That is basically a union effort. The cognitive dissonance on display with regard to labor in tech is fascinating. Many have internalized the propaganda created by big business that "unions are bad, unions are expensive, you don't want to unionize" and they aren't willing to revisit that internally, but they're like "what if we just organize without a union, refuse to work unless our demands are met" failing to realize that's exactly what a union is.
Union dues aren't collected so somebody else can get paid for doing nothing. That somebody (or somebodies) else is your advocate. They know your industry like your bosses do, except they aren't on your bosses payroll, they're on YOURS, meaning they go to bat for YOU, not the company. And Union membership is often a requirement for working. Why? Because if it wasn't, the company would staff up on workers not wanting to be part of the union, until they had enough to survive the resulting strike, and fire all the union people.
The effectiveness of corporate America's attack on organized labor over the last century cannot be overstated. They have done a fantastic job of demonizing any efforts at bargaining from the employee's side, and employee's wages demonstrate it.
FWIW, what's amazing to someone like me, who is anti-union (in tech, at least), is that pro-union people don't seem to understand why people who have succeeded by being highly differentiated from the rest of the talent pool would want to participate in a scheme where the entirety of labor is presented to an employer as a homogenous block.
My understanding is that actors don't typically have a choice whether to join a union. SAG-AFTRA has enough power and preference agreements that you can't really make it in the industry without joining, even if you don't otherwise want to.
Possibly, but it doesn't have the problem of treating the actors as a homogeneous equally skilled block; "10X actors" are definitely getting adequate compensation while at the same time all guild members benefit from the common protections.
I don't know where this perception comes from but it's not true. Collective bargaining isn't about the entire employee pool being represented as one skilled homogeneous block. It's about giving employees a voice at the decision-making tables in a company.
I'm sure you've heard the myriad stories about where the decision makers at a company have done some damn boneheaded thing, something so rock stupid that could only come from never having worked on whatever ground floor the business has. And what can the employees do? Nothing. They have to comply because they don't have a voice, because if they argue, they're fired. If they don't do it, they're fired.
THAT is what a union can fix, among tons of other problems. A smart boss is one that listens to his employees when they speak up about problems; a boss working with a union doesn't have a choice.
And that's not to say that unions are perfect, like anything else made by humans and run by humans they have flaws. But IMO, problematic representation is better than no representation.
Right. Unions have their problems, but they provide considerable protection against arbitrary actions by management.
Here's The Animation Guild, Local 839, IATSE, which represents Hollywood animators at the major studios.[1] Disney, Pixar, Warner, etc. This union is all creative people. They have salary floors, but not ceilings. Most usefully, they have overtime rules. Beyond 8 hours, time and a half. Weekends, time and a half. Crunches, double time. In Hollywood, management tries hard to avoid crunches, because they have to pay for them.
The Animation Guild has a pension plan, which has, they point out, outlived all but two animation studios.
The Animation Guild tried to organize game development companies. They got Pixar, but not EA. They used to send a labor organizer to Bay Area SIGGRAPH meetings.
That's an overly idealized view of unions. In practice union leaders are often going to bat for themselves rather than the members. The level of corruption in larger unions is off the charts.
In principle I do support the right of workers to unionize. But the current implementation of unions in the US has a lot of problems.
And this is an overly cynical one, painting all unions as the same despite them being individual entities, all composed of different people.
Plenty of them have problems. Plenty more don't. Generalizing them all in this way is exactly how big business has demonized them to the average worker.
If you're part of a union, you have say in how that union operates. Can you say the same for your employer?
> If you're part of a union, you have say in how that union operates.
Really? I'd likely have very close to the same amount of say I have in my company, namely, zero. I might even have more in my company, depending on my position and the relative size.
Going to work without a union is like going to court without a lawyer. Are there incompetent lawyers? Does it cost money to hire a lawyer? Of course, but that doesn't mean it isn't a stupid idea to try to represent yourself pro se.
Unfortunately, workers in the US have been the subject to the equivalent of a fifty year propaganda campaign bankrolled by prosecutors (business owners) to convince people they're really better off if they represent themselves pro se (without a union).
I wouldn't categorize individual decisions to quit as union action. The whole point of unions is that collective action is massively more powerful than individual voluntary action.
I would argue that the cognitive dissonance regarding labor from pro-union advocates is more fascinating. Anyone can organize themselves already, independent of organized labor laws - it's called a company. If employees are so confident in their abilities, they could just as well form their own company and sell their labor as a service back to their former employer. It doesn't make sense to have a special allowance for unions that forces everyone into collective bargaining and effectively a second, parallel management structure.
This is honestly naive, if I dump poison in the river your village is drinking from you should move the village. If a company is abusing the employees what is the danger in organizing and negotiating better conditions as a group and not as individuals . The only excuse I read here on HN is that "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."
I think you are glossing over the reality of how unions work. If someone is dumping poisons in the river, you have the chance to get laws passed against it. Others can organize to prevent those laws from being passed as well. Everyone is not compelled to take a single position on the issue or obligated to join a single party, and there is no mandatory fee either. It is a very different situation from being in a union (in the US, anyways).
Can't you have multiple unions in US? like teachers,medics have more then 1 union here in Romania and you are not forced to join,
I do not understand the rest of your comment, what I was trying to argue against is the idea of "leave if you don't like it" so it appears to me that some people are trying to suppress employees that complain, organize and demand improvements.
Are you suggesting that the only way for say game developers to get better condition is to lobby some politicians to pass a national law for the sector ?
The way the union regulations work out here, you may only work at a certain company if you belong to a certain union (a single organization). You can’t for example, choose between multiple competing unions or work without representation. I’ve heard this is different in other locations like Germany.
As a result, having a job at that company means you automatically adopt paying their fees, their organizational structure, the pay scale they’ve negotiated (often can turn into tenure-based, which is basically age-based), etc. This means you sort of have two management structures in a sense. Since unions participate politically and fund campaigns and such, you are automatically paying your salary to support political candidates you may disagree with, because union leadership makes the choice on how to spend the money it collects.
It can also lead to workplace inefficiency and frustrations that customers end up paying for. As an example, if you work at Boeing you may have some task you can finish immediately yourself (like screwing something in) but the union protects the job security of some people by saying that only those people may do certain tasks. As a result you might need to wait to coordinate with the screw guy to do something you could finish in 5 seconds.
I am wondering if years of anti union propaganda pushed to the surface the bad examples and all the good ones are just hidden. I am not in a union but what I know from my family that are in such jobs in public or private sector is that6 they get only benefits. Like if they have to work more hours you get paid double for those hours, you are forced to take your vacation days - this means that management can't put pressure on you to work on weekends because they are bad at managing, management will try to optimize to avoid extra hours. Where my brother works he is evaluated each year, there is company wide(multinational) scheme on how people are paid so you can get a raise but there are no 10X mechanical engineers that work 1 night and have the output of 10 good regular engineers.
Without this protections the company could promote the people that stay and work extra hours and from home for free or find different ways to abuse you.
> The only excuse I read here on HN is that "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."
And one could easily say this is a ploy by management-level people to show the other serfs that "You can make it too!" because paying one dev who's a little better than his peers costs a fraction of paying them all what they should be paid.
> "I am a 10X dev and I don;t want the union to pay me the same as my colleague that is a lesser developer then me."
This is a valid concern for highly-paid/specialized individuals, IMO. Price's Law (https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/): 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
Probably true but how many devs that think they are 10X are just regular devs with 10X ego that compare themselves with the lowest possible dev to feel superior.
I could see a union that won't put upper limit but would fight for fairness, extra hours paid double, no more then X hours a month etc.
Except that the very concept of a 10X developer, no matter what they themselves may say about it, is disgusting; it's a person who has, even if willingly, distorted their work/life balance to a point where they "go the extra mile" as management would put it; usually involving working off hours, working extra hours, working from home on weekends and evenings, or eschewing general life activities in favor of doing more work.
I know this is sacrilege to say this in our system and even moreso in our profession, but this is not good for you. I don't care how much you like it, I don't care how much money you're gaining from it, I don't care if you're the most willing of willing to have ever willed. You're abusing yourself in exchange for money, and that's the end of it and it shouldn't be allowed.
You should have a salary commensurate with your skill set, and you should not have to eschew anything resembling a proper work/life balance to do it.
You are assuming that greater value generation is only a function of greater effort in the form of more hours. It is also a function of other things like higher talent, smarter decisions, and past investment in one’s skills.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and especially not name-calling ones and ideological battle ones. We're trying for better than that here.
So if I say arbitrary stuff like what I was responding too but use enough words, it's all good? The "just make a company" is not just unsubstantive but also a completely fake idea :) it's comical propaganda dressed up in verbiage
Sounds like the issue isn't content but rather whether something is quippy or wordy.
Yes and no. The way to refute a bad comment is by respectfully providing better information, and this is very much a question of content. "This is some capitalist nonsense" obviously doesn't do that.
It may feel to you like you were refuting the GP as much as it deserved, but from the point of view of an open-minded reader who's here to learn and doesn't have a fixed position, your comment contains no information, only name-calling.
Don't forget that all this is a matter of degree. Degrees of badness matter; responding to a bad comment with a still-worse one is a step in the wrong direction.
Union dues aren't collected so somebody else can get paid for doing nothing. That somebody (or somebodies) else is your advocate. They know your industry like your bosses do, except they aren't on your bosses payroll, they're on YOURS, meaning they go to bat for YOU, not the company. And Union membership is often a requirement for working. Why? Because if it wasn't, the company would staff up on workers not wanting to be part of the union, until they had enough to survive the resulting strike, and fire all the union people.
The effectiveness of corporate America's attack on organized labor over the last century cannot be overstated. They have done a fantastic job of demonizing any efforts at bargaining from the employee's side, and employee's wages demonstrate it.