[saghm]

I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collectivism of the masses somehow drowning out the desires of the elite few, but they never seem to address the obvious counterexamples in higher-paid work; the $780,000 minimum salary for MLB players doesn't seem to have stopped Shohei Ohtani from getting a contract making almost 90 times more than that per year, and Adam Sandler doesn't seem like he's struggling with his $48 million payout last year despite the union-negotiated guarantees for anyone getting a speaking role on screen existing for decades.

(I'n not usually on the "downvoting for disagreement is bad" train, but when the major point of my comment is that there never seems to be a strong counterargument to the line of thinking here, it's hard not to find it a bit ironic when someone doesn't care to elaborate on why they don't like what I said)

[9rx]

> I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions.

Tech attracts a lot of "undesirables", for want of a better word, and there is no great way to separate them from the quality people you'd actually want to have a union with. The MLB union works exceptionally well because the business naturally screens out anyone who isn't in the upper echelons of baseball society. Try advocating for a baseball union that includes the MLB down to every small town B-league team and you'd get the same pushback.

The trouble is that there is no MLB of tech. Anyone random yahoo who no more than the smallest amount of motivation to work in tech is pretty much guaranteed a place in it (at least that was the case up until recently). Even at companies that like to boast about only hiring the best end up with lots of the dregs all the same. The need for tech workers is larger than the number of quality people. When there is a social division then the desire to associate goes out the window.

[saghm]

I'm not sure I find that argument super compelling, since the union campaigns for software engineers (or more specifically game developers, since that seems to be where most of the recent examples are) do not seem to start out by organizing at the national level but usually at individual employers or even a specific office location. If we were drowning in software jobs the way you describe, why would anyone tolerate having such awful coworkers at their office instead of finding somewhere better? I don't think I've ever had a significant number of coworkers I'd describe in terms like "undesirables", "random yahoo", or "dregs", so I can't really relate to the idea that I find my colleagues so loathsome that I would be reluctant to associate with them; after all, that's what I'm already doing!

[9rx]

> If we were drowning in software jobs the way you describe, why would anyone tolerate having such awful coworkers at their office instead of finding somewhere better?

I am not sure I follow your thinking here. We would be (or at least would have been until recently; the market is much less clear now) drowning in software jobs if businesses were only willing to hire the "MLB superstars" of the tech world. We have never drowned in software jobs because businesses have been willing to hire warm bodies for where the "MLB superstars" weren't available. To be clear, I said "The need for tech workers is larger than the number of quality people", not "The need for tech workers is larger than the number of people".

> I would be reluctant to associate with them; after all, that's what I'm already doing!

You may work together, but would you want to start a business with them? That is what a union ultimately is, after all: A group of people who have come together to want to sell labor under an organization instead of individually.

The thing is that working together when you're not the stakeholder is quite easy because the stakeholder has to deal with the shit. Things get real when it is only you and your fellow brethren. That's not to say that it wouldn't work in your particular situation. There are going to be pockets where the stars have aligned. But no doubt you have already formed a union with your coworkers if you have the necessary mutual trust. I mean, why wouldn't you in such a case?

(If you are game but your coworkers are the ones who are reluctant, remember it is you who is the "yahoo")

[saghm]

> You may work together, but would you want to start a business with them? That is what a union ultimately is, after all: A group of people who have come together to want to sell labor under an organization instead of individually.

My livelihood already depends on their work, though, because they far outnumber me! (I've never worked at a company with two or fewer total people working for it). I'd argue that if you've signed a lease, mortgaged a house, or any number of any extremely mundane things that rely on "the people I work with won't literally cause me to be unable to receive income in the short- to medium-term future because of how recklessly incompetent they are", you're clearly pretty comfortable with the idea as well.

The question then becomes whether you think that the only reason they manage to not cause everything to crash and burn is because they have far less relative power to the people who sign the paychecks or if you think that maybe moving the needle a bit in the other direction wouldn't be catastrophic. Personally, my experience is that people in positions with more power are not obviously so much more competent than the ones below them that having my coworkers band together with me to be able to agree on what a reasonable set of things we should try to collectively strive for is a scary idea.

> The thing is that working together when you're not the stakeholder is quite easy because the stakeholder has to deal with the shit. Things get real when it is only you and your fellow brethren.

I'm incredulous that you think that the people who are currently the stakeholders care more about your circumstances if you're an employee than the ones who literally are in the same ones as you. If you seriously think "management might willingly do things that are worse for their current set of employees in order to make a bit more money" isn't something that employees should ever be concerned about, I have to wonder how much time you've actually spent as an employee outside of management.

(It's also pretty telling that you talk about "dealing with the shit" being something only in management; I guess the saying "shit rolls downhill" is easy to dismiss for people who have traditionally not been far from the peak)

> (If you are game but your coworkers are the ones who are reluctant, remember it is you who is the "yahoo")

If I accepted the premise that the waters hadn't be sufficiently poisoned by constant bombardment of messages like yours over the past century, then maybe this would be a less ridiculous axiom.

[9rx]

> The question then becomes whether you think that the only reason they manage to not cause everything to crash and burn is because they have far less relative power to the people who sign the paychecks

The question is how much do you trust your employer to weather storms. If a business is going to crash and burn if the people you work with move on to new roles at other companies then you're in a bad place trying to bet your life on that business. However, if you trust that the business stakeholders will keep things moving even as people come and go then the people you work with don't really matter.

Going into business with the people you work with is quite different. If they decide to back out of being business partners, everything falls on you and you alone. You have to trust yourself to not screw everything up when times get hard. And, well, if you had that trust in yourself and desire to deal with it you'd already be the business owner yourself. One becomes an employee exactly because they don't want to have to deal with all of those headaches. You need to have a great deal of trust when you are the owner that you don't need if someone else is the owner.

> I'm incredulous that you think that the people who are currently the stakeholders care more about your circumstances

They couldn't care less about your circumstances. They care about themselves, though, and if they let things run wild their business will fail. That would not be in their interest. In a union, you become the employer, so to speak. You have to put your time into ensuring that things don't run wild.

If you are surrounded by good people, like you and MLB players are, then you don't have to worry about things going wild so much. Good people can be reasonably trusted. But that is a privileged situation. Not everyone is nearly as fortunate as you are.

> If I accepted the premise that the waters hadn't be sufficiently poisoned by constant bombardment of messages like yours over the past century

I get that you have no idea what I'm talking about, as evidenced by the non-sequiturs you keep replying with, but how does a pro-union message poison the waters? Are you purposefully posting this nonsense in an effort to diminish unions?

[bonsai_spool]

> In a union, you become the employer, so to speak. You have to put your time into ensuring that things don't run wild.

Not really! You can hire for this role—your union can hire an attorney, an accountant, an HR professional, whatever you collectively decide with your peers.

However, without a union, you have no way to reliably access information that would reveal whether things are 'running wild'.

[zdragnar]

You're comparing unions that cover short-term contracts (film production, MLB) with "blue-collar unions" that represent hourly or salaried long-term employment contracts.

Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?

[bonsai_spool]

> Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?

Yes, it is a surprise! Because we're talking about very educated technical workers.

It seems like top tech programmers are closer to pro athletes than factory floor workers from the perspective of their value to owners.

[saghm]

> It seems like top tech programmers are closer to pro athletes than factory floor workers from the perspective of their value to owners.

To me, the question is whether that will continue to remain the case in the absence of unions. It doesn't seem at all implausible to me that 50 years from now, tech programming might much more closely resemble factory work if there's no mechanism for pushing back against it.

[saghm]

MLB players routinely have contracts for multiple season, so I'm not sure what you're talking about here. How many salaried engineers in the US do you think have multi-year contracts compared to "at-will" employment?

Also, I'd argue that establishing a union when a profession has relatively high social standing and pay if it seems likely that things will get worse is exactly the mechanism for fighting back against that decline. It's a lot harder to get management to agree to your terms if you've already lost most of your influence.