[scsilver]

I full on support their goal to clean up their yard before moving somewhere else. Employees are stakeholders and can use their leverage as they please. You somehow cast a negative moral light on workers for using this leverage when every other stakeholder, managment, stockholders, board members, government agencies, voters all use their leverage to change the ecosystem.

Entitlement?

You are entitled to what you can get the world to render for you. Not asking is allowing others to over entitle and enritch themselves at your loss.

[panarky]

This shows how deeply ingrained right-wing ideology has become in America.

Outside America it is obvious that billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs wield power in their own self-interest, and that workers benefit from collective action in their own self-interest.

But inside America the billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs are mythologized as benevolent actors, and workers should be thankful for the gifts graciously bestowed upon them.

No compensation is too high for billionaires, but if some workers make a good salary, that's seen as extravagant, and the workers should be extra grateful and stop asking for better working conditions, too.

It's bizarre how Americans celebrate ruthlessly competitive markets when workers compete against each other for food, shelter and medical care. But it's a cultural taboo to use those same competitive market forces for the benefit of workers.

[spicybright]

Don't know why this is down voted, because it's spot on.

It's what gives us advantages in areas like medical/technical research, powerful mega corporations that can effect global markets, and schooling. All at the cost of the lives of people that crank the cogs forward to maintain it all.

[prox]

Edit : See comment below

[AsyncAwait]

Seriously?[1]

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/07/covid-19-cr...

[prox]

I was actually agreeing with that comment, but I can see how it got misconstrued. There really aren’t any good arguments against a union, if done (regulated) well.

[AlexandrB]

Reminds me of when American Airlines gave their workers a raise[1] resulting in financial analysts saying things like:

> “This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a widely circulated note. “Shareholders get leftovers.”

Pretty amazing that someone could write this without a hint of irony.

[1] https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/4/29/15471634/american-ai...

[ghufran_syed]

You mean a note written to help determine the value of a stock focuses on the effect of a decision on that stock rather than something else that you (a non-shareholder possibly?) find important? Do you really find that surprising? Should be no more surprising than the idea that an internal union communication would focus more on benefits to workers instead of benefits to shareholders. Neither of the above is meant to be some kind of ethical treatise, why would we expect them to be so?

[sidlls]

This comment does not deserve these downvotes. Not only is it not aggressively, negatively contentious or malicious, but it’s a thoughtful commentary on the state of worker/owner relations that has direct and specific relevance to tech work in general.

[Izkata]

> negatively contentious

...did you miss the first sentence?

[sidlls]

There's nothing negatively contentious in that sentence. It may be debatable.

[Izkata]

The line has a built-in assumption that "the right" is bad, without realizing that half the country is (and had pretty much always been) on the right.

[LMYahooTFY]

I disagree that this is clearly indicative of anything.

>But inside America the billionaires, oligarchs and CEOs are mythologized as benevolent actors, and workers should be thankful for the gifts graciously bestowed upon them.

I've spent my life living in different parts of America, and this sounds very out of touch.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/03/02/most-america...

I've come across other polling that indicates similar trends.

[kortilla]

> But it's a cultural taboo to use those same competitive market forces for the benefit of workers.

Forming a union is not competitive, it’s the opposite. When you gather up all of the suppliers of something (in this case employees are supplying labor) and collectively fix a price that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.

It’s not a cultural taboo to be pro-union on the left because it’s not free market. It is a cultural taboo on the right precisely because they are seen as discouraging competition and rewarding tenure over competence.

[minimuffins]

> Forming a union is not competitive, it’s the opposite.

Yes.

> that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.

This is so muddled.

Anti-trust and pro-labor policies are not at odds. Corporations and the people who do their work for them are not cut from the same cloth. When the owners of the world's productive capacity collude to fix prices, that's a trust. When laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity, it's not. It's a union. These are two different words for two different concepts about two fundamentally different kinds of entities (capital and labor).

Thinking of the wage relation as a bargain between equals is a cope. You're not as powerful as Google.

There is a reason we don't talk about employers (especially enormous ones Like Alphabet that are becoming so deeply integrated into modern life and politics that it's now difficult to fully conceive of) and individual working people as if they are the same kind of thing.

One is a supranational bohemoth that owns an enormous productive capacity, the other relies on wage labor to live. (That's not a sob story, just a true fact. You can rely on wage labor and still live pretty comfortably. I do.)

[DarmokJalad1701]

> laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity

Is this really true for a job like SWE where all you need to do the job is a laptop and internet?

[minimuffins]

Yes because to actually produce the way Google produces you need more than a bunch of laptops. Think about all the kinds of capital Google owns from IP to massive data centers.

On top of that they have huge sway with governments and a hand in control of cultural production.

It's easier to start a software company than an oil company because it takes way less fixed capital but the same rules as the rest of political economy apply on the whole.

[8note]

The SWE does not own the data center though

[scsilver]

You also need a developer community, standards bodies, universities, regulatory bodies. You are made valueable by the interplay of all those institutions. Guess who makes your laptop and provides access to your internet, its directories, and communication channels, the same companies you have to work for.

[minimuffins]

Yes, this is the commodity fetish in action. The laptop seems to just appear before me when I fork over a thousand bucks, conjured out of the ether of "the market." But of course there are long (often blood soaked) supply chains, all with their own interesting international, political, developmental history, that brought the thing to me. But the details are mystified by the complexity of all the actors and processes involved.

The feeling that tech work is mostly mental and somehow "immaterial," like we're just beyond all that concrete meatspace stuff, is really an illusion.

[bumby]

I’m not sure you understand how collective bargaining works. A company enters into a contract with a union. Contracts are not anti-market.

Edit: Downvotes are fine, but at least have the courtesy of adding to the discussion by explaining why the above point misses the mark

[kortilla]

But the company usually doesn’t have a choice of a different set of employees if they don’t like what the union is offering.

The whole point of a union is to eliminate competition on the labor side and ensure a given company is cornered into accepting the union’s conditions.

[bumby]

Intra-union competition is a thing as is the ability for the company to not sign a contract. What they often lose out on is the ability to retain the previous union employees and with it lose all their training, institutional knowledge etc.

A company does not have to sign a union contract but those losses are part of the leverage unions use to balance the power structure

[missedthecue]

Unions are cartels by design , which is anti-market in and of itself. The only way unions could exist while being pro-market is if they competed with each other, which they don't. There is only one teamsters. There is only one auto workers union. There is only one longshoreman's union.

Following your logic, if your ISP has a total monopoly, and you sign a contract with them, that is pro-market transaction. Of course, we both know it isn't. Contracts aren't what makes a market. Competition is. And unions have no competition with each other.

[bumby]

Except a company does not have to enter a contract with a union as well as the fact there are more right-to-work states than not. Extending your analogy, if there is no monopolistic suppression of competition, entering a contract with an ISP is not anti-competition. The contract is not the determining factor, the anti-competition is. Lack of competition shouldn’t be conflated with suppression of competition.

Unions don’t have to compete with other unions to still have competition. They have to compete with non-union workers. There are laws prohibiting strike lines from allowing non-union workers through, for example

[missedthecue]

The company can choose not to, but they will be unlikely to procure the amount of labor they require. You can also choose not to get service from your hypothetical ISP monopoly, and you wouldn't get internet access.

If the UAW went on a full strike tomorrow, GM and Ford would not be able to continue production. There just aren't enough non union auto workers. There is no real competition. This is the problem. It creates a situation that allows for rent seeking.

[fckthisguy]

But a union doesn't have to set a price for work. And the company can often hire outside of the union if they want (many are opt-in for employees).

Moreover, the free market still has checks and measures to ensure workers are treated fairly and equally. Unions are just another implementation of that - the only difference is that they're employee run not government run.

[Barrin92]

>It's bizarre how Americans celebrate ruthlessly competitive markets when workers compete against each other for food, shelter and medical care. But it's a cultural taboo to use those same competitive market forces for the benefit of workers.

yep. Class consciousness exists in the US, but predominantly among billionaires and celebrities.

[mattmcknight]

A union is not a competitive market force. It is a means to force an employer to use a monopoly supplier of labor. It's anti-competitive.

[fckthisguy]

That's not always the case though. There's plenty of industries and workplaces the world over that benefit from unions whilst still maintaining the discretion to hire who they will.

I've worked in a company with both union and non union staff and I believe the union benefited all of us without limiting the company in any meaningfully negative way.

Contrast this with shareholders and C level execs who have immense power and often world it to the detremen of the workers.

That same company was literally bought out and our office was shuttered.

Unionising allowed us to collectively bargain for better severance pay and allowed us to prioritize those of us who had additional family/visa considerations.

[xav0989]

Interestingly, (nearly) all of the Canadian government public servants are unionized. When you get hired, you can decide whether you wish to join the union or not, but the union will still collectively bargain on your behalf no matter what you choose.

The union is (mostly) in place to work on ensuring benefits such as sick leave, parental leave top-ups, overtime limits, etc. They also are there to ensure that management respects the rules when dealing with the workforce.

[missedthecue]

Why would anyone join the union then? Save on the dues, and still reap the benefits.

[sudosysgen]

Can't vote on your fate otherwise. It's worth paying the dues :)

Also, in Canada you are forced to pay union dues even if you choose not to join the Union, at least partially.

[tcgv]

This is only one side of the coin. Unions can go that way, sure, and it should be avoided through regulation.

Unions are a way of balancing the power equation between companies and workers. Neither side should be in disadvantage.

[missedthecue]

Why should the buyers of labor be forced to compete amongst each other but not the sellers of labor? In order to truly even the playing field, Facebook, google, apple, and the rest should unionize together to effectively negotiate with labor.

[tcgv]

Good question. From my point of view it's because megacorps are already too powerful entities with whom individual workers have little leverage for negotiating or influencing business decisions in favor of improved working environment and socially responsible company conduct.

If FAANGS were to unionize together the field would be even more imbalanced. For instance, Apple already makes US$ 1.9 million per employee [1] which is 19x its average worker salary [2]. Nothing wrong about that, it's a profitable company, but it doesn't strike me as if they're in a unfavorable position.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...

[2] https://www.zippia.com/apple-careers-825/salary/

[Thlom]

I think this is something that only happens in the US. I've never heard of a union being a supplier of labor anywhere else.

[mattmcknight]

If a company is forced to use a union to hire workers (cannot hire non-union workers), then the union is the monopoly supplier of labor. It's a matter of perspective, unions certainly don't like to think of themselves that way. In some US states, there are right to work laws which allow for multiple unions or people not affiliated with unions to compete with unions to supply labor to the hiring company.

[8note]

Nothing says you can't have multiple competing unions.

Given that capital is overwhelmingly concentrated into a few hands, the job "market" is also a monopolization. You can get a different job but the owners are always the same

[missedthecue]

Why don't unions compete with each other? They should be forcefully broken up by the DOJ if they are not competing with each other, just as Standard Oil and AT&T were.

[mattmcknight]

This is sort of the heart of my complaint, they are allowed to function as monopolies. The AFL-CIO has rules like "no-raiding" for affiliated unions that are anti-competitive in that sense as well.

[scsilver]

Hey thats protestantism for you...

[briandear]

“Workers” aren’t some monolithic group. Individuals can certainly optimize for their own best interests. We don’t see ourselves as victims in a collective but individuals all pursuing our own goals. My goals aren’t necessarily the same as the person sitting next to me. Why should that guy have a voice in my compensation?

[minimuffins]

> “Workers” aren’t some monolithic group

Yes they are. We're all individuals and have different goals, wear different clothes, read different books, code in different editors, whatever, but objectively we all have something in common by way of being workers in the first place: we rely on wage labor to live.

And crucially: we don't own the means of production (or we'd be owners and not workers).

Why should "that guy" have a voice? Because our fortunes rise and fall together.

Frankly it boggles my mind to no end that tech workers, just because they're contingently pretty comfortable while riding the wave of an advantageous labor market that gives them a lot of (contingent) leverage at the moment, don't understand that they (as single, individual people !) aren't standing as equals against like Alphabet, Inc. an institution that brings in double digit billions per year, increasingly has its hands on levers of policy and culture around the world, etc.

[brippalcharrid]

> We don't own the means of production

You're going to have to break that down for a 21st century software developer on a SV messageboard. Aren't the means of production increasingly our own brains? Can't computing resources be rented cheaply enough for the average person to bootstrap their own business ideas if they're worth pursuing? I'm puzzled to see stuff like this in the present day, I thought it had been discredited within Marx's own lifetime.

[minimuffins]

I wish there was a term for "means of production" that was clearer or more succinct but I don't know one. The term is sometimes a discourse killer because it triggers a kind of (understandable) reflexive distaste for extremism and a certain kind of annoying radical personality or whatever.

But whatever synonym we use for it, MoP is a concept that you can't really dispense with if you want to talk about this stuff productively. You don't have to buy into a Marxist worldview to use it.

I'll take a crack at a definition: The means of production is the conditions required for making the things that the economy makes, whatever that is. For oil production, it's land and mineral rights in oil rich areas, oil derricks, trucks, private roads, refineries, all the plant equipment to make a refinery work, tools, maintenance equipment, barrels..., I'm sure there's 65,000 more things...whatever happens to be required to convert dead dinosaurs into 10W30.

It sounds Marx-y, but it's a simple, straightforward idea.

In tech, MoP is things like intellectual property, data centers, etc. The lines are blurred a bit because when work takes place inside a worker's brain instead of in a mine or on a factory floor where workers push things around with brute physical force, it's not exactly clear who owns what. In my view that ambiguity is something employers have used to mystify the relationship between employer and worker. They try to convince us that we are all just working together to make the world better, and anyway, we're paid well enough so why complain and rock the boat?

But in the end the rules are the same. You can't make it in this system unless you own some means of production (or get access to them by starting a company of your own and becoming a capitalist yourself--which is fine, but by definition not everyone can do it), or you work for someone who has them.

A related point is tech production is not actually as ethereal and abstract as it sounds. Yes, code is just a bunch of immaterial mental abstractions, in some sense, but it's useless without a shockingly large array of computers, buildings, massive data centers which are expensive, difficult and labor intensive to secure and maintain. They suck up a ton of electricity and water and require armed guards, etc. There's a huge amount of hidden physical infrastructure and somebody is going to own it. Whoever does will wield a ton of power in our society, especially as we become increasingly reliant on tech in our everyday lives.

[minimuffins]

As for whether Marx was "discredited" in his own lifetime, I don't know where people get that idea. I hear it or something like it all the time. Like him or not, he's a hugely influential thinker even today. So are most of his critics. It's hardly a settled issue.

But the idea of MoP isn't even part of the controversial parts of Marx. It's just a description about how part of capitalism works, as he saw it. The ideas he draws on in that analysis come largely from Ricardo and Smith, hardly "discredited" radicals.

[brippalcharrid]

> becoming a capitalist yourself--which is fine, but by definition not everyone can do it

This is where I was disagreeing in the comment above; I think the barrier is now so low to entering certain markets (eg. SaaS) that it's meaningless to talk about some of these concepts in terms that are artefacts of the 19th century. I also think that there are far more people who don't want to do it than who want to do it but are prevented from pursuing a more entrepreneurial lifestyle by their economic circumstances.

Datacenters are complex and expensive, but it's now very cheap (in some cases free) to rent resources in them, because they have been commoditized, so I don't think it makes sense to talk about them as a "means of production" that the dispossessed masses have been alienated from achieving their productive desires through. Free Software is another area over the last few decades where barriers to entry in technology have been removed. I doubt that there are too many budding entrepreneurs who are put off solely by the fees to license certain non-free codecs of private datasets in cases where these are the only codecs or datasets that could be used for their business idea.

Exceptions to this that I see would include regulatory moats that big incumbents are happy to help build, and a more general tendency for governments to favour regulating private enterprise and then to show partiality towards larger businesses in an attempt to simplify the resulting administration.

[bergstromm466]

> > We don't own the means of production

> You're going to have to break that down for a 21st century software developer on a SV messageboard.

I love Wendy Liu's explanation on this, it's the best I've found:

"The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation.

Consequently, fixing the problems with the tech industry requires revisiting the economic assumptions that underpin it. If technological development is to be truly liberating, it cannot be funded and developed by an imperial machine, driven by the hare-brained schemes of growth-hungry investors, and owned by a miniscule clique not accountable to broader society.

What’s needed instead is a movement to reclaim technology: to prevent its capture by capital, and direct it towards creating social value. Of course, the tech giants are not going to cede this ground easily. This is why the demand of the future will not be to tame or reform Silicon Valley, but to abolish it. For it to serve society, technology will have to be liberated from the constraints of corporate ownership and subjected to democracy.

If this is hard to imagine, it’s probably because we’re so used to the way technology works in today’s economy that most of us are unable to see beyond its horizons. But it’s time we started seeing Silicon Valley for what it really is: not separate from the economy, and not its saviour, but instead capitalism on steroids. All the negatives we associate with Silicon Valley — useless gadgets that no one needs, companies with billion-dollar valuations going up in smoke, exploitation of precarious workers — are a microcosm of a broader economic system. Abolishing Silicon Valley, then, means more than breaking up a few corporations; it’ll require a fundamental transformation of the economic structures that govern society.

Transformation

In the coming years you’ll read a lot of columns agonising over how to ‘fix’ Silicon Valley. Most will be technocratic, evacuating politics from the discussion. This is, after all, the framing that allowed Silicon Valley to grow so powerful in the first place: a binary choice between technological development on capital’s terms, or remaining stuck in the past. But structural problems require structural solutions. Rather than relying on ‘ethical’ founders or investors to change the system, we need collective action to challenge it.

This will mean undoing the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, which are intended to protect corporations and commodify information. It will mean revisiting the funding model that gave rise to the ‘go-big-or-go-home’ culture responsible for so many wasteful start-ups, shifting away from the return-driven venture capital model, and towards a state-backed social entrepreneurship with public responsibilities.

It will also mean building worker power, within the tech industry and beyond it. Within it, the long-term goal must be a union culture encompassing all workers involved in production. That means not just the highly-paid software engineers but contractors packing boxes for Amazon, or driving for Uber, or cleaning offices in Silicon Valley should all have representation in decision-making structures. And beyond the confines of the industry, a wider-organised labour movement needs to offer resistance to technology being used to facilitate increased worker exploitation through surveillance or regulatory arbitrage.

None of this will be easy, of course. Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles." [1]

[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[minimuffins]

I mean, I agree with most of the content here, but it's written in that confident left-wing manifesto style that is probably more convincing to the already convinced than to the undecided.

If I kind of saw myself as at-one with the basic Silicon Valley ethos, like I used to, this would definitely put me off before I fully ingested the argument.

I wish I had an example of an introductory text in the style I would like to see. I will try to find something like that. I'm sure it exists, given how much writing there has been on this topic over the last decade.

[Daishiman]

It is absolutely hilarious how you think that the voice of your colleagues in collective bargaining is somehow less aligned with your own interests over those of your company's executive body.

[scsilver]

And you are free not to join. But you are lacking understanding of market forces if you dont think your colleagues dont have any say in your wage. Them being there is part of an ecosystem that supports your value to the world. Unless you can produce professional software and competitive speeds all built from the ground up by yourself.

If you work in javascript, the javascript environment has given you your value, companies have bought into that talent pool and must court it to compete. Unless you provide value to the world without that ecosystem and without that company, your wage is necessarily impacted by those stakeholders.

You are free to press for your own goals, just dont be so sure those goals are divisible from your coworkers.

[infinite8s]

You realize that actors are all in a union (SAG). I don't think Tom Cruz's pay is affected by how much an SAG extra is being paid. In the case of SAG, they set the minimum floor for pay, but have no say in the upper bound.