[AnthonyMouse]

> Worker's unions helped win the majority of our rights in modern democracies. I wish this fact was more widely appreciated.

The problem with modern unions, particularly in tech, is that the legacy structure is inapt for current problems. Tech workers don't need a union to negotiate compensation, they're compensated fine already. They don't need a huge bureaucratic structure for engaging in long-term detailed negotiations. They don't need a contract at all.

What they need is a no-dues no-fulltime-union-reps union that operates through direct democracy. It does nothing unless the employer is doing something bad wrong. Then if the majority of the union members vote to refuse, either the employer concedes or they strike.

Because it's not about a thousand little things here, it's about a small number of big things. It needs to be able to address those and then go back to being invisible instead of succumbing to feature creep and destroying the host with overhead and principal-agent problems as we've seen with the auto makers.

[cultus]

> Tech workers don't need a union to negotiate compensation, they're compensated fine already.

Software one of the highest margins of any industry. They can afford to pay more, especially since they are constantly whining about "shortages" of tech workers.

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...

[AnthonyMouse]

> They can afford to pay more

Which is why they already do pay more than other industries.

The best argument you have against that is the anti-poaching shenanigans they've engaged in -- but that's already illegal, so the answer there is a courtroom rather than a union.

[ygjb]

No, it really isn't. The court requires someone to notice the pattern, or be aware of the pattern, and be willing to risk their reputation. With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The court requires someone to notice the pattern, or be aware of the pattern

How is that different with a union?

> and be willing to risk their reputation

Class action suit or submit evidence confidentially to the attorney general.

> With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.

If Apple won't hire Google employees then the Google employees can retaliate against Apple by not working for them?

[tomlock]

> they're compensated fine already.

I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have.

Yes, having a higher salary would be ridiculous in a lot of these cases, but we should moderate that through legislation that benefits the most people - not by a public company further lining the coffers of its owners.

Apple and Google particularly have a lot of cash just lying around, and that cash is the result of the employee's efforts, and they deserve it. I think if we think their salaries are too high in that case, we need to talk about better taxation systems.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have.

They have massive cash reverses because the tax laws have encouraged that rather than paying it to shareholders as dividends. And that level of return is necessary because of the nature of the industry -- you have to spend millions of dollars trying to create the next tech giant before you know whether you've succeeded or not, and most of the time you haven't. The returns to success have to be enough to overcome the high failure rate.

Most of the employees aren't taking the same level of risk. If you work for a company for five years taking home a six figure salary and that company fails, you don't have to give back your salary and in a few months you're working for another company making the same amount of money.

If you think you can do better on your own, risking your own time and money instead of taking outside investment, go right ahead -- but then shouldn't it be you who gets more of the reward if you succeed rather than the people you hire in after you're already an established success?

[tomlock]

On the one hand it sounds like you're saying that software engineers are paid enough already, then on the other hand you're saying you think the compensation given to the software engineers that founded the company - which is much MUCH higher than that of the average company engineer is appropriate.

It feels like what you're saying is that the risk of failing in a startup is massive enough for a founder that they deserve literally billions of dollars.

Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee? Are you saying that because a founder may go bankrupt they are entitled to thousands of times more money? Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee? Could you help me understand what makes you think that?

[AnthonyMouse]

> On the one hand it sounds like you're saying that software engineers are paid enough already, then on the other hand you're saying you think the compensation given to the software engineers that founded the company - which is much MUCH higher than that of the average company engineer is appropriate.

Of course, because the level of risk is different. $100,000 guaranteed is worth more than a <50% chance at $200,000, much less a <1% chance. A very high reward is inherently necessary to offset the very low probability of major success, otherwise people aren't going to do it.

> Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee?

The less than one in a thousand chance of making that much.

> Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee?

There are many ways to turn a thousand dollars into a 0.1% chance at a million dollars. Then 99.9% of the time you lose the thousand dollars -- and it's your time/money, not the bank's. Nobody is going to give you an unsecured loan to gamble with.

But if you bet on your own horse at 1000:1 odds and win, how are you not entitled to the proceeds?

[tomlock]

I'm assuming that you don't think risking making no money is enough to entitle a founder to their entire employees wage. How much does it entitle them to?

[AnthonyMouse]

> I'm assuming that you don't think risking making no money is enough to entitle a founder to their entire employees wage. How much does it entitle them to?

The amount they mutually agree upon. The employee wouldn't agree to work indefinitely for no pay.

The high compensation of successful founders is actually one of the things keeping salaries up, because any of the salaried employees has the option to quit and found their own company. The existing company has to pay well enough to compete with that -- because if what they're paying wasn't actually competitive with that alternative given the relative risk between them, why would anybody accept the salary?

[pravinva]

The successful entrepreneur makes his money by capital gains in the share or venture capital markets and not by extracting it from his employees. Employees compete with each other for salaries. Employer competes with other employers for both a)market share b) hiring employees -bidding up their prices. By comparing gains from entrepreneurship with regular salaries, you are comparing a stock variable with a flow variable. Even Marx got this part correct

[kiliantics]

If tech workers form a union, I'm sure it will look very different to the industrial worker's unions of the 20th century. And so it should, the needs of today are very different. The thing is, apart from the remaining unions from that time, most unions already look very different to that model so this is not really a good argument against unionising.

The other thing you aren't taking into account is the fact that this boom in the tech industry isn't guaranteed to continue forever. There will come a time, maybe pretty soon, where tech workers will become as precarious as those steel workers and autoworkers eventually became. Big tech companies are already putting a lot of effort and resources into educating the next generation of programmers to provide a more competitive labour market and drive down salaries. There's already talk of a coming recession, where I'm sure the belts will be tightened and people will be laid off. When we have a union, we will be more protected from the inevitable exploitation in such scenarios.

The temporarily embarassed unicorn founders among us need to realise that we are the creators of all the value in these companies and, collectively, we have the power to influence their direction and impact on society. We can help secure not only our own rights as workers but also have the power to change society at large and secure better standards of living for all workers (or non-workers). That's why these recent actions by Google employees have been so important. They can set a precedent for how other companies and even states can safely act in future, without fearing repercussions from their most valuable resource - the workers.

[ineedasername]

How do you get and pay for the infrastructure of this direct democracy without resources paid for by dues? How do you get the minority in any vote to go along with the result when there isn't any common binding agreement such as a contract that enforces majority rule?

[AnthonyMouse]

> How do you get and pay for the infrastructure of this direct democracy without resources paid for by dues?

The technology needed to let people submit proposals and let other people vote on them is on the level what individuals do over a weekend as adjunct to a side project.

> How do you get the minority in any vote to go along with the result when there isn't any common binding agreement such as a contract that enforces majority rule?

Why do you need to force them to? By definition the majority will already agree, and then many in the minority would participate out of solidarity because that's the whole point of joining a union to begin with. You don't need 100.0%, a large majority is quite sufficient in general. And anything that actually required 100.0% is already lost, because then they could pay off the cheapest defector or contract it out.

[ineedasername]

The technology to submit and receive votes on proposals is only trivial until you think about the details, especially those required for security and authentication.

And your picture of humam behavior is all too rose-colored glasses if it's having all members of a minority vote just go along out of solidarity when it's non-binding. I've seen unions vote on issues, and it's often contentious with emotions running high on all sides. If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have. Sometimes they try to anyway.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The technology to submit and receive votes on proposals is only trivial until you think about the details, especially those required for security and authentication.

This is a major problem for country-level populations. For corporations it typically comes pre-solved by the corporation itself, because each employee would have a company email address or Active Directory account etc. that could be used for authentication. (In theory the corporation could illegally tamper with the results that way, but the tampering would be immediately obvious to the person whose vote was changed.)

> If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have.

Because they're using the union for the wrong stuff. A lot of the votes would be for things like accepting a policy that gives raises to only senior people. No doubt the junior people being screwed over by that policy would strenuously object when they're the 49%, especially when being in the union deprives them of the opportunity to negotiate something else as an individual.

But how many Google employees have that kind of personal stake in a question like whether to censor search results in China?