67% of American Tech Workers Interested In Joining a Union – Slashdot

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• • • While I’m known to bash unions a lot, generally I’m just talking about US unions, with very rare exceptions. In most other countries, even ones with a strong work ethic like Japan, unions seem to have a more symbiotic relationship with their employers. Here, they’re more like legalized mafias. If you’ve ever seen that documentary called fear city, it pretty well sums it up.

      • It’s just that they’re bargaining from such a strong position already that you’re not seeing the actual fighting that goes on. Go look up a little bit on the history of unions in America and you will find no shortage of miniguns being pointed at strikers. Like full-on military grade weaponry. Not to mention law enforcement even to this day constantly working with and coordinating with businesses.

        Hell remember occupy Wall Street? The reason I got broken up is a combination of the news media and the law e

  • While I don’t go out of my way to avoid buying from them, some unions in particular produce objectively shitty products, such as UAW. Go look at their own published list of makes and models, then look at their reliability ratings on consumer reports.

    And then there’s Boeing… Definitely leadership problems there, but what’s the point of a union if they don’t even do anything about retaliation? Feels like the union is only there to ensure people get longer breaks and more pay.

  • There is no such thing as unskilled labor.

• I’m curious how much that correlates with age? With age discrimination being a very real thing, and as a just-middle-aged software guy, the thought of some concrete protections for those of us getting up in years is very appealing.

  • because they grew up during the pre-India labor shortages. Survivor bias is a hell of a drug and every boomer and older Gen Xer I know that made it this far through layoffs thinks they’re Richard Stallman by way of Albert Einstein (or vice versa).

    The kids know better. They go to meetings and see a see of cheap labor they’re forced to compete with. They get laid off ever 2-5 years to bump the stock price for another round of buy backs no matter how productive they are. And every year price gouging eats u

    • Isn’t it always your assertion that Elon treats his employees badly and outsources wherever possible? So why is Tesla at the bottom of this list?

      And I don’t know what this “pre-India” shit is about. In the aughts I kept hearing not to bother going into tech because you’ll just get offshored. Yet ten years later I went into it anyways and haven’t seen even the slightest hint of that happening.

  • Higher value employees generally don’t favour unions. They’d rather be paid their above average worth. Lower value employees would rather their pay be brought up to the average worth of all the employees.

• I started programming in 1972 when there weren’t very many of us and even fewer good ones. Those of us who could demonstrate skills and produce good results were treated VERY well

  Then the word spread. A job in software is the key to riches. A flood of people with no talent or passion poured into schools and then into industry, believing that they could command the same high pay they read about. Few were excellent, most were mediocre or worse. The software world adapted by inventing tools and frameworks that allowed mediocre programmers to churn out mediocre code. Bosses noticed that extreme skill wasn’t required to do this and looked for cheaper alternatives. India provided them

  Today there are still a few highly skilled and talented programmers who are treated well, but bosses often prefer to hire cheap people and treat them poorly. These are the people who want a union

  • Because programming is more or less a trade now and without unions trades get paid like shit because you can train somebody up on it in about a year maybe two at the most.

    People with advanced mathematics are the ones getting treated well. Typically people who have a specific niche skill that’s needed. And the unemployment line is littered with people who developed those niche skills and technology moved on and they didn’t have three or four years to spend obsessively building up a new niche skill set. O

  • This comes across to me as, “fuck you, I got mine.” Maybe you’re not like that in person, but that’s the impression you’re giving. And I think most of that deals with this assumption on your part:

    >Then the word spread. A job in software is the key to riches. A flood of people with no talent or passion poured into schools and then into industry

    Now, I don’t know much about your life, and maybe you’ve been lucky to avoid the boom and bust cycles of our economy, and maybe you just chalk that up to being a

• Because I want some union to take a few hundred a month out of my paycheck. And claim that they got me the raise that my employer was more than happy to pay me due to my skills and experience anyway. But then turn around and hand a pretty big chunk of that to some socialist political organization. Who are accusing me of fomenting inequality because of my pay disparity.

• Growing up in 70s Britain, my experience of unions was extremely negative; they nearly ran the country into the ground until Margaret Thatcher beat them down. In 1990 I got a public sector job. A few years later it imposed a ‘job evaluation scheme’ which tried to equate the level of skills in different departments in order to pay on the basis of skill, not the level of wages necessary to recruit for the job. However one effect of this was to mean some of the employees were expected to take LARGE pay cuts –

• After decades doing software, and watching some others be soundly abused, but refusing to consider uniting and speaking with one voice, they’re finally wising up? Hooray. If you act like a doormat, you’ll get stepped on. Its that simple.