| Honestly, I don't understand the role of unions in modern society. At least not in major metropolitan areas. The original goal of a union was to protect people who had no other realistic employment oppotunities. If you lived in rural Pennsylvania digging in a coal mine, I totally get unionization. More power to you (/me beats his chest in solidarity). But you're talking about the modern age for a group that has arguably more career mobility than any other career in the history of the world. If I don't like the conditions at a job, I'll pick up and leave. There are hundreds of jobs I can select from; the tech world is literally my oyster. If enough people leave, conditions will change, but frankly I won't care because I won't be there. Protection against mass layoffs? That sounds like you want to drag the company down. I'd rather see 50% of the people continue on with a job indefinitely than see 95% with a job for a few months until the company shuts its doors. These factors makes unions uninteresting for me. But there are other factors that make me openly hostile to unions. I think that collective bargaining in pay brings the average salary up, but I'm not an average engineer. I like to think I'm in at least the top 25% (I'd like to say I'm in the 5%, but I don't know if I am), and so my assumption is that unions will bring my salary down. Frankly I don't care about bringing low-end engineers' salaries up at the cost of mine. I assume that the company isn't totally irrational, and it is capable of deciding for itself how important employees are and compensate them accordingly. Also, my experience with unions in the past had to do with my spouse working in education. The union there was not acting in teachers' best interest. They routinely brought in retirement savings pitches that advocated terrible choices for the teachers, any proposed change was immediately mired in committees where it would languish and die, and when you did have an issue the union was outright hostile (spouse was laid off over summer break for the crime of being pregnant, union abruptly stopped discussing the issue with us after a cutoff date until we'd paid the next year's dues, when we paid union said "thank you, we're not going to pursue this, the school's decision stands"). |