who they want to be their direct supervisor along with some sort of incentive for output.
Start your own company, and you're free to try that out. Trying to force your own will on someone else's company and business plan is an economic road-to-ruin for everybody. Just ask the US Auto-makers.
This idea resembles the election of brigadirs (work brigade leaders) in a kolkhoz. It requires that the production is collectivised/nationalised, or at least that the private ownership is nominal in nature, because owner cannot effectively direct work.
It did work to some extent in agriculture prior to mechanisation, when much of the work was manual, but it is hard to see how this would be possible e.g. in high-tech industry, where even the fundamental nature of "capital" and "means of production" are different.
The top 10% are also putting in a lot more hours. Moreover, a good education, which now costs about $150k, is no longer a guarantee of a good job. I have many friends who won't pay off their student loans until they are 40. I have other friends with union jobs but little additional education that have houses and boat. Why should someone be compensated more than those who took the risk to pursue a higher education?
It sounds like the more compensated made better choices. Why does risk-taking engender high pay than working for good money? If the facts in the books aren't worth a damn to the employers, maybe the higher education has no market value?
Just because someone says it's a 'good education' doesn't mean it breeds worthwhile labor in a market.
Income inequality is the highest it has been since the beginning of the depression. Real wages have been flat for decades despite large gains in GDP. Is that a sign that workers have excellent leverage in negotiations?
Programmers are in a privileged position right now because there aren't enough of us to fill demand. That will not be the case forever. Look at what has happened with law - people saw the money to be made, flooded the market, and now a law degree doesn't really mean shit unless you're from a Big N school. The majority of programming work is not innovative or challenging - look at how many "I taught myself Javascript Framework 38! Look what I built" posts that flood this site. What do you think the long-term outlook for programming work is going to be like? Are you going to be the special snowflake ninja 10X rockstar in 10 years? Are you going to be happy to have no collective bargaining then?