
Tech Start-Up Fires Engineers Amid Union Organizing Effort - thinkpad20
https://www.bna.com/tech-startup-fires-n73014474793/
======
jacknews
> Organizational Values

> “We win only when our customers win.”

> Fast, Deliberate, Accountable, With Integrity

> Resourceful, Empathetic, Inclusive and Creatively Frugal

Creatively frugal. Check. Not sure about the others.

~~~
valtism
> “We win only when our customers win.”

Organisational values focusing on the customer is for me a big red flag for
how workers will be treated.

------
lifeformed
Seems like discussions about unions never get more nuanced than: "unions are
good" or "unions are bad". I wish such topics could be more about learning
from the pros and cons of different systems and figuring out new solutions.

~~~
commandlinefan
So here's what I can't seem to get my head around. I keep reading how we -
programmers, developers, software people - are in such high demand while
observing a world where the perception, at least, is that we're a dime a
dozen. On the one hand, I make good money doing something I genuinely enjoy
all day - not retire early money, but not "how am I going to pay the water
bill this month" either, and I've only been out of work for a month in the
past 25 years. On the other hand, I sit in a wide-open bullpen next to people
who are shouting into speaker phones all day and inputting timecards at
15-minute granularity. I have to forecast how I'm going to spend my time weeks
in advance, and that forecast had better not include anything as mundane as
"reading the Bootstrap documentation" because education is my responsibility,
not their problem. I've been rejected from four times more jobs than I've been
accepted to. Now, you may say that I'm in this relatively low-status position
because I suck - and you may be right - but I have decades of experience and a
master's degree in CS. Nobody can say that I don't at least look good on
paper. We "technology people" ought to have the upper hand here. We shouldn't
need a union - we should just be able to say what we need to produce what
we're being asked for (time and quiet) but the prevailing atmosphere is more
like "you're lucky you even have a job; shut up and stop complaining".

~~~
Kiro
I'm not feeling that atmosphere at all. Here programmers are treated with
utmost respect because there's such a high demand for them. That's also the
reason why very few are members of a union, even though I live in a country
with the strongest unions in the world. Programmers simply dictate their own
conditions without the help of unions and the employers have no choice but
submit in fear of losing them.

------
curuinor
they're not going to have an actual product in 3-5 months, union or not, if
they fire everybody

e: it looks like they're in the salesforce ecosystem, so perhaps they're
glomped onto the Benioff philosophy of "No Software". i guess they're ok with
the 1.5 nines of uptime and universal agreement that the software is crap that
this implies

~~~
curuinor
oh my god, they actually put Webvan as an example of a disruptive company on
their site (as of 1940 PST Jan 30 2018)

[https://www.lanetix.com/company/#why-
lanetix](https://www.lanetix.com/company/#why-lanetix)

~~~
craftyguy
In all fairness, webvan was addressing something that folks apparently want.
IIRC Amazon is actively trying to roll out something very similar to this
right now...

Don't confuse "disruptive companies" with "mismanaged companies". The first
implies they are on to something, the second implies they don't know how to
reach it.

~~~
ThePadawan
In fact, Webvan's Wikipedia article lists their fate as "Bankrupt, resurrected
by Amazon.com in 2009" without going into further detail.

~~~
rgbrenner
But that's inaccurate bs that someone edited there. There's no real connection
between Webvan and Amazon.

Louis Borders founded Webvan (the guy who founded Border bookstores). They
went bankrupt in 2001. Mick Mountz and a few other Webvan employees started
Kiva Robotics a few years later... In 2007, Amazon launched AmazonFresh, and
then in 2012 Amazon purchased Kiva... and those former Webvan employees
started work at Amazon (IDK if they still work there).

And if you click on the ref in wikipedia.. you'll see it's an article from
2013 saying Webvan was alive at Amazon because former webvan employees came to
work there when amazon bought kiva.

That's not the way acquisitions work... Webvan is long dead.

------
conanbatt
Isn't it 'illegal' to fire as retaliation for unionizing?

~~~
Alex3917
Not exactly. It's illegal to fire people for engaging in protected concerted
activity to improve their working conditions. Unionization is one example of
something that could be protected concerted activity, but not all tactics for
forming unions would qualify as protected concerted activity, nor is protected
concerted activity in any way limited to forming unions. (There are some
explicit protections for unionizing, but this is the general principle.)

For example, using your employer's Slack to discuss improving things like
healthcare, overtime, wages, etc. would be a textbook example of something
that would be protected. You need at least two employees (non-managers)
leading the discussion though to qualify as concerted, one person complaining
is just a malcontent and doesn't qualify for any protections under the law.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Related to this, one of the most interesting things I took home from my short
course in Employment Law was the statement from the lawyer teaching the class:
"if you're going to complain about something to your boss that he won't like;
make sure there are at least two of you complaining. That way you're covered
by the laws pertaining to Collective Bargaining and you can have some recourse
if you're fired as a result."

------
csense
Want to know why the Rust Belt is the Rust Belt? Because the manufacturing
industry discovered this strategy decades ago: If a union's going to come in
and make your life inconvenient, send the jobs overseas to a country where
that won't happen.

~~~
wmeredith
You want to know why we have a 40 hour work week and kids don't work in
factories? Unions.

------
azinman2
> “We believe one of the most anti-unions things you can do is to let all
> employees go,” Parks said. “We’re going to fight as hard as we can.”

Isn’t the strength of a union in that everyone stops working collectively?
Firing all of them is basically calling their bluff.

~~~
bwestergard
Step 2: bigger union.

~~~
scriptingnerd
Sadly, while the 21% tax law is great for companies, it can suck for those of
us who sling code for a living. This administration is hostile to unions, and
the last administration was not overly happy to support them but in name only.
America is simply not a terribly friendly place for unions. I wish our tech
scene looked more like Norway or Sweden, but good luck with that...

~~~
thestephen
Why would you want that? When it comes to working immigrants, the Swedish
unions generally have the power to say no [1], which they use – several high-
skilled immigrants have been thrown out of Sweden the past two years.

[1] [https://www.affarsvarlden.se/juridik_affarer/facken-
stoppar-...](https://www.affarsvarlden.se/juridik_affarer/facken-stoppar-
arbetskraftsinvandring-6695338) (Swedish)

------
branchless
A graph of income share versus union membership:

[https://i.redd.it/nhp7e2rzy8d01.jpg](https://i.redd.it/nhp7e2rzy8d01.jpg)

Think also of the insanely high CEO pay.

~~~
Robotbeat
As much as I see flaws in unions in the US, that graph should be plastered on
everyone's eyeballs whenever unions come up. Unions are one of the very few
proven ways to address inequality

The others are worse: war and revolution.

~~~
michaelchisari
There's no doubt that unions in America have had their problems. But the
solution was always better (more democratic, less corrupt, etc) unions, not
less unions or none at all.

~~~
pdonis
I'm wondering why an alternative solution hasn't been tried: make unions into
corporations, selling the service of efficiently managed labor to other
corporations who want it. All of the workers could have shares in the
corporation, so they would fairly share its profits. And the union/corporation
could then negotiate for itself for things like health care, retirement plans,
etc., without having to depend on other corporations to do it.

~~~
rdl
Because all of the problems with unions come from the "closed shop" \-- the
right to exclude non-members from working freely for companies. No one has a
problem with voluntary associations of workers (e.g. ACM or IEEE); the issue
is when a group is allowed to force a business to only hire members of that
organization, or to force all employees to pay dues to that organization.

Your "labor contracting corporation" would just be one competitor among many.
If it tried to increase the price of labor, it would be bypassed.

Right-to-work solves the problems of unions. It also eliminates most of the
power of unions, so it is unpopular with trade unionists.

The only unions I really want to see eliminated, though, are public employee
unions (prison guards, especially, but also police, fire, teachers, etc.).
Those employees have other means to redress grievances. I'd also like to see
AMA and ABA (which are effectively unions, but for people making far higher
wages) de-fanged as well.

------
meesterdude
If unions are a good idea, and we're all in theory smart, why aren't we
unionizing more? Why is it something we allow to be set aside; the organized
effort to advocate for our needs?

Are unions anti-startup? are startups anti-union? or is it really just a PG
ideology trickling down?

What can we do to bring about unionization efforts to the industry?

~~~
sjg007
Because we are not actually that smart. We are probably too smart to
understand that collective bargaining looks at the survival as a group which
protects it’s members. Most technologists are young and haven’t experienced
hardships that would have been resolved readily by a union. These hardships
include disparate health care (less likely to impact the youth), vacation
time, involuntary separation, retirement etc...

~~~
djsumdog
I knew a friend: pretty smart guy who was working on his masters, hated his
field and decided to go to trucking. He's been in a union for decades. He
talked about union vs non-union drivers. A lot of companies will tell you all
this crap about how union shops pay less, lay off tons of people, etc. etc.

He told me union trucking agencies do tend to lay a lot of people off after
the busy seasons, but their contracts allow them to take other loads during
those times, and many of them get hired right back on in a month or two. If
you really compared union and non-union shops and factor in benefits and
healthcare, you come out way ahead in union shops.

He talked about FexEx and all the videos they put out showing they're a better
company to work for and how you can go from truck driver to pilot. He told me
UPS is a union shop and they spend less money on that bullshit advertising and
more giving their workers benefits, better wages and hours. (FedEx is non-
union and UPS is union right? I might have this backwards ..was a long time
ago.. anyway...).

I watched him debate with a hard core, franchise owning (he owned like 8 Jimmy
John's), libertarian, anti-union guy at brunch once and they had a really good
rational argument about unions.

~~~
sjg007
I agree. People need to talk to their friends in a union and ask if they
regret it. My union friends have great benefits and love it.

~~~
peoplewindow
Depends if your friends are managers I guess.

My father worked his way up into management in a union shop in the 70s and
80s. The union was completely insane and basically declared war on the
company. It was hacking computers, stealing mail, working with the cleaners to
rummage through wastebaskets looking for corporate info they could blackmail
management with. And of course they kept interrupting service to the customers
via strikes.

The solution was simple enough in the end. The company replaced the striking
workers with machines. But lots of people's lives were harried and disrupted
in the intervening years.

~~~
gaius
_The union was completely insane and basically declared war on the company_

This happens when people become full-time employees of the union, rather than
doing union stuff while being employees of the company. The only paid staff an
honest union needs are maybe some people to do admin. Union bosses always seem
to be paid as much as managers or more too, they don’t have anything in common
with the Workers anymore, if they even ever did

------
Alex3917
Congrats to all the engineers who are about to get a year plus salary without
having to do any work.

~~~
hueving
But I thought they were unsuccessful in joining the union.

~~~
rgbrenner
it's illegal to fire someone for joining a union, attempting to join a union,
or forming a union.

Alex is probably referring to their settlement offers if they prove their case
to the NLRB. But the truth is the penalty will probably be far less... they'll
likely just be required to rehire the employee and back pay wages from the
date they were fired to the day they're rehired (if they win).

~~~
tomjakubowski
I think that was a dry joke about "lazy union workers".

------
wasx
The attitude towards unionisation on this site is sickening.

I live in a country with a very strong union movement and the only reason I'm
able to sit here typing this message is because my parents and grandparents
unionised rather than live off of slavery wages. That may mean nothing to
Americans where it's every man for themselves, but don't think yourselves so
lucky that you got to the position you're in without workers uniting with one
another and ensuring they get a fair share against the greed of the few.

It might not have affected many of you with the silver spoon you have in your
mouths but the only damn reason that kids still aren't working in sweat shops
and you get to go home at 5pm is because of workers organising and having each
other's backs when abuses and overreach occur, and a little bit of solidarity
for each other is necessary when you see such flagrant abuses like this.

~~~
shubhamjain
> I live in a country with a very strong union movement and the only reason
> I'm able to sit here typing this message is because my parents and
> grandparents unionised rather than live off of slavery wages. That may mean
> nothing to Americans where it's every man for themselves, but don't think
> yourselves so lucky that you got to the position you're in without workers
> uniting with one another and ensuring they get a fair share against the
> greed of the few.

There is another side of this coin too. I just finished reading The Box, a
book on the advent of containerization, and it's appalling how unions fiercely
fought any sort of mechanization. A job that required only 1-2 longshoremen
mandatorily needed many more because unions said so. Days, and sometimes
weeks, were wasted on strikes when a consensus couldn't be reached. Jobs that
weren't needed anymore were still forced to be kept because any labor-saving
innovation was undesirable. In the end, it was more cost-effective to
compulsorily retire the longshoremen with a guaranteed income than to fight
them.

I don't deny that the unions serve a purpose but the exploitation of their
dominance can surely set back innovation by years. I wouldn't want to part of
an organization that mandates that I can't touch PHP code because I am a
Frontend Engineer.

~~~
gaius
Unions in the UK and US are antagonistic to the point that they will gladly
destroy a company or even an entire industry rather than give an inch (union
bosses don’t care, they are very well looked after, strangely). But unions in
France and Germany are far cleverer, they would never kill the goose that laid
the golden eggs. That’s why Germany is strong in manufacturing AND has superb
working conditions... and the UK has a service economy and zero-hours
contracts

~~~
willbw
And France has...?

~~~
telchar
High productivity, great worker protections, and high unemployment. Seems to
be a mixed bag but the workers who have jobs wouldn't trade it.

~~~
pm90
France is a very interesting country. I would really like to know details
about labor conditions there before making the default judgement that I used
to when I was younger, that unionization and over-regulation had basically
killed the French economy, causing the high levels of unemployment. They seem
to have a system of protecting their workers, now if there was a way to also
increase innovation/employment so more people could benefit from this system
...

~~~
realusername
At the moment it seems to be a choice in the developed world for high
unemployment or high ratio of poor part-time workers , there's not enough work
for everybody anyway so I'm not sure which one is the worst.

------
nicetime
Not unlike the gothamist.

------
enknamel
Just wait until Google engineers threaten to unionize. I'll need a few buckets
of popcorn when that happens.

------
angry_octet
Just one more company I'll never deal with or buy from.

------
doseOfReality44
Unions... the thought or intent was good, and initially they helped more than
hurt, but eventually things went south as usually happens when power is
wielded by a few and backed up by threats.

Unions, rather then help represent workers of a company, eventually hold it
hostage with their demands. This hurts the company's ability to flourish,
compete and grow.

Let's ask ourselves, why did we need unions during the industrial revolution?
and do we still need them today?

1\. The fact that unions were ever thought to have been needed suggests the
lack of competition at the time. This is often a side effect of over bearing
government regulation. There aren't too many jobs in America today where if
you quit, you can't find another doing the same thing (Competition for workers
drives wages and benefits up)

2\. Worker's used to work for one company their whole career. They were loyal
to a fault. This is no longer the case today.

3\. It was harder to move across the country or world back then. Also Society
was less racially diverse (in dispersion) back then. People would not leave
their town or side of town because all the immigrants from XYZ country lived
there and they would face far more challenge moving to another city than
today.

4\. Social pressure and media coverage (social media and other). Most
companies would find it hard to survive if their workers were starving because
of lack of pay. The same can be said if their factory was grossly unsafe, or
if they were being a-holes to their employees in any way. The way we are
connected today would expose abhorrent behavior to the world in minutes and
people would start to threaten boycotts ETC.

5\. We live in a much different world today. Unions, if they were ever really
needed, are not anymore. Yet they exist. Teachers somehow cannot be fired for
doing shoddy jobs, yet their wages aren't great (is that a good thing?).

6\. Registered Nurses go to a junior college for 3 years and start at $100/hr
here in northern CA. Meanwhile half of the citizens in this country cannot
afford health insurance (They are part of what is driving up the price. Is
that a good thing?).

7\. Fireman work 3 days a week and are averaging $150k salaries where I live.
They still march in protests every few years around here because they aren't
able to feed their family whilst living in their frat house making $75 per
hour. (I don't want to minimize what fireman do for us. They are heroes who
put their life in danger, though they die less often than minors and factory
workers who earn far less). The unions have extorted the cities that employ
them. (is this a good thing?)

8\. Police unions protect bad cops in many cases. Factory and other
manufacturing jobs have gone oversees because of the overbearing demands from
unions.

9\. Unions demand dues, yet often push laws through that the workers don't
even agree with ethically or politically.

10\. Unions buy and sell politicians with their donations and favors. It's a
quid pro quo that has gone on for over 100 years.

What is the upside of unions in the context of 2018? Do we need them? Are they
more harm than good?

------
pm24601
someone needs to post to glassdoor about their experience

------
leot
Unions, like police, serve as a corrective force. Sometimes needed and often
not, they are good only contingently.

It is sad that they are often seen only as either hateful or a panacea.

------
clackanon
Good, because unions have long outlived their usefulness. The time for them is
OVER.

Why organize for the privelege of being able to fork over a good chunk of your
paycheck for not a damn thing?

HOW DO I KNOW?? I've been a union member. CWA. It was worse than worthless and
useless. A net negative in every respect. 20% of my net pay for not a damn
thing. Unions are a waste of time/money/oxygen.

~~~
KyeRussell
It's unfortunate that you had a bad experience, but I don't know how you can
expect anyone to respect your view when you've made it blindingly obvious that
it's based on a single experience you've had. The "unions don't have a place
anymore" argument is nothing more than privileged neoliberal propaganda.
Shitty apathetic views like yours are how workplace standards slip.

~~~
dang
Please don't break the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments.
"Privileged neoliberal propaganda" is on the line but "shitty apathetic views
like yours" is well over it, especially because it's a personal attack too.

You don't have to change your views to comment on HN, but please edit out the
bits that don't make for thoughtful conversation.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

