1. Fat cats. What are the due fees? %1 now?, later then? %5 of gross annually? 200 people * 300k year * %5 of salary = 3 million. They will use this on fancy dinners with Google execs? Or spend it in "wrongful terminations" law suites with google for years? What happens when 50x more join.
2. Who runs it? Will it be a 10 year long president? What is her union salary? A non-google person? Will it be full time? A slack group? They dish out favors to win elections?
3. Who gets into the union? Base is on the newest woke culture? Base it on need? Salary? Scan their social media? Popularity contests? Seems like a great way to start discrimination.
4. Will being in this union freak out future employers? If your union spends most of it's time suing - will they want you around? EG. I don't see Tesla wanting a high ranking union person from google.
5. My wife worked at a union. Unions tend to not fire - so (non blue collar) you end up with hundreds of drained, demotivated, incompetent - due payers. This is the direction people at google want to go? Who will actually do the work? Non-union Sub-contractors?
6. Will they become political? Will you have to join this political party? What if you disagree on a few things? You still pay dues right - to the Fat Cat?
7. Will they corner off work? EG. You can't be a designer level III without being in the union.
One thing that wont happen: better working conditions.
These are all real problems, especially in a lot of today's older unions that have been completely hollowed out and have become a kind of do-nothing "labor aristocracy."
They don't function as democratic institutions serving laborers' interests anymore, only their own narrow, elite, institutional needs--often institutional self-preservation at the expense of their members' interests. They're decrepit, corrupt dinosaurs, just like the Right says. But they got that way by losing the fight in the 20th century. Now they're kind of useless vestiges just waiting around to slough off eventually.
So the old unions are no model to emulate here. But just noting that and giving up of course leaves the problem of my lack of power in the workplace completely unsolved.
> One thing that wont happen: better working conditions.
I still want better working conditions though, for me and for everybody. What do you suggest?
> I still want better working conditions though, for me and for everybody. What do you suggest?
Well, a re-brand for one. Don't call it a "union". Call it something else if it is something else. If you make a union patterned after traditional ones, why shouldn't it become a corrupt entity 50 years later just like all the current corrupt unions?
I'm very pro-labor/pro-worker, whatever you want to call it, and I'd be all about using a different term than union. It's a loaded term that has all sorts of negative connotation. New decade, new world of tech, new term for collectivized labor. I will admit, the police union problem is a hard counter. It's a solvable problem though, I think.
Guild has a connotation of workmanship and craft expertise, industriousness, etc. I do like that.
But there is also an existing phenomenon of various things calling themselves guilds (there are various "freelancers'" guilds, e.g.), but they do not function as an economic bargaining institution at all. They're just professional organizations where people exchange contact info for networking purposes.
I think there's no getting around the task at hand: rehabilitating the concept of a union of workers with shared interests and goals (even shared fraternity, if I'm gonna be super sentimental). It's capital, it's labor, it's unions. New century, same basic stuff.
My take on this is the old unions aren't decrepit just because they're unions and they've existed for 100 years. I don't think it's built in to the nature of unions to eventually become decrepit (no more than any other institution anyway).
Their problem is not that they're old, it's that they're not powerful enough anymore to be the kind of adversarial force they once were. They're shrinking instead of growing. Their strategy, if they even have any, is built around defensive self-preservation and survival. It's a siege mentality.
There's a reason for it, and a history to it. In the first half of the 20th century, upstart unions were on the rise, growing all the time, taking over everything, expanding into new sectors, gaining power. There really was a time when it was reasonable to think eventually just about every job in the country would be union, and that's just how things are. Perfectly normal. (And generally speaking, those young unions were more spontaneous and democratic than their progeny today. They were more "bottom up", less bureaucratic. Also much fightier.)
But capital isn't stupid or defenseless and they fought back. The result, for a while, was the Fordist paradigm that ruled the postwar years. The idea was union leaders and management leaders could work together and reach compromises that were acceptable to both sides, and overall productivity and quality of life would be optimized through this kind of give-and-take. We're all Americans, right? We all have the same goals (even if I own the factory and you work in it).
Well, that's all gone now. From the 70s on, the formerly powerful unions got totally pulverized. One major weakness they had is their own leadership had, in the compromise period, gotten pretty cozy with management and formed a kind of "labor aristocracy" whose interests were more aligned with management than the rank and file. This is basically the state the old unions are in today.
In other words, the developments were contingent on dynamics of 20th century history, not the only thing that could have happened. The problem with 20th century unions is not that they have some innate structural flaw, but that they lost the fight.
I don't think we need to re-invent the concept. The boss owns everything you need to do your job, and you have to have a job. You lack power and control over your working conditions. As an individual you can't do anything about it. Banded together with the rest of the workforce, you can. This is a concept everyone can relate to already and I don't see any utility in renaming it for the new generation or something.
I used to drive a 30 year old beat up car. One day somebody crashed into it and smashed it up. I tried fixing up everything I possibly could, but eventually I realized the engine was completely shot, the block had been cracked, and the thing just wasn't coming back. I didn't rebrand and go get a hoverboat or something. I just got another car that wasn't wrecked.
This is a really well-formed response with great historical context. I think you should consider posting some form of this to the main article so more people up top can see it.
Working conditions should be regulated reasonably at a societal level. This already exists in practice via OSHA and minimum wage regulations. Advocate for improved worker conditions via legislature, although be aware of the market counter-reaction of making certain jobs more expensive than they are worth.
Industry-wide unions can work, they are widely used in Europe, but they essentially act as barriers to progress and create arbitrary barriers to entry.
Industry wide unions are the goal, but you don't just flip a switch and change to a society with industry wide unions.
We don't have industry wide unions in the United States because, although unions were on the rise in the first part of last century, they eventually got beaten down into their pathetic state after the Fordist compromise broke down.
> act as barriers to progress
They give workers a say in what counts as "progress." "Progress," to my mind, does not necessarily equal improvements in my quality of life. e.g. I used to not be constantly surveilled. Then some progress happened, and now I am. Am I better off?
What if we got to decide what technology to build instead of Google and the Pentagon?
Yeah, it's a tradeoff they have to make. A lot of "knowledge worker" unions decide to do this, hoping it's worth it for the institutional support they'll get. Some grad student unions were formed under United Auto Workers in recent years, oddly enough. I'm not an organizer, and I don't really have an informed opinion about whether it's worth it.
One hopes that these old unions could be revived with a bunch of new membership. What I described above is how they are now, not how they have to be.
Worth noting also that even unions with totally screwed up leadership often have passionate and talented organizers with a lot of experience and institutional know-how at the lower levels, just like tech companies.
When I did employee-side employment discrimination law, the stories from the union employees who worked at a giant US airplane manufacture were the saddest. Often with local union leadership being involved in the discrimination.
Eventually I learned to pass on cases that involved unionized employees because having a union involved made it much more difficult to prosecute cases.
But could that be due to just paying the lowest tiers more and highest tiers less?
Companies usually make salaries opaque, but say you have 9 software engineers. Your 3 underperformers are being paid $10 per year, your 3 average performers are being paid $15 per year, and your 3 top performers are being paid $20 per year. So average worker pay is $15 per year.
Now a union comes in and over the years the pay structure changes so that the most senior employees make the most, not the top performers. Now 4 youngest employees make $14 per year, the 4 middle employees make $16 and the most senior employee makes $18 per year. So average worker pay is now $15.3 per year, and you can now make the claim "workers in unions make more money (on average)", but I would argue this new structure is overall worse for the company since you are basically rewarding underperformers and punishing top performers in order to raise wages.
> It’s open to anyone working for Alphabet (besides, if it works like a typical union, management).
This to me kind of highlights the disconnect of unions in software engineering. In many companies including Google, there are parallel IC and management tracks. There are ICs in leadership positions but just without any reports. Does that mean, e.g. an L7 staff engineer can unionize but not an L5 manager?
And then it leads to me wonder, why can't managers unionize in a typical union? Even at a big old-fashioned manufacturing company with a union, the managers are still individual people who are separate from the company itself. Presumably the reason is that they already have better conditions, they're highly paid, maybe they're already aligned with company itself because they have an ownership stake or some incentive bonus structure. All of those arguments apply to software engineers as well.
This may be a cheesy analogy, but in some ways all software engineers in tech are already effectively the middle managers. They oversee the "assembly line" that generates the revenue for the business, which just happens to be software rather than people.
From my read of the situation (based on past union experience), this is not a normal union. They do not seek exclusive bargaining power for a contract.
It seems more like an association of employees who seek to influence leadership on specific topics. There influence comes not from the threat of a strike, but rather just numbers (eg we have X% of workers, all willing to put up 1% of pay, you should really listen to us).
In that case, for an average employee making $100k-$200k a year in base salary at Google, I can't imagine paying $1-2k a year for the privilege of raising concerns without any real teeth. They can already do this anyway in retros or all-hands meetings, signing on to open letters to the executive team, etc.
Not saying that the organizers here have malicious intentions, but if you did have malicious intentions then something like this could actually be a pretty good scam... Re-purposing the word "union" for something that is not really serving that role, and collecting money from people who will ideologically sign onto it without thinking because they automatically think "unions == good". Basically making money off of the current shift to the left in US politics.
At least in Canada I’ve seen two different unions at the same place. One Union for managers and one union for the other non-manager employees. I don’t think there is anything stopping managers from forming their own different union.
> 6. Yes, you’ll have to join the Communist Party of America and pledge allegiance to AOC in order to even join the zoom call, of course. Because that’s how unions work
You might say that as a joke but Unions have a long history of heavily pressuring or forcing members to vote one way and in turn using these "guaranteed" votes to extract "favors" from politicians.
1. Fat cats. What are the due fees? %1 now?, later then? %5 of gross annually? 200 people * 300k year * %5 of salary = 3 million. They will use this on fancy dinners with Google execs? Or spend it in "wrongful terminations" law suites with google for years? What happens when 50x more join.
2. Who runs it? Will it be a 10 year long president? What is her union salary? A non-google person? Will it be full time? A slack group? They dish out favors to win elections?
3. Who gets into the union? Base is on the newest woke culture? Base it on need? Salary? Scan their social media? Popularity contests? Seems like a great way to start discrimination.
4. Will being in this union freak out future employers? If your union spends most of it's time suing - will they want you around? EG. I don't see Tesla wanting a high ranking union person from google.
5. My wife worked at a union. Unions tend to not fire - so (non blue collar) you end up with hundreds of drained, demotivated, incompetent - due payers. This is the direction people at google want to go? Who will actually do the work? Non-union Sub-contractors?
6. Will they become political? Will you have to join this political party? What if you disagree on a few things? You still pay dues right - to the Fat Cat?
7. Will they corner off work? EG. You can't be a designer level III without being in the union.
One thing that wont happen: better working conditions.