I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits?
Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?
The issue is the idea that there’s something that can magically solve all your problems. If you believe in panaceas, everything will disappoint you.
Unions are a tool, and tools have tradeoffs. They will be able to solve some of your problems — most importantly, the power imbalance between employer and employee — and introduce new ones you didn’t have before. The bet is that if we collectively use unions correctly, they will solve more problems than they create; that we will, on balance, be better off.
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.
Let me put it this way. If a rowing team spends their time infighting rather than coordinating, they’ll find it difficult to make progress even though they can in theory move very fast.
> What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
I'd like to see unions negotiate better equity deals. For pre-IPO companies, it's typical that the equity is worth nothing, and employees can actually lose money on their equity by buying it during early exercise or when they leave. For a typical employee, equity is too risky and too detached from their individual activity to be part of compensation, and it makes more sense to have different incentives. E.g. SAFEs or convertible notes where you can get paid at the next funding round instead of the IPO between 10 years and never. Alternatively, a union would have leverage and scale to arrange tender offers that individuals wouldn't. Also, during an acquisition, the union can negotiate to waive liquidation preference, since an acquirer doesn't want to buy a company where the employees don't get paid and strike on the first day.
this is a great example of the kind of things unions should talk about when doing tech organizing.
too often, unions pitch themselves on fixing problems that are low on the hierarchy of needs in a particular job (e.g., will this job kill/maim you? do you make enough money to feed yourself?) and it just doesn't resonate with the types of problems that tech folks have.
but pre-IPO equity deals are something that all employees hate and are completely powerless to change as individuals.
I'd be particularly interested in cases where unionization led to better products and processes. Like in a world where management just wanted to ship everything half baked, the union gave the workforce the voice required to insist on accurate and up to date documentation, comprehensive testing, proper dependency tracking and security practices, etc.
I feel like almost everyone I talk to in tech says that behind the scenes, their company's development workflow is a nightmare, so this doesn't appear to be a problem that's fixing itself under market pressures.
We don't need software unions. We need to break up big tech.
Software companies should be able to hire and fire. We often need to have 24/7 oncall. Needs are flexible. Startups must be nimble.
It's the tech giants that are ruining it for everyone. They're preventing new centicorns from forming. They're forcing underpriced M&A for successes, moving into markets with infinite money and killing upstarts before they find legs. They own every platform, every discovery mechanism, and they tax more than governments do.
Big tech recently figured out they could pay off everyone and put pricing pressure back on the engineers that built their market position. Previously they were worried engineers could leave and start upstart competitors. That's why they hired everyone and paid top of band salaries. Now that they realize there is no governmental antitrust legislation to fear, they just crush everything.
They're in search of infinite growth, so they move into new markets like Hollywood movies and primary care doctors and undercut everyone. They market themselves for free at the top of their websites and app stores (or print giant ads on their delivery trucks and cardboard packaging). Things that would cost competitors hundreds of millions of dollars to do.
> Software companies should be able to hire and fire.
Almost every company in every industry makes this dubious claim. Then we rediscover the benefits of team knowledge and stability.
> We often need to have 24/7 oncall
This feels completely orthogonal to the discussion at hand, nobody is claiming that a union will somehow make doing on-call impossible. Many other professions that do have unions, have an on-call analog.
Forming the union is step one of a long road before you actually reap the benefits. It can take year(s) to negotiate the CBA with your employer. Sounds like fear of layoffs was a huge factor, but the employer must agree to those terms, and that remains to be seen. So for now that's all rhetoric. Show me a team that has gotten to the other side with these terms in a contract.
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.
I think a lot of people might consider taking a pay cut in return for an easier tech job. In theory working in an equally profitable company by lowering stress and comp for everyone and hiring more seems possible, but I'm not certain that it'd work out in practice because of increased coordination overhead etc.,.
The union members (i.e., the employees) give that power to the "union boss." Not all unions work like that (some do not have a traditional union leader), and for those who do, having a powerful union leader can be a good or a bad thing, depending on who gets elected as the union leader by the union members.
One of the problems with real world union examples is all the laws that weakened and destroyed unions over the years. Even if there were few or no examples of thriving unions today because of issues with the legal regime, that does not strictly imply that better conditions are not possible. For example wildcat strikes and sympathy strikes have been illegal since 1947, putting more power in the hands of union management and taking power away from unions. That’s both unfair from a libertarian perspective (if workers want to strike there should not be a law preventing them from doing so) and it undermines the concept of worker power which unions otherwise aim to uphold.
So it may be instructive to look at past examples when unions were strong and compare the working conditions of workers in unions and workers not in unions. Or to look at unions in other countries like Germany where they have board seats and better legal accommodation.
Isn't that a function of living within hierarchies?
Can you describe a system of change where one person is not ultimately responsible for the changes?
Unions exist as a structure of power, but that power still has contend with company power. Good outcomes are proportional to challenging someone else's power, and people use their power to punish challengers and reward loyalists.
That means good outcomes, no matter what the system, are a function of pain tolerance and people's willingness to make sacrifices for the benefit of others. Unions are a higher leverage vehicle for making sacrifices, but if there is no tolerance for pain or sacrifice then your only option is submission and hoping those with more power than you use it responsibly rather than becoming increasingly more despotic.
Seems like a good time to unionize is when you don't need it, while the job is good. Get the union in place and work through issues like on-call, laying out actual articulable and measurable performance targets for review time, work-life balance rules and other "small" things while the job is good. That way when the money grubbing starts, the true horror-show policies are attempted, etc - you have an established union and a better bargaining position. Better than waiting until the job is shit and having to fight an uphill battle all the way.
i've recently been thinking about when in a start-ups lifecycle should employees consider unionizing.
it'd be great if a worker-friendly culture was instilled in the company from its earliest days, but i'm not sure if a) there's an effective minimum size needed to unionize or b) if the existence of a union would kill your ability to fundraise in the future
> I think unions need to work on their marketing. I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
That would track if you were asked to elect anyone. You aren't. You're told to get your shit together, talk to your coworkers, and _solve your shit_ together. And when you do that - that's a labor union. Maybe not necessarily in the legal sense, but in a very real, material sense.
> I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."
Damn you have a way different ear for people than I do. Unions actually have an incentive to please their constituents. Politicians generally don't (at least in america).
Unions need to stop marketing themselves as a way to get better work-life balance. The main benefit of unions is that employees are protected from individual abuse, because the entire union can put pressure on management in support of individuals who are being mistreated, underpaid, etc.
Half of those problems disappear in Europe, quality of life and happiness skyrocket. Sure, you won't have some carrot-on-the-stick IPO games but I don't need to, I am not on the verge of burning out, I have plenty of time for my family and kids and also myself. Kids education is free including top notch unis, (almost) so is stellar healthcare, no need to massively save up for that regardless of what can happen.
I had a big paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, tons of treatment, mris, various physiotherapies... still ongoing and cost 0 nothing, in even rural US those costs would be brutal. My (early) retirement is very well taken care of if all works out, we will probably have more money than we could reasonably spend plus some serious assets, all just our work from 0 in past decade and a half, both just employed at companies. Criminality is a topic on its own. I could go on for a looong time.
I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Good luck putting a price tag on such things, if you don't get it wait till you are older. Thats how advanced modern society should look like IMHO... the stress of being american with family and without massive cash reserves must be quite intense and relentless.
I live in the US and my employer provides excellent healthcare. I broke my collarbone last spring and had surgery to repair it followed by months of physical therapy. Zero dollars out of pocket.
That's the problem though, you're dependent on your company in order to not go bankrupt after your injury. If you get fired, you're screwed, if I get fired here in EU, it's not that big of a deal (plus it's harder to fire me in the first place)
>My (early) retirement is very well taken care [...] I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.
Where in Europe? Early retirement is a dream for the vast majority of European SW engineers. So you're in a very privilege position that's very hard to nearly impossible to achieve.
I have so many complaints about unions. Very briefly.
#1 Suboptimal governance. Especially when leadership gets "captured". But that's always true of all human orgs. I have nothing helpful to add here.
#2 Accelerating inequity. Corporate profits up while wages remain stagnant. Just as u/singron commented elsethread. I just don't understand how this isn't the central issue. For every person, union, voter, policy maker. For everyone.
#3 Adversarial relationship (in the USA). Labor and Capital (via their proxy, Management) need to work together. My only notion is to encourage member (employee) owned and managed co-ops. (Which would need access to financial support of come kind, eg "slow capital". Which is antithetical to Wall St, neoliberalism, rent seeking, yadda, yadda.)
That said... I'm very pro-Labor. And unenthusiastically pro-union, out of necessity, until we figure out something better.
Like you suggest, no way simply unionizing magically resolves my complaints. Meta stuff like culture, policy, laws, expectations would have to change, to create the space for "better" unions. Stuff like repeal Taft Hartley Act, institute sectorial bargaining, investment banks structured to support social endeavors (like co-ops), yadda yadda.
> If you don't see how this can be useful, that's a failure of imagination on your part.
I too can sometimes find it quite frustrating when a thing that seems like a good idea to me is rejected by other people, especially when that rejection seems to come after very little consideration.
But if you want people to adopt a view similar to yours, and they haven't yet, I think this sort of attitude is counterproductive. I think the person you replied to is right about there being a marketing problem here. If there's a genuinely good idea, and its acceptance/adoption is disproportionately low, it must be because people aren't seeing its value. Maybe that's because they haven't been exposed to it, maybe it's because they lack the curiosity or motivation to understand it, maybe it's because they've been misinformed or propagandized against it... either way, if you care about increasing adoption there's really no other choice than to try to actively persuade people.
What's the A+ example out there of a unionized engineering team that has been able to find a great work-life balance, great benefits, and a fun product development life-cycle that is profitable or clearly on its way to profitability? Show me this company.
I have family and friends who work for airline unions, parcel unions, teacher unions, etc. Some love it, some hate it. Those who love it had a broken fan in the van all summer with no air conditioning until the union stepped in. How would a union meaningfully improve that situation at a tech office with paid lunches and decent benefits?
Like, the promise of a better tomorrow from unions carries the same tone as a promise to IPO "really soon" from the CEO/CFO tag team at the annual kick-off meeting. What does it look like when rubber meets the road?