Let’s take the NYT Tech Guild. They negotiated a new contract following a strike last November. Here are some of the things they won:
> Enhanced job security with ‘just cause’ protections
> Guaranteed wage increases for the first time of up to 8.25% (plus additional base rate discretionary compensation) that prioritize the largest wage increases for the lowest paid members over the life of the contract
> Additional compensation for on-call work
> Important protections that lock in guardrails on additional variable compensation (including stocks and bonuses)
> Improved protections for workers on visas
> Language guaranteeing flexible hybrid work schedules
> Process and transparency protections related to career growth, performance reviews and other workplace issues
As a fairly progressive news outlet attracting staff with certain sensibilties in the NYC area and selling views to people who are the same, the NYTimes board of directors has a vested PR interest in tolerating unions with the large amounts money they have to pay for the privilege. I'm not convinced the company is better served by unionized employees over the rest of the tech scene, which has to innovate to stay solvent.
Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
> The National Labor Relations Board rejected the New York Times’ attempt to stop the election, alleging the bargaining unit was improper. The company had previously declined to voluntarily recognize the union and immediately began holding anti-union captive audience meetings with workers.
> The NewsGuild of New York filed a complaint earlier this month with the NLRB, accusing the Times of violating federal labor law by adding new paid days off to the company holiday calendar for non-union employees only – which was viewed as a tactic to dissuade workers from voting for the union.
> After the complaint was filed, the New York Times made similar changes to its bereavement policy, making it applicable only to non-union workers. The union is collecting signatures as part of a public petition demanding the New York Times stop what it calls union-busting.
> On 5 January, the NLRB filed a complaint against the Times, ruling the company violated federal labor law by telling some employees they could not show support for tech workers seeking to unionize.
It’s funny how you have hard facts backed by citation, and the other poster has nothing but vibes and anecdotes. I don’t know if you convinced him, but you certainly make a compelling case for everyone else reading this exchange.
Forgive me if this is an overly-simplistic question – I'm a student, so there is a lot I don't know and this seems to be a complex topic, but I ask this in good faith: if the people that are members of the union are happy with it, what negative outcome is produced so as to make the union a bad solution?
From what I understand, the basic purpose of a union is to give its members more collective negotiating power with the employer. Its purpose isn't to better serve the company, necessarily, but to give the employees a more effective means of having their needs met – if employees feel these needs aren't being met, negotiating and making an agreement collectively could be a more effective route. Its job is to change the power dynamic between employees and companies, in favor of the employees. If this is the case, and the NYTimes tech staff who are union members like the outcome unionizing has had, then how is it a bad solution? What would be a better alternative of meeting the employees' needs?
I recognize my understanding is probably incomplete; I write this comment not to defend this position on unions, but to learn why it may be wrong.
A general problem is it can make the industries less competitive and the companies struggle as work moves elsewhere. See the history of Detroit for example.
> Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
Hackernews poster go 5 minutes without insulting your peers challenge: impossible.
I made $450k TC in my last job. In Atlanta. I don't think we need unions to be treated well.
Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career. Just like every other place unions exist without a talent monopoly (manufacturing, automotive, and most recently film crews).
Google is going to hire in developing markets and stop hiring domestically. Everyone else will follow. The talent in India is incredible these days. You can't knock them or call them less talented than US engineers. They're rock solid. And there are lots of other talented worldwide markets for software engineering.
Without antitrust action from the DOJ/FTC, big tech will continue to crush domestic startups too or create a ceiling for how large they can grow in our market.
And if unions lead to offshoring happening, we're fucked.
1. Tech workers are currently treated as well as (or better than) we would be without unions.
2. Unions would cause companies to offshore jobs to developing markets with similar talent.
If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs? Conversely, if companies could acquire comparable talent in emerging markets for less money, why aren't they doing that already?
† Or, rather, they could be, but it would mean companies leaving a lot of money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts.
Wake up. Engineers in other countries are just as good as we are. The only reason we don't hire remote is that the business functions here keep the same hours.
You throw unions into the mix and suddenly dealing with the time difference becomes the lesser evil.
I suppose "treated well" is kinda nebulous. Personally, I'd say it encompasses job security, so if unions make it hard to fire people then they are improving treatment of workers.
I’m sorry, but you must not be paying attention to the current climate. To name one example, Facebook just laid off many workers and explicitly labeled them “low performers”.
Tech companies have already been caught colluding to suppress wages. They are sending as many jobs as they can overseas, and bringing in even more h1b workers.
It is clear to anyone that’s paying attention that they are doing their best to damage our negotiating position so that they no longer have to treat us well (read: fairly)
>If unions don't increase worker compensation, why would they cause companies to offshore jobs?
Because unions are a headache for management to deal with and that headache is much worse than compensation, which is a budget-line item, and doesn't personally impact anyone in management.
The AWU, for e.g, has political goals that represent what a small minority of Alphabet employees want but end up being a pain in a for anyone to deal with.
I assure you that management tracks budget-line items very closely, especially when they are the largest one (as is the case at almost all software companies).
> Unions will kickstart the offshoring of our career
People are offshoring right now, and increasingly so. A union is arguably one of the only tools left to prevent offshoring, short of government intervention.
how would that work? Maybe the current force is protected, but if there is no new US hires, then teams will slowly shift due to people retiring or leaving.
"sorry, no more open positions in the US... but don't worry, you are getting some helpers from India!"
There are simple location-based reasons why jobs wouldn't be offshored- longshoremen, electricians and plumbers, flight attendants (for USA based airlines), and also the NYT tech staff are unlikely to be offshored.
I'm still not sure that unions don't make sense for tech- it seems like the idea that tech workers need protection from their employers is gaining ground.
I also think there are still a lot of reasons why unions don't make sense.
> also the NYT tech staff are unlikely to be offshored
I agree with most of your list, but not this one. Tech staff is one of the easiest jobs to offshore. It has been happening since the early 2000s in the US to lower cost locations (mostly India, the others later). Is there anything special about the NYT tech staff that makes them less likely to be offshored?
But with tech unions, situations like the parent's become non-existent because individuals can't negotiate for themselves.
I've been in three different unions in my life. All three exploited me. All three were in the employer's pocket. All three unfairly distributed the work so that the union rep and their friends got the easiest work and the best pay. All three made sure I was paid the minimum.
My computer skills are what finally allowed me to punch my own ticket. I'll be damned if I hand that power back over to someone else.
Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential. New employees are jealous of tenured employees with more benefits. Once people get tenure, they'll take advantage of their status. This leads to lower productivity, not higher productivity.
Without a union, you have people fighting to show their seniority and leadership at every level. The top 10% naturally sort themselves out. And the take home typically correlates with that.
Union jobs get easier and cushier with tenure.
Non-union jobs get harder the more you want from the job, but you are in control of your career progression and comp. And the strongest rise to the top.
Switching jobs or unions will fuck with seniority, dues, etc., so it will become a factor in choosing jobs. It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Businesses are probably more afraid of unions than they are high compensation.
> Unions lead to an ossified workforce where nobody does more than what is essential.
> It will likely lead to many more "lifers" who work at a single job for a long time. This leads to less knowledge and skill mobility, tighter code ownership (less fungible, less exposed to new ideas), and this will certainly lead to ossification of organizations and business functions.
Funny, you just described basically every large company I have ever worked at. None of them were really unionized (one did have a union but it was very small).
I work in a data center with electricians, tower climbers, and systems and network engineers. ALL of us are blue collar. Including me, a systems/network engineer. I suggest you investigate this aspect of tech — there’s more to it than VS Code and JavaScript
Data Center and Operations people absolutely are blue collar in attitude and mindset, but you DC folks get to be isolated.
If you're in a working environment that hires SDEs straight out of Tier 1 Universities, start talking about what it's like to grow up poor and you'll see quickly how everyone's eyes glaze over and you get treated like a pariah.
Kickstarter only voted 97.6% after absolutely bitter internal conflicts and a semi-forced exodus of people who weren't on board with the plan. The in-fighting was extremely bitter, extremely personal, included death-threats and I know several former Kickstarter employees on both sides of that mess who are in therapy over how that all went down.
Yeah but the question is "are there any examples where unions obviously helped the workers". You responded "blue collar unions", where there's a pretty common perception that they did help, but when it comes to white collar unions you can only come up with examples that aren't really known for having done anything. UAW isn't even white-collar.
The whole conversation is about the novelty and usefulness of something that doesn't exist in the mainstream. Those who are skeptical can eternally say "show me more examples". Maybe your critique isn't as useful as you think it is.
the "tech industry" is somehow totally isolated and completely different from all other types of labor in the history of the united states? how?
here's an answer i gave to this question downstream: "the Riot Games union is bargaining for better pay and less brutal working hours. at Blizzard they did employee walkouts, leading to better pay and changes in work culture. at Kickstarter they negotiated better remote work policies and reduction of discriminatory actions."
Why is tech not blue collar? Because you use your brain instead of your hands? You are closer to a plumber or an electrician than to Sergey Brin, griping that you should be working 60 hours a week to develop AI to replace you for Alphabet shareholders.
Doctors have unions [1] ("among actively practicing physicians, approximately 70,000 currently belong to a union, representing 8% of physicians" [2]), lawyers have essentially guilds. If your wealth is closer to Brin’s than the median, than you’re an outlier whom I would not expect to need nor value a union (congrats on your luck). Unions are for the median, not the very wealthy and lucky [3].
The median annual wage for physicians and surgeons in the US was $239,200 in 2023. In May 2023, the median annual wage for lawyers in the U.S. was $145,760, with the lowest 10% earning less than $69,760 and the highest 10% earning more than $239,200. Stats shamelessly stolen from the US BLS website.
We don’t have feathers in our caps. Blue, white, red, whatever - we are all resources working for the capitalists, and should try to learn whatever we can from each other.
So, why are there no major tech unions specifically? Tech is a “new” field (relatively speaking), is generally well paid, and comes with relatively better benefits compared to other fields. This is not something inherent to the field: it’s just a supply vs. demand thing combined with easy access to money (low rates, VCs, etc).
Unions will start to become more prominent as shit hits the fan for us tech workers. Because without a unifying threat, there is no realistic way to convince a bunch of people who are living relatively well to join forces - as demonstrated by this thread.
Unfortunately, the existence of a common threat is necessary imo but not sufficient (in the US at least), as we’ve witnessed over the past few years of layoffs and forced RTO.
The following is my personal experience being part of a collective bargaining union (OPSEU local 598), which encompassed a few hundred workers for Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, in Toronto Ontario, from 2007-2017. I worked in IT for the duration of my employment (although not all union members were IT - but a lot were.)
The good:
- An elected collective bargaining team negotiated for us every ~5 years, and came up with a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This allowed the members to express their desires for what they wanted (although not all requests were brought up in bargaining, and had to be agreed to to be ratified), which were generally listened to
- On-call compensation was set out as part of that agreement, and was the most generous I've experienced in my 25+ year career.
- Members could file grievances with the union regarding work conditions, or unfair treatment of the workers (I don't recall hearing of this ever happening, but there were processes in place for it)
- Health benefits were good, if not the best I've seen
- You could get two pay bumps per year, one that all union members got that was set aside in the CBA, and another moving you up a spot in your pay band (but only if you were not at the top of your salary band)
The bad:
- Union dues, while not huge, were yet another noticeable deduction from each pay
- When at the top of your salary band, you only got the one cost of living adjustment per year. There was no automatic way of moving to the next salary band
- Getting promoted means applying for internally posted positions (which all employees can apply for), and successfully being hired in to that position. This is the only way to move up salary bands, and you could only move up one pay slot in the new band (as they overlapped between bands). This really limited upwards career growth, and meant that leaving the company was the only way to get double-digit pay increases (or move in to management, which was outside the union)
- Our CBA strangely didn't cover / prevent layoffs of staff (although other union CBAs certainly do - so this is just my own experience), so I was one of the 100+ members that were laid off when a new VP decided to outsource a bunch of our roles to Tata Consultancy Services in India. There were provisions in place given my seniority that would have made a more junior union members have to be laid off in place of me (so I could take over their role instead), however I opted to take my severance package as I was ready to move on.
So to summarize - unions are definitely a mixed bag in my experience. I can appreciate the good they can do (and different CBAs will result in wildly different experiences), but from what I've personally seen, they generally function to treat all workers in a similar way: not rewarding the best, and not really punishing the worst.
Are you working 7 days a week in horrific circumstances? Do you have children as your colleagues? No? That’s due to unions and labourers fighting for the rights you currently have.
IMO that's a pretty irrelevant example when it comes to today's tech unions and ignores the thrust of the commenter's question.
Yes, unions were responsible for changing the factory working culture in the past. But I know tons of people that work in tech jobs now that have to be some the cushiest jobs in the history of the planet. Yes, there is stress, not a lot of job security, and the standard corporate BS, but tech employees are generally paid quite well with great perks (obviously, depending on the company). The people who work at these companies aren't accidentally falling into vats at meat processing plants a la The Jungle, so unions need to convince them what the benefit would be to them now.
Unionization, mandatory schooling, and work-life balance are all collective outcomes of industrialization and urbanization. Claiming that one caused the other is silly oversimplification.
Heh, it terrifies me at times of how clueless of the past the general population is. We're already at the point in history where people like Bezos and Musk want to return to company cities with their own non-cash payment systems.
The 1800's were horrific. It was not the industrial revolution alone that made things better. People had to fight and die in the labor movement for better outcomes for us now.
Unbelievable that this had to be spelled out. Do people actually think that current working conditions and employee rights were bestowed upon us by benevolent capitalists?
When it comes to tech workers, not by benevolent capitalists, but by greedy capitalists.
Up until say 2022 or so, the vast majority of people who worked in tech companies in the US were compensated extremely well (relatively) without unions, the reason being that (a) modern tech, especially software, can be such a "force multiplier" where a small team of programmers can serve millions of customers and (b) there really is a huge difference in individual programmer capability, and in winner-take-all/most markets, capitalists were willing to pay outsized amounts for those they deemed higher quality workers (meaning able to create higher quality/better/faster etc. products).
We're at an inflection point now both with the general maturity of the Internet, and with AI, that the ability to capture huge parts of the market is less dependent on the skills of individual software engineers/product managers, etc. When you are less able to differentiate the quality of your labor against your peers, that is when unions become more desirable.
Only when this thread got sidetracked. The article and comment that started this thread are about tech industry unions. I can fully appreciate the role unions played by improving working conditions in the past and still come to the conclusion that I wouldn't want them for (most) tech industry workers now.
A quick read up on the history of the labor movement will show that it started because people didn't want to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day in factories anymore.
