Should IT Unionize?

snydeq writes "Sixty-hour work weeks with no overtime or comp time, a BlackBerry hitched to your belt 24/7, mandates from managers who have no clue what you actually do — all for a job that could be outsourced tomorrow. 'Is it finally time for technology workers to form a union and demand better working conditions?' InfoWorld's Dan Tynan asks. To some, the odds against IT unions are long, in large part because the 'lone gunman' culture is pervasive. Diversity of skills and job objectives is another hurdle for rallying around common goals. But that has not dissuaded several union-minded groups from cropping up across the industry as of late, Tynan reports. In the end, the best bet for IT may be a professional organization modeled after the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association, one that could give IT professionals a single voice for speaking out on issues that affect everyone — such as H-1B visa limits or tax incentives to keep IT jobs onshore."

Hell no.

Well, gee, lets see. Setting aside the economic issues, the inertia and sloppy work that comes with systems where "seniority" is more important than "ability", lets talk about the Bar thing.

What does the American Bar Association do? Primarily it sets standards for it's members, and enforces them. Almost all professional associations do this, whether it's lawyers, accountants, or plumbers, you can't practice your trade unless they say you can...In Union strong states, you aren't allowed to hire plumbers and electricians who haven't jumped through the hoops, regardless of qualifications...Which is to say Joe Bob with his Master Electrician badge is more fit to wire your house than a guy with a PhD in electrical engineering who has 20 years experience in the field. Not only is he more fit, but you can't even hire the other guy because he can't get licensed without jumping through the union hoops.

Now, how many people get into IT through "non standard" channels? How many self-taught pros are there out there? How many people have a non-IT educational background? How many people from other countries?

Do you really want a bunch of senior people telling you what qualifications you need to have? This is a young industry, and it's changing all the time. What you need to know changes all the time. And they think setting up a professional organization is a good thing? Instead of clueless PHBs, we'll have 30 year vets telling us that our modern methods are crap compared to the work they did, back in the day, with punchcards.

Jesus. If you want to drive offshoring, that's the way to do it. Make American IT more expensive and less efficient than everywhere else in the world, and the work will flee this country and leave us longing for the days of H1-Bs and mere outsourcing.

Re:Hell no.

Oh for mod points. I agree wholeheartedly.. Can everyone say 'rent seeking'? I found it disturbing that the summary mentions 2 organizations who have gotten the law to explicitly protect them from competition as good examples to follow.

Re:Hell no.

I agree with what you said, except for one small nitpick. .Which is to say Joe Bob with his Master Electrician badge is more fit to wire your house than a guy with a PhD in electrical engineering who has 20 years experience in the field

Joe Bob may be better qualified. Code changes from year to year, and I doubt an electrical engineer is going to be up one specifics of what gauge wire is appropriate for a given number of electrical outlets to feed, or how far the circuit breaker must be from the gas line. The electrical engineer undoubtedly would have a better theoretical understanding, but I would not want him wiring my house.

Re:Hell no.

Maybe, maybe not. The point should be whether or not the wiring passes code, not who does it.

The thing that bothers me most is the exclusivity, especially with craft unions. There is no way in except through seniority, so if you come from a non-union state (or country) with tons of experience and ability, you're automatically a second class citizen in your chosen trade, and the only way out of that is having to jump through union hoops for literally years, maybe even under the supervision of someone with less skill and experience than yourself.

As far as I'm concerned, the work is what's important. It all has to be inspected, so if it passes code, then what does it matter who did it in the first place?

Re:Hell no.

Who do you suppose writes those codes?

This is akin to saying "a bank manager would never be able to work as a loan officer because of the bank's constantly changing interest rates".

A small group of electrical engineers of which your particular engineer may or may not be a member.

Joe Bob's job, OTOH, is to keep up with what that small group write.

Re:Hell no.

Um..... no it isn't the same at all. If our PhD is in fact, the one writing the codes, then fine. In your example, it would be a finance professor stepping into a teller role for the day. He happily accepts a deposit of $25,000 in cash, not realizing he needs to fill out the appropriate "suspicious activities" form required by the government.

Re:Hell no.

It's possible for an electrical engineer to have very little experience with electrical power systems.

I have taken several electrical engineering courses (have a degree in Engineering Physics) and have also done extensive home renovations (permitted and inspected).

While the actual electrical parts of the NEC are generally fairly simple for most household circuits, there are many aspects to the code that are not simple electrical issues: conduit fill, thermal derating (which varies depending on the specific insulation type, wire gauge, and number of bundled wires), pigtailing requirements, box fill calculations, GFCI/AFCI requirements, mandated switch/receptacle locations, exceptions for heaters/furnaces/air conditioners, and all sorts of other things.

Re:Hell no.

On top of that, it's just one more hierarchical power structure that inevitably becomes corrupt.

I happen to be listening to Lola Vs Powerman & the Money-Go-Round by The Kinks and there's some great lyrics on this in "Get Back in Line [lyricwiki.org]":

'Cause that union man got such a hold over me
He's the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve or I eat
Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine
Then he walks right past and I know that I've got to get back in the line
Get back, get back, get right back in the line

I also would be against IT Unions--on the mere basis that (like SatanicPuppy said) my connections would outweigh my skills. When I was a kid, my dad (an independent concrete pourer) was threatened by a Union. They would tell him that he's ruining the economy by pouring cement for barns much cheaper than the unionized companies and they would try to strong arm him into joining. They were telling him to pay more in Union dues than what he spent on food to feed our six member family.

Ridiculous.

Re:Hell no.

I also would be against IT Unions--on the mere basis that (like SatanicPuppy said) my connections would outweigh my skills.

Most times, union or non-union, connections outweigh skills anyhow. I can't count the number of people I've dealt with professionally who talk a good game, know all the right people, and fuck up 90% of the things they touch.

Re:Hell no.

Not to mention the idiocy of suggesting that everyone actually agrees on anything.

I'm an American, but I know a lot of very smart foreigners working in the U.S. on H1-B's who make normal U.S. wages, and who are as good or better than their U.S. "competition". Given what I've seen, the constant whining on slashdot about H1-Bs has always seemed petty.

The Indian Government pre-empted it...

The current Indian Government pre-empted such a move by classifying IT as a "Profession", meaning no fixed working hours, no overtime pay, no benefits, but, we do need to pay close to $50 a year as Profession Tax.
Plus major indian IT cos have gone on record stating that long hours are simply "fiction" and each employee works only 8 hours a day: The last time i checked my team was working 14 hours a day.

The main problem with a professional organization

Is that one of its first tasks will be to lobby for a law requiring that membership in it become mandatory for anybody practicing in the field. No thank you.

Unions are broken for very similar reasons. Basically, any large organization that claims to 'represent' you actually represents itself and only has your interests as a peripheral matter because appearing to cater to them is how it gets political power.

Sixty-hour work weeks with no overtime...

...or comp time sounds like it's time to change jobs, not unionize. Unions correct for errors in the free market, and are not effective in situations where the market already has checks and balances in place. And in any case, there are few companies with large enough IT workforces to make unionizing a viable idea.

I think what you need to look at is the fact that IT jobs are becoming a blue collar skill. Just about anyone with a computer can pick up enough training to do the majority of desktop and server support work that the market demands. On-Site support for mission critical machines are increasingly being moved to co-location centers who have highly trained staff available. What this means is that there is an overabundance of workers in the field, thus decreasing the value of the service.

If you want to get more respect in the IT field, I recommend that you move to large data center work rather than desktop or small server support. Another idea is to develop industry-standard certification programs (not MSCE) that show qualifications for work in sophisticated environments, thus further helping differentiate desktop support from high-end IT support. These certifications would work a bit like the Engineering or Electrician certifications that differentiate true professionals from the trade-school material entering the field.

That being said, let me turn this thing on its head. Has anyone thought of addressing the reasons behind why you work 60 hour work weeks? Is it truly because the field demands it or is it because your environment needs improvement? Whether it be greater automation, additional help, or better procedures, you need to be making an effort to help reshape your environment so that you can accomplish your job more effectively. Not only will it help reduce the hours you work each week, but shaping your environment displays the true mark of a professional.

unionization = siren song

Ah, yes-- the siren song of unionization, born out of the early 20th century labor struggles where socialism was still an idyllic future utopia, and factory conditions were truly brutal.

Collective labor bargaining has a brinksmanship game at its very core: give us what we demand or we all quit. The problem is that this brinksmanship is all too easy to call bluff now: globalized workforce, wider literacy, part time contractors, etc. Beyond the obvious changes to the labor pool, the idea that IT work-- one of the most portable sectors in the economy-- could be unionized is laughable.

The AMA and ABA are possible because the inflow of labor is restricted from the beginning: one must graduate Med School or Law School from an accredited university. The AMA and ABA have very strict tests before one gets into these schools, and even harder tests at the end of them before they'll let you in the club. In that way, each association has monopolized the labor force by severely restricting membership. Would such a scheme be possible with IT?

An ITPA (IT Professionals Association) would require specific graduate schools and horrendous tests. The last thing IT needs is an officially ordained priesthood about what is IT and what is not IT. This would restrict the labor pool so tightly that businesses would freak out, the hopeful students would freak out, then the government, and the whole thing would fall apart before it got started.

I consider myself an IT professional, and I got my degree in Japanese Literature.

Hell yes.

I'm going to take a purely myopic, personal stance on this. I got into IT because I was interested in technology. I have seen more burnout and sacrifices by coworkers in this industry than any other. I have seen people responding to Blackberry messages at 2 AM (when they work 9 to 5), spend their days freezing their bodies slowly in server rooms and watched IT managers lose their hair trying to explain that "technology" doesn't mean "magic all the time" to executives.

I always thought there were worse occupations out there. Surely the garbage man or coal miner has a less satisfying/harder job than me. However, at the end of the shift, these guys go home. The garbage man doesn't need to pick up heavy cans in his living room. The coal miner doesn't need to chip away at the walls in his bedroom. In no other industry is the disconnect between work and life non-existent like in IT. Hell, even doctors have calling services.

The joy of learning new things was quickly squashed by the nature of this industry. Even when I'm programming or building new hardware, I'm connected to the responsibility of maintaining 24/7 systems on a 24/7 schedule.

I know some are saying "You don't need to have a job like this. There are other jobs in the IT industry that don't demand this kind of schedule." Bullshit. We brought this unto ourselves. We were the ones arguing for telecommuting. We were the proponents of portable tech. And now we have to "eat the dog food". We sold people on it, we have to bow to it ourselves.

I was thinking about this the other day. I'm almost 30. The internet came about in my generation. IT has been going on much longer. How was it done before "always-on", "always-connected"? Surely it was less efficient. And yet, you hear about IT people from that time staying in their jobs for decades, loving what they do, etc. Nowadays you're surprised to see someone stick around 3 years in a "permanent" job.

What did we do to our industry? How bad have we fucked it up? Can we change it by unionizing? I'll do anything at this point.

Define IT

Are we talking about sysadmins, application developers, support staff, programmers, testers, system analysts, etc.?

if Hollywood writers can organize effectively

That's because it's only a specific selection of writers. It's not like there's a union for all writers (fiction authors, non-fiction authors, columnists, manual authors, speech writers, journalists, etc.).

Yes - if you're in the UK

The UK has some very strong employee rights - but I would still recommend that anyone join a union.

I'm a member of Connect [connectuk.org] which is a specialist union for professionals in the Telecoms sector.

The way I look at it is like this: my employer has several floors of lawyers - how many do I have? I hope never to have to fight my employer for my rights (sick leave, working time directive, disciplinary etc) but if I do - I want a team of lawyers on my side.

I realise that the situation in the USA is different - the corruption and ties to organised crime that you see doesn't seem to have affected unions over here.

It's important to draw a distinction between "You can't do that - it's not your job" unions and "You can't do that to me - it's illegal" unions. The former are usually found with low-paying, blue collar works who have a vested interest in protecting their job at the expense of all else - including the company. The latter are usually composed of professional members who own shares in their employer and who want reassurance that should the worst happen, they're legally protected.

I view my union dues (less than £10 per month) on the same level as life assurance, building insurance etc. I don't want to pay them - but I realise it's probably a good idea. In fact, as well as all the legal help, my union also provide me with sickness and death benefit as well as good deals on general insurance etc.

Basically, if you think your employer is perfect and would never shit on you from a great height - don't join a union. If you live in the real world - sign up.

T

Sweet Zombie Christ, No

I cannot think of a single thing that would make employers and customers abandon US IT more than if we unionized. We'd be signing our own death warrants. It's _already_ incredibly easy to fire up e-lance, and grab a Romanian and Indian developer, even if there are the quality and language issues. If we unionize, we'll only increase their incentive to do so by burdening them with all of the baggage that comes along with having unionized employees.

Unions rely on the ability to have a monopoly on labor (and violence, and backing from the government for their violence, but those aren't relevant to my point). With manufacturing jobs, where the physical presence of the employee is a requirement, their hold over an industry is far greater than it would be over IT services, since it's very very easy to utilize non-local labor that doesn't care about the fact that there's a union that went on strike.

Furthermore, I think that it'd be a straight up financially bad idea for almost everyone. In addition to making the barriers to entry for new developers and IT professionals higher, we'd all suffer in terms of the actual money we take home. Union contracts base pay around seniority, not productivity. In fact, most unions violently oppose productivity-based pay scales. That'd remove a lot of the incentive for new, young developers who are just _better_ than their older co-workers to excel at their jobs. They'd be locked into their pay level. It'd also make it MUCH harder to fire shitty employees.

I also reject the concept that there CAN be a single IT voice to represent us all. We're a fairly diverse group of people, from all backgrounds and with all goals in life. The incentives of, say, a sysadmin working for a NOC are not the same as a web developer working for a small business. They have different sets of priorities, both of which are completely valid to their particular situation. Say, for example, that the NOC guy is a little older, has some kids, and wants benefits, while the young kid doesn't care, and just wants as fat of a paycheck as he can get. How do you resolve those competing, equally valid desires? As it stands now, we negotiate our own contracts according to our desires. With unions, we'd be locked into the choices made by other people.

Another problem with unions, highlighted by this article, is that they're often ideological tools of the leadership. I don't have a problem with H1-B visas (except that I think they're too restrictive) or offshoring. I think both things are awesome. It's the market at work, and forces us all to be competitive at SOME level, whether that be on quality or price or reliability or whatever. Competing against a guy in India or a new Chinese H1-B immigrant is no different than competing against a college kid. The idea that we need political protection from that is absurd.

We also shouldn't ignore the negative impact that unionization of IT would have on the economy. You want to see the long-term effects of unionization? Take a look at the auto industry. Completely saddled with legacy labor costs imposed by union contracts, they're in many cases simply unable to compete on price. Unions are little more than mechanisms for imposing arbitrary minimums and caps on the costs of doing business, which decreases the flexibility of businesses when responding to changing market conditions. The only reason that Japanese automakers hire anyone over here is because we force them to by law.

There's nothing that a union can give you that you can't achieve for yourself by paying attention to your contract. Do you want a guarantee that you'll never be asked to work more than 40 hours in a week? Put it in your contract. Do you want cash instead of benefits? Put it in your contract. Do you want to get paid better? Don't work for less. You make the choices that you want to make, and don't impose them on the rest of us. We'll do likewise, and we'll all be happier.

Yes, tech workers need unions

Yes. It is the corporate DNA to pay workers as little as the can get away with and produce as much work from workers as possible. That's just the nature of capitalism. By joining a union, workers can push back against being treated as nothing more than a disposable tool.

Are unions perfect? Of course not. But neither is anything institution run by mortals. But like anything, you have to weigh all the advantages and disadvantages.

There's no question unions have brought more balance to laissez faire capitalism. Unfortunately, they have become victims of their own success. Health care, vacation pay, pensions, 40 hour work weeks, overttime, health and safet regs, etc. All of these were the result of workers pooling their money and getting themselves political muscle. Believe me, it wasn't given to them. Ask you grandfather or great grandfather who got his head cracked open with a club for participating in a strike.

Unfortunately, it's in most people's nature to be sheep and be complacent to try to protect what they have. Why risk your job by going against the company's wishes to remain union free. It won't be until workers really feel the sting of boots on their necks grinding them into the pavement will workers actually get pissed off enough to fight back.

So, look for your hours to get even longer, your paychecks to shrink even more, and lose more benefits before unions can become a reality.

But ff they were smart, and could learn to stick together (get over that rugged individualism bullshit they like to believe), techs could do a lot for themselves here and now.

I should know. I'm a union guy working in the tech industry.

nonono

Unions aren't a good idea any more. When they first started up, employee's had very few rights. Now the rights unions fought for are enshrined in law.

A union won't save your job, and to be frank, if you're job is at a high risk of being outsourced, or management is being retarded then you need to get a new job, because just as you have the 'right' to walk out in protest, an employee has the right to save their business by dropping you as an employee for any reason and going elsewhere.

Unfair dismissal doesn't work if you put their business at risk by striking, even if you have a union telling you to do it, not any more.

There is also the fact that employers need not employ anyone who is in a union. Join/form one if you like, but after the first time you 'punish' a company, I'd bet actual English pounds that none of your members will work in the IT industry again.

I was a member of a union when I was a teenager. The damn thing nearly fucked me by saying we had to go on strike. I didn't want to, I had rent and a bike to pay for, and the last thing I needed was no pay for a week, or even a few days.

Luckily the strike was averted because the management pretty much said 'sure, go ahead and leave, but you won't get the pay rise anyway, and you put your jobs at risk if the factory closes for long'. Seemed fair to me.

Re:Fine by me but...

If you unionize, your employer has far less rights regarding workmanship and professionalism than if he can simply fire someone who displays neither. He also has fewer options come hiring time.

By all means, lets restrict all IT work to people who have the piece of paper, rather than the actual ability. In my experience the people who want the former, are the people who lack the latter.

Re:no

I don't agree with that assertion at all. In my experience, IT people are scattered all over the political spectrum. Sure, the libertarian types tend to yell the loudest, but the libertarian types yell the loudest everywhere.

Personally, I think unions are a good thing for a lot of industries. However, I don't think they're good for IT. Management in many places already see IT as nothing more than an expensive but necessary burden, and putting a union on top of that just makes the perception worse. In places where IT is seen as a vital component to the overall health of the company, techs tend to be treated much better.

The bottom line is that for most positions within IT other than the low-level button pushers, demand and pay are still high. However, it always has been and still remains to a large extent a meritocracy, so all the people who got into the field in the late 90s because they heard it was easy money now find themselves working the grunt jobs at the bottom of the totem pole with no hope of advancement. Unions may give these people opportunity to advance based on seniority alone, but doing so would be bad for the industry as a whole.

One racket too many.

Isn't this really what is comes to? You're just paying money out of your check for someone else to tell you what to do.

I already give money to one protection racket: the government. Why should I give money to another, run eventually by the mafia?

Re:You Have 2 Choices...

Let me fix that -

1) Unionize and loose your job to outsourcing or contractors in a few years

2) Continue to be abused, until you work with your employer to fix the situation, or quit and go work somewhere else

Re:Huh?

Ignorant you may be, but you hit the nail on the head.

Unions don't make any industry more efficient, and that loss of efficiency can mean the difference between a successful company and an unsuccessful company. If the work can be done more efficiently by non-union employees, it will be, and IT work is very portable...You can't do the old Union trick of changing the laws in a geographic area when someone across the world could be doing your job remotely.

It comes down to market issues. If you're top notch at what you do, and there is demand for that skill, you'll have work. If your skills are dated, if you're not qualified, you could have problems. Lot of people jumped into the industry in the 90's with extremely limited skillsets. If you can't roll with the changes, you're going to get pushed out.

The industry is really volatile right now, and that makes people crave the sort of stability that Unions seem to provide, but there is a difference between stability and stagnation.