Tech Workers of the World Unite? 1254
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."
Unions had their place years ago, now they don't (Score:3, Informative)
Their time has come... and gone (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Fight your own battles. (Score:3, Informative)
Because that'll work *so* well. (Score:3, Informative)
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:Fight your own battles. (Score:3, Informative)
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 newspaper website right after college, and they would send the stories over at 430 am from the unionized production dept, and the guy who sent them would leave for home right after. I would get into work at 530, and look for the feed. If the guy had forgot to send the stories, or had messed it up, I had to call a manager at home and wake him up (I couldn't call the production dept because I am was nonunion, so I could only talk to management) The manager would have to call the union guy at home, he would have to drive back into work (making OT) and send the feed. No one else was allowed to do his job, even though it was very simple to send the stories. So the site wouldn't be populated with stories until around 830 am. I hear that the process is now completely automated (this was back in 1999), but how ridiculous is that? It screwed all the people who liked to read the paper online first thing in the AM when they got to work....
Anyway, unions have clearly been great for GM and Ford!!!!
Re:Heck no. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I am in a union! (Score:1, Informative)
The only real draw backs I've found are that getting hired here took a lot longer than other places because the union requires a committee based process and that things like bonuses are out of the question.
I was pretty skeptical about being in a union before I got the job - I bought into the whole "union=lazy" rhetoric, actually being in a union and seeing how it really works has changed my mind. We don't have any more lazy or incompetent people than anywhere else I've worked and not only are we unionized, we're "state workers" too so if you believe the hype we should be twice as lazy as all you poor suckers in non-unionized private industry. Guess what, we're not!
Slacker programmers (Score:3, Informative)
In fact it could potentialy make things better by working out a compensation package that is based on... _actual merrit_. Then your precious salary would be safe because clearly you will be in the top percental of valuable contributors and so take home most of the bacon.
Unions can actually work out solutions to problems so as to benefit a company and the people in it. It's about having the leverage to negotiate.
Yours and others line of opposition sounds firghteningly ignorant.
Kind Regards
Re:Fight your own battles. (Score:3, Informative)
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 one. Otherwise please look up "quidquid Latine dictum sit altum viditur".
Mostly you haven't taken care to address my points, so I don't have much in the form of rebuttal. However, I must take issue with a factual error:
No. We have low numbers of people collecting unemployment insurance. The "unemployment rate" does not and has not ever measured the true unemployment rate.
This is a lie told by those who wish to portray a failing economy; it's surprising how many people believe it. Snopes has a decent article at http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm [snopes.com], and they link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Re:Fight your own battles. (Score:2, Informative)
I have been debating this with myself and others for a couple of weeks now. Im not saying that you are wrong, but here are some things to consider.
In my area house pices have doubled in the last 5 years. (I just bought a 1200 sq ft fixer upper home for 1/2 million and got "a good deal" by standards of the local market)
Gold, Silver, Gas, the price of a stamp, and most other commodities have also doubled in the last 5-10 years.
The stock market has finally reached the same point that it was at 5-7 years ago.
So, if the price of most everything has doubled but the value of your portfolio is the same as it was 6 years ago, then you can take your expensive all time high stock and sell it to buy a sock or perhaps a spoon-full of gas.
On your second point:
If people are unemployed for a long period of time, they eventually tend not to report it (by law in many cases).
There were at least 60000 layoffs in the auto industry this year alone. Additionally there were thousands of people put out of work by the major hurricanes of the year and a few thousand more people layed of in the airline industry. I have not heard of any major hiring trends this year. So, how can the job numbers be getting better? It just does not seem to add up.
Re:Agreed; I have no interest. (Score:3, Informative)
The booming construction industry is entirely functioning on borrowed money and symbolic equity that doesn't entirely exist. There will be a correction soon (unfortunately). Every area is different so the magnitude of the adjustment will differ by geography.
Re:Agreed; I have no interest. (Score:3, Informative)
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 parties involved.
But most of the big manufacturers don't have the flexibility to build new plants to take advantage of new manufacturing techniques, because they're tied into employment contracts that make retooling plants much tougher. Going from frame-on construction to stamped uni-bodies, or from bolted together parts to robotically spot-welded, isn't something you just decide to do over a weekend. If you can do it without building an entirely new plant, you're lucky.
Plants can't be retooled because employees can't easily be laid off; old plants are expensive to close, and new plants are almost prohibitively expensive to open.
It's naive of anyone to just say "Americans don't know how to make cars." That's stupid; there's no magic that the Germans and the Japanese have and we don't. There's no reason that the Ford engineers would want to make crappy cars (and in all fairness, I don't think they do); every car design is a result of lots of tradeoffs, including what can be manufactured at a certain price point at a particular time.
The U.S. auto industry is a behemoth, always lagging behind the times and wandering ponderously off in wrong directions, because it's almost impossible to steer. While some of that can be attributed to poor leadership, the root cause of the problem is just that there's a whole lot of dead weight that the foreign auto industries (particularly the Asian ones) don't have to deal with. If Kia wants to shutter a plant for six months so it can implement the latest robotic welders, it does; GM can't, although I think the unions are slowly getting with the program, and realizing that when the U.S. auto industry finishes its wounded-dinosaur routine and collapses, they're going to be squarely underneath.
http://www.washtech.org/ is a union. (Score:3, Informative)
Please join. At least get their newsletter. It's VERY informative. You don't have to give them money.
Re:Because that'll work *so* well. (Score:4, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Informative)