In my opinion you’re hired somewhere to work there and be productive, not to unionize. Workers who join companies and then try to subvert the entire system are a cancer to the org.
To say this person joined and then tried to subvert is a pretty dishonest reading of this story. They worked on something for 12 years and I’m sure there were many others similarly invested. To spend such a significant portion of your life on something and have basically no input on how it’s run, directed, etc… is not a good system. In my opinion the people forming the union had much more invested in this company than the people that just invested money. I’d say the handful of people that insist on complete control for having invested money are a cancer to the org and society at large.
There are many short term pressures on executives and finance people. Sharing power with the people their decisions affect leads to better outcomes for the business than when they use their power over workers for short term gain.
On the contrary I think it’s a good system. If they want to control the company they can buy 51% of the shares. Those shares are valuable for a reason.
If management doesn't want to negotiate with a majority of workers, they are free to pick a different career path and leave it to other professional managers.
Anyone can make their own company and their own shares and it’s practically free other than registration costs. The people with the shares get to set all the rules. That’s generally how it works. Otherwise the shares would be worthless.
You are sidestepping a massive amount of factors that allows somebody to create their own business. Even then, a company grows on the backs of its employees, and there quickly comes a time when a single person should not have complete control because it’s not just theirs anymore.
I own shares in public companies and have basically zero say in how they operate and those shares are worth quite a bit.
At this point it’s clear these arguments are flippant and not serious. I hope one day you can have a perspective on these issues that is not so shallow. They are important and you also should have a say in your workplace. Our voices matter.
Anyone who is willing can create a business, especially a software one that has no upfront costs, and the owner usually does most of the work to get it off the ground. The owner gets complete say in how it’s run until they choose to relinquish or sell control or structure it otherwise.
A company is a group effort and people can quit whenever they want. The owner doesn't have complete say and shouldn't have complete say, and it's good for employees to talk to each other so that they can use their say together.
People can quit whenever they want which is the main point.
Instead of banding together and threatening the management and owners with strike action it’s better that they quit because maybe there are other people who are happy to do the work without a union.
I think the problem is most people don’t imagine themselves as owners/managers. If they did they would oppose unions too because they would not want their autonomy taken away.
> Instead of banding together and threatening the management and owners with strike action it’s better that they quit
Why? It's pretty weird to say they should use the most extreme option without negotiation or do nothing, and that this is better than using intermediate options.
> because maybe there are other people who are happy to do the work without a union.
The main concern isn't the mere fact the union exists, it's to have a more even negotiating position, and I feel like everyone should want that. And I'm quite sure that the number of people that want that is much bigger than the number of unemployed workers, so that trade you suggest isn't even possible.
> I think the problem is most people don’t imagine themselves as owners/managers. If they did they would oppose unions too because they would not want their autonomy taken away.
Are you actually encouraging the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" point of view? How about an attempt at an objective view, that even if we look at it like a zero sum game, it's better for 20 workers to have more autonomy than for 1 employer to have more autonomy.
And who's to say that the current management isn't doing a poor job? Based on Glassdoor and Blind, they've been experiencing high turnover and mixed reviews at best. So why shouldn't the management and owners be held accountable for questionable decisions? Why are you so insistent that workers get no say, and can only leave? On what basis is blind obedience mandatory in the workplace?
The owners hold the management responsible. If targets are not met then they dig deeper, see staff turnover, find causes, and fix them. It’s capitalism at work. If the owners are not savvy enough then the company should fail or be sold and the capital should be allocated elsewhere.
If workers have a say it distorts these forces. And by say you mean the ability to force the hand of management. Because they already can have a say and modern companies measure everything and listen to feedback.
Why does (in your view) capitalism mandate that only owners hold management responsible, and that workers having a say would distort that process? Are you suggesting that class warfare is inevitable? (That's a Marxist concept.) Otherwise, why keep workers out of the decision-making process?
Also, if in most tech companies workers are given equity, are they not owners also?
Workers don’t have same incentives. They can push for conditions that would risk bankrupting company, and if the company does shutter, they can simply get new jobs with no loss. Meanwhile owners lose their money.
Workers don't have an incentive of bankrupting the company. And not all employees are so blasé about finding another job- there are always some dependent upon a company for their livelihoods. Different owners also have different risk thresholds. As evidenced by the lavish VC funding of the past decade, there are many investors with a strong stomach for waste and failure.
Examples of unions fighting for management to make better business decisions:
Money is paid for the employees backs and the business entity owns all the IP. Employees agree to this and can leave at any moment. They are welcome to start a co-op style company and give that a go. But would a VC want to invest in such a company? Prob not.
People like to pretend we don’t live in a cut throat capitalist system and that it has worked out best.
Employees did not agree to the systems of corporate governance we have. There is no real choice, and not working means starving. Nobody is pretending we live in a different system, they are trying to change it. The level of defeatism you are showing is unfortunate. “It has worked out best” is a pretty amazing assertion to make.
Removing the profit incentive was pretty disasterous throughout history. I just can’t imagine a group of employees being able to veto strategic decisions can work. The system for this is startups which is working great. If you don’t like something, setup your own company and do things the way you want.
But if employees always demanded things to be run they way they want, then you couldn’t have this level of experimentation and innovation.
I think the obvious fact is that there are not many co op companies because it doesn’t work. It’s like: stop trying to change someone else’s company, and start your own and build it from the ground up with the governance structure you want.
Nobody said anything about removing the profit incentive. Workers having a say can be setup in a lot of way, it does not require direct veto power. There have been and are many successful coops. The argument is these are not somebody else’s company, it is the workers company because they built it. That’s a lot of straw men you are arguing against.
The shares give you a claim on the profits. The rules are a combination of the corporate bylaws and the law. The latter does not let owners set all the rules: it imposes health and safety restrictions, taxes, and (yes!) unionisation rules.
The people who make the laws get to set all the rules. The shares are valuable anyway, because an economic interest in a profit making entity is valuable whether you have perfect control or not.
In my opinion, if you are starting a company in the US, you're supposed to follow labor law. Founders who create a company and then try to ignore the rules they signed up for are a cancer to society.
You are free to not work at unionized orgs, and also vote no when a vote is scheduled to unionize.
Unionization is how employees get a seat at the table and a say in the business they contribute their labor to, labor without which the business could not exist. Comp and benefits are only a component why organizing is important, in my opinion.
Honestly I've had plenty of influence at the various workplaces I've been a part of. If a company is so dysfunctional it doesn't even take what employees are saying into account then I'm not convinced a union would help. Do you have concrete examples of unions succeeding in software?
Why does it have to be software-specific? It's a new-ish field and American unions have been pretty disadvantaged over the last few decades due to an increasingly conservative judiciary and some nasty anti-union lawyers. But you can't just ignore that unions got us weekends, OSHA, and 8 hour days. Now there is enough wealth in society to support three day weekends, and people are ready to fight to distribute that wealth fairly. Why shouldn't they?
Because as far as I know traditionally unions have existed in jobs where humans are basically robots (manufacturing, etc...). These jobs can be dangerous and also each worker is very easily replaceable giving the employer a huge upper hand.
This is not the case in software at all. Skill levels can vary dramatically and the more experience you have with your company often the more valuable and harder to replace you become. Software developers are expensive, especially bad hires. This puts them in an advantageous position. In sum we are - In demand, scarce, hard (or at least expensive) to replace (skill & domain knowledge vary considerably). The exact opposite of what a union fixes.
That's a pretty new development, and not necessarily true. Screen writing is pretty obviously creative, collaborative work, and they've been represented by a professional guild since 1933.
I think it is more common for the umbrella union orgs to focus on industries either with high barriers to entry (like nursing) or huge employers, because they are going company-by-company & it's just more efficient. On the opposite end of the spectrum, trade unions are more likely to serve people who change jobs ever couple of years and where most of the learning happens on the job. They tend to be run by & for people actually in the profession and can cross company boundaries.
Trade guilds will do things like specify minimum wages, but most of their members end up paid more than that. They'll specify minimum safety standards, but also support people on specific job sites that want or need additional protection to make that particular job safe. It isn't the same kind of one-size-fits-all approach you may be used to from Detroit auto plants.
There are advantages for employers too: they know that people in the guild are held to certain professional standards, for example. When retirement programs or health care are managed through the guild, workers can take the benefits with them to their next job, and small employers don't get taken for a ride. And employers can benefit from the steady influx of newly-trained workers who have been taught up to the standards the trade feels are important to meet.
Just look at the people in this thread who think it is "drastic" to have a lawyer look at our employment contracts: we may have individual leverage, but we aren't necessarily able to use it to make our working conditions better, or even to ensure the software we build is reliable and safe.
What happens if a minimum wage is set but there are people prepared to work for less? Or under lesser conditions? And a company cannot hire as many people because they have to pay them more?
Isn’t it fairer to rely on the free market to set wages? There are shortages and surpluses in many industries that vary over time. Unions seem to just distort the market.
Reviewing employment contracts can be done by one’s own lawyer via legal insurance too. Why does this need to be collective? Why not pay a fee for services you use rather than union dues. A lot of the benefits you mention doesn’t need unionization.
A free market is only fair if there are many labor purchasers and sellers. But when employers hold power (they are a major employer and they control many jobs in an area, they control your recommendations, the switching cost of changing jobs is too high) they can use that power to deflate wages below their fair market value. Unions create a level playing field to workers to negotiate with companies.
Agree but tech is not like this. Especially with the rise of remote work. Unions can also hold down wages by reducing flexibility in conditions to suit different employees preferences.
A new tech union need not operate identically to the ones that came in the past. Heck, it might not even be called a “union”, given tech’s propensity to reinvent concepts under different branding. We have the benefit of over a century of historical expedience to improve how such an organization might operate. And already, not all existing unions are overly restrictive about their working condition stipulations.
I agree that union organisation work is not _work_, it's not what people are paid to do, and it should therefore be done on personal time.
However, employers are in a position of significant power over their employees, and unions represent a way to balance that power. I think this is a broadly positive thing that I think employees should be in favour of, and that I think the best employers would also be in favour of.
IANAL, but my understanding is that it is illegal to treat unionizing differently than other social activities. If a company wants to ban unionizing on company time, they have to ban all non-work related socializing. If people are allowed to talk about movies & video games, they are also allowed to talk about unions.
One way conceptualize many companies is that they're just the id of senior execs measuring their genitalia against one other, why shouldn't workers get to participate?
Your belief system isn’t congruent with US labor law. Why leave when you can make your existing job better?
Your other comment indicates they should have to amass 51% of company shares. Ridiculous. Their ability to organize and vote to do so comes from their labor rights, and is precisely why they don’t require capital (per labor law) to have a say.
Businesses can be built without capital. They cannot be built without labor.
Seems like a waste of effort and manpower if you have an otherwise perfectly salvageable business and product that is being hamstrung by management. Think of the customers.
> In my opinion you’re hired somewhere to work there and be productive, not to unionize. Workers who join companies and then try to subvert the entire system are a cancer to the org.
We are doing the "Tell me you haven't read the article without telling me you haven't read the article." kind of posts on HN now?
