alt Hacker NewsEssentially, we need more unions - I'm not sure we have to invent new names for these things. These won't be your parents' unions, or the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV—the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
I've been (unintentionally) part of two union drives in my own life and have seen friends in an unrelated field participate in a third. They make perfect sense in moments like our current one, where owners can hire dozens of attorneys to jeopardize your job while you of course are limited to whatever legal representation you've been saving up for.
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My only experience with unions was as a low level employee while I was in high school. It consisted of certain employees trying to drum up willingness to unionize through a combination of unrealistic promises and threats of violence. The company I worked for at the time was in trouble and went out of business before the unionization effort came to a vote. I don't know how representative my experience was, but it definitely soured me on unions for a long time.
These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.
> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do", so why do people complain about it so much and want it gone when it does what people want?
The answer is that even democratic institutions easily get corrupted and hard to deal with. US unions seem to be very prone to this for some reason, both union leaders and corporate lobbyists wants the unions to be corrupt so I don't see that changing either. Many people would gladly take a salary penalty if it lets them avoid yet another corrupt bureaucracy above them.
> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
There is no such thing. A problem with a union is that everyone's going the same place, and you're not driving. Maybe that place is better than where you could get to on your own, or maybe not. But one thing that is definitely not true is that your union is going to do exactly what you want.
Agreed. The best time to form a union was 20 years ago (Especially because Tech Workers had leverage because they were in demand). The second best time to form a union is today.
I wouldn’t mind unions except they get involved in all sorts of political battles that I would get opted into. I would rather they focus on the barebones of negotiation for compensation instead of taking it over like it’s their personal nonprofit.
I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collectivism of the masses somehow drowning out the desires of the elite few, but they never seem to address the obvious counterexamples in higher-paid work; the $780,000 minimum salary for MLB players doesn't seem to have stopped Shohei Ohtani from getting a contract making almost 90 times more than that per year, and Adam Sandler doesn't seem like he's struggling with his $48 million payout last year despite the union-negotiated guarantees for anyone getting a speaking role on screen existing for decades.
(I'n not usually on the "downvoting for disagreement is bad" train, but when the major point of my comment is that there never seems to be a strong counterargument to the line of thinking here, it's hard not to find it a bit ironic when someone doesn't care to elaborate on why they don't like what I said)
That’s not what this is. Nor do we need more of them.