| > In industries where employees are critical part of business theybhave a vote and meaningful share. Employees are critical in literally every industry, otherwise they wouldn't be employed. > For example startups where early engineers have options/shares and management listens to them and wants to keep them happy. You're confusing "importance to the business" with "market power". Tech employees generally tend to have market power in the current economy. And how many of those options (read: lottery tickets) and shares even grant the employee voting power? > All critical code is written by early and now very senior engineers, current employees are tiny tiny cogs that are not critical to business. This is absolutely not true at the companies where I've worked. Can't speak for FAANG. > I mean look at twitter - musk fired everyone he could and twitter still works. This is a really weird example to generalize from. Most businesses are absolutely not organized this way. > Same with google - google could fire everyone outside Search&Ads and still run its cash cow machine. This is speculation. Google does a lot of things that aren't directly "making money on ads", but if they didn't think those things were worth doing, they wouldn't do them. > Sadly in most cases with big tech - there is no reason to give a vote to employee class because they are not critical. Weirder still is the notion that businesses ought to give their employees voting shares based on some notion of criticality to the business. I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions. Some leftists argue that the union should be entitled to this share. I won't even go that far, although I think it's a good idea. |
if we talking in a context of unions, then there is nuance. Employee class can be critical, but unionized employees - may not be critical to business. If unionized employee is replaceable cog that anyone with Associate degree/IT Bootcamp and 3 month training/offshore worker can do the job, then unionized employees lose their bargaining power, and the incentive to unionize disappears.
US airline pilots enjoy unionization because US laws require quite extensive training&experience to become pilot, so that only former US Air Force pilots can qualify. With these Government protections it is easy to enjoy labor union benefits.
Try to pull it off in tech? Unionized folks will be fired and their jobs will be offshored very quickly.
>> I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions.
This argument could work in 20th century, where the barrier to create business was huge. To become factory/steel mill owner you gotta have huge capital$$$, and most ordinary folks had to be laborers for life. So there was natural divide between owner class (capitalists) and labor class, so labor unions provided some sort of bargaining power and a seat at the big table.
Nowaday in tech - literally anyone can create a startup. Anyone with a pulse and a PowerPoint deck could have create a startup funding during zero interest rate era. Some FAANG engineers earn more in salary+stocks than some business owners make in profit (talking about traditional small-medium businesses like barbershop or corner shop owners)
That means there is no real divide between capitalists class and laborer class. In 21st century your brain is the capital, not money. Money is cheap and investors are willing to fund good brains with good ideas.
Because not everyone is gifted with good brains, this created a natural divide within modern laborer class. People with good brains don't want to share big pie with every other laborer (via labor union). They'd rather become capitalists and get the biggest slice of pie for themselves.
This is why capitalism and market forces always win, and archaic schemes like labor unions are unfit for 21st century where quite a bit of jobs can be offshored/Automated/ChatGPT'ed