Tech Workers of the World Unite?

okidokedork writes "Wired News reports on the lack of unions in the IT workplace. If you could join a union in your workplace, would you?" From the article: "The rich get richer, the shareholder is valued more than the employee, jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency (remember when they called firing people 'right-sizing'?) and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year. You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand. Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way. They'll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they're the first to scream, 'You're stifling innovation!' at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work."

Fight your own battles.

[RunFatBoy.net]

I certainly do not want to belong to an organization where I can only be guaranteed a salary increase across the board next to the same slacker programmer who didn't contribute. You know how I fight the big companies? If the job sucks or I don't think I am being treated fairly, I quit, simple as that. Let your feet do the talking and get the hell out of there.

The fact is, when the PHBs numbers aren't going to be favorable, then your job may be on the chopping block. But with the same sentiment, when it comes times for initial salary negotiations, take the gloves off, and _fight for every penny_. When the going gets tough, and your team may be part of the downsizing, be sure that you've accounted for such job insecurity/risk.

Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ [runfatboy.net] - A workout plan that doesn't feel like homework.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Here's a quote from the article that seems almost tailor written for you:

Those weaned on an Ayn Rand kind of individualism aren't likely to appreciate the debt they owe to the American labor movement, or why restoring it to health is in their interests, too. Until the ax falls; then they understand. I've known talented people who have lost their jobs with little more than a shrug. The shrugging usually stops, however, when finding a comparable job proves more difficult than they ever imagined.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Crashmarik]

Oh yes I loved being in new york when the trains werent running. 60K a year retire at 55 and they wanted to retire at 50. No one owes you a job or a life you have to make your own.

"make your own"?

[hackwrench]

No you don't make your own, you have to bargain for it, and that's where collective bargaining comes in.

Re:"make your own"?

[Minwee]

"Would you buy gas at $3.00 a gallon when you could go down the street and by it for $.99? Would you pay $5 more for the same sandwhich?"

And this is why expensive coffee shops like Starbucks have failed while cheaper, smaller businesses thrive in the...

Oh, wait. Somehow paying $5 for the same sandwich seems to be very popular and the more expensive option is the only one that is making any money. There may be more to the business world than simple analogies.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[monopole]

Oh yes I loved being in new york when the trains werent running. 60K a year retire at 55 and they wanted to retire at 50. No one owes you a job or a life you have to make your own.

Oh yeah, doing manual labor in a rail yard in summer's heat and winter's cold till you're 55 years old! Why don't you drop that rough programming job and sign up for the transit authority? Just because you can be outsourced at the drop of the hat doesn't mean that you should hate on folks that have real leverage cause they unioniz

Re:Fight your own battles.

[smellsofbikes]

Hm. So on the one hand you have people with no job security, working 12 hour days, and having their bosses yell at them if they don't produce code or fix machines fast enough, and on the other you have "60K a year retire at 55 and they wanted to retire at 50."

And you see a *problem* with this? Unionization is getting them all that, and you're against it? Why? I'd love to have that job description.

Yes, Unions help -- themselves

[mr_mischief]

Every time my father's contract was up, the union would strike for weeks. Unemployment in Missouri wasn't very good, and I think it still probably stinks. They'd get a little pay raise, maybe a bit more paid time off. This was an every-year thing, because the union would never negotiate a multi-year contract -- no matter how much the local membership wanted one.

Then the union, seeing how it caused a strike around Christmas with January heating bills coming up and got us that little more money once they guys

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Colonel Angus]

Oh how that statement rings true with me.

Several years back I was employed as a webmaster (I hate that job title, too) at an ad agency here. I quit a decent job that paid an hourly wage for this new job that was salary and almost double the pay. It seemed a no-brainer.

The company had been around for 20some years and had had contracts with some of Canada's biggest banks and agricultural companies.

Well, about 3 months into my job I discovered that things weren't going so well for this company. To be honest, I'm not even sure why they hired for this position if that was the case, but that's neither here nor there.

In a nutshell, 8 months later I was laid off (rightsized, downsized -- whatever they want to call it) and didn't really think much of it.

Then a few months passed. Then it was half a year. Not a single reply from any of the resumes sent out. Then it was a year.

It was three years before I was employed in the tech field again. I was unemployed for over a year at which point I went back to school and was lucky enough to snag a really nice job right out of the program.

So just quitting the job might be great if you live in a large urban center where jobs are aplenty (even there it's tough to get work), but in anything short of that finding a job that remunerates at a level that you can continue your mortgage payments and kids' needs is damn hard.

Re:Maybe you just sucked?

[Colonel Angus]

I said before I found work in the *IT* field. That was what I was referring to when I made the unemployed statement. I didn't consider temp work to be employed. It was shit money for shit jobs but (mostly) paid the bills.

I did temp work in factories, in offices, in wherever work could be found and money made.

I had a feeling that the lay off was coming and had started firing resumes off well before it actually happened.

I'm not dumb or lazy. I work my ass off and I'm damn good at what I do. The fact of the matter was that there were very few positions in my area and many other unemployed people in my position who likely had more experience than I.

I hate to call someone I don't know an asshole, but your entire reply was flip and condescending without even a hint of thought that someone could legitimately just fall into some bad luck at some point in their life.

Please, consider yourself lucky to have (obviously) never been in such a situation and may you never find yourself in it.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[jeff4747]

If you focus on heavily unionized businesses like auto production or the airline industry, you see corporate failures and bankruptcy

You'll also find a bunch of executives with massive salaries and bonuses, who continued to receive them while leading the company into the ground.

The problems at auto companies and airlines are not labor costs. Toyota is paying very high labor costs in Japan, yet still profitable. The three things that are killing these companies is 1. Executive incompetence/short-term

Re:Fight your own battles.

[timster]

The point with GM, which you seem to have missed, is that it's an example of how unions cannot prevent jobs from moving overseas by preventing a single individual company from outsourcing. The individual company's customers can simply choose to buy from overseas producers.

Also, I did not and do not claim as fact that unionization is what causes unionized businesses to fail at an increased rate; please read my statements more carefully. However, I would be interested in a counter to that point if you have

Re:Fight your own battles.

[psyberjedi]

It may be easy for you to say quit and depending on where you live there may be a plethora of jobs available. However, where I live is rather rural and there are only so many tech jobs. After following the same line of thought that you expressed, I had a company disolve out from under me 3 months later and spent the next 9 months unemployed.

I agree with your sentiment in that I do not want to be given a raise if, and only if, everyone gets one, but going home to my wife to tell her that "Oh, by the way sweetie, we are going to be tightening the old belt because the company sucks and I told them to stick it," is not my idea of fun.

I am not sure that a union is necessarily the right choice, but clearly there must be some middle ground between the techs and the guys in the suits making all the money. My manager makes 3x what I do and he has the spine and decision making skills of a jellyfish. Like many managers, the only quick decisions he makes are those that make him look good. Good for the techs or good for the company comes 3rd or 4th on his list.

If a union can toss my boss in the trash, where can I pay my dues?

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Jason Earl]

The question then becomes, would a union actually help you? The short stint that I did as a Teamster spoiled the idea of unions irreparably for me. From my own experience Unions are just one more layer above you and the management. Instead of just having an incompetent manager to deal with you also end up with an incompetent union representative that can make decisions that have a huge impact on your life. The primary difference between the management and the union reps is that at least some members of the management team will have taken a basic college course in economics. Layoffs are a way of life in union shops, the only difference between union shops and non-union ones is that in union shops you know who is going to get laid off, the folks with the least seniority. Never mind that the you are a more valuable worker than the folks with higher seniority, if you are the new guy, you are out of work.

Never mind that the union actually charges you for its so-called "services." As far as I was concerned I paid union dues so that the union could guarantee that lazy idiots with more seniority than me were impossible to fire while I could be let go at any time.

What stunning arrogance.

[bstarrfield]

Your fault for not being financially solvent. So smug, so self assured. You know, bad things happen. And in an economy where wages are stagnant, gas and health care costs rise, and you can be outsourced in a second - financial solvency becomes much, much harder.

Here's some things that can blast your smugness damn fast:

• Divorce. Say goodbye to your reserves with your first visit to an attorney. My case - $30,000 + down the tube.
• Catastrophic illness while unemployed, no health insurance. Thousands of bucks.
• Long term unemployment. Welcome to tech reality. It takes a long time to find a job. Six months is optimistic. I've had friends waiting eighteen months.

And it's really easy to buy a cheap home after prices have gone up 9-10% per year for the last decade. Average price of a home is well over 200k across the country. Where should you live, a cardboard box? Don't say rent - in many areas you can't find a good home to rent.

Things are messed up, my friend. Your planning is at risk to economic fate. Don't judge everyone so quickly.

Re:What stunning arrogance.

[HardCase]

Here's some things that can blast your smugness damn fast:

* Divorce. Say goodbye to your reserves with your first visit to an attorney. My case - $30,000 + down the tube.
* Catastrophic illness while unemployed, no health insurance. Thousands of bucks.
* Long term unemployment. Welcome to tech reality. It takes a long time to find a job. Six months is optimistic. I've had friends waiting eighteen months.

And it's really easy

Re:Fight your own battles.

[SuperBanana]

If you can not make your mortgage and basic bills on a little over 1/2 your income then you are living beyond your means and is a stupid thing to do.

Wow. That's the most uneducated thing I've ever heard in my life; I hate people who have mortgages and whine about how expensive they are or think the rest of the world has it as easy as they do; property owners have always been, are, and always will be, a true privledged class. My boss once complained about his mortgage and I flat out said "how much is your mortgage a month?" "$600 a month." "That's for a 2 bedroom house right?" "Yeah." "Want to switch? I'm paying $1200 a month for half of someone's basement."

Did you stop to consider that a huge percentage of people in the US (and the world) lease their home or apartment? A decent one bedroom apartment in Boston, for example, will cost you perhaps $1200 a month; NYC, I'm told studios are something like $1400-1500 a month. That's $14400 a year; figure another $2k in utilities and now you're at $16,400 a year in BASIC living costs. Lets say you need to drive a half hour to work on the highway each way, and you get 30mpg. That's about $1500 in gas a year. Don't forget $1k in insurance. So we're up to $19K.

I've seen companies around here offering about $20-25/hr to techs (basic, ie first-tier jobs from "consulting firms" in the area.) So you're making 40-50k. Let's assume your employer happens to be one of those increasingly rare types that actually "employs" you, so they pay their fair share of taxes and so on. Wellllll...Uncle Sam and his buddy Sammy State still take about 33% of your paycheck. Don't forget health care; that's probably another 1k off. So you take home about $25k-32k. Sounds great, right? Anywhere between 7k and 13k to "play with", right?

EXCEPT YOU HAVEN'T EATEN YET (with apologies to Bill Cosby.) You haven't saved for your "retirement" or short term savings. You haven't bought clothes, or maybe gone to the movies once or twice a month, or spent the weekend somewhere nice to relax, or maybe splurged and bought yourself a new, reasonably priced camera since your current one kicked the bucket after a few years. You haven't moved (perhaps to get cheaper rent or because the cheaper apartment turned out to be in a warzone). You haven't done a lot of things. You're certainly not married, and you sure as hell don't have children.

Maybe you're paying off student debts, or maybe you've got $1200-$3600 in car payments per year. The list goes on, and on, and on in terms of expenses that qualify as several steps below what most people begin to consider luxuries.

Many people drive a BMW that they can not afford and the check engine light has been on for 4 months because they cant afford the service.

Seen a BMW commercial lately? -All- maintenance, down to wiper blades, is free for several years.

There are plenty of people who overspend beyond their means. The rest of the people in debt are there because everyone from the electric company to their landlord is a greedy little shrew and trying to bleed them out of every penny they've made.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[cduffy]

Why not start by not using credit cards that charge more than 10%, or perhaps by never carrying a balance?

The credit card fairy didn't charge those purchases to your card; you or someone you authorized did.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Unions have good and bad aspects to them
That being said, at one of my first tech jobs, I was the newest person in the office. After I had been there a year, they did a layoff. I survived, I wouldn't have in a union because they would have gone by seniority. The people they got rid of were mostly the unproductive people.
But the real deal is this- if tech employees unionize, you will see tons and tons of jobs go overseas, and more tech places in right to work states.
One funny story- I worked at a newspape

Re:Fight your own battles.

[sfjoe]

I certainly do not want to belong to an organization where I can only be guaranteed a salary increase across the board next to the same slacker programmer who didn't contribute.

The biggest battle that unions have to fight is the battle against the FUD that the corporations (including corporate-run media) has been putting out. Just read all this misinformation that various posters are spreading based on no actual, firsthand knowledge of what a union does or can do.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[dgatwood]

Unions fundamentally don't work when dealing with a highly heterogeneous, creativity-driven workplace. They are designed for labor forces with little to no specialization and little to no creativity. Yes, there's a good bit of difference between someone who welds the frame on cars and someone who snaps on trim, but the difference between someone who welds the frame and someone who welds some part of the exhaust system is minimal, and there are a large number of people doing each individual task, all managed by a relatively limited number of managers (foremen).

In the technical world, at every company where I've worked, my pay is, to a large extent, determined by my immediate manager on an individual basis. To some extent, the lower level management is limited by upper management in terms of total expenditure, but pay raises are much more a small group decision than in... say a factory or even in a university. The problem is that collective bargaining doesn't buy you much in such an environment, and what it does buy you is likely to be overshadowed by the union dues.

Add to this the fact that it costs a huge amount of money to relocate a plant and huge expenses to import, so there are reasons for a manufacturing firm to stay in the U.S. It is, by comparison, relatively easy to export tech jobs to other countries, making the power of strikes (which are the only bargaining chip a union really has) essentially a moot point in the tech sector.

Finally, I've seen creative industries (not computing) that were union run. Not a pretty sight. They basically try to turn the creative shop into a factory floor in which each person does exactly their job and isn't allowed to have anything to do with anybody else's job. That's not the way tech companies work, that's not the way tech employees want to work, it doesn't allow the individuals to grow in their abilities, and it isn't conducive to producing products that require creativity in their creation. It is a design that is conducive to mass manufacturing. For tech, that closed box thinking is a real hindrance to creativity, and at least to me, a real turn-off. I won't work in a union shop. Period. I doubt I'm the only one.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[geekoid]

I am in an union.

I am a software programmer, and until last year I had worked non-union corporations fore many years.

The only across the board raise is a rate increase to help offset inflation.
I worked for a place for 4 years, when you adjust for inflation I was making less then when I started.

There are merit raises for people who are good at their job. Also, a bonus for the exceptional. No one I work with is 'lazy' or a 'slacker'. Dedicated, smart, hardworking people who want to go home at the end of the day and not worry that their job will be cut so the books will look nice for an aqusition.

Another advantage of a union is your not going to get 'laid off' because you hold an unfavorable opinion, or point out things people don't want to hear.

It prevents the 'Do this now, or your fired' mentality.

It mean getting paid for coming in and working on the weekend.

While itis more difficult to get rid of a slacker, it's not impossible by any stretch.
It means managment is responsible as well as the programmer.

I could accept an offer from a large non union corporation today, and make more money, but I don't want the job to be my life.

"Let your feet do the talking and get the hell out of there."
Easier said then done.
Corporation are treating their IT employess worse and worse.
Many communties don't ahve an unlimited amount of jobs.
Changing jobs makes your resume less and less desirable.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Carnildo]

Union? I suppose Jeff and I could form a union, and picket Mick's office for higher wages, but we'd feel rather silly doing it.

Slacker programmers

[xeno-cat]

I have worked in tech. for over 15 years and it is filled with lazy, ignorant, prima donnas that entrench themselves in cozy little positions and act like the company would come unglued if they ever left. I've seen these people quit over silly management disputes and the company moves on without a hitch. I doubt highly that unions could make things any worse.

In fact it could potentialy make things better by working out a compensation package that is based on... _actual merrit_. Then your precious salary

Re:Fight your own battles.

[drinkypoo]

Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.

Perhaps you should have considered your family plans in your financial plans. Or perhaps you did, and you decided that running closer to the margin was a good idea. Regardless, I didn't make your bed, so I'm not the one who has to lie in it.

You're not worth every penney- you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for.

No, it can't. An inferior version of your job can be done. Some employers will go that route. Some won't. Woe betide those who pick the wrong one.

I'm as sad as the next guy when my employment doesn't work out, but expecting someone else to be responsible for my choices is unreasonable.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[0racle]

No, it can't. An inferior version of your job can be done. Some employers will go that route. Some won't. Woe betide those who pick the wrong one.

You're just a man, and another man can do the job just as well as you can. Where you're from or where you live does not mean you can do a better or worse job then someone who is from or lives elsewhere. Continue thinking you're all that and you'll find that someone is going to come along who will be quite happy to show you your not as special or indispensable as

Re:Fight your own battles.

[sp0rk173]

You're assuming that the $2.50/hr indian programmer will produce a lower quality product. Do you have actual statistical evidence of that? Note that we're not talking call centers here, we're talking coders. I would wager that India has some pretty amazing coders there, as well as some pretty attrocious ones - exactly like in the US. The difference is not quality, it's cost of living. Since someone can live a fairly decent life in India working for much less money than someone in the US can, India (or

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Kadin2048]

There is no such thing as a permanent job, and you're naive if you believed that.

Employment is an agreement between two parties, the employer and the employee. It only works as long as both people think they're getting a good deal: your employer thinks that your output is worth what they're paying you, and you (the employee) think that your pay is worth your labor.

If one or both parties don't feel that way, it's not going to last.

This myth that people have of "lifetime employment," where somehow an organiza

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Agreed that I was Naive. But on this:

Institutions aren't deserving of any feelings of "loyalty," since they have none in return. A corporation feels nothing when it fires the 30-year veteran or the 6-month temp hire.

Then we should be either a) teaching this in grade school, that business people lie through their teeth and can't be trusted at all, or b) not allow such institutions to exist at all.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[drinkypoo]

I'll try and find some citations for this so I can share them. It's really quite deliberate. The basic form of current American public education (I can only REALLY speak for this place, of course) was laid down when we needed factory workers. Also I think it's clear that the no child left behind shit is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator. Hell, I was in a GATE program in elementary school, and they told me I couldn't participate in their astronomy fiddling because I wasn't old enough. If programs explicitly for gifted students aren't encouraging our children to learn, where ARE we? Answer: In the higher-class private schools that kids from families with money get to attend. They're taught to be shepherds, and everyone else is taught to be sheep.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Kadin2048]

Don't get me wrong -- I agree with you completely.

Management would be criminally stupid to get rid of someone who has that amount of accumulated knowledge in a situation like that. Heck, where I work, we keep a few guys on the team who are basically like that. They spend maybe 75% of their time donut-munching their way towards a myocardial infarction, and the other 25% solving problems nobody else can solve. I don't know what they get paid, but I'd say they're worth every penny, just for the times they've h

Re:Fight your own battles.

[maraist]

Your technical priesthood job is on the block, my friend, and it has nothing to do with "making ourselves less competitive" because there *is* no "us". As you yourself noted, companies don't give a shit about you, and they don't differentiate between you or your Bangalore doppelganger. You're doublethinking if you believe your "rugged individualism" and "personal responsibility" ethos logically meshes with your neo-nationalistic competitive "patriotism". You are the perfect tool for what is happening right now--a me-first isolated soul who waves the flag even as his government and the greedheads that own it mortgage any possibility of a decent future not just for "their people", but the world itself.

Ok, perhaps a history lesson is in order. Once upon a time, everyone was "mostly" self sufficient.. "Employment" was a personal issue.. You found food or money to buy food or you died. But everybody knew this.. The problem was protection. Tribes were great because you could fend off animals or other tribe-sized competetors. Inside the tribe, you had various needs that would be fullfilled by directly growing/hunting food or providing services that others would share their food/money for.

Ok, boring, so far. Well, eventually economies of scale, technology and competition entered the picture until tribes were no longer sufficient.. Kingships (which could organize massive armies) were needed for this protection.. Or the scarseness of farmable/huntable land was needed.. Obviously this didn't exist everywhere.. It only seemed to have affected the middle east and Europe. Africa, north-east Asia and Austrailia managed to maintain very healthy hunter-gatherer tribes up through today. The competition never required advancement, consolidation, specialization, 'technologization', ...

Now with the king-subject situation, it was in the king's interest to keep everybody in the border.. You could be "fired" from the kingdom (exiled) mostly because there was land between kingdoms into which you COULD be exiled. But this was very rare. Further, it was in the king's interest to keep people employed - maning the armies, building the palaces, growing the food, etc. If people were lazy, they died.. Was pretty darwinistic.. But we hadn't really seen much of modern employment problems creep up yet, because the incentive structure didn't yet exist.

Later came fuedalism.. Smaller versions of king-ships.. Mostly focused around protection.. Because money was now a staple, not only did you farm/hunt for the food, but to pay your taxes and other "utilities" / "services".. We're much closer to modern day.. If you couldn't make ends meet (utilities were generally fixed, irregardless of your income level), then you became a debtor/slave. Now you were a ward of the state, BUT, much like older days, the smaller lords still have use for you... They could kill you whenever they didn't - but rarely did they exile you (wasn't enough people to fill the voids). The problem during this era is still stability and resource-starvation, not a lack of available work or "employers".

Finally came industrialization.. For the first time, we shift away from resources because we can manufacture new resources virtually anywhere. We also remove the primary focus away from security, as the "valueables" are no longer "your women", but the "goods" stored in the vaults.. Individual protection is no longer as important as the factory's protection.. BUT coincidently protect a single factory better than an entire village. So essentially protection is no longer the concern of each individual..

BUT, since we've now reshifted the focus away from the farms, away from the churches, away from the kings/lords.. We've focused them to the resource maker... The factory..

NOW, exhile takes on a whole new meaning.. There is a calculated fixed demand for workers for each factory, and a realisticly calculated fixed demand for regions with factories.. And moreover, there is a tradeoff between capital (money or fi

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Shajenko42]

This is the inherent weakness in the free market.

See, the selling point of the free market is that it improves society by making everyone strive to be the best that they can through competition. People work harder, companies produce better products and sell them for less, etc.

They never mention that there are two ways to improve your value in the free market - raise yourself up, or bring your competition down (ie, sabotage).

This second option does not benefit society, or anyone except the person who is sabotaging his neighbor. And if his neighbor sabotages him in turn, you get a very messy situation where everyone is destroying instead of building, and so many resources and lives are wasted on this conflict.

BTW, this situation is called "the jungle" or "anarchy".

So, the first societies basically evolved with the rule that no one could do the very obvious things to sabotage their neighbors (murder, theft, etc) without retribution from the leader. Some did anyway, but you can't stop every crime.

But people got more clever. They exploited the rules so that they were technically within the law, but they were still causing harm to the system in general. So laws were passed to prevent these acts as well.

Eventually, we get to where we are now - people are manipulating the system, stock markets, taxes, etc. to the detriment of everyone else and enrichment of themselves, and they have their defenders say that it's right in itself to allow these things to happen, regardless of the harm they do.

Yes, you'd be one of those defenders.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[TopShelf]

I took them at their word- that they couldn't afford more salary, and that a PERMANENT job meant PERMANENT (as opposed to, we'll toss you for no reason when we feel like it). But they're liars- just like everybody else in this rotten economy.

Wow, that's a startling level of naivete on your part. I don't know where you'd go to find an economy that's less "rotten" and would provide the security you seek.

They don't want the superior job- superior jobs are not respected by stockholders or managment.

Another stu

Re:Fight your own battles.

[LunaticTippy]

As for "rotten economy": I have to call FUD on that one. The stock market is near an all time high, and unemployment is near an all time low.

I'd say that record-breaking national and personal debt and bankruptcy filings and declining or flat inflation-adjusted median income indicate a rotten economy.

For a portion of the population. It's a good time to be on a corporate board, or to be an executive.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Frymaster]

Business has the same responsibilities as the people.

wrong.

business has one responsibility: to make profit for their shareholders. if that means firing you, okay. if that means shipping your job overseas, fine. if that means violating any labour law they can get away with (or afford to get caught for), sure.

if you don't like that you have three options:

1. whinge and complain but, bascially do nothing about and pray your boss doesn't hear you being 'ungrateful'
2. start your own company so you can be the person shipping jobs overseas and reaping the profit
3. unionize

this is the way the economy runs for steelworkers and the way it runs for programmers. period.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[richieb]

business has one responsibility: to make profit for their shareholders. if that means firing you, okay. if that means shipping your job overseas, fine. if that means violating any labour law they can get away with (or afford to get caught for), sure.

This is how we define public corporations in today's laws. However, the laws that create and govern coorporations have been made by regular people, and we can change the laws if we want.

There is nothing sacred about the current structure of public corporations.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[hal2814]

"Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for."

You don't have enough money saved up to be able to stay afloat financially while between jobs and you're claiming the GP is avoiding responsibility? It sound to me like you are the one who is avoiding responsibility. If you were fired tomorrow how would you feed your family or keep your home? Being financially independent enough to leave a job when you are unhappy with the working con

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Alascom]

>Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler by day, OS/2+DOS+Linux Hobbyist by night.

Mainframe? OS/2 for the love of God? No wonder it took you 33 months to find a new job!

AFWIW, if you have friends in IT that haven't found work since 9/11, here is a clue for them: They are not in IT anymore, and they probably never should have been.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Richard Steiner]

Yup, I admit it. I did an 8-month contract in COBOL so I wouldn't lose the house (I needed the money and it was one of the 20 or so languages I'm fairly good with) because my various distributed skills (C/Sybase/Solaris/Linux/Tux) hadn't yet gotten me in the door anywhere, and because folks weren't interested in hiring me for PC support work.

See my posting about the Twin Cities job market.

Like so many hiring managers, however, you seem to assume that the last position one has held is the sole measurement o

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Gilmoure]

Exactly. Wife and I chose to move across the country, after her corporation was bought up, split up and everyone laid off. Took 5 months for me to find a job and 12 months for her but we had savings (now greatly depleted) and were able to make it. And yes, we did have a mortgage and we do have a young daughter as well.

In the past, you had to plan for Huns or Picts or Hottentots to attack and burn your homestead. now days, you have to be nimble on your feet financially. Different times, different skills.

Because that'll work *so* well.

[Kadin2048]

You're not worth every penney- you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for.

Oh yes, and if all of us tech workers in America join a union, I'm sure it'll make those folks in India look that much less attractive! That's what we need in this country -- make us even more expensive to hire.

So once all the good jobs get outsourced, which shift at Wal-Mart do you want to take? I assume you'll have to check with your manager down at Mickey D's first...

Re:Because that'll work *so* well.

[Jason Earl]

And when you lose that war, do we get to kill you, or will we have to settle for enslaving you?

Here's the beauty of economics. If the Chinese and the Indians truly do have a comparative advantage at creating software then that means that everyone that uses software will benefit as more software production is moved overseas. Sure, you'll have to find something else to do, but everyone that buys software will benefit. No one is going to go to war to preserve your job because chances are good that they will actually benefit from the shift.

Hooray for economics!

You can try and fight economics if you want, but its not likely to help. Free markets are as old as mankind, and even in places like the former Soviet Union, where the government tried to limit the power of the market, markets still had a very powerful influence on the economy. So declare war on India and China if you wish, just don't be surprised when your army turns out to be pathetically small, and full of deranged lunatics.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[mangu]

you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for

You are worth the lowest value anybody else is charging for what you can do. That's true everywhere for any skill. If all you can do is to clean toilets and a guy from Honduras is willing to do that for $1.00/hr, then that's what your job is worth. Neither unions nor legislation can change that.

Make it illegal to work for less than a certain amount and you'll see Robert Heinlein's words (in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", 1965) come true: "I am fre

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Citizen of Earth]

Good for you being able to avoid responsibility to the point where you can- I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for.

Being a proper nerd, I have no family obligations, no mortgage, and a $425K rainy-day fund.

You're not worth every penney- you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for.

If someone in India can do my job for $2.50/hr, then bring it on, baby! Just like during the dot-com land rush in the US, most of the Indian IT workers are basically incompetent. Outsourcers are beginning to

Re:Fight your own battles.

[LordKazan]

Perhaps you should look up the definition of communism. Labor unions don't fit it. Labor Unions are collective bargaining organizations that use the power of the collective to increase the leverage of the employees to be on a level playing field

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Fatchap]

Why would I want the playing field artificially leveled? My playing field greatly favors me because I am better at my job than most people. A collective bargaining agreement would end that advantage. I could only do as well as anyone else.

Unions are great at representing manual workers who perform repetitive tasks and who have a very horizontal organisation structure. If there are 100 people on your production line reporting to one supervisor even if you churn out more gizmos than anyone else you do not stand much of a chance at becoming the supervisor. Hence why it is in your interest to bargain collectively and have all of your standards raised.

If on the other hand your job involves a high level of innovation and metal agility these attributes may well contribute to you rising through an organisation. Such organisations are often far more vertical in structure. In this case, it is unlikely that you would benefit from collective bargaining where the curve is straightened out.

Agreed; I have no interest.

[Kadin2048]

Why would I want the playing field artificially leveled? My playing field greatly favors me because I am better at my job than most people. A collective bargaining agreement would end that advantage. I could only do as well as anyone else.

Well said. I agree; the playing field looks just fine from where I'm sitting, and I damn well don't need anyone jiggering around and propping up the low end of it, thanks very much.

If I had wanted a lowest-common-denominator, unionized job, I would have gone to trade school, become a machinist, and made auto parts for a living. Oh wait -- all those companies, that whole freaking industry is going out of business in this country, because of the way the Unions have driven the cost of production through the roof. I hope they've had a good run, because they've collective-bargained themselves out of a job.

And that's exactly what would happen in the technology sector, except it wouldn't take half a century for the jobs to start to disappear, it would take half a decade -- and that's at the most. We already have a problem getting businesses to not outsource tech jobs to places where the cost-of-living is a lot lower, and now people want to unionize and make that even higher? It's insane.

Joining a union is about as appealing to me as chaining myself to a half a dozen people who can't swim and jumping into a lake.

Bravo!

[bigtallmofo]

Here's a different example. Skilled construction jobs are way up, and they are largely union.

Therefore, unions create larger markets.

Fantastic! Not since my 9th grade health class have a heard such a good example of impaired mental ability demonstrating faulty logic. The example back then was:

"Jesus was a man with long hair. I have long hair. I must be Jesus."

Again, great job on ignoring the largest real estate bubble ever to hit a capitalist economy in your pro-union analysis.

Re:Agreed; I have no interest.

[kevlar]

It's called a housing bubble, my friend. It's when a large amount of people take out negative ammortization loans or interest only loans trying to build and flip the property quickly for a profit. The construction industry booms until interest rates climb and suddenly a couple of Joes in your neighborhood need to sell their house below market value because they can't afford their variable interest rate mortgage. All it takes is for a couple people in your neighborhood to do that to tank the value of ever

Re:Agreed; I have no interest.

[Kadin2048]

This is where I think you get into the false conclusions.

Do you really think that the engineering teams at U.S. automakers are so inept they can't take apart a Toyota and see how it's made? They have whole labs just for doing that. (Coincidentally, so does Toyota, and every other manufacturer.) Trust me, they know exactly how one is built. There's no secrets. Outside of maybe a few computer chips that aren't documented, everything inside cars today -- foreign and domestic -- is well understood by all partie

Re:Fight your own battles.

[griffjon]

Did you miss the memo about the gaming industry [livejournal.com] (Followup here [slashdot.org])?

Sure, unions are often used for wage disputes; which is not much of a problem in the IT world as in the bluer-collar world. You don't see many full-time IT personnel talking about fair-wage increases much.

But what you do see are horrible work environments, tacit and explicit requirements to work constant overtime, abuse of salaried staff, poor medical coverage/leave for RSI-type injuries, crappy vacation plans with constant on-call status... (what do you mean you're at the beach? the server's down!!)

These are all issues that unionization can help.

Further, IT industry unions could push for standards compliance, and have a real voice in pushing the Microsofts of the world to adopt things like the ODF and, heck, I dunno, maybe better CSS rendering in IE*. There's lots of good reasons to unionize, even in the tech world.

*(IE7 renders PNGs correctly at least. Welcome to the alpha-blending 21st Century, Bill. Took ya long enough.)

Re:Fight your own battles.

[killjoe]

"Unions are great at representing manual workers who perform repetitive tasks and who have a very horizontal organisation structure."

Bullshit. The American Medical Association, the American Bar Association are unions. Professionals now form "associations" which they pay membership fees do just like unions.

The purpose of a union isn't "just" to level the playing field. It's also to lobby for your members. AMA gets legislation passed, hell they write legislation and demand that politicians vote for it.

Where is your mojo? Did quitting that last job because your company sucked prevent the DMCA from becoming law? Did it reform the patent system?

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Kadin2048]

Leveled between the employees and the company, not between the employees. Beyond that your post because a bunch of BS that even cursory study of the history of even skilled labor shows to be bullocks.

You'd have a point if most unionized professions didn't also view employees basically as interchangeable units, all deserving of the same compensation for the same hours worked, increasing in value only through "time in grade" based metrics, where as long as you manage to not get fired, every year you get a small raise.

I've yet to see any unionized employment that really rewarded outstanding performance and recognized that some people are just inherently better at some jobs than others. And generally any attempt to do this is opposed, tooth and nail, by the unions.

Unions THRIVE on an antagonistic relationship between "boss" and "worker," and intentionally suppress competition between one worker and the next. If you shut up and slog along with everybody else and put in your time, you can't be fired and you get your raises with your "seniority." After you put in enough years, you get retirement. It's the same track, everyone's on it, and everybody's the same.

That's not a system that rewards creativity or superior ability, or any other types of individual differences. It's a system of artificially-enforced equality that has the effect of bringing everyone down to the same level.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Z34107]

What's artificial about a union?

Short answer: everything.

Long answer: A union fights for extra perks for its memebers (like higher salaries and fewer hours) through three mechanisms:

1. Controlling hiring (closed shops) to artificially raise the cost of labor (i.e., people's salaries) above the market rate.
2. Leveraging collective bargaining (and the power gained from #1) to give workers an artificial influence over their employer that they would not have normally.
3. Using media coverage, which is generall

Re:Fight your own battles.

[Vyvyan Basterd]

What really gets me about people like the top post is that union bashers never seem to have any problems with corporations. You know, where a group of people band together to create something bigger than they could do on their own. Yeah, that's _so_ different from those communistic union bastards.

Re:Fight your own battles.

[hlh_nospam]

The union's job is to screw you out of money.

Close. The 1st priority of any union's leadership is to make sure that the union members are unhappy. Happy workers don't want a union. Whatever problems exist in tech employment, unionization is not the answer.

In any case, the government has been bought off on this one. With the current government-encouraged abuse of the H1-b system, programming will be a McJob by the end of the decade, and that isn't very far off. My solution to the problem is to build a business that I hope will support me [celtic-fiddler.com] before that happens. Best part of that is that I enjoy teaching young children how to play the violin a lot better than I like putting up with the attitude that all programmers are fungible.

Guild model

[mgabrys_sf]

Might be more applicable. Getting royalties to work produced has served the information industry as it exists in Los Angeles well to date. Might be time for Northern California (and other parts) to investigate this model further.

There used to be a Graphics guild back in the day, I wouldn't mind seeing that return either.

IT is just too different for Unions

[bnet41]

IT people are too mobile to be in a union. IT people like to change job more so than other professions I've seen. Unions depend a lot on Brotherhood, and office people generally just aren't like that. I would have no interest in being in a union. The IT sector is too fast paced for unions who can really hamper a company's desire for change. Also, the seniority thing is what I think would drive most workers away, as most IT workers like to be rewarded for their work and not how long they have been there. I was in a Union when I worked at a grocery store, and sadly most of the things I had heard about unions I found to be true.
Another thing is I love my job, and don't mind working 60 hours a week. Unions really like to supress that behavior. I work that much because computers are my hobby, and there are much better computers here at work just for testing than I could ever afford at home. Is it bad that I like to be here that much doing my hobby? I know others like me as well.

Re:IT is just too different for Unions

[gorehog]

Sure, IT workers LOVE to change jobs, they dont WANT job security. They'd rather be the migrant workers of the middle class.

Re:IT is just too different for Unions

[AuMatar]

For the moment we are. And due to that, I wouldn't join an attempt to start one unless there was a lot of momentum behind it. And if I was being that mistreated that the movement was working, I'd probably switch jobs first.

But I can definitely see it being different in 10 years. Outsourcing and the increase in health care and other costs without seeing an increase in general wages (especially for current employees- the only time I get raises tends to be when I switch jobs) may bring about a market where

Re:IT is just too different for Unions

[theodicey]

You don't mind hacking for 60 hours a week?

Great!

Work 40 hours at your union programming job, and then spend the extra 20 hours contributing to free software!

Seriously, just imagine -- for one second -- how good Firefox, GIMP, KDE, GNOME, etc. would be if everyone in the tech world were following that plan.

Re: IT is just too different for Unions

[Marxist Hacker 42]

We get paid well for doing what we like.

When adjusted for inflation, I stopped being paid well for doing what I like about 8 years into the industry. Since then, my wages adjusted for inflation have been falling.

Re: IT is just too different for Unions

[freeweed]

And when adjusted for inflation, I've had nothing but raises for over a decade. Even if I had chosen to stay at the exact same job level, doing the exact same thing, I've have gotten a larger raise than the inflation rate, often by 50% or more. To help that out, I've moved around a bit, taken more challenging work, more responsibility, and have nearly doubled my salary in the past 5 years. Meanwhile, I've seen a steady stream of underperforming, whining, "it's always someone else's fault" employees be fired

Re: IT is just too different for Unions

[Khyber]

And just what the hell would you know about DNA to say it's our nature to stay fucking put? We started out as NOMADS, HUNTERS/GATHERERS, MOVING AROUND to where the FOOD was to SURVIVE. We still do this TO THIS VERY DAY, CIVILIZED OR NOT.

I generally enjoy your posts, but this one is just pure and simple BULLSHIT!!!! (Sorry Penn & Teller,) and I'm calling you on it. DNA... what are you, a geneticist?

capitalist pig speaking

[boxlight]

I know I'm going to sound like a totally insensitive capitalist pig, but I'm been a programmer for years and my experience is there are lots of challenging well-paying jobs for good, enthusiastic, productive programmers.

Every once in a while someone in a group mentions the idea of unions and -- no joke -- it's *always* the laziest, whiniest, least productive member of the group that brings up the idea.

So I vote no.

boxlight

Re:capitalist pig speaking

[SatanicPuppy]

Coincidentally, the article was written by the whiniest, least productive member of the Wired Staff, the guy who writes the "Luddite" column, and who, on a site full of people who often make me grit my teeth, stands out as a clear leader in the spouting of irrational crap.

I'm in an industry that is very heavily unionized, and all I see is crap coming out of it. It is a system that rewards inertia, inefficency, and placeholding. And I'm speaking as a guy with a wife and family, and as someone whose department has been hacked in half in the last year, so don't give me crap about me "not understanding the plight of the american IT worker".

It's a cutthroat, high stress business, and we're competitive because we're cutthroat high stress people...Turn that into a system of sinecures and self-important jackasses who think they're entitled to excellent treatment just because their fat ass is already in the spot? The idea makes me sick.

This isn't a business where you can just walk in off the street, pick up a hammer, and get to work. You have to study, you have to work, you have to be skilled. If you are those things, you may still not find a job...But at least it won't be because some less skilled, less dilligent, less educated person can't be fired because of his union connections.

Talk socialism? Right now, today, in this business, we're actually in a position to create value from powerful, freely available tools. The workers control the means of production! It's the fricking socialist dream! You want that and free doughnuts too?

Re:capitalist pig speaking

[Crashmarik]

Translation- the person most likely to bring an AK-47 to work and blow your responsibility-avoiding head off.

Thank you for making the point.

Re:capitalist pig speaking

[TopShelf]

You are correct that some people do lose out in a union. The people who would otherwise be able to make demands at a job for whatever they want wont be making an unfair salary anymore.

If that person is so valuable that they can make demands on management and get them met, how is that salary unfair? In IT in particular, the best employees are often hugely more productive than their peers, to the tune of 100% or more as opposed to low-skill workers in fields like manufacturing or warehousing, where 20-30% ma

Counting

[tktk]

You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand.

Count in binary and you'll get a larger number.

Re:Counting

[Minwee]

Because your fingers don't have five states.

That was the polite response. The impolite one would have been to count to four.

Shhh...

[digitalamish]

Don't give the suits yet another reason why offshoring is a better alternative.

Simple Solution!

[MBraynard]

the shareholder is valued more than the employee

Maybe the employee should buy some shares.

Re:Simple Solution!

[Bacon Bits]

Hey, it worked for Enron!

Join a union?

[DaHat]

Never! The job I work is not mine... it is my employer's and they are free to can me at any time for any reason... just as I am able to leave at any time and for any reason.

Now that... is true freedom!

One of my major beefs with unions (and one of the biggest reasons that I would never join one) is that they provide the ability for... dead weight. People who either are unable or unwilling to contribute to the bottom line are able to be carried along on the shoulders of those who are capable and do do the work.

Lets also not forget that in many unions, ones loyalties are to the union and the company you work for far behind.

Depends

[eln]

If you can somehow improve job security while maintaining the meritocracy that currently exists in technological fields, then it might be worth looking into. Clearly, companies have become too quick to lay off tech workers (and other types of workers as well) simply to bump up stock price. On the other hand, I don't want a system where seniority is the only (or the major) consideration when deciding raises and promotions.

In short, I want a system where skilled employees are not let go just because the CEO wants to skim off the top 10% of wage earners in every department in order to improve his bottom line, but I also don't want a system where a company is forced to hang on to morons just because they're in the union.

Is IT labor in its infancy?

[drinkypoo]

If so, then a labor union is a good idea. Otherwise, not. Unions help people get rights, yes. Then they start sucking the lifeblood out of everything they touch. You are guaranteed a job even if you don't do it, and that is bullshit.

With that said, the BOFH union local 666 would rule the fucking world, so from that standpoint, it might be fun...

After being laid off for three years

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And seeing the truth about what management thinks of IT (basically that you're all a bunch of losers who failed to get your MBA and deserve to be treated like shit), I won't work for a non-union shop ever again. Keeping your job on merits is fine- until you find out that they reward your hard work by kicking you out with as few $$$ as possible, so that they can justify their million-dollar McMansions and pools and Mazda Miatas.

Re:After being laid off for three years

[pastpolls]

Laid off for three years.... that stinks. The longest I have been without a job since completing college was 2 months. Even through the bubble and through 4 layoffs. Perhaps it is because I don't go through life with the same chip on my shoulder. Perhaps it is because I am a hard worker that people enjoy being around. Truthfully, I think it is because I don't believe I have a right to a job and am thankful to come to work each day... and by you name and attitude, I bet that is foreign to you.

Is you name r

Re:After being laid off for three years

[bm17]

I never had a wife or kids. Instead I saved up enough money that I can spend my time doing charity and working on my self-sufficient farm. I guess I must be irresponsible for not following your little genetic breeder script and bringing little copies of myself into a world that already has more people than it can sustain. Thanks for the insight. My life is a failure.

Heck no.

[outZider]

After seeing the joy of what unions have done to most major industries, no way would I want them invading IT. While working really sucks, I enjoy the fact that slacker developers that I've worked with have been culled, and that pay raises have been earned and not given because they have to.

Unions foster mediocrity.

Re:Heck no.

[theodicey]

Unions, unlike corporations, are democratic. They foster whatever you want them to foster.

If you end up with a lousy union that cripples your employer, you have only yourselves to blame.

If your employer cripples itself through ineptitude, though, you're still SOL.

Re:Heck no.

[geekoid]

that statment is laughable at best.

Coporations don't cull 'slackers' they cull people who have unfavorable opinions, were on 'the wrong project', friend of the 'wrong person', or was forced to play a political game.

As someone in a union, I can assure you people who don't do their jobs are removed.

Unions had their place years ago, now they don't

[teshuvah]

They were a necessary evil when the Industrial Revolution came about, but now they're just an unnecessary evil. The unions are nothign more than legal mafias. Just look at GM. I have 2 family members who work there. My brother-in-law is a toolmaker, and his job consists of playing cards, working out, watching TV, and taking naps. Oh, and for about an hour out of the day he actually has to do some actual work like reset a machine or something. Poor guy only makes $35/hour after being there for a year. He started at $28 an hour. He has no college degree either, so GM is paying for him to get his journeyman's card, and pays for him to attend school (pays for the school plus his hourly wage why he is there). Up until recently, he could take as much overtime as he wanted, including double and sometimes triple time on Sunday. Guess what he pays for family health insurance? $0.00 a month. I guess this is why GM is so financially sound, oh wait.......

Union?

[isotope23]

Did unions protect steel workers? Or textile workers or airline employees here in the US?

Steel and textiles are pretty much gone from the US. Why do you think an IT union would
stop offshoring?

Unions don't matter in that respect. What does matter is a legal/tax structure which
encourages corporations to ship work overseas. Not to mention a system that favors
large corporations over smaller ones.

If you want to protect jobs, then ban multi-national and even multi-state corporations.
Then put back the limits that a corporation can only work in the one field it was originally incorporated for.

Sweet idea! Not.

[tacokill]

Then put back the limits that a corporation can only work in the one field it was originally incorporated for.

Great idea (not)! If we did that, then we could go after Apple Computer for getting into that pesky "music" business. And we could go after Berkshire Hathaway for not being in the textile industry. And after those two go down, we can go after WD-40 for being in the lubrication business instead of the oil production business.

Forcing companies to "fit" into certain molds is not the way to

You know...

[Otter]

It's not like unionization is necessarily contradictory to free markets, nor is it necessarily aligned with the statism the author seems to think it demands. In a free market, workers can come up with whatever individual or group demands they want, and employers can take or leave them.

if they could stop corporate abuse

[yagu]

I don't know if I would join a union. I once belonged to one in a PPG glass factory -- we made Anderson Twindows (actually a pretty cool thing). But, the work wasn't too hard, and the pay (for that market) was pretty good.

You could argue the salary and conditions were a result of the union. That is probably true. But, as power grows, so does (did, seemingly) abuse.

We were up for new contract and the union came so close to putting us on the streets. They were demanding a cut back of the number of glass "lines" each worker ran per shift. As it was at the time, I was barely able to fill much more than four hours of real work in an 8-hour shift, and now I almost had to strike because the union wanted to bust balls with the company on this.

I know sometimes it's about putting a stake in the ground way out to reach certain compromises, but this seemed off the scale.

If IT wanted to unionize it would have to be with sanity. I'm not a big fan of seniority being the only yardstick for who stays and who goes when there are cutbacks (more on that in a moment). An IT union worth its salt would allow for hearings and maybe prevent arbitrary and massive layoffs.

Which brings me to an abuse I only figured out 2 years after getting laid off from a major telcom:

Part of my severance package was one months pay for every year I'd been there, with a maximum payout of 10 months. I'd been there for 21 years, so with my 60 day notice and severance, it might seem generous that I'd be getting one year of pay. But why would any employee with only ten years get the same benefit? That didn't seem fair.

Turns out, part of the contract for getting and keeping the severance requires the employee to honor what amounts to a gag order... no bad mouthing the company, and no legal proceedings against the company or they would take all of the money back.

Coincidentally it turns out that the statute of limitations for EEOC actions against a company is 300 days which conveniently happens to be 10 months. Aha! So, the company skates with what (IMO) amounts to hush money and looks generous at the same time. (for those who would claim these were generous terms, consider there are many hidden "costs" to the 20+ year employees, including but not limited to: health care coverage and costs, pension changes)

If unions had the power to change that kind of treatment, I'd consider them.

Empirical evidence in recent news suggests though (e.g., United Airlines, et al. where pensions have been handed over in default to the government) unions ultimately have little power to stem corporate abuse. The rich will continue to get richer, the poor will continue to have babies.

Sigh.

More obstacles than advantages

[analog_line]

Frankly, in order for an IT union to get any real traction, you would have to unionize just about everyone in the world that's qualified, because outsourcing is so easy. Quality may suffer for a short period of time, but knowing what the IT people I know would try to demand, it would be cheaper to pour money into training of foreign workers than to cave to an IT union's demand.

Unions are organized and stay organized easier when the job cannot, at all, be exported. In-store workers, miners, hospitality workers, truck drivers, etc. I can't have someone in China clean my office in New York. I can employ a code monkey in China to code for my business in New York. In America, quality is job none, just look at the abysmal performance of our big car companies. Americans don't care about quality, they want cheap, and that's just what we'll be given. No IT union is going to be able to fight that.

i had this idea, but it won't work

[buhatkj]

i had this idea years ago, but i realized it won't work, because there are so many kinds of IT work, it would be impossible to come up with standards, and it wouldn't have the results we want.
the union would end up run my business guys anyway, then it would just be working for a company within a company. still all sorts of dumbass crap we'd be told to do.

no, the answer is just to work for people who have a recent IT background in the first place. that way at least they might understand what's worth doing, and what isn't.

we could form some form of labor organization, but the union style is not appropriate for us. coding anyway, is more like a production art discipline than anything else, maybe a guild? this was suggested before...more plausible than a union anyway.

I have seen this before.

[Churla]

I have been working in the IT field since before the boom. From field work to tech support desks.

The union idea comes up about every 2-3 years. Then it fades again. Most of the commentary here is from programmers who don't want to see some slacker next to them riding comfy while they work hard. Programming jobs should be contract for just that reason.

Unions would help the rank and file workers who are far more at the support and field engineer/help desk end of the spectrum. I have seen companies let people leave and not hire replacements for 2 and a half years while praising themselves for "never having a layoff", and review processes where your actual performance seems to affect the outcome about as much as telling your cat to fetch.

Just something to think about if you're only seeing this from the "leet coder" perspective.

Their time has come... and gone

[Billosaur]

My mother's father was a member of his local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He was an officer and I still have his union seal stamp he used to mark union documents. It's one of the few momentoes I have of him, that his sailor's hat from his time in the Navy during WWII.

He grew up in a time when the unions were gaining power, forcing companies to make concessions, improve working conditions, and pay a decent wage to everybody. Unions served an important function in the early history of the industrialization of our nation. But their power is waning and frankly that's a good thing.

It might seem seductive -- hordes of geeks, banded together for the common good, but honestly, would it accomplish anything? In this day and age, workers are disposable. My IT job can be shipped off to India or China in a heartbeat and then what? Is the union going to shut down Microsoft or Oracle for unfair labor practices? Is it right that some other guy in my department gets as much as I do when he can't write code for sh*t?

Nope. I'm not for it, not in my industry, and not if it means I get dragged down by others who aren't interested in being competent programmers. I'm not walking a picket line for them and not striking when I know there's some guy in another country who makes one-third what I do and would be happy to punch keys for it.

IT Unions would fail

[cartman]

The power of a Union is directly proportional to how capital intensive its industry is. That's because capital-intensive firms suffer huge capital costs as a result of work stoppages, strikes, and disruptions at expensive factories.

Software, however, isn't capital-intensive at all. The total investment in a software house is a few thousand dollars for PCs and servers. If you struck, then your employer could move your PCs out of the building, outsource your jobs to India, and fire you all on the spot, with very little cost to himself.

Unions in IT would accomplish one thing only: an acceleration of the outsourcing trend.

an IT article coming from 'the luddite?'

[avi33]

Can I flag TFA as Troll?

My family has always been pretty pro-union, mostly on account of my grandfather:

-NOT being issued shop glasses (he was a drill press operator in automobile production)
-NOT being allowed to bring his own
-being injured on the job
-being administered by a substandard alcoholic 'company doctor' who promptly removed one of his eyes and hacked up the other one
-being fired without compensation
-eventually being re-hired at an ornamental job and given a $10,000 payoff to drop the whole thing.

In addition, there were stories of so-and-so's family having to buy the boss' groceries, or so-and-so's sister having to 'deliver' them, if you know what I mean. It was enough to make most of his kids go out and get their heads busted in fighting for the right to assemble a union.

I'm not going to get into where that particular institution has gotten itself today, but for this knucklehead to equate that with today's tech workers is ridiculous. Where was he when a crop of English majors called themselves 'programmers' and 'project managers' and started making $50-60k right out of college? When the company soda was flowing, foozball was an HR necessity, and the break room had a couch and a Playstation?

What exactly are the author's demands? That we be offered guaranteed jobs for life? That'll work, just ask GM and Delphi. With the possible exception of game developers, I don't think I've ever known a great programmer that felt 'exploited' for very long. Between my wife and I, we've been hit by one round of layoffs and dodged at least 6 others. If any of our past employers had been prevented from trimming the fat by union regulations, the entire operation would have folded up sooner.

And besides, some of my best freelance jobs were put together with fellow layoff victims...does that mean that I turned from a proletariat to a robber baron overnight?

There are plenty of problems with a handful of executives doing the insource/outsource swing every couple years, and playing games with people's careers in the process, but is a union going to fix that? Only if they break a bunch of other things in the process.

i vote yes

[pintomp3]

i know i may be the only yes vote here, but i see unions as a necassary evil. an evil to counter the greater evil of greedy management. yeah, there are side-effects like mediocrity and what not. but without unions, we would not have a middle class in this country. we would be stuck in the early days of the industrial revolution where workers were just rats to be killed off when the bottom line (or extra mansion) called for it. some argue that unions only protect the lazy, but they protect everyone. all you union haters should try working at a place like walmart. you will be thrilled by their anti-union stance.

Liberty, Fraternity, Equality

[Doc Ruby]

There's nothing libertarian about a disorganized labor sector. Unions are organizations among workers, not a government. Libertarians stand for freedom from government control - and corporate control, too, which unions can provide. Libertarians stand against unions which control people, but those are much less common than governments, corporation and other management that controls people. Especially in the absence of a union, disorganized laborers' liberty is defenseless in the world of corporate and government control.

http://www.washtech.org/ is a union.

[ClioCJS]

http://www.washtech.org/ [washtech.org]!

Please join. At least get their newsletter. It's VERY informative. You don't have to give them money.

Where are the adults???

[sm62704]

I mean, the ones with families to feed? This Ann-Randian spewing is the sort to come from high school or Rush Limbaugh.

I certainly do not want to belong to an organization where I can only be guaranteed a salary increase across the board next to the same slacker programmer who didn't contribute. [slashdot.org]

Without a union, you have no say if the boss' lazy-assed nephew gets a raise while reading slashdot all day (ahem). With a union, you can vote any contract that allows this down. Nobody else wants to do a lazy man's work, either.

If the union negotiates a contract that lets this happen, you can vote againt it. The "union boss" is a myth: he works for YOU, not the other way around.

If the job sucks or I don't think I am being treated fairly, I quit, simple as that... But with the same sentiment, when it comes times for initial salary negotiations, take the gloves off, and _fight for every penny_.

Fight? No, unless your skill is so unusual nobody else can do it, you mean beg.

The company is organized, all the shareholders and board is against you, you all by yourself. A union evens the playing field. "United we bargain, divided we beg."

There is no such thing as a permanent job, and you're naive if you believed that. [slashdot.org]

Naive? Funny, most of the people I know from my elderly father's generation are retired, with a pension, after working at the same company all their lives. Why shouldn't you be able to as well?

And as a country, the LAST thing we need to be doing right now is making ourselves less competitive with regards to the rest of the world.

Where's my cluebat? There are no more American companies! At least, no publically traded ones. Crysler's profits don't help America a bit unless THEY HELP AMERICA'S WORKERS. I am an American, Sony and Disney and Crysler and Toyota aren't. I'm patriotic, a company cannot be.

How Toyota treats the workers in its North American plants affects America. Welcome to your new foreign overlords (I for one...)

If only we could make stupidity more painful...

Are you some kind of masochist?;)

"I've got a mortgage and a family to pay for." So? Your investment and choices in life are not your company's responsibility to deal with. [slashdot.org]

Which is precisely why if that company mistreats its workers it needs a union. They have no reason to give two shits about you or your needs.

It's better to loose *some* jobs than to have the entire company collapse like the auto industry is collapsing to foreign competition. [slashdot.org]

The unions haven't killed the American auto industry, its incompetent management has. Japan sells more cars (made in unionized American plants) because they make what is percieved (probably rightly) as better cars. Note before the '70s a foreign car was rare on the highways. Then the oil crunch came, but Big American Auto continued to sell big, badly designed and built pieces of shit. It wasn't the unions that made the decision to ignore the Japanese.

Why would I want the playing field artificially leveled? My playing field greatly favors me because I am better at my job than most people. [slashdot.org]

So long as your employer treats you fairlly there is indeed no reason for a union. In the '80s, the head of the then non-union Eastern Airlines rightly stated that "any company that gets a union deserves one."

Folks only unionize when management comes from a Dilbert cartoon.

Oh yes I loved being in new york when the trains werent running. 60K a year retire at 55 and they wanted to retire at 50. [slashdot.org]

Re:The Cry of the Socialist

[benzapp]

The guy on the bottom doesn't have the balls to quit, create a company, and run it in the way they feel.

Name one company anyone can start that simply requires "balls".

Last time I checked, starting a company required money. Money to rent an office, pay for computers, employees, and a host of other operating expenses an idiot like you couldn't even appreciate it.

Re:Union: No thanks

[Bacon Bits]

The only people who need unions are lazy folks, people without foresight, or people without initiative.

You're either willfully ignoring the historic effects of the labor movement, or you're ignorant of what those effects actually were:

• 40 hour week/8 hour day (35 hours in much of Europe)
• Overtime pay
• Child labor laws
• Equal pay for equal work
• Right to a living wage
• Paid holidays
• Weekends
• Health, life, and dental benefits
• Expectation of a safe work environment (OSHA in the US)
• Right to quit your job (it was not unheard of for employment contracts to be as strict as today's cellular agreements)
• Protection from unwarranted dismissal (can't be fired without reasonable cause)
• Right to organize (form unions)

Those would not have happened without the labor movement and, specifically, unionized labor. I don't know if you value any of those, but I do. You can certainly argue that trade unions are causing harm today and have reached the end of their usefullness, but I'm not going to stand by while you spit on the men who -- often quite literally -- died for those rights which you now seem to dismiss so readily.

Of course, some "Right to Work" states in the US have revoked some of these worker rights (yes, it was a misnomer to trick people into voting for it). I'm not even going to touch the stupidity of that one.

[Note: Yes, I posted a similar list elsewhere.]