Software engineers and people who work in IT departments in general should unionize, because outside of the big five tech companies, these employees are mistreated relative to other employees at their company.
Consider:
1) Workers in IT departments are less likely to get bonuses.
2) They are often asked to put in longer hours than people in other departments, because of deadlines.
3) They often have to work weekends because of “emergencies” and DevOps-related tasks that can’t take place on weekdays. Guess who’s patching the servers this Saturday? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Bob in Sales.
It is in the employees of these companies' interests, as well.
Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay [0] colluded to prevent competition, and thus increased pay and mobility, among their employees.
> 1) Workers in IT departments are less likely to get bonuses.
Sincere question - why should they? Are they denied bonuses that they are contractually obligated due to their compensation package?
> 2) They are often asked to put in longer hours than people in other departments, because of deadlines.
Sales people are often asked to travel away from their family and their homes. To me this seems like a normal 'part of the job' you sign up for.
> 3) They often have to work weekends because of “emergencies” and DevOps-related tasks that can’t take place on weekdays. Guess who’s patching the servers this Saturday? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Bob in Sales.
Who else should do it? Isn't that factored into their compensation and outlined in their responsibilities before they take the job? It seems like it's part of their job to do that, more so than clicking around on HN or Reddit during the week.
Those arguments could be used against any sort of worker mobilization ever. I do agree that they aren't great reasons to unionize. The real reason the workers should unionize is because they can, and if they do they can capture a greater percentage of the profits that the company attempts to keep for themselves
> Are they denied bonuses that they are contractually obligated due to their compensation package?
No. The usual explanation given (in large corporate company's IT Departments) is that IT is a 'Cost Center' and not a 'Revenue Generating' center. Forget the fact that it's the software and services that these 'Cost Centers' build and maintain, which is helping Bob in sales close his sale.
Source: Me. Worked at 5 different Enterprise IT companies. Got the same response from every Manager. What's even more obscene is the Managers in IT get bonuses, but not the Engineers who are doing the actual work.
Quitting to start your own business is lauded in the annals of Americana because it positively reinforces certain tenets capitalism that are valued by the ruling class.
Organizing a labor union however is vilified in American society as it directly challenges the inherent class structure of capitalism. Workers in the past have been beaten, murdered, and imprisoned not because they sought better pay and more amicable working hours, but because they dared to challenge the success and profit of the classes above them.
Tyranny of the many has dangers just as does tyranny of the few. There can be significant downsides to unions, so it's a bit reductive to think they're a universal good and that to disagree with them in any case is necessarily about "the inherent class structure of capitalism"
Unions (or similar labor organizations) are not only a universal good, capitalism only works when ^both* labor and capital keep each other restrained. The problems start when either side is allowed to "win". Power always needs to be restrained with checks and balances.
Yes, that's the intended result. Each side has to fight for their own goals. The resulting competition is what limits each side from gaining too much power.
> A union that only subsists because it gets special state powers is not a union, its government.
You do realize that all business organizations other the sole proprietorships and simple partnerships (including, but not necessarily limited to, all of, in the US, corporations of any kind, LPs, LLPs, LLLPs, and LLCs) only subsist because they get special state powers, right?
The corporation is a legal fiction created by government to shield the people from liability for harm those people cause through their agents while seeking profits; it's the original (well, at least an early) manifestation of socializing risk while privatizing gains, done through the power of the State.
"The corporation is still fully liable." is incoherent. Pfizer (the corporation) is a convicted felon. Whereas this would basically eliminate an individual's access to credit, ability to vote, and a whole host of other rights and privileges, in the context of a multi-national corporation it means literally nothing. They got fined a little money, that's it.
Yes, unions are usually corporations. But it's not the side defending unions in this thread arguing that relying on government-granted power deligitimize an organization.
I completely agree. If we look at the compensation growth in the last 50 years, I think we can see that “tyranny of the few” has been the predominant force in the U.S. and things have been far, far out of balance.
Worker pay has been extremely stagnant while c-suite pay has skyrocketed to over 300x the worker pay.
This wouldn’t be so problematic if worker pay was not being pushed below livable wages. The presence of unions could balance things a bit.
> Organizing a labor union however is vilified in American society as it directly challenges the inherent class structure of capitalism. Workers in the past have been beaten, murdered, and imprisoned not because they sought better pay and more amicable working hours, but because they dared to challenge the success and profit of the classes above them.
This is unabashedly revisionist. Look at what labor unions did throughout the first half of the 20th century. They went to great lengths to ensure that their members could access the privileges of the upper capitalist classes by explicitly oppressing other groups of people - black workers, east Asians, south Asians, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. They fought to deport legal immigrants and migrant works. They fought to inter (poor) Japanese-Americans in camps in order to free up jobs for their relatively well-off, white members. After the war, they fought to prevent Japanese-Americans from returning to their homes. The immigration quotas that people oftentimes complain about on Hacker News? Those quotas were originally written to appease labor unions in the first place. The disaster in Puerto Rico? Labor unions opposed allowing foreign relief ships to temporarily service Puerto Rico, which has been standard practice for every single hurricane since Katrina, because they wanted to protect US members' paychecks.
If you want to cherry-pick some good things labor unions have fought for, fine, but don't portray them as the antagonist of capitalist class structure. Labor unions have always thrived on class inequality; their goal is simply to make sure that their members are on the "right" side of it.
That depends entirely on which unions you're looking at, the wobblies were organizing across racial lines and across industries. The pullman porters were black. And, yeah, unions very much are a class antagonist, they were conceived as precisely that. I'd even go so far as to say that actually your comment is the revisionist one. Note how you start the history at "the first half of the 20th century" leaving out arguably the most violent and repressive period of union struggle. Google The Battle of Blair mountain.
> That depends entirely on which unions you're looking at, the wobblies were organizing across racial lines and across industries. The pullman porters were black.
I'm looking at the unions that were the strongest, the most powerful, and the most influential. The IWW was never particularly strong after WWI, and that was at the peak of their membership. AFL- and CIO-affiliated unions were the strongest - and, more importantly, remain so to this day.
It's funny you mention the porters' union - they were the first to receive recognition by the AFL. Why is that unusual? Well, they were special not because they were a union that represented black members, but because they were the first union of black members that the AFL didn't deny membership to based on race, after decades of explicitly prohibiting black unions from joining their federation. (Even after that, they refused to recognize most unions that accepted black or Japanese workers as members).
> I'd even go so far as to say that actually your comment is the revisionist one.
No, it's not "revisionist" to point out counterexamples to OP's claim, especially when those counterexamples include the largest group of unions for the last 100 years.
Yes, sometimes it's convenient for labor unions to leverage rhetoric that flirts with socialism or communism, but in reality, their source of power is dependent on both capitalism and class hierarchy, which is why the largest and most influential ones have fought so hard to preserve it.
You also neatly sidestepped my point about the origin of these unions, by starting in the "early 20th". You also ignored the Blair Mountain reference, and other deeply capital-hostile examples of union struggle. Unions started as an instrument of class struggle and remain precisely that, the fact that that is even slightly controversial is more representative of the ideological climate of today and specifically this website. Also, if unions are not a direct, full frontal attack on capital and hierarchy, why are they facing constant attack from organs of ruling class consciousness, like, say, the WSJ, the Financial Times, or even other less explicit papers like the New York Times? Why are teachers unions treated like the scum of the earth everywhere? Its downright weird that this is even questionable.
EDIT
Also worth pointing out, there is an anti-union case being argued before the supreme court today. Its been widely acknowledged as an attempt to "kneecap" public-sector unions. If unions are not hostile to capital, are not an element of class struggle, where do these battles come from? Why are unions perpetually on the defensive, not merely from specific owners of specific companies facing individual actions, but across the board from class conscious (from above) institutions and people who have no individual stake in any given organizing struggle.
>Also, if unions are not a direct, full frontal attack on capital and hierarchy, why are they facing constant attack from organs of ruling class consciousness, like, say, the WSJ, the Financial Times, or even other less explicit papers like the New York Times?
The fact that the capitalist class doesn't appreciate tactics that complicate or reduce the effectiveness of their preferred business practices doesn't mean that those tactics represent an attack on capitalism itself. Corporations violently oppose taxes and regulations, too, but neither threatens capitalism or its fundamental class structure.
>Unions started as an instrument of class struggle and remain precisely that, the fact that that is even slightly controversial is more representative of the ideological climate of today and specifically this website.
It's hardly peculiar to the 'climate of today'. Karl Marx, 1865:
At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!”
And in regards to unions specifically:
Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.
Organizing a labor union however is vilified in American society as it directly challenges the inherent class structure of capitalism.
It's vilified because of the corruption and strong-armed tactics many unions have resorted to in the US. You talk about beatings and murders, but the unions pretty quickly took up those tactics as well.
Here's a tangentially-related question: if I want to start-up a consultancy or agency for web development as a co-operative, are there any resources for getting it organized as such?
I'd start at Democracy at work. But in the end it comes down to how decisions are made and what check and balances are placed on the elements of power, such as who's an employee and what they get paid and how/what gets voted on, who can start a vote, what each vote weighs. I'd also say that transparency of execution is paramount so that members can verify that the actions/policies they are voting on are being carried out as voted.
Great question, and I wish I had a definitive resource to direct you to, but alas. However, there are a lot of conversations happening, and this is a good way to get some insight into them: https://ioo.coop/library/
Well, they wouldn't come out and say that it was due to illegal reasons.
Now, we can't prove intent, but we can look for evidence that supports their statements. Such as, if other non-engineers were laid off, if these engineers are eligible for rehire, if only people who signed the petition were let go, or if there are open positions for engineers on their website, etc.
Yes, but the HN submission headline (before ‘, union claims’ was added) didn’t allow for a subtler interpretion. (And, the SFChron didn’t dig much into these obvious followup details, for determining what really happened, before reporting the allegations rather uncritically – maybe as a sort of punishment for the company refusing to comment.)
In this and other coverage, it’s mentioned that more than just the employees discussing a union were laid-off. There’s hints of layoffs being started, or signalled, before union discussion began. That could mean the unionization discussion was a reaction to immminent layoffs, rather than the other way around.
Actually the title is a fact. What is alleged is the reason. It is a fact that the engineers seeking to organize were fired. And they are alleging that it is because they tried to organize. But it is still a fact that the ones who tried were fired.
Then “SF company Lanetix lays off engineers, union alleges illegally” would be a fair headline. (The original headline here did not include “, union claims”.)
The title has now changed since I saw it. I don't remember exactly what it said before, but I remember it saying something like "fired software engineers for seeking to unionize".
I'll admit it's possible I misread it and the "for" wasn't actually in there.
That headlines should be fair about unresolved allegations in pending legal disputes. (The original headline here omitted “, union claims” at the end.)
Engineers are treated like crap at a lot of companies. Not everyone works at a FANG where they are treated like top-tier employees. Most of us are seen as overpriced means to an end.
When companies complain that they "can't find qualified candidates," they really mean people willing to work cheap enough. I've given the okay to my manager on several hires and none of them were actually hired.
Lots of people in our industry deal with hazing and harassment that goes unchecked. And there's no guarantee that the next job will be any better. Personally, my last job was horrible, while several people left due to harassment, those that stayed were the ones that got it the worst and couldn't leave due to being a contractor or an industry specialist.
> Not everyone works at a FANG where they are treated like top-tier employees.
But virtually any IT worker with demanded skills can find a job where they will be treated similarly well. Compared to most of other industries, tech has the lowest incentives to have labor unions.
> When companies complain that they "can't find qualified candidates," they really mean people willing to work cheap enough.
Well maybe they can't find anyone who will work cheaply enough to justify hiring them based on how much they will generate the company? That's just economics.
An acronym invented by Jim Cramer: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google
> Maybe they can't find anyone who will work cheaply enough to justify hiring them based on how much they will generate the company
While we're on the topic of FANG, these companies post profits in the billions of dollars. They could afford to pay their engineers 5x what they get now, if they were so inclined.
As you said, economics (read: the profit motive) means they will actually pay them what the market demands (and no more). As rational actors (again thinking with our economics hat on), big tech companies would love it if the market for SWEs were a little less hot, and they could get away with paying less. Why make 1 billion in profit when you could make 2 billion, amirite??
So it's not a conspiracy theory to suppose that a big part of what motivates the "we need more STEM grads!" narrative is a desire to saturate the job market and thereby depress engineer salaries.
Why in God’s name would they raise salaries 5x just because they earn billions of dollars? Do you really think that’s how it should work?
I own stock in all the FANG companies, I would be beyond pissed if their costs when up 5x or even 2x just because they decided they wanted to overpay employees.
These companies are businesses, they are not a big happy family or a charity. When you work for them, you agree to a price for your services. Go to work, do your thing, and go home. That’s it. An employee does not need to be compensated anymore than what the market is willing to bear, and on average the payout is usually a bit less anyway.
Yes someone people seem to think that if you can't find anyone qualified for the money you want to pay, that you should just keep increasing what you're offering to pay.
But obviously at some point it just becomes not profitable to employ someone to do that job at that pay rate, even if you want the job done.
Certainly, and it's probably difficult for smaller tech companies just barely making a profit to cover the high cost of hiring a software engineer.
But typically the companies who complain the loudest about "not finding qualified engineers" are not small consulting shops, but big firms that are already very profitable. They _could_ afford additional engineers, but they'd rather make another $1 on their dividends. It's often just a question of priorities.
FAANG: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google -- It's a generalization for tech companies that have been doing exceedingly well in the public market in the last 5 or 6 years.
As for your edit: you could be right, but if that's the case, they really should say that. Because not being able to find qualified people is different than not being able to find affordable people.
Sec. 7. [§ 157.] Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all of such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3) [section 158(a)(3) of this title].
UNFAIR LABOR PRACTICES
Sec. 8. [§ 158.] (a) [Unfair labor practices by employer] It shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer--
(1) to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in section 7 [section 157 of this title];
>Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all of such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3) [section 158(a)(3) of this title].
Unless I'm reading this wrong, it means that employers have no ability to stop their employees from forming a union, to fire them for forming a union and to hire non union employees without the unions approval. I can understand such regulations in socialist countries like India (where other than IT, most industries do have strong unions, with legal and politican support). However it seems to be against the image US projects
What is the difference between a bunch of software engineers unionizing their wages versus a bunch of small and large companies all agreeing to price-fix their products? Nothing.
Did you try to make a point here? If so, it seems that you are suggesting corporations have it harder given that they can't legally price fix while labor can.
2 words: "At-will employment." I empathize with their situation but sadly there's nothing they can do about this. Kind of naive trying to attempt this in a state like California.
You can’t be fired for attempting to unionize even with at will employment. You can get fired for any reason as long as it’s not an illegal reason (like discrimination). Attempting to unionize or lobbying to improve worker conditions are generally protected. Of course the company is trying to get around this by claiming that they were terminated for other unrelated reasons (layoffs).
This is not true. There are ways in which "at-will" termination can be illegal. Most obviously, protected-status discrimination.
Termination related to labor organization is illegal. However, recourse (for the employee) generally fails because of the time scales involved, with the inevitable failure to form a union, but the employer will have to deal with the fallout eventually.
That does not make it naive, and you should not further participate in making this self-fulfilling.
At-will employment has nothing to do with this. At-will employment just means your employer has no contractual obligation to continue employing you for any period of time. Certain actions are still illegal under state / federal law such as firing you for:
* your sexual orientation
* race
* veteran status
* political views
* not sleeping with your boss
* etc
Organizing a union is one of these "protected" reasons why you cannot be fired. Of course your employer can pick another reason and say that's why they are firing you, which is what it looks like this company did. Whether that defense will hold up in court is another matter entirely.
This is more or less what I was trying to say with my original comment.
Although unionizing is protected, "at-will employment" also leaves a lot of gray areas that can be leveraged for an employer to justify a termination. For example insubordination. The employer can claim that an employee was being hostile and creating a stressful work environment.
At-will employment means you can be fired for any reason other than specific prohibited reasons in law (the alternative is systems where you can only be fired for reasons named in law; the difference is between “default allow” and “default deny”.)
But firing for labor organizing is an explicit prohibition in both California and Federal law (the federal prohibition was the basis of Damore’s NLRB complaint against Google, for a recent example that has gotten much HN attention.)
IANAL, but I believe the Federal NLRA trumps any state-level at-will provision in much the same way as the EEOC operates. I don't even think formalizing a union is required, but simply banding together to improve working conditions automatically gives you protected status.
I think he's saying that California is at-will employment. Not that unionization is bad, but that it makes it very difficult to unionize, if you can just be fired immediately and replaced.
A company firing people who are trying to unionize seems to be saying that the value that the company gets for the cost of paying the employees will go down. It seems unions or unionizing might have better luck if it was able to position itself as a value increasing tool for both the company and the worker.
