
Union Is Formed at Los Angeles Times and Publisher Put on Leave - chollida1
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/business/media/los-angeles-times-union.html
======
losteverything
Imo union-ism is an attitide and coupled with experience is effective.

Just because you are salaried and "professional" does not mean you
collectively do not have extreme clout.

Whatever the hot issues are - say hours worked in a 7 day period - and the
desire is to place limits (say 4 twelve hour days amd 1 eight hour day) having
a union attitude means your bargained (agreed upon) rules are enforceable. And
you carry a right to not work outside your agreed upon scope.

The attitide comes in when you stop work after the last day. It's your right.

People in unions (i am one) are the beneficiaries of years of compromise and
abuse But it's fragile.

All the union is is a sturdy frame which everyone stands on. Its sure footed.
Otherwise workers - even professionals- have no true security, no true
predictable work conditions.

Iz is very unfortunate that union has become such a negative word. If a
handful of people got together and simply stopped the management "abuse" i
guarantee (!!!!) you you would be surprised how much power even engineer types
can have

~~~
phil21
Dunno. Maybe.

All a union did for me in my younger years was have me work my ass off so
older union members could sit around doing literally nothing. In fact as far
as I could tell their jobs were effectively finding ways to do nothing, and
then when they got too good at that finding ways to keep others from doing
anything.

I would not be paid _nearly_ what I am today had I been stuck in my first
union job. Even if I had stayed in the same field.

Until unions can stop being basically safe havens for either the lazy,
incompetent, or corrupt (what they've effectively become in the US) I want
zero part of them. The two I were in in my teens and early 20's were enough
for me. They were so bad I did not want to be _morally_ associated with them
in any way whatsoever. All I ever saw from them was protection for the worst
kind of people, and the high performers were ran out of the company as soon as
possible by all the other members.

It sucks there isn't something else that can champion the rights and pay of
the workers without simply serving the lowest common denominator. I'd actively
join and support a "trade guild" where membership was predicated on competence
and work ethic - and members actively policed to ensure they meet the
standard. I'd also seek out employing such guilds when possible.

Unfortunately that doesn't exist, and I tend to actively avoid union shops
with a few notable exceptions. Typically when you say the word "union labor"
to me that means it's going to be 4x the price, take 5x as long, and be done
halfassed so we'll have to re-do half the work anyways.

~~~
SteveGerencser
My experience is quite similar, in two different unions. The first was in the
Teamsters at a bottling plant and the second was some years later, on the
other side of the country, in the Teacher's Union in California. I left both
jobs because of the way they were run by the unions.

In the first, it was 100% seniority-based with zero regards to effort or
skill. The second I left for basically the same reason. Ability played very
little part in pay or benefits. It was simply a time served deal.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine was named shop steward at an automobile
manufacturer. The next day he showed up at the airport, in the middle of a
workday, in a brand new truck that he just took off the lot as a perk. When we
asked why he was hanging out with us at the airport rather than at work, he
smiled and said that all complaints went over his desk first, and he wasn't
likely to let a complaint against him go past him.

I know that unions played a massively important role in the past, but like all
bureaucracies, as it aged and evolved, they became something far different.

~~~
knieveltech
Yeah unions have definitely changed over the last 40 years. Folks forgot the
meaning of the word "solidarity" and are too impatient to put their time in
like the older workers they like to complain about. There was an old guy that
worked in a union fabrication shop where I used to work. His sole job was to
run the band saw that we used to cut structural steel. Given how long a single
cut took he spent the overwhelming majority of his time sitting on a stool
reading a book and getting paid well for it. Meanwhile here's me pulling
overtime fetching shit for every other workstation in the shop and
ocassionally pulling 12 hour shifts in front of an industrial milling machine
making cable trays. Over time I started resenting the hell out of the guy
running the bandsaw, since he had a cushy job and was making way more money
than me. I commenced to bitching about it one day on my lunch break and
learned from some of the other guys in the shop that this dude had seen more
coworkers maimed or killed and hand hung more structural steel than any other
8 men in the shop put together. Among other accomplishments he'd been part of
the crew that erected the US 19 bridge over the New River Gorge. He'd paid his
dues, put his time in, and was short for retirement, so the Union took care of
him. He retired with a full pension (you go ahead and pretend a 401k is
equivalent) and healthcare a year after I started working there. The shop
found another graybeard to replace him running the band saw.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
That was a great example, thank you.

One way of looking at his role could have been that while you were running
around, his health and safety was being preserved. If he (or any other vital
employee) was injured in an accident that didn’t involve his explicit job
requirements, that could have resulted in a bottleneck much more costly than
his clocked time spent reading books.

------
chollida1
I thought this was interesting because if knowledge workers like journalists
can do so, why not programmers, or what ever term you'd prefer to be called?

~~~
ng12
Why do we need a union in a seller's market? If I'm unhappy with my job I can
quit and get a new one in a week.

It's not about being a knowledge worker. Screenwriters are unionized because
there are many more people who want to write than there are gigs, therefore
there's a high potential for abuse.

~~~
tptacek
If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work under onerous IP
contracts that grant their employers rights to what they build in their spare
time?

If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers work in noisy bullpen
environments where they have to blast music into their ears with headphones to
focus their attention on what they're building?

If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers have stories about
working late at night and on weekends to ship features on bogus accelerated
schedules they had little hand in setting?

If it's a "seller's market", why do so many developers accept payment in the
form of equity that has to be executed at great expense immediately after
leaving the company, and offers no actual guarantee of return after making
that investment?

If it's a "seller's market", why are developers forced to move to the most
expensive real estate markets in the country to work every day from a
particular office when their work can be done more productively from their own
home offices?

If it's a "seller's market", why are so many developers compensated with
equity whose terms they're not even allowed to fully understand? And why is it
that their common shares are last in line after liquidation preferences and
VCs take their rake?

I don't understand how you can spend more than a few months on Hacker News
without seeing the litany of complaints developers have about their working
conditions. Not simply how much they're paid --- and make no mistake, plenty
of developers have those complaints, and feel victimized by the way
compensation is negotiated for in this market --- but also simply for how
inefficiently and inhumanely their jobs are structured compared to what they
so obviously could be.

Tech workers should organize. United they bargain, divided they write
anonymous complaints on HN.

~~~
phil21
Honestly the answer to all your questions is "because people traded those
items for massive pay increases".

I've never had a problem negotiating any of those points with any of my
employers in the tech industry. Perhaps work for smaller companies if these
sorts of things are important to you?

If you want to max out salary in silicon valley, I guess your list applies.
For almost everywhere else in the country it's simply not the case - if you
are truly talented you can almost write your own job description.

> I don't understand how you can spend more than a few months on Hacker News
> without seeing the litany of complaints developers have about their working
> conditions.

I suppose that's one reaction. My reaction is generally amusement at the
ridiculous complaints. Once in a while a legitimate one comes through, but
most of them are truly "first world problems" to the absolute utter extreme.

~~~
majormajor
CA is one of the few places I've found where companies actually _can 't_ pull
the we-own-everything-you-do-at-any-time trick...

But to the rest: this is a forum where people constantly complain about the
shoddy standards of shipping software. Shit security. Shit privacy. Shit
performance. Shit dependency hell. Right now people get paid a lot of money to
make as-bad-as-possible-to-still-make-money products. It's interesting.

Maybe a group that could negotiate on a larger scale with companies to say
"we're not making that shit" could have some use. Or maybe the jobs would all
go overseas, but from my experience... good luck with that!

------
jostmey
The journalist have no leverage. The job market for journalist is horrendously
awful. It won't be difficult to replace the them quickly and easily

------
bmmayer1
How does unionization protect workers against the decline in demand for
journalists and the collapse of the newspaper industry? (serious question)

~~~
tptacek
Here's one possible way: by exploiting their negotiating position to act as a
check against management's impulses to sell cathedrals of journalism for spare
parts on the promise that maybe the resulting third-tier incarnation of
Buzzfeed that will result might temporarily juice returns to owners. Maybe
it's possible that the people actually doing the work know better about how to
run a successful media company than the Troncs do?

~~~
jamiequint
> Maybe it's possible that the people actually doing the work know better
> about how to run a successful media company than the Troncs do?

Why don't they start their own media company then rather than resort to short-
term value extraction tactics which will likely drive said "cathedral of
journalism" into the ground?

~~~
tptacek
It wasn't the reporters that Tronc'd The Tribune Corporation; it was owners
that did that. Why am I required to accept the premise that it's labor that's
pathologically short-termist, and not management? I reject that premise.

------
dmix
I'm curious what effect this will have on all the constant cries for more
"real journalism" instead of companies pushing for low budget high volume
output and semi-digitized content milling. Hiring "real journalists" full time
just got a lot more expensive for a company that was already attempting to
reinvent itself in a struggle for profitability in a strained industry.

Also, can't the LA Times easily just buy up more freelance material from non-
employees (not only journalism, graphics, web work, etc)?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> Also, can't the LA Times easily just buy up more freelance material from
> non-employees (not only journalism, graphics, web work, etc)?

Not if the union's any good.

~~~
dmix
In what way could they stop the company from doing this? Besides making firing
(even bad) employees difficult?

Any future growth that may have previously resulted in hiring full time
workers could easily now be redirected to freelance, temp work, and p/t
workers regardless of the union.

I remember watching a Tronc video when it was trendy to make fun of them and
they were already talking heavily about digitizing much of the work that was
done manually. It's a much more dynamic industry than an old-school factory
that needed a set of bodies with predictable roles to show up.

~~~
untog
> could easily now be redirected to freelance, temp work, and p/t workers
> regardless of the union

Not if the union is willing to go on strike. This is one of the main things a
union can achieve.

~~~
tonyarkles
And negotiating it into the collective agreement. It's pretty common to
require that all work done be done by union members.

------
andrewprock
The LA Times is long time anti-union organization, but bad leadership at the
top was the issue. It appears that forming a union was a last ditch effort to
get rid of the bad leadership. It seems to have worked.

In some ways, this looks like a reflection of what happened at Uber. Ousting
bad leadership can be a difficult and complex process sometimes.

------
p_monk
For those people suggesting programmers shouldn't unionize, read the op-ed in
Financial Times written by Sequoia's Michael Moritz this week to see why
programmers should unionize ASAP:

[https://www.ft.com/content/42daca9e-facc-11e7-9bfc-052cbba03...](https://www.ft.com/content/42daca9e-facc-11e7-9bfc-052cbba03425)

In this article, he suggests Silicon Valley engineers should be worked to the
bone like their Chinese counterparts. Some of the things he suggests in the
articles:

1) End vacation days (he refers to taking a vacation day as "stealing")

2) Workers should get used to not seeing their kids

3) End the weekend (employees should work 14 hour days, 6-7 days a week)

4) Buildings should turn off the heat. Instead, employees can wear coats and
scarves at their desks.

5) Physical fitness should be discouraged.

~~~
jdross
And yet here we are today in Silicon Valley with lavish perks, much higher
than average pay in the country for software development, and no unions.

We also have the ability to fire untalented or unpleasant people, and promote
especially talented individuals regardless of age or tenure.

You don't need to work at any company that looks like the above. And I don't
know of any company that looks like the above.

~~~
Apocryphon
I'm sure there was an assembly line in '70s Detroit with this same
conversation.

~~~
paxy
What's your argument here? Every assembly line worker in 70s Detroit was
unionized.

~~~
Apocryphon
The "here we are today, look how good we have it" narrative is complacent and
dangerous. Eventually you will be disrupted.

~~~
altstar
And the point is unions didn't help to counter it.

~~~
Apocryphon
Why make the assumption that unions of the future need to be identical to the
unions of the past? Do self-driving cars need to resemble classic hot rods?

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joemaller1
Because forming a union worked out so well at Gothamist and DNA Info...

~~~
theklr
That was a totally different environment, it was a monopsonistic structure
where the head determined the ROI wasn't even worth the discussion. But same
issue, most media is bad at revenue streams, but technically Walmart and
Amazon (and most retailers) are for that mark.

What troubles me if this is the logic for our newspapers (especially local
which cover tangible issues that we could actually change in comparison to a
CNN/Fox News/MSNBC) what does that say about our trust in the fourth estate?
When they disappear, who will watch our officials? Cause we collectively have
been on the ball for the last 30 odd years...

~~~
visarga
Many politicians don't give a crap about "being watched by the press" because
they can always fix it with more bullshit and fake news.

------
aphextron
Solidarity forever.

