Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8pp5/kickstarter-employees-win-historic-union-election

by danso • 6 years ago

910 1052 6 years ago

dangus2• 6 years ago

That dynamic doesn’t reflect who we are as a company, how we interact, how we make decisions, or where we need to go. We believe that in many ways it would set us back, and that the us vs. them binary already has.

What a shameful statement.

Kickstarter has a so-so 3.6 on Glassdoor, and a sub-50% CEO approval rating. A lot of reviews talk about a secretive, insulated management group.

You don’t see companies with 4.5+ stars on Glassdoor unionizing.

So I’d have to ask their leadership: who made this an “us versus them” situation? Perhaps your local superstore sells handheld mirrors.

You don’t want your employees to unionize? Offer highly competitive salaries, benefits, and opportunities to grow. Treat employees like real people you care about and avoid turning the C-level suite into a force of secrecy, discrimination, and exclusion.

namdnay• 6 years ago

Or even better: your employees are unionizing? Great! It means you have an organized structure to discuss employee satisfaction with!

totaldude873• 6 years ago

or it could be even worse, the “us versus them” has gone to the next level.. its all up-to the mentality of management , if everyone flexes their muscle nothing good can come out of it.

celdon257• 6 years ago

Kickstarter has a so-so 3.6 on Glassdoor

Glassdoor's ratings are not terribly reliable. Here's something I wrote previously about my own experience with using it:

-----

I left a poor review for an employer only one time in the 10 years or so I've been on Glassdoor (there were only a couple other reviews). And almost immediately after, there were about 20 or 30 5 star reviews posted in a short amount of time. The company only had about that many employees, which proves that the CEO (or someone at the top) either told everyone to write a good review, or some of them were fake, both clearly 'incentivized' by any sane definition of the term. I reported this to Glassdoor and they refused to do anything about it, and I even had the report escalated and re-reviewed, without any effect.

Krasnol• 6 years ago

Our HR department spammed with "go to glassdoor and rate us" mails and hinted at giving good ratings because this way we'd be able to get people.

At some point people really started to rate them. Ended up with a 3.2 rating.

driverdan• 6 years ago

One of my past employers did something like this. We had some negative reviews from job candidates that weren't hired. At an all hands our CEO encouraged everyone to leave honest feedback on Glassdoor. A lot of employees did, bumping our score up. It wasn't dishonest or misleading, all of the reviews were real.

hello_moto8• 6 years ago

Offer highly competitive salaries

Every time I see this statement, I can't help it but wonder why people don't put some estimate what constitutes "highly competitive".

FAANG just shoot everybody expectation to the roof and non-FAANG is having hard time to compete in salary (sure, there are some exception but they are exceptions).

kerkeslager16• 6 years ago

From the workers' perspective, why should we care exactly? That sounds like a you problem.

If you aren't able to pay your workers, I'm not sure why you think you shouldn't just go out of business. People aren't obligated to work for substandard wages so you can get rich.

I certainly think that there are a lot of ways in which the playing field needs to be evened between small and big companies, so that the playing field is fairer to entrepreneurs and small business owners. But taking it out on workers isn't the answer.

codingmess10• 6 years ago

Isn't forming a union creating a "us versus them" situation?

naiveprogrammer3• 6 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if in some instances a low approval rating is endogenous to the company's employee makeup. I work in the HE sector and I can tell you that the lowest levels of student satisfaction comes from departments or disciplines comprising of mostly people complaining about society, yadayadyada

ksr_throwaway5• 6 years ago

Treat employees like real people you care about and avoid turning the C-level suite into a force of secrecy, discrimination, and exclusion.

This was the main driver for unionization. Outrageous incompetence from upper management.

Source: I work at Kickstarter

echelon• 6 years ago

I really don't understand this. A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of. Due to the shortage of software engineers, we can go anywhere and get a job instantly.

The only downside I can think of is ageism, but then again, I have colleagues in their 50s and 60s where I work. But I suppose this isn't universal. (I'm in Atlanta and we have a lot of older workers. Age doesn't seem to be a thing here.)

Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide, but we're paid a hell of a lot more than most people. We have the flexibility to find new work or create our own businesses.

Why introduce a new level of politics and collective bargaining? I don't want to pay union dues. If I don't like where I'm working, I'll go somewhere else.

Can someone explain why I should want this? (Or why I should empathize with those who do?) I don't understand it at all.

dangus2• 6 years ago

Just look at their employee reviews. The management there seems toxic.

I implore you to also think twice about the way in which you are demonizing unions. Sure, some unions aren’t the best, but what you’re saying is 100% discounting the benefits that a union can bring to employees. Union dues can more than pay for themselves in wage negotiation. They can restrict overwork, unpaid overtime (see the special salaried overtime exemptions that IT employees and teachers get enshrined into US law), and unsafe working conditions.

Sure, unions have bureaucracy, but they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase outcomes for the employee and not the employer. You are directly paying the union to represent and fight for you.

The “go work somewhere else” solution isn’t an equitable or realistic solution for many employees. That often equates to “I can go work somewhere else that’s just as shitty.”

Sure, life is nice for many tech employees right now, but what happens when the supply/demand situation inverts?

Tech employees often also have a very bad habit of pretending that more poorly compensated areas of their own company are enjoying the success in the same way. Ask someone in support or a junior graphic designer about what they think about the prospects of “working somewhere else.”

ApolloFortyNine2• 6 years ago

junior graphic designer

I don't think anyone says tech employee and is referring to graphic designers/anyone in that area.

99% sure anyone who hears tech employee is thinking software development.

EDIT: How on Earth can anyone downvote this statement? If you ask 10 people to name 10 tech companies, not one of them is going to pick a game studio.

celdon257• 6 years ago

The “go work somewhere else” solution isn’t an equitable or realistic solution for many employees. That often equates to “I can go work somewhere else that’s just as shitty.”

Bingo. I've worked at enough places to know that the greener grass myth is indeed a myth in the industry. That doesn't mean you can't get a better job, but there's always a very real risk that things will be worse at your new job.

briandear• 6 years ago

Union dues can more than pay for themselves in wage negotiation.

Those negotiations can also drag down your salary potential as well. You get paid what everyone else gets paid. If you warm the chair longer, you get paid more, regardless of any innovation or extra value you bring to the business.

You have incentivized mediocrity because what’s the point of doing anything beyond the minimum requirements? It isn’t like you’re going to get a raise for being especially clever.

manfredo13• 6 years ago

Sure, unions have bureaucracy, but they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase outcomes for the employee and not the employer. You are directly paying the union to represent and fight for you.

No, they have bureaucracy that is incentivized to increase the influence and power of the union leadership. You are directly paying the union to represent the union's interest, which may or may not align with your own.

E.g. a motivated, capable teacher has a portion of their salary deducted and spent on defending seniority based pay even if said teacher is in favor of performance based pay. The union directly acts against the desired of the employee.

maire• 6 years ago

The bigger issue is going from Salaried to Hourly employees. I assume (but don't know) that you need to be hourly in order to unionize.

I have been at a bunch of companies that reclassified employees from salaried to hourly. This always came after a single employee filed a lawsuit. It almost never impacted developers, sometimes impacted QA and often impacted other development support employees. I have never seen an impacted employee like it because they could not participate in stock options. I was only at companies with lucrative stock options.

If a company had poor stock options then I could see that somebody might like the change.

jkaplowitz4• 6 years ago

You don't need to be hourly to unionize. Salaried employees can do that. The exclusion is based on meeting the definition of supervisor, not by the payroll category.

ditonal• 6 years ago

Why do people on HN constantly claim that companies are right to consider “a false negative is better than a false positive”, act like insane interview gauntlets are normal and desired, AND claim that people can easily change jobs? It’s not true.

I live in the SF Bay Area, have worked as a SWE for 10+ years including at top companies like Google, and changing jobs is NOT easy and I’m sick of the implication it is.

There are also a LOT of younger kids on HN who have never worked through a recession.

Finally, just because you make an ok salary doesn’t mean a political voice is worthless. Why do doctors have the AMA?

Engineers desperately need to stop boxing themselves out of the discussions, we absolutely need to organize, badly.

crmrc114• 6 years ago

Having family who worked with the UAW as well is IBEW I can tell you that Trade Unions in general are much better at 'holding a standard' and truly keeping their trade-craft respectable.

However the UAW, the most worthless crap joke of a union that makes other unions look bad. Basically just protects people who show up to work drunk or drive forklifts into walls. Forces companies to do insane things to fire people who do nothing but drag down the common output of a factory.

Be careful what you wish for and who you choose to put in control a good union can be a blessing... a bad union can be a millstone around your neck that ends up just being owned and, in the case of the UAW, is just a puppet for whatever company they serve.

I will say that when with Amazon I talked to some of my peers in Germany and I was fascinated with the labor protections that were provided to staff over there vs. the USA. They have some kind of thing, like a "labor council" or something. This group had to be consulted before lots of things could be done. In this case I think that it kept the Amazon buildings across the pond much happier than the ones in the USA. (Obviously this is simply my opinion)

I am on the fence, I was raised in a blue collar union family- even went to a little UAW brainwashing camp as a kid (Black Lake anyone?). My family members in IBEW have shown me that there are some very dedicated unions that do very good things and keep a trade from turning into a free market shitshow where everything becomes lowest bidder. If a union exists to truly protect staff AS WELL AS uphold high standards I think it will survive. When its just US V. Them...gimme` free crap, you are asking to be burned to the ground by competition.

bitwize• 6 years ago

Why do people on HN constantly claim that companies are right to consider “a false negative is better than a false positive”, act like insane interview gauntlets are normal and desired, AND claim that people can easily change jobs?

If you were fired today you could walk into a new job by end of week, if you were any good. At least that's what Hackernews keeps telling me.

AnimalMuppet4• 6 years ago

Make your case. Why do we desperately need to organize?

celdon257• 6 years ago

I really don't understand this. A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of. Due to the shortage of software engineers, we can go anywhere and get a job instantly.

There are dozens and dozens of threads on this site about the cancerous software engineering interview techniques in widespread use in the industry. Despite having 15 years of experience and a lot of accomplishments under my belt, I still had a bad streak a few years back where I had to interview 30 times before getting an offer.

So I have to say it's a fallacy to make this kind of claim.

refurb3• 6 years ago

You think a union is going to fix the interview process?

karatestomp7• 6 years ago

Well, for one thing, the good times won't last forever. Now's the time to prepare for the bad—it's much harder to organize when you're weak.

For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money.

And then, software development and related jobs are not all at FAANG, or even close to that. Many of those working in software aren't negotiating, individually, from a position even a little better than a "normal" office worker. Probably most, in fact. There's a whole world of software developers out there beyond SV, Seattle, and New York—the average state of a worker in our industry, even just in the US, is probably much closer to the norm outside those places than in them.

It's also a proven avenue for putting a stop to all sorts of abuses that exist due to the uneven power of workers and employers, not just direct compensation. Lots of non-California workers in tech are under badly disadvantageous employment agreements, but without working collectively, either through unions or government, against them, they're so common that resisting them carries high individual risk and a low chance of benefiting anyone else who's in an even worse position to resist them. That flexibility to work or create our own businesses you bring up? Yeah, that could be assured for non-California, non-public-figure-rockstar developers, too, through union negotiations.

majormajor3• 6 years ago

For another, despite our compensation we're still much weaker at the bargaining table, individually, than our employers. See how casually so many of them reject applicants just to make sure "false positives" don't get through the hiring pipeline. I'm not saying they shouldn't do that—it's not my point—but it's definitely a sign of who's setting the terms of these interactions, and where the power is. And it'd be incredibly unusual if that weren't the case, as the overwhelming norm is for employers to have a huge advantage in labor negotiations versus individual workers, even if circumstances are currently such that those workers are paid a lot of money.

At the handful of places I've been, those "reject heavily" decisions are driven by engineering, not by HR or CEO.

HR often gets upset about the low offer rate, since it's not all that much fun for a recruiter to see so many people they bring in get rejected, or for a CEO to see "we need more people" as a continuing excuse for why stuff isn't getting done but also see people constantly rejected by the engineering managers.

Compensation decisions are a different beast, of course, and there a union could be much more helpful, but I would worry some about it introducing more of a "just throw more people at it" mythical-man-month thing.

pastor_elm• 6 years ago

Most of the people that work there probably aren't software engineers.

dunkelheit2• 6 years ago

Some things other than salary to consider: open-space offices, unpaid overtime, increase in managerial oversight (pointless standups etc.), erosion of work time/free time boundary, onerous non-compete/intellectual property clauses in employment contracts. Everybody is constantly bitching about those things but despite the claimed shortage of software engineers they seem to only get worse with time. I don't claim that unions are the solution but these problems don't seem to magically resolve themselves either.

AnimalMuppet4• 6 years ago

You say "increase in managerial oversight", but then mention standups. That's about the least onerous oversight possible. I understand not liking standups, but... that's not at the level of excessive management oversight. Excessive management oversight is a whole different level. (And yes, I know, standups can be part of that whole different level. That's the one you specifically mentioned, though. If that's the excessive management that most grates on you, you don't have excessive management.)

notJim• 6 years ago

As others say, one reason is that busts happen. I was reading the union contract for one of the local government unions (like you do…) the other day, and noticed they had a lot of provisions related to lay-offs. How much severance people get, how it's calculated, how it's decided who gets laid off, etc. This kind of thing would be very valuable if there's ever a tech bust.

The other thing is that not everyone experiences the supposed benefits of these careers. I talk to a lot of people who are exploited in the tech industry with long hours and salaries that aren't really that high for the high CoL we deal with. Talk to bootcamp graduates about their job experiences some time. PoC and women also report rampant discrimination—lower salaries for the same work, sexism, organizations providing cover and golden parachutes for harassers.

Finally, think of all the issues that we gripe about here on HN:

- Open office plans

- Horrible and overly-demanding hiring processes

- Lack of transparency or consistency around promotion processes and salaries

Fixing these types of issues are bread and butter for unions.

pathseeker14• 6 years ago

This kind of thing would be very valuable if there's ever a tech bust.

Not if you're a top performer who switches jobs to find new interesting things. If you look into the details of the "who gets laid off", it's very frequently just all of the newest members of each department.

HeroOfAges4• 6 years ago

As someone posted previously, would you consider the possibility it's not the software developers that are leading the push to unionize? Perhaps there are people occupying roles in the company that don't pay as well or roles that aren't considered as valuable. Could it be that they feel they should be compensated on par with their software developer counterparts?

edited for grammar

nitrogen• 6 years ago

I don't understand it at all.

I'm kind of in the same boat, though I actually kind of lean toward some kind of organizing. Those I know who are members of a national union complain about the union spending most of its money on things unrelated to the employment of its members.

But at the same time professional organizations like the AMA and ADA seem to benefit their members (unfortunately sometimes at the expense of the public).

I think the questions to ask are what's the bigger picture? What is the framing used in the current discussion to limit our view of that bigger picture? Who is doing the framing?

I don't have answers there, but it definitely seems like there's some important hidden variable that is omitted from the framing of either side of this debate.

standardUser• 6 years ago

"The only downside I can think of is ageism"

"Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide"

Seems like you came up with another downside in pretty short order. I believe you can come up with even more if you peruse the comments here.

HeroOfAges4• 6 years ago

Why do you assume software developers are leading the push to unionize? All we know is that Kickstarter employees have voted to unionize. The majority of Kickstarter employees don't write software. My cynical take is the non-dev employees feel they're not getting what they deserve in the form of let's say salary. Perhaps they would like compensation closer to or on par with the software developers at their company.

carapace9• 6 years ago

I've already mentioned this twice in other comments here, so I feel like I'm overdoing it, but I'm sincerely interested in your (and others') opinions:

About six years back it came out that the big tech companies were conspiring against their own employees:

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

ksr_throwaway5• 6 years ago

Sometimes it's not all about money. People in the bay area may not understand that most people working at Kickstarter truly believe in the company's mission. The money is not great and we've been willing to accept that to feel like we're making a positive change in the world. Unfortunately upper management has used this (as well as Kickstarter's reputation) as a bargaining chip to treat employees poorly.

Source: I work at Kickstarter

commandlinefan7• 6 years ago

we can go anywhere and get a job

that's exactly like the current one.

buzzkillington• 6 years ago

Yes, we're underpaid for the value we provide, but we're paid a hell of a lot more than most people.

And compared to Africa everyone in the US is overpaid. Janitors are welcome to try and raise their wages too. I will not lower mine on their behalf.

themagician• 6 years ago

“A career in software is one of the most pampered and lucrative ones I can think of.”

Yeah, when you are in the top 5%. I’m not sure you realize just how shit most tech jobs are. Not everyone gets $300k a year in stock. Most people get nothing.

You don’t want it because you are in the top decile. That’s the same reason that everyone who is in the top decile of anything doesn’t want change. This is for the 90%, not for you. You shouldn’t empathize. You should oppose this because it will ultimately hurt you.

baybal2• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft had something akin to a union at least a decade ago. Any Microsofters here?

DenisM• 6 years ago

I was there a decade ago, nothing of the kind was transpiring within my earshot. I also have plenty of friends there and never heard anything like this.

danharaj• 6 years ago

As a contractor, I'm happy for them. One day we will have one big union.

chimeracoder6• 6 years ago

One day we will have one big union.

The strength of labor unions in Europe is drawn in large part due to the fact that there are a multiplicity of unions representing workers for the same companies, and workers can choose who they want to represent them.

That's not the case for labor unions in the US.

Someone12346• 6 years ago

That's not the case because the US Government and industry has spent the last 150 years crushing unions and weakening them. Anti-union propaganda is rampant.

It could be the case in the US. Having a single union is a good place to start.

luckylion4• 6 years ago

That's not the case in Germany as well, there's practically only the DGB (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, German Trade Union Federation) that has member unions that have very little overlap. Yes, there are some small, competing unions (e.g. there is another union representing police officers and another federation for people working in government organisations) and some non-members (e.g. a union representing airplane pilots or medical personel), but there's not a lot of competition, the DGB represents about 85% of all union members and is very closely connected to the SPD, one of the major parties.

whalesalad2• 6 years ago

As a contractor, I am happy to have absolutely nothing to do with unions.

andrew_• 6 years ago

Agreed. I'm also happy to live in a right to work state, and that I'll never be beholden, without choice, to a union regardless of where I work.

erik9986• 6 years ago

You can be a contractor with your own S-corp and still get the same benefits as union members if you are in an industry that has union workers like SAG.

https://www.wrapbook.com/how-to-set-up-a-loan-out-company/

jdkee3• 6 years ago

“ I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

-Eugene Debs

exabrial2• 6 years ago

Nobody at kickstarter is living a wretched existence.

PaulHoule2• 6 years ago

That is some of the reason they can unionize. Kickstarter produces enough surplus that the workers can get a better deal than they would otherwise.

What's much more interesting is the labor status of the people who work on the Kickstarted projects.

Frondo3• 6 years ago

And if they want to negotiate collectively to change how the organization treats them, it's absolutely their right to do so. Unionization is also specifically enshrined in law.

I hope they pursue a path toward codetermination: getting workers a seat on the board. It'd be absolutely fascinating to see how that plays out in a US-based tech company; I believe it'd be for the good, but we'll know for sure if we can see it play out.

Edit: Oh, and not having a say in how your organization is run is a wretched existence. Time to raise our standards, if we don't see that.

xtian• 6 years ago

That's why they have the leverage to organize and help reset the precedent for labor representation at a point in time when that representation is at a historic low.

dv_dt7• 6 years ago

Do they have to live a wretched existence? Exactly how wretched does it have to be to allow them the ability to organize.

Or perhaps they are justified to want a better share of the value created at kickstarter by their labor.

carapace9• 6 years ago

Tech workers are better off, but still treated poorly by management:

"Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees"

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

The thing that gets me about Apple specifically is that they did this while sitting on huge cash reserves and being one of the top ten most profitable companies in the world, yet they still fucked over their own people to make more.

I used to think that, as a 733t programmer, I had no use for unions, but then this happened and showed that there's no particular reason to trust tech company management at all, at all. They'll screw you to make a buck and get a slap on the wrist if anything if they're caught.

Interview with Google and they will send you lovely little videos with folks sliding down banisters and such to show you how wonderful it is to work there. It won't mention the "wage-fixing cartel" that limits your job opportunities and take-home pay.

It's pretty sick when you think about it. I don't know it unions are the answer, it's complicated after all, but absolutely these folks are not your friends, and you should coe in with as much leverage as you can get if you want to work for "the man".

dmos622• 6 years ago

I'm sure this phrase inspired many, but it's talking about an extreme. What if the disadvantaged are not having a "wretched existence"? Is immense inequality ok then? That's the big question.

davengh• 6 years ago

Your definition of "wretched existence" might be very different from the folks seeking union representation.

stronglikedan• 6 years ago

one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful

Assuming all of the risk is useful. I understand the point, but it's undercut by that woefully inaccurate jab.

dv_dt7• 6 years ago

Workers assume risk taking on an opportunity cost with their employers, and the very wealthy often mitigate their risk by pushing it onto the government.

kleer001• 6 years ago

Assuming all of the risk is useful.

I've never seen a multi-millionaire, let alone a billionaire actually take the cost of failure on personally. Risk externalization is the theme of the era.

eej71• 6 years ago

If the world gets to the point where it really thinks their work is useless, I hope _they_ go on strike.

exabrial2• 6 years ago

They'd be wise to learn from history: There are many people willing do your job for cheaper, most of them in other countries working for smaller wages.

MBCook• 6 years ago

If that was true it should have happened years ago, no?

pcwalton2• 6 years ago

There wouldn't be any programmers in the Bay Area—or, for that matter, the US—if price were the only relevant factor in hiring developers.

notyourday10• 6 years ago

That's what Detroit thought.

Someone12346• 6 years ago

I hope then you're passing on pay increases and benefit improvements to stay competitive. If not, then you're applying different logic to single employee competitiveness then to group bargaining without any factual basis.

ughitsaaron4• 6 years ago

This is a perfect description of a race to the bottom.

Dirlewanger• 6 years ago

And this is what open and free markets will allow for.

claudeganon9• 6 years ago

They'd be wise to learn from history

Seems like they did learn from history. Unions are they only thing that have proven consistently, across the world, to protect wages, rights, and give workers a say in their workplaces.

ilikehurdles7• 6 years ago

Those same people working for the same cheaper wages have existed for a long time before kickstarter got a union. Running with your logic, it's a wonder anyone is employed in this country at all.

dudul• 6 years ago

I think that on the contrary, History has proven over the past few decades that wide outsourcing doesn't work. Companies tried it in the 90's and it was a disaster. This is why software devs in the US can command a salary of $100k+

barryrandall• 6 years ago

Rockwell Collins, which became United Technologies, which became Raytheon, who was responsible for the 737 MAX's MCAS software and outsourced it to a low wage country, agrees.

throw_m239339• 6 years ago

They'd be wise to learn from history: There are many people willing do your job for cheaper, most of them in other countries working for smaller wages.

Then why didn't all start ups outsource all their IT jobs to India for instance already? They are considerably cheaper than US software engineers.

I mean what stopped all these IT businesses to do that yesterday? I know more instances of businesses that tried to outsource their IT overseas only to go back on that decision, than successful IT outsourcing stories.

kerkeslager16• 6 years ago

You would be wise to learn from history: many software companies have tried this and many of those companies no longer exist as a result.

claudeganon9• 6 years ago

I hope we can look back on this day as the first in a series of victories in which tech workers rest back control from their workplaces from their executives that have driven them off course. From sex abuse scandals to wage fixing to collaboration with authoritarian regimes, it’s clear that many of these companies have become unmoored from the vision, talent, and ideals of the labor makes that makes them possible.

Pfhreak3• 6 years ago

Congrats to the Kickstarter folks. Here's hoping this is the turn towards increased workers rights in the tech sector.

Yes, this sector tends to pay fairly well, but that doesn't mean there aren't other areas to improve. From IP restrictions to overtime, oncall to transparency in promotions, there are countless workplace conditions I hear about needing to improve constantly.

ancarda• 6 years ago

transparency in promotions?

Pfhreak3• 6 years ago

In a lot of companies there's a sense that the promotion process is secret, unfair, or doesn't evaluate everyone equally. Especially at big tech companies (at Amazon, for instance, I often heard a sense that it was 'impossible' to get to L6. Additional transparency can help people understand why they are/are not moving to the next level.)

kirstenbirgit• 6 years ago

What's the benefit of being in a union for highly specialized tech workers that are very in demand?

adrr• 6 years ago

Maximizing the value of the demand.

pcwalton2• 6 years ago

Same sort of benefits as, say, union electricians receive, who are also specialized workers who are very in demand in certain markets.

Or, for that matter, doctors, who are frequently members of professional organizations that are unions in all but name.

Someone12346• 6 years ago

The same things as any other union? Improved working conditions (e.g. hours), protecting employees from abuses, and maintaining fair pay & benefits.

Unions as only a working class institution is mostly a US historic artifact. Other countries have unions in highly specialized and in-demand industries too.

dmix2• 6 years ago

What were the specific concerns of the Kickstarter employees though? Were they being worked extra hours or being abused by management? Or not getting proper market wages? This is quite a heavy hammer to a set of problems, so I'm curious how bad it really was.

Were they firing people arbitrarily making it a positive thing that the company will now have to jump through hoops to reprimand or get rid of the worst non-productive workers? Or the countless other limitations now imposed on the company from making decisions which benefit the existence of the company itself (and the fact they can even hire/pay for these workers)?

Will it make Kickstarter super cautious about hiring new people with their new extensive protections lowering the amount of people who would benefit from the success of various companies who have unions (and the taxation of these which benefits the wider community)? Turning them into mini-exclusive clubs of workers, while everyone else works p/t or on contract to avoid f/t hires?

jamiequint5• 6 years ago

How are extremely in-demand tech workers not "maintaining fair pay & benefits"? Surely if they were not being paid "fairly" (not sure what that means anyways, if not market price) they could just leave, as there are plenty of tech jobs in NYC where Kickstarter is based.

paxys2• 6 years ago

The top earning actors and athletes in the country all have strong union representation, but for some reason it's software engineers who think "nah we are too well paid".

tqi2• 6 years ago

Professional athletes in the US need unions because the leagues are granted a legal monopoly. AFAIK most European soccer professionals (where there is more options and competition between leagues) do not have player unions / Collective Bargaining Agreements.

commandlinefan7• 6 years ago

for some reason it's software engineers

Well, at the risk of getting all tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, I can’t help but wonder if the people posting these “you guys are too well paid to have any other concerns” types are really practicing software developers and not “startup founders”.

Pfhreak3• 6 years ago

Advocating for better working conditions. For example (not saying that these are specific to Kickstarter, I don't know that culture, but they do occur elsewhere in tech):

1) Better IP restrictions. Working on open source, side projects, etc.

2) Better treatment around oncall.

3) Limiting hours (no expectations of 60+ hour weeks)

4) Transparency in hiring, promotion, and review processes

5) Transparency in company performance and benefits decisions

6) Better benefits, particularly things like parental leave, vacation, and health care

7) A greater slice of the value that workers provide

8) Representation at the board level, or at least a democratically elected representative to the C-level

9) A representative during disagreements with the company (e.g. making it harder to be singled out/fired just because)

There are probably a bunch more, this is just what comes to mind off the top of my head.

CPLX• 6 years ago

Many other specialized high demand workforces with intense disparities in skill and compensation between coworkers have done well with unions. Professional athletes, screenwriters, and actors are obvious reference points.

goatinaboat• 6 years ago

You should ask members of the AMA or the SAG or The Bar.

Mvandenbergh2• 6 years ago

I think most Americans mostly have experience with blue collar unions, often ones that represent relatively unskilled labour. Consider though that even in the US, there are plenty of unions (or things which are effectively unions) which represent highly differentiated and skilled professions.

Notably, directors, actors, and writers in American film and television are unionised. That does not mean that everyone is paid the same, nor that there is any concept as "seniority" (very rare in unions that represent highly skilled workers), nor that it is assumed that everyone has the same level of skill.

While the AMA and ABA are not conventionally considered unions, they do effectively control entry into and regulation of their respective professions. (Medicine and Law).

If brain surgeons benefit from being in a union, javascript developers probably do as well.

papreclip• 6 years ago

AMA and ABA are protectionist and "America-first", though. The tech unionization movement is full of people who favor open borders and the like

ughitsaaron4• 6 years ago

Just off the top of my head: transparency in promotions and evaluations, greater pay equity, and just cause protections against arbitrary discipline and termination

fistfucker3000• 6 years ago

You can actually stop your company from doing shady or unethical things. This can mean holding a person in power accountable to sexual harassment, preventing your company from selling user data to a shady third party, demanding better working conditions for contractors at your company (think apple and foxconn).

astura• 6 years ago

There's many benefits but one big one that would apply to tech workers is benefits/working conditions guaranteed by a contract where you have a union negotiating those benefits on your behalf.

For example, the vast majority of employers reserve the right to change benefits at any time, and they liberally do in a minor downturn. I've worked at places where an email was sent saying "as of tomorrow we will no longer match your 401(k)." That's it, one executive decided something, you just have to deal with it or quit. Another example is an email saying "this is the new PTO acquiral schedule." I lost a whole week of PTO that day, no apologies, just a "this is how it's going to be." If you're working under a union contract where the benefits are spelled out in the contract, they have to wait until the contract term runs out and then renegotiate another contract to change the benefits.

Some tech companies are known to demand unpaid overtime without prior warning. A union contract may have a provision where you must be paid for overtime or overtime can't be mandatory, etc.

Another example might be that allegations of misconduct must have a transparent investigation before adverse action is taken and the employee is entitled to be represented by the union during the investigation.

If you've only worked in a bull market environment with a massive amount of free flowing VC money you might not appreciate those sorts of things. I've worked outside SV during the Great Recession, during that time jobs dried up and benefits were dropped like a bad date. I was laid off and had to relocate to get a new job. I'm not saying that a union would have prevented that, I'm just illustrating that jobs might not be so plentiful at some point in the future.

Another thing is when a significant portion of a workforce is unionized then there is a tendency to improve the working conditions of non-union shops because they have to compete with unioned shops for employees.

Professional athletes are some of the the most highly specialized, highly paid, and highly demanded employees and the vast majority of them at the highest level are unionized.

commandlinefan7• 6 years ago

very in demand

Who, exactly, is highly in demand? There was a post on here last week from somebody who had gone on, I think, 40+ in-person interviews and hadn’t gotten a single offer. It’s well established that experience actually works against you in this profession; you can end up being too old long before you hit retirement age. Influential hiring authority Aline Lerner argues that people with Master’s degrees should be rejected in favor of those with just Bachelor’s degrees; education can work against you, too. There’s an unprecedented market for 30-year-old developers with specific education and experience; if you’re anybody else, you would have been better off getting a business degree. To paraphrase Bane, “Do you feel in demand”?

mempko6• 6 years ago

Ask highly paid actors why they are in a union.

LarryDarrell3• 6 years ago

Assuming this is true, now is the time to form a union. Not when they are no longer in high demand.

There's a lot of hubris in the tech field that high salaries and a plethora of available jobs is the norm and will forever be that way.

I anticipate a lot of "Why Tech Needs A Union" posts on HN during the next recession or when the current crop of 25-35 year olds reach their late 40's and all of a sudden have trouble finding stable work.

fogetti3• 6 years ago

It didn't happen in the US but back during the 2009 global financial crisis Nokia let about 15000 employees go. Many of those were employed in Germany (I am not one of those though) and I heard they were pretty well protected by their union and up for a generous allowance when their time came to leave the company. If it were not for the union, the company would have let them go empty handed.

ughitsaaron4• 6 years ago

Congratulations to everyone at Kickstarter!

All workers deserve a voice in their workplace and that's exactly what the solidarity of a union provides.

nimbius• 6 years ago

Speaking as an IAM union member, congratulations! now comes the hard part.

You're probably (still) going to hear a lot of FUD from your employer but dont worry, things really do only get better from here. Once you get a union youll get more quarterly insight into your companies profits, losses, and a MUCH better picture of what the company intends to do in the next six to twelve months. Youll also get a direct say in almost anything you think will help the business. Im not just talking about a suggestion box for the snack-o-matic, but real input to people with actual power.

the hard part is the election period. Kickstarter is going to pull out ALL the stops to change your mind. youll get harassing phone calls at night, weird letters in email, meetings intended for one thing but that end up as an anti-union rant (EX: Safety meetings that turn into anti-union propaganda immediately) and of course lots, and lots, of direct mail from people and organizations no ones heard of outside a union busters office. Youll also get invited to a ton of after-work "pow wow" or "support" groups that sound like they are union related, but arent. Keep your eyes on the prize, ignore the fliers on your windshield, and vote.

crankylinuxuser3• 6 years ago

I just formed a company back in December. Super easy to set up an LLC, C or S Corp. But I wanted it to be a worker co-op like Mondragon. And there's no real guidance or help.

Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm. And trying to do it right from the ground up is high impossible.

As a obligatory comment: are there any other in the HN-sphere that focuses on worker cooperatives?

danso• 6 years ago

Sure, it's hard/unfeasible for a startup to unionize in its formative years. But Kickstarter was founded in 2009 and is a relatively mature company in the tech sector.

umvi3• 6 years ago

Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm.

Democracy is a horribly inefficient system of government. Its only redeeming quality is that it seems effective at (so far) deterring tyranny and abuse of power.

However, like I said, it's horribly inefficient. Changes that are easy to make under a dictatorship can be extremely hard to make under a democracy. Not exactly a quality you would want for a project or company, especially if you (the founder) have a vision.

IMO, part of the reason Linux and Python were so successful was that they had a "benevolent dictator" with a strong vision. Imagine the gridlock that would occur with Linux development if we had a 2-party system that polarized on controversial issues and got mired at every vote.

dv_dt7• 6 years ago

Look here and with their sister orgs

https://www.usworker.coop/home/

They hold conferences and workshops.

Edit: And if you're looking for a higher level approach:

https://democracycollaborative.org/

archagon• 6 years ago

I’ve been wondering recently to what extent the political structures of the most successful corporations may influence those of politics at large...

It’s funny that we value democracy in name, but still enforce a rigid, top-down, and winner-takes-all hierarchy in most of our businesses.

j4pe• 6 years ago

Nice! I also ran a company as a worker coop - but I structured it as an LLC, just because it was far easier. Coop practices like revenue sharing were defined through company bylaws, not its legal ownership structure.

Lots of people have done coops in tech. One decent list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic theory of why corporations are structured as centrally controlled fiefdoms instead of democracies, and why Valve was apparently more democratic (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...). Great read.

metalliqaz2• 6 years ago

election period

didn't they just complete the election?

jkaplowitz4• 6 years ago

Yes, and successfully.

rolltiide3• 6 years ago

Opinions aside, you have to see the writing is on the wall.

codingmess10• 6 years ago

Which is? People crave Socialism?

commandlinefan7• 6 years ago

However you feel about unions (and I personally have many reservations), if tech workers unionize, management will have nobody to blame but themselves. They've had decades to listen to us, and they've responded with open offices, JIRA (or the equivalent) ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, whiteboard coding interviews and zero training. We're well paid but besides that, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.

codingmess10• 6 years ago

You can always start your own company if you are unhappy about other companies' conduct.

rolltiide3• 6 years ago

We're well paid but besides that, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.

Relative to other wage workers yes, but nowhere close to the ratios between wage and housing last seen 30 years ago. There are opportunities to negotiate for that sort of compensation again.

As long as annual compensation doesn't let you own a house outright in 5 years in the same area as your place of work, then there is more work to do.

Comparing yourself to other trades is not relevant. Wage growth in one not-so-rare trade will benefit many more trades and people.

Most of us would not be where we are today if we limited our aspirations to what other people do.

michaelt2• 6 years ago

I'd be hard-pressed to think of a way we could collectively be treated with any more contempt than we already are.

I'm guessing you've never worked a job in the retail, warehouse or food service industries :)

rolltiide3• 6 years ago

more shares for everyone! immediate monthly vesting, no 1-year cliffs, refreshers 6 months in woooo! I hear some companies are already like this, but then you have other companies with like only 5% vesting on the first year and no refreshers.

busterarm2• 6 years ago

Kickstarter has had no intention of going public and doesn't issue shares like that to employees at all.

zchrykng5• 6 years ago

Is Kickstarter in a right-to-work state? Because if not, 46 people are forcing 37 to support a union that they might not agree with, which is distasteful in the extreme.

ughitsaaron4• 6 years ago

Thankfully, New York is not a right-to-work state.

zchrykng5• 6 years ago

So you are fine with the majority forcing the minority to support something they don't want to support? Never going to get behind that notion myself.

big_chungus4• 6 years ago

Why thankfully? Don't workers' rights mean they ought to make their own choices about joining a union or not?

freepor• 6 years ago

60 million people are forcing 63 million people to support (pay taxes to) a government they don’t agree with. This is just how governance works.

ilikehurdles7• 6 years ago

You led me to find a map of US anti-union "right-to-work" states on wikipedia[1]. I previously figured pretty much all of the US is under RTW legislation, but it seems like, outside of the folks in Texas, almost the entire tech industry is in non-RTW states.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law#U.S._states_...

zchrykng5• 6 years ago

Looks like a nice list of places where I'm willing to live and where I'm not. If my co-workers want to unionize, more power to them, but I'm not going to give the union a single cent. Even if they are officially responsible for representing me to my employer, that wasn't my choice and they don't represent my interests.

Joeri• 6 years ago

Why does it work that way in the U.S.? In my country everyone can freely join a union, all union employees can go on strike if the union allows it, and they’re not allowed to prevent others from working. At no point to my knowledge do all workers in a company have to decide to unionize. Why the collective decision?

jcims3• 6 years ago

This is the problem with the conversation around unions. The way they operate traditionally in the US seems to be very different than how they operate in Europe, and many of the negative externalities from how they operate in the US are just pissed away as anecdotal rather than a possible threat to their success.

If this union shits the bed, and there's no evidence that it will but plenty of evidence that it's possible, it's going to be catastrophic to the overall case for tech unions in the US.

Unfortunately the signal from the actual discussion is going to be lost in the noise from vested interests in both sides, so we're probably not going to learn anything.

Ajedi322• 6 years ago

Anyone else think the phrasing in the title is a bit weird? Were there other people voting in this election who were not Kickstarter employees? How can a group which makes up 100% of the electorate not "win" an election? The outcome reflects the majority opinion, by definition.

zchrykng5• 6 years ago

Only 46 employees voted for the union, 37 against.

Ajedi322• 6 years ago

That's kinda my point. A significant percentage of employees were against unionization, so it seems rather odd to treat "Kickerstarter Employees" as a monolithic group who "won" the election. It'd be like announcing the results of a political election with the headline: "U.S. Voters Win Historic Presidential Election."

ccsnags• 6 years ago

It isn’t a win for those people that voted against it. I worked blue collar union jobs throughout my 20s in private and public sector. That experience has made me critical of unions. I will never vote to unionize and I will always buck unionization.

SpicyLemonZest9• 6 years ago

When employees vote against joining a union, that's generally called a victory for the company's management, so the phrasing contrasts against that. It's definitely loaded language, but it's common enough I can't get too worked up about it.

sp3322• 6 years ago

It doesn't say they won, as opposed to losing. It says they won a union, as opposed to winning a... lack of union.

arrogantidiot• 6 years ago

Sounds like Kickstarter will sell their assets and close soon.

_sbrk3• 6 years ago

I worked in a union shop once, as a summer intern.

Every day, we were told to be in the break room at 7:59am to begin promptly at the 8am bell. By 4:30 or 4:45pm, everyone was back in there, waiting for the clock to hit 5pm.

One day, I needed to connect two PCs together, which was approved by boss as they would be isolated from the network. So, being the diligent type, I went off and found some network cards and a cable to do this.

About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.

Not "you're not qualified", not "you're not taking the proper ESD protection steps" (was wearing a grounding tape strap), etc. This boiled down to the union job classification, which said that I couldn't open up a PC to put in a network card.

Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

I got my degree, went to work for a start-up where ambition and taking on responsibility are appreciated and rewarded. I never looked back...

crankylinuxuser3• 6 years ago

You Do know that there's more than 1 way to set up a union, right?

There are such things as professional unions (think old European guilds) that also enforce competency and much more.

wellthisisgreat5• 6 years ago

somehow I seriously doubt the people from that article will add any competency laws or requirements to the workers to their union at all.

claudeganon9• 6 years ago

That's a cool anecdote. Meanwhile, unions across Europe won massive increases in standards of living for all workers, from better leave, healthcare, safety protections, to even blocking the wealthy from having control over their democracies through militant, labor-backed political parties.

SpicyLemonZest9• 6 years ago

I'm not sure that last part is really a recommendation. What if I don't agree with the political positions of my union's leadership?

nradov• 6 years ago

A friend of mine worked as a developer at defense contractor with mostly union employees. One time they moved him to a different cubicle. Due to union work rules he literally had to wait two days for a union electrician to come by and plug his desktop computer into the wall socket. Just ridiculous.

duxup6• 6 years ago

Personally I had to wait a week to move desks until an electrician carried my desktop two desks over. He didn't move my monitor ... that wasn't included in the rules.

jtbayly• 6 years ago

I ran into this sometimes when I worked conferences. We weren’t allowed to plug in our equipment, though we had paid for a power drop and it was sitting there. Of course, nobody was there to do it, so I would just plug it in. If they want to come by later and unplug it and plug it back in, they can feel free.

dd364• 6 years ago

I had same issue at a large investment bank. I don’t blame the union so much as the negotiated rules. De minimis items shouldn’t need union unless there’s a safety or liability issue.

kstrauser• 6 years ago

I've personally seen this exact same thing. I was raised pro-union. I'm still very pro-union. Stuff like this is just batty, though.

zipwitch• 6 years ago

Was that "union rules" or "the way the company had agreed to comply with their agreement with the union"? Because 'work to rule' can be a double-edged sword, and in my experience companies just love to blame their own chosen behavior on the union. "We have to fire you if you're late five times this quarter, because the union" really means "after we frequently and arbitrarily abused employees under the excuse of 'attendance' the union insisted we have a uniform attendance standards and this is what we came up with".

lexs8• 6 years ago

That exact same scenario happened to me but it wasn't at a union shop. Seems weird to blame this on unions in general. Dumb rules are dumb rules...

carapace9• 6 years ago

Since we're all trotting out anecdotes...

I knew a guy who came to work at Google and didn't get a laptop for two weeks. No unions were involved.

commandlinefan7• 6 years ago

had to wait two days for a union electrician

Ok, fair enough. I once had a job where there was no union, but if I needed to get something deployed to production (or even test), I had to fill out a form, submit it to devops, have them tell me that I filled it out wrong, fill it out again, wait for them to prioritize it, stay on a call with them while they did it, have them tell me again that my form wasn’t specific enough, resubmit it again, wait again, and hopefully be permitted to let them complete the job that I was being held responsible for. I could have ssh’ed into the server, uploaded the binary and restarted the server at any point, but bureaucracy prevented me. This is, in fact, pretty standard. This has nothing to do with unionization, it has to do with liability and risk management.

mason55• 6 years ago

Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

There is nothing inherent in unions that make them operate like that.

joncrane• 6 years ago

It's something inherent in human nature, unfortunately.

zip1234• 6 years ago

I had a uncle that was a bricklayer and moved somewhere that bricklayers were in demand so that he could get paid more. He was not a union member. When the union found out he was doing the same work for slightly less, they sent some people over to threaten his life if he didn't join union or leave. He left.

Mirioron2• 6 years ago

There is nothing inherent that makes dictatorships violent. Yet they are. But maybe there is something inherent that makes them violent after all? It's simply not obvious at a glance that they're going to be violent.

I'm not sure that there's nothing inherent in unions that makes them promote mediocrity. There could be - the fact that unions add more layers to the bureaucracy and slow things down could very well have the effect of promoting mediocrity.

Generally, if you want people to do the best work, then the people need to be motivated and they need to have as little friction as possible. Unions add friction. In a company where things work, unions would probably add friction and cause more mediocrity.

Note that I'm not saying that unions necessarily cause this, but I am saying that they might be a cause for it. Claiming otherwise with no supporting arguments isn't convincing.

rpiguy3• 6 years ago

Unions operate financially like churches. They depend on the dues (tithes) paid by their membership. The more members you have, the more influence and power you have.

This incentivizes unions to never voluntarily reduce their numbers. The more mediocre the employees, the more protection they need from the union, and thus the more power the union has over the employee population.

The ideal union employee to a union boss, based on how unions are funded and run in the US, is a minimally competent drone that regularly pays dues.

Unions also consistently advocate credentialism over performance. If an employer wants to improve performance the union will fight any outcome based benchmarks, and will instead push for everyone to be educated and certified. In truth it would be best for the business to do both, educate and measure outcomes. What is more important, that every teacher in the US have a masters degree, or that every teacher be good at teaching. The union will always advocate for the former.

I like unions, particularly in the private sector. I wish they operated differently and were more pro-active in cultivating skill (like old school guilds) and less about body count.

jdkee3• 6 years ago

Millions of people across the U.S. benefit from collective bargaining, such as increased wages, health benefits and retirement security, yet one anecdotal off-topic post gets upvoted.

azinman24• 6 years ago

Probably because it resonates as a real problem despite the upsides.

lawnchair_larry14• 6 years ago

That’s not the correct comparison. Unions are a hedge against abusive employers when employees lack other options. They are a blunt instrument with many downsides. They make sense when the downsides are not worse than the abusive employer. This does not describe the situation with kickstarter employees, and any real union job would find this entitlement laughable.

dubcanada• 6 years ago

This is a very strangely specific comment.

I am not saying if I agree or disagree, it just seems that you had a rather specific instance.

Unions don't mean anything you said above, all a union does is have a strong-arm against the "company". And gives the company a way of communicating with everyone.

Unions don't make rules like what you experienced, a large amount of unneeded employees with nothing to do convince unions to do that.

jcims3• 6 years ago

This is an extremely common pattern with union practices in the US.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22that%27s+not+your+job%22+...

duxup6• 6 years ago

"Unions don't make rules like what you experienced,"

They negotiate them with the employer. What comes out of those negotiations like all compromises sometimes gets really wonky.

amyjess• 6 years ago

Any union in the tech industry is going to resemble professional unions such as Hollywood unions or sports unions much more than the punch-clock unions seen in manufacturing and government.

ilikehurdles7• 6 years ago

This goes against the anti-union propaganda, though. I'm sure if we unionize, some mafioso from "corporate" will come down to my home office 8 US states away to plug in my monitor before I'm allowed to work.

/sarcasm

What an absolute joke of a discussion. Rather than discussion how actual professional unions operate in our fields, instead we're talking about punch-clocks and strict schedules (which I had plenty of in non-union shops) and over-bureaucratic corporates.

lawnchair_larry14• 6 years ago

No, it will look nothing like those. The industries have virtually nothing in common.

duxup6• 6 years ago

My experience with US unions was similar.

They're just another layer of bureaucracy that is NOT required to respond to you as an individual in any way. I've had lots of poor experience with US unions protecting the lowest denominator at the expense of everyone else. They seem to focus on very specific rules that came up in specific situations applied to everything possible and end up just creating a web that is no different than an employer's web of bureaucracy ... albeit much slower / resistant to change.

I've seen a lot of strange posts about how a union will help with X, Y, Z. They can only help with what they've negotiated, and those rules are restrictions on you as well as the employer. In the US if you've got a fairly simple job that's probabbly OK and a net positive. A nuanced job / people with lots of different skill sets / moving quickly ... those rules can be a nightmare.

Those rules apply to what you can or can't do as much as they apply to what your employer wants to do.

I've heard European unions are notably different, I'm highly skeptical of anyone's ability to emulate that as the help most tech union drives in the US seem to be getting is from traditional US unions.

Balero2• 6 years ago

The experience I have had with UK unions is very different from this, and the other descriptions of unions in the US.

I only had a few interactions with them (in a union capacity, the rep was a normal worker as well). These were things like: Getting some new equipment for the break room (kettle and mugs), pushing some new health and safety process (developed alongside the company), and then the yearly meeting, which was along the lines of: "We tried to get X% pay increase, but we ended up only getting X-y% increase. We're organising events for this charity this year. If you want to get involved please get in touch".

I get the feeling that, in general, in Europe unions and companies work together with a co-operative relationship. Whereas in the US there are many that have a more antagonistic relationship, which is just weird to me.

azinman24• 6 years ago

It’s all pros and cons. This is very much one of the big negatives of unions. That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time. In an era of massive income inequality, it’s a loss. I wish there was a way to get best of both worlds.

—-

I’ve always felt ESD stuff is way overhyped. I’ve handled a ton of electronics over decades without any ESD protection, and never had an issue. I just touch metal once before starting in while seated.

pathseeker14• 6 years ago

That said, they also are one of the bigger drivers of worker pay increasing over time.

Not in the tech industry. Salaries in software have outpaced any union environment just through competition for labor and a booming economy rewarding technology.

mc324• 6 years ago

Tech companies in NYC (the likes any one would recognize) who have DCs in NYC area are affected.

If you’ve worked with them in infra you’ll have come across issues like so and so left for the day. They’ll be back tomorrow and so on. It could be as simple as flicking a switch.

1_2__4• 6 years ago

This is absolutely bog-standard anti-union propaganda. This could have been written in the 1960s.

mempko6• 6 years ago

If you don't think there is waste and ridiculous rules without unions, you need to work for any medium to large company.

Large/medium sized companies are run with tiny fiefdoms where the more people working under you means more power.

You don't need unions to have people do bullshit and useless wasteful work.

dd364• 6 years ago

Agreed. All people protect their realm regardless of unions.

Jweb_Guru11• 6 years ago

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this reads like poorly disguised anti-union propaganda, but it does. In my experience with startups--which is a bit more extensive than yours is with union workplaces--"ambition and taking on responsibility" are rewarded only when it's convenient, and those rewards are often removed or withheld for arbitrary or personal reasons that have nothing to do with your quality of work. The fact that your bosses can (and do) fire startup employees at a moment's notice without any real consequences to themselves would probably concern you more than whether the employees... worked regular eight hour days (wait, why is this being spun as a negative?), were you in an industry where jobs were tighter.

Goronmon3• 6 years ago

The only thing missing is the comment starting with "I'm not anti-union, but..."

overthemoon• 6 years ago

Sounds like a crummy union.

Anyway, what's wrong with keeping mediocre, unmotivated employees employed? What's so great about ambition? This is tongue in cheek, but I feel like plenty of people, with good justification, would think of their jobs in exactly the terms you describe, with words like "serve" as in a prison sentence.

cactus2093• 6 years ago

One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served"

I really dislike any kind of system that more tightly couples people's well-being to their employer. Government regulations on industries like safe working conditions can be great and really help to protect people. No matter what company you work at, they'll protect you. But a company union, where I am only protected as long as I work in this one place, just isn't appealing to me. If I get transfered to a bad manager, or any number of other things happens that makes the job a little worse, now I have to worry about leaving the union, maybe throwing away the number of years I've been working towards my next promotion, etc. Similarly, I really dislike employee healthcare plans for being a huge hurdle to anyone who wants to leave a job and work for themselves, or work part-time to spend more time with their kids, or take on any number of other flexible work options.

I don't buy that the only possible choices are either to have no protections and continue to erode the middle-class standard of living, or force everyone to work 40-hours a week full-time at a big corporation the rest of their lives to have decent conditions. I really hope other alternatives like UBI start to catch on more.

Goronmon3• 6 years ago

Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed.

What's wrong with "mediocre" employees staying employed?

homonculus1• 6 years ago

Everything is a trade-off between priorities. You can optimize for anything, but not everything.

There's nothing "wrong" with stable employment for unproductive people, but when you optimize for that as a goal, then you're paying for it with things like decreased productivity and immense frustration for the creative people who actually want to solve problems. Detaching employment from productivity reduces it to ritual, which is incredibly demotivating for the good workers who see through the farce. They can't even go off on their own to volunteer their skills for the common good, because they still rely on employment--but their hands are tied within that sphere due to a fundamental distortion of its meaning.

The current system was designed at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution for factory labor. Instead of pretending that we can force it to be relevant into the future, we need to accept that productivity is moving into the realm of cognitive work. Part of this means educating people from the ground up to use information tools and reason abstractly, but we also have to admit that not everybody is going to have the innate ability to contribute in the future, and handle that in a way that doesn't hamstring the people who can.

manfredo13• 6 years ago

Because now other employees have no motivation to put in anything more than mediocre work. The reality is people are motivated primarily by self interest. If advancement and retention is based on seniority rather than merit, people have no incentive to put in more than the minimum work.

LarryDarrell3• 6 years ago

It takes time, but you'll find that most of the ambitious and motivated people you'll meet are also mediocre. The successful ones tend to also have had luck on their side.

erik9986• 6 years ago

Those were my initial feelings as well. I guess the issue comes down to focusing on software development as a skill and having that skill rewarded in manner you can count on. Our industry is really similar to actors. They have SAG and their guild negotiates with the MPAA. So every studio needs to belong to MPAA. Every year they negotiate the daily/weekly minimum rates for actors with SAG. They are pretty flexible with different rates for indy films vs big budget films. It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such...

https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate....

If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well.

I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG.

I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job.

If your are making over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point...

https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c....

Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.

notyourday10• 6 years ago

Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.

Unless you want to spend most of your life waiting tables and bartending while looking for another part time gig at some software house, this is the last thing that you want.

creaghpatr• 6 years ago

Also, several of these companies like Apple, Netflix, and Amazon already deal with those unions as content producers.

apexalpha2• 6 years ago

This seems like a cartoonishly simple respresentation of what a union can do.

Why would one have no incentive to excel? Our union creates entire promotion matrixes for excelling employees.

Comparing it to a prison... Are you a worker or a shill for corporate?

dang5• 6 years ago

Please don't cross into personal attack, and please don't insinuate shillage or astroturfing on HN. I know you probably didn't mean it literally, but it's still against the guidelines.

Your comment would be fine without the last sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

preinheimer• 6 years ago

I worked (years ago) for the UFCW as a worker at a grocery store. All of the union that was exposed to me as a part timer was:

- hours go out by seniority

- raises happen at set intervals regardless of quality of work

- that guy selling pot out of the backroom will be protected until they catch him stealing a rotisserie chicken

- 0.x% of my paycheck goes to the union.

- I got paid less, and received raises less often than I did when I worked at Walmart.

Now there's lots more to them then that, but they certainly failed to sell me on the concept as a teenager, despite having me as quite the captive audience.

vkou4• 6 years ago

I've worked once in a non-union shop, where I wasn't allowed to move my computer from my old desk to another. I was expected to unplug all my stuff, label it, put all my personal effects and peripherals into a crate, label it, and sign out. Then, I was supposed to come back the next day, and set everything up.

In one of these moves, my new desk was twelve feet away from my old desk. (In seven years of working at this non-union shop, I have had my desk moved 9 times.)

What conclusion can we draw from this anecdote, combined with the one by the parent poster? Why does one gather positive karma, while the other negative?

wcfields2• 6 years ago

About the time I had one PC opened up and was installing the NIC, one of the local IT guys dropped by and told me "You can't do that." 'Why not?', I asked. "That's not your job.", he replies.

I say this as a non-union IT Tech who works at convention centers and trade-shows regularly and really wishes at times I could just grab a hole saw to make the mouse-hole to run my cables through:

It's not your job. If there was a need for more NICs to be installed the company needs to pay for the necessary labor to make that happen.

Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?

Unions, in my experience, exist to help keep mediocre, unmotivated employees employed. One has no incentive to excel, as promotions are based on years "served", much like prison.

Great! Not everyone has to be motivated to work or excel! I come to my job, do the job, and go home. It's a business transaction.

xur172• 6 years ago

Similarly anyone could pick up a broom and sweep the job floor, but without clear delineation that is ONLY the janitors job then why not make the electricians sweep the floors when they're walking back?

They are not being forced to sweep the floors, sometimes people are choosing to step slightly outside of their role to do something when it is more efficient for them to do it rather than inefficiently finding and having someone else do it.

If I make a small mess, I can:

1. stop working, contact the janitor, and ask them to clean it up, or

2. grab a broom, take 2 minutes and clean it up, and continue working

In most cases 2 is the better option, and most good workers would prefer to just do 2.

vharuck• 6 years ago

Sounds more like the union added contract terms preventing the business from hiring somebody for position X and "asking" or even "allowing" them to do the tadks if position Y (which might pay more than X).

A lot of times, rules are cryptic and complex because they were adapted to prevent a workaround.

commandlinefan7• 6 years ago

Well, there’s a lot of philosophizing on here about what a hypothetical future with unionized programmers might look like; some good, some bad. We already know what a future without one will look like: open offices, JIRA ticket quotas, unpaid overtime, permanent contract work, whiteboard coding interviews, penalties for experience and education and zero training.

Apocryphon36• 6 years ago

Don't forget HR covering up harassment and discrimination until stories are leaked to the media!

xkemp2• 6 years ago

A union is run rather democratically. It will tend to reflect the attitudes of its membership, i. e. your coworkers. In some old industry on a downward slope, employees will tend to be older and risk-averse, and so will the union. Tech Unions will tend to be rather different.

Don't get hung up on this concept of "union". Look around the office and imagine what you and the ten people you see might want to ask from management.

It could be "no open-plan offices", or maybe it's better options for working remotely, budget for conferences, free choice of OS, whatever...

biztos2• 6 years ago

But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well?

I get that it would be frustrating to not do your own hardware setup as a techie.

Just like it must be frustrating sometimes to not do your own lighting as a camera operator in Hollywood. But in Hollywood they've collectively decided they want an industry that supports actual lighting experts, and that there should be a career path from "junior lighting person" to "sought-after lighting expert" that isn't constantly at risk from self-appointed jacks of all trades and also bean counters.

Sure there are other negative aspects: it's hard to get started, a lot of production gets moved to other places (countries) where they don't have unions, etc.

But in principle it looks to me like unionized Hollywood does a pretty good job, considering the challenges, of enabling careers for a lot of the people who are necessary for good filmmaking but by themselves wouldn't have, say, the power of Brad Pitt (a member of the Screen Actor's Guild of course like almost all famous actors).

_sbrk3• 6 years ago

But doesn't the "not your job" thing exist in order to protect actual jobs worked by actual people from being arbitrarily "rationalized" out of existence, because hey someone else can do that? Potentially your job as well?

I'm not concerned about any specific job, including my own.

I will learn, adapt, and excel at whatever I need to do to survive.

SpicyLemonZest9• 6 years ago

That is the reasoning, and it's exactly why it concerns me. I'm imagining a world where the national SRE union comes by, and tells me I should never write any monitoring code or change any configuration flags because that's an SRE's job I'm taking.

codingmess10• 6 years ago

Condolences

chairmanwow1• 6 years ago

I don’t see this playing out well for Kickstarter in the long-term.

tempsy• 6 years ago

How do unions operate in organizations where voluntary turnover is relatively high? A small % of people in tech stay at one company for more than a couple of years. I guess there's nothing about a union that stops you from voluntarily quitting for something else in that case, other than paying whatever fee you pay for the time you do stay?

ilikehurdles7• 6 years ago

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that question; but, I believe the fees are usually prorated and split between each pay period. Also a lot of job switches are because that's the best way to get a decent raise, and frankly I haven't seen great benefits outside of the really big tech commpanies. Perhaps collective bargaining would disincentivize some of that turnover.

erik9986• 6 years ago

The model you are asking about is similar to SAG-AFTRA. This how actors work. This is the preferred model. Kickstarter employees should have used this as an opportunity to push for something like that.

The reason SAG started was because production companies made an agreement amongst themselves not to bid competitively for talent. (Remember that just ocurred in tech...)

mc324• 6 years ago

I wonder if they’ll be able to do anything about outsourcing jobs?

If they gain some advantage by being in a union but practically lose out due to outsourcing, what good would it be?

Do they have any options to protect against that scenario?

I recall a few years ago one of unis in SF outsourced many of their IT ops overseas. That is a progressive city also ships off jobs.

Is there any way to attenuate that?

shmerl• 6 years ago

What exactly does it give the workers, better ways of dealing with management?

advisedwang• 6 years ago

Leverage.

Without a union, you can ask management for stuff, but they can just say no. Your only recourse then is to quit, which wouldn't change anything when it's just one person.

With a union, a work stoppage is a possibility. Suddenly management have a reason to come to the negotiation table and make concessions.

chrisco2553• 6 years ago

First of all "asking for stuff" implies a negotiation between two parties. A negotiation implies that either party can walk away from a deal. You're implying management shouldn't be able to say no. Management is not necessarily out to get employees and excessive compensation or regulation around hiring and firing leads to either insolvency or stagnation. It's a balancing act.

A union can be just as exploitative as a company can. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.

The software industry has been regulated by demand over the last few decades. Demand is still extremely high for software devs. Managers know that employees can make moves because unemployment in our sector is something like 2%. I've worked in many industries in my life and I've never been chased down or marketed to move jobs as much as I have in software development.

wellthisisgreat5• 6 years ago

Wow this really sad, provided Kickstarter is one of the nicest places to work at and their public benefit corporation was not empty words.

These people ruined a really nice NYC company for everyone around. Anyone running their company who thought of making the workplace a bit different will expect the kind of crowd from this photo to show up and implode it.

One thing is if the conditions were bad, there was insane overtime, the pay was low etc etc., but no, none of that applies to the people on the photo.

This is why we cannot have nice things.

mempko6• 6 years ago

Why do you hate people making Kickstarter what it is? The people actually doing the work want a union, how is that ruining the company?

wellthisisgreat5• 6 years ago

The whole thing started as political stunt sort of due to the neo-nazis' outcry over some anti-fascist project. It was a mess (of course not sympathizing with Breitbart at all for the record).

And now they just added a whole new overhead of dealing with their initiative. Look at that one-pager of extremely poorly formulated demands. Obviously the company will have to spend resources sorting this out, through lawyers, through hiring MORE managers to deal with these managers. KS is NOT a bad place to work at by large margin it's a GOOD place to work at.

I am hearing already around here in NYC that no I don't want to go work there next to these folks, I am a developer not a polit-sci wannabe etc.

The spectacular outcome would be if KS fails to raise more funds because of this which is quite a possibility.

lexs8• 6 years ago

What exactly is "ruined" about Kickstarter when the employees unionize?

cameronbrown4• 6 years ago

I'm just annoyed because there are so many people out there working in supermarkets treat like dirt, yet 'software engineers' who are paid huge amounts still want to unionise? Where exactly is the struggle here?

I am not anti-unionist by a country mile, but I can't sympathise with this group.

lexs8• 6 years ago

You can only unionise if you struggle?

jkestner• 6 years ago

Can you elaborate how Kickstarter is now ruined? As a creator and backer, this makes Kickstarter better for me. The organization as a whole is maddeningly unresponsive to me, but the workers who voted for, and organized, the union have been my strongest advocates.

username906• 6 years ago

a historic win for unionization efforts at tech companies.

Kickstarter is a small company which isn't representative at all for other tech companies, so I doubt this will mean much for efforts at other companies. For example, a majority of their staff at every level are women (a quick glance at their linkedin shows that this is likely true for engineering roles as well) but that doesn't say anything about gender equality of the tech industry as a whole. It is very easy to make wins like this at small companies just by having random (or sometimes not so random) perturbations.

https://qz.com/923957/kickstarter-is-teaching-the-tech-world...

Jweb_Guru11• 6 years ago

The fact that Kickstarter is unusual for a tech company does not make the fact that it was able to unionize any less historic. Keep in mind that it is far from the first tech company (small or not) to attempt to unionize.

mc324• 6 years ago

I want to know if their union contract does anything from preventing parent co from shipping jobs to places with less regulation and cheaper labor...

coldpie• 6 years ago

That will kill your company way, way faster than any union will.

uerobert• 6 years ago

How? In my country for example there is a surge of US companies setting shop here just to hire local devs, and a lot more hiring remote, when their products have presence only in the US. Each year the number keep increasing.

mc324• 6 years ago

India, Eastern Europe and other places have English speaking devs. Good ones may not be dirt cheap but they may perhaps be cheaper in the eyes of management in the face of unionized devs...

AnimalMuppet4• 6 years ago

Clarify, please. Shipping the jobs will kill the company, or the union contract preventing it will?

elicash8• 6 years ago

Now that there's union recognition, they will finally negotiate a contract. Sometimes, this process can take a very long time. This step hasn't begun yet.

wellthisisgreat5• 6 years ago

Is there a list of demands and laws anywhere they want to impose?

There is only this: https://kickstarterunited.org/

Not a word about the standards of performance or expectations from employees who would want to be part of union. A short list of some fairly handwavy statements and a one-page website "join-join-join".

Also what kind of positions do people who pushed this occupied? How many engineers have signed this?

Are they actually technical workers or ex political studies majors, who lucked out to get a job at Kickstarter and not Starbucks.

lexs8• 6 years ago

Literally taken from your link.

Is there a list of demands and laws anywhere they want to impose?

"02) What are the workplace improvements Kickstarter United is seeking?"

Not a word about the standards of performance or expectations from employees who would want to be part of union.

"Kickstarter United will be made up of all employees in the bargaining unit."

wellthisisgreat5• 6 years ago

"Kickstarter United will be made up of all employees in the bargaining unit."

So no standards of training etc. for the workers? Just you know, show up for the work, punch in and punch out?

Also there is no specific requirement in the list. The only one that is not a blanket statement and has actually some case in it is "when disciplinary action is taken"

the rest is just a list of what KS is already doing and has been doing better than many companies.

logfromblammo• 6 years ago

"inherently adversarial"

Given that the employer-employee relationship--or indeed any vendor-customer relationship--is already inherently adversarial, and its power balance is skewed in favor of the employer for everyone but the most highly-skilled of laborers, one might naturally expect that laborers might cartelize to improve their bargaining position.

The "us versus them" binary arises as a consequence of typical corporation management structure. One of the best ways to avoid it is by giving the employees an actual stake in the success of the company as a whole. Pay them in stock, or give bonuses based on meeting the company goals. Employees with zero stake are more likely to find any lever they can use to pry more of the value that they provide to the company out of its owners.

aty2689• 6 years ago

Absolutely pathetic for both sides. If you don't like your white collar tech job, go somewhere else. It's not factory work where you're paid way less to do the same thing wherever you go. You make yourselves and your company look weak in doing this.

This is why the rest of the United States thinks tech is full of a bunch of entitled pricks.

ChuckNorris892• 6 years ago

Just because you work in tech doesn't mean you can't get exploited. And just "go somewhere else" isn't possible for everyone.

aty2689• 6 years ago

And why would it not be?

If I don't like my job, I get another one. It's easier to do this as a software engineer than almost anything else.

dang5• 6 years ago

Please follow the HN guidelines when posting here. Lashing out like this not only damages the commons, it discredits what you're saying, so it's neither in your interest as a community member nor as an individual.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

aty2689• 6 years ago

I understand. I apologize. You may want to remove my comment on the other thread then (exactly the same), although interestingly it is upvoted there.

notSupplied• 6 years ago

Folks should really read this article to get more context on Kickstarter's history with unionization, it is truly bananas and not what you think:

https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-turmoil-uni...

- The first thing that jumped out at me was that the primary spark of conflict was NOT compensation or working conditions.

- The main conflict was around a Kickstarter project "Always Punch Nazis", a project that gathered a few laughs among Kickstarter's largely liberal staff + management. When they faced right-wing political pressure to de-platform this project, since it technically violates their "do not incite violence" ToS, it triggered a ideological schism within the company.

- Unionization seems to be largely about placing this kind of decision in the hands of the employees. This is somewhat consistent with Kickstarter's history of activism.

- However, it's pretty uncharted territory here: Unionization that is not primarily motivated by distribution of wealth, but for the political soul of the company.

ksred• 6 years ago

This is exactly it. After scrolling through so many of the comments it's crazy to see the actual reason for unionising so far down the list.

legohead• 6 years ago

good luck to them. I was part of a union and joined the negotiations board. come bargaining time, I was probably the most stressed I have ever been at a company ever. you learn just how little the company actually cares about you and everyone else.

oh_sigh3• 6 years ago

So what happens now? Do the 37 nay voters need to join the union or be fired?

erik9986• 6 years ago

Will they publish the union agreement? Wow... we will go from job/salary comparison sites to sites comparing transparent union agreements.... That is a step up!

jaredtn• 6 years ago

I would love to understand the dynamic better, so please correct me here or chime in.

Tech is has one of the best combinations of (lucrative + meritocratic) I've seen. Fields that pay similarly or better (law, medicine, investment banking) require either significant time-consuming credentials or significant time investment as an underlying (like IB analyst).

The interview process does require intensive preparation to land a top spot. However, your compensation package increases proportionately to the preparatory time. From the mind of a top performer, wouldn't you want to seek out the best of the best, rather than settling for median wage? It seems like unionizing will encourage the top workers to leave while the below-average to stay, dragging down the overall talent pool.

_1qd4• 6 years ago

Just to add to this comment; It's one thing for software developers in the government or a large "essential" corporation like a bank or telecom company to unionize. Those places get toxic because the work has to be done and gets very political because of the sheer number of people's lives they affect. I understand the labour issues around working for those organizations.

But kickstarter? You mean the funding apparatus for indie games and gimmicky consumer products? That's where you want to unionize?

boomlinde3• 6 years ago

Workers' unions represent workers, not consumers or society as a whole, so why should they care about whether the workers they represent work at "essential" corporations?

lyrr• 6 years ago

I don't know how you can fail to see how an organised and unified workforce will always benefit all workers in a firm. Pitting 'top performers' against the rest, scaremongering about 'lazy workers' etc. just divides the workforce and allows management/owners to exploit/underpay workers as a whole. The company would not be able to function/make as good a profit as it does without ALL workers contributing. If a worker truly is lazy/not pulling their weight, they get fired. A union doesn't stop that. A union is a unified voice for workers that can demand rightfully, better working conditions, better pay, better benefits.

This fiction that somehow tech workers should avoid unions because their pay is so well is utter corporate propaganda. The money won't always be this good people, especially as more and more are told to enter the industry. I know HackerNews is an entrepreneurial haven but it's funny to me how people here, with all their technical wisdom, are so blind to any benefits to workers and aversion to anything seen as 'socialist'.

castlecrasher2• 6 years ago

I don't know how you can fail to see how an organised and unified workforce will always benefit all workers in a firm.

I don't know why you assume that unions = organized and unified workforce. It's like claiming that HOAs = organized and unified neighborhood.

pathseeker14• 6 years ago

I don't know how you can fail to see how an organised and unified workforce will always benefit all workers in a firm.

Because historically it hasn't in the US. Unions end up implementing a seniority-based compensation/benefits scheme and there is nothing given to employees who outperform everyone else. This even fosters an environment where top performers are discouraged by their peers for "making everyone else look bad".

bsder• 6 years ago

From the mind of a top performer

Unfortunately, we also know that tech has a big age discrimination problem, for example. Unions are one of the tools to combat that.

helen___keller• 6 years ago

Perhaps to look at it the other way, those with the tools/mindset to haggle and negotiate and prepare for a top career will end up at a place that offers top benefits and top salaries.

Which means the places that don't offer top benefits, top salaries, or places that otherwise mistreat their workers, will, almost by definition, retain mostly a workforce of employees who are either not top talent or are bad at negotiation (or some variation of this - e.g. the video game industry has some great programmers who work with awful treatment & pay for one reason or another).

If you're in this poorly treated group, unionization looks great. If most of your workforce is in this group, then most of your workforce will be eyeballing unionization.

CJefferson• 6 years ago

So, first of all, most people aren't "top performers", so it would make sense for 75% of developers to want a Union under your reasoning.

Secondly, in my experience it isn't the "top performers" who end up with the highest pay, it's the people best at spouting bullshit and sounding convincing.

balls187• 6 years ago

who end up with the highest pay, it's the people best at spouting bullshit and sounding convincing.

Putting it more objectively--it's the people who often are able to provide their first line manager with opportunities for better pay.

ryanmcbride• 6 years ago

seems "lucrative + meritocratic" if you aren't in a marginalized group. Age/gender/pay discrimination is a serious problem in tech that unionization can help solve (it's not a magic bullet, but it's a step in the right direction)

erikpukinskis2• 6 years ago

You don’t even have to be in a marginalized group (although that does entreat all kinds of bias).

In my experience tech companies largely make decisions based on clique behavior, not “merit”. Management identifies individuals they like personally, those people are given juicy projects and veto power in meetings.

The game is not “who is driving business metrics?” it’s “how can I package my ideas in a way that makes management feel comfortable?”

Maybe you can argue that’s a form of meritocracy (“excel at making management feel comfortable!”), but I don’t think that’s what most people think of when they think of merit.

I have sort of come around to it. Part of my job is to be kind and helpful to the people around me, including the bosses. So that’s how I judge myself. Hitting business goals is good in the long term, but on every timescale I am expected to engage on, nurturing relationships seems to matter more.

_lacroix• 6 years ago

Tech is has one of the best combinations of (lucrative + meritocratic) I've seen. Fields that pay similarly or better (law, medicine, investment banking) require either significant time-consuming credentials or significant time investment as an underlying (like IB analyst).

You mean ENGINEERING, not tech. The people who need these unions are not the engineers, they're the "disposable" soft skills jobs like community and customer support. These are the tech jobs that pay poorly and are mistreated while engineers are fought for with absurd compensation packages (see: Away).

lawnchair_larry14• 6 years ago

What an awful decision by those employees. They’re in for a rude awakening.

busterarm2• 6 years ago

I guess they didn't think they could win their vote when there were ~110 employees but they did when there were 86.

I guess things were so tense between the two camps that many people moved on.

mech1234• 6 years ago

Kickstarter prints money, so I don't think they'll be hurt too much by this.

I think that Kickstarter as a company could exist in its current form with little change for a long time. I wonder how the culture works around there.

calderarrow• 6 years ago

Coming from a public accounting background, I’ve seen a variety of businesses. Somewhat obviously, I’ve seen some be successful with unions and others be successful without, which makes sense, as unions are neither inherently good nor bad. They are a tool which can change the power dynamic and incentive structure of workers and employers throughout an organization, but there is nothing inherent about having a union that guarantees ineffective operations, just as the absence of a union does not indicate that employees are getting shafted.

Generally speaking for well run, ethical companies, whose management actively try to do the right thing, unions add unnecessary redundancy and bureaucracy. When there is a sense of trust between employer and employee, communication flows between employees and managers, employee working conditions are safe and healthy, and compensation is reasonably fair. For companies that are shady and treat employees poorly, unions help enforce structured communication and transparency between managers and employees.

Usually I look for symptoms of bad management when hearing about employees who want to unionize. In tech, we can generally assume reasonable working conditions and pay, so Kickstarter unionizing screams “toxic management” for me, personally. I haven’t heard management’s defense, but ultimately the burden is on management to convince a majority of its employees that they don’t need a union. Clearly they haven’t, and given how easy it is to appease developers, this is particularly damning.

metalliqaz2• 6 years ago

The (original) article only mentioned one grievance, that Kickstarter removed a "punch nazis" project and the employees revolted. Honestly it sounds like they had it pretty good.

naiveprogrammer3• 6 years ago

"play stupid games win stupid prizes"

spa3thyb2• 6 years ago

I'm with you on the theory, up until your last statements - the vote to unionize was 46 to 37; 55% in favor with no breakdown in the roles means we can't be sure the dissenting voice wasn't the development staff.

It could be the support and community management roles (or any other 'soft skill' role which is less scalable and no less valuable but perceived as more easily replaced) carried the vote.

HeroOfAges4• 6 years ago

"...support and community management roles..." are less scalable? Does this mean companies are finding it more difficult to fill community management roles than developer roles? Also, what do you mean by "no less valuable"? I don't think you can have a company who's product is software without developers. You do not, however need community managers. You make an interesting point: I do wonder if those in "soft skill" roles perceive their roles as equally valuable as software developers. I personally do not.

fennecfoxen• 6 years ago

It is also worth noting that NY is not a right to work state. This means that the 37 people who voted against the union have no right to not-pay-dues to the union.

If the workers change their mind then, in theory, they will have the opportunity to vote to decertify the union, later in their employment (a minimum of 3 years). Approximately 0 unions a year are decertified this way in the US.

asdfasgasdgasdg2• 6 years ago

It's also possible that some organizations have a high concentration of folks who have a particular viewpoint on unions, regardless of whether they're being treated poorly or not. For example, Vox's newsroom unionized, even though I would suppose that they are likely treated better than most journalists -- at least to the extent the business' economics allow. I'm not saying this is necessarily the case with Kickstarter, just that this strikes me as possible. I'm also not trying to imply any judgment for or against the move.

dmix2• 6 years ago

I get the impression a lot of tech companies aren't doing it out of particular absolute need for such a strong a hammer, but because they can and it suits their ideology for legitimately bad stuff they see happening in other industries.

It always made 100x more sense to me on some factory floor in the early 20th century than it does in a tech startup like environment in 2020, plus some labour jobs in between.

I can just imagine the thousands of additional mandatory meetings across the entire company, the needless costs, and hoop jumping that will be added for very little ROI. But because they see gig delivery workers facing shitty conditions under weak contractor and unemployment law designed for a past century, so they think it's justified and want to start it somewhere.

The laws that get passed that make non-union members pay dues even though they volunteer not to be part of the union is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. Or how they make it impossible to fire egregiously bad workers. Or how in the small town I grew up in these union jobs were coveted and hiring was super nepotism driven, you had to know the right people to get the job - which to me is the opposite of "diversity and inclusion", which is (unsurprisingly) the 2nd bullet point on their political union website, right after "equal pay for equal work" which is a statement riddled with mythology over data.

naiveprogrammer3• 6 years ago

Vox's newsroom unionized, even though I would suppose that they are likely treated better than most journalists -- at least to the extent the business' economics allow.

Better treatment also involves better pay. Being nice to your employee is not enough. Vox may treat employees nicely, but you'd be surprised how low they pay to their occasional writers who are scattered in a bunch of niche vehicles.

thu21114• 6 years ago

If it helps, I'll say it for you.

From the article:

But in 2018, a heated disagreement broke out between employees and management about whether to leave a project called “Always Punch Nazis” on the platform, according to reporting in Slate. When Breitbart said the project violated Kickstarter’s terms of service by inciting violence, management initially planned to remove the project, but then reversed its decision after protest from employees.

Following the controversy, employees announced their intentions to unionize with OPEIU Local 153 in March 2019.

If this story is accurate Kickstarter employees aren't unionising because of bad treatment by management but because management wanted to stop them badly treating other people. If this story isn't accurate then Kickstarter and this new union need to loudly sue Vox right now because this story makes them look like hateful extremists.

This is especially true because Kickstarter management gave in to their employees demands. Now they're unionising anyway. For what? To protect the right for the hard left to encourage violent extremism against their political opponents? What kind of union is this?

In case anyone is in any doubt what "punching Nazis" means the project is here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/282505033/always-punch-...

It says very explicitly their definition of "Nazi" includes anyone with "anti-immigrant ideologies" or really anyone who isn't woke.

Kickstarter's management look like utter fools. How did they not crush this right at the start? They have every right to fire every single one of their employees who objected to the original decision.

pathseeker14• 6 years ago

Somewhat obviously, I’ve seen some be successful with unions and others be successful without

From the company perspective maybe, but I've not seen a union in the US that successfully rewards high performing employees over mediocre lifers. Overachievers end up leaving and you're left with no innovation. Do you have any examples of unions that have solved this problem?

tikhonj• 6 years ago

Aren't a lot of professional sports leagues unionized? I know that NBA players have a union, and top players definitely get rewarded well.

lexs8• 6 years ago

NBA players association, actors guild, writers guild etc are famous examples of "rewarding high performing employees"

burkaman• 6 years ago

Overachievers end up leaving and you're left with no innovation.

Do you have any examples of this problem occurring?

Ididntdothis5• 6 years ago

I would think that in well run ethical companies the relationship with unions would also be harmonious. That’s at least how it works in Germany with unions like IG Metall. Seems to me that problems mostly arise when management becomes unreasonable.

toasterlovin• 6 years ago

Or when the union leadership becomes unreasonable.

Mirioron2• 6 years ago

Unions can become corrupt too. After all, it's an additional organization and when money gets involved...

zpallin7• 6 years ago

Generally speaking for well run, ethical companies, whose management actively try to do the right thing, unions add unnecessary redundancy and bureaucracy.

The only type of "well run, ethical companies" where unions are redundant are worker-owned cooperatives. Otherwise, an employer, regardless of how ethical they are, can never replicate the most critical aspect of unions: collective bargaining rights. Sure, an employer can essentially just implement the kind of benefits that would be negotiated by a union, but it does not replace the fact that until a union exists employees have essentially no means to collectively demand changes to compensation and working conditions unless they unionize.

wpietri3• 6 years ago

That's becoming my take as well.

I think the tech industry was, at least for a while, an exception here. Developers were so hard to get and retain that the power of individual workers did a lot to keep things sane. But I think that power is, for a variety of reasons, waning. If we want to keep our unusually good working conditions, and especially if we want to make sure our colleagues enjoy them as well, then I think collective action is going to become more and more necessary.

(For those wondering why, a key part is the intrinsic size difference. It's much easier to lose one employee than to lose your full-time job. This inherent power imbalance is easily exploited.)

For the next thing I start, I've been looking into worker- and member-owned co-op structures. It turns out some of my favorite businesses are run that way, from my local bakery (Arizmendi) to my favorite outdoor goods company, REI. My explorations are early yet, but I'm seeing a lot to be optimistic about. I think it's possible to combine the discipline of a value-for-money business with the mission orientation of a not-for-profit. For example, imagine if WhatsApp had been a worker- or member-owned co-op. If instead of selling to Facebook, they'd just kept making the thing they thought the world needed.

If this resonates with people, feel free to contact me on email or Twitter. Maybe we can get a mailing list together for further discussion.

proc02• 6 years ago

Bargaining rights don't come for free. At the end of the day, unless you are the owner of the company or union leaders, you are basically serving two masters.

Camas2• 6 years ago

An employee can at any time choose to work somewhere else.

skybrian• 6 years ago

Collective bargaining is one way to do better for yourself but the other is to change jobs and negotiate for better pay and conditions as part of the hiring process.

This has other advantages too, like meeting new people and learning new things.

ksr_throwaway5• 6 years ago

In tech, we can generally assume reasonable working conditions and pay, so Kickstarter unionizing screams “toxic management” for me, personally.

I can confirm that "toxic management" is the only way to describe the situation when this union drive began.

Source: I work at Kickstarter

thu21114• 6 years ago

Is the article's description of why the union was created accurate?

cowpig• 6 years ago

Honestly, I really want tech workers to unionize and push for companies to install ethics committees.

Particularly at Facebook and Google -- tech workers should unionize there not because they need better work conditions but because otherwise all business decisions are in the hands of executives for whom unethical or sociopathic behaviour is often an advantage.

marknutter• 6 years ago

They're unionizing because they're politically likeminded. There's absolutely no other logical reason why they would do it.

tensor• 6 years ago

Clearly they haven’t, and given how easy it is to appease developers, this is particularly damning.

In my experience, developers are probably among the hardest to appease. It's probably a tie between developers and sales. Both groups are primarily money driven and keen to negotiate, but developers also feel entitled to influence or control other aspects of the business based on their personal idea of morality (e.g. developers are not inclusive of the opinions of other groups of employees).

lawnchair_larry14• 6 years ago

I don’t think there is much that management can do in this case. What you say is true where unions have historically shown up. But these times are different. Like most people pushing an agenda and participating in twitter outrage mobs, I think this is ideologically driven, and the employees have a very limited understanding of how unions work and when they are needed. It’s essentially a meme.

wirrbel2• 6 years ago

You may think you can do without a union if business is good and management OK. When shit hits the fan, that is when you'll learn that you need them.

I work in a German unionized company and I think unions can be quite well-aligned with workers and business interest.

IIRC certain aspects of US law make unions be the way they are in the US on purpose to lower their acceptance among employees. For example work councils which are commonly established in unionized companies aren't allowed in the US iirc, they can be a nice alternative from going all in into unionizing, a democratic representation of all employees.

bluedays2• 6 years ago

Yeah this discussion appears to have been hijacked by thinly veiled anti-union astroturfing. I would be highly skeptical of all posts in this thread. Many of the posts literally using the exact phrases commonly repeated by anti-union propagandists.

This makes me wonder if Silicon Valley is starting to see the writing on the wall and pay for disinformation campaigns in places where engineers regularly read and post. I know that there are people who share similar views to Peter Thiel within the software engineering community, but they are not the majority as you see in this thread. This is pretty shameful that this is what the Internet has become, a new medium to misinform the public. I wouldn't expect any productive conversation here.

socalnate1• 6 years ago

Or maybe some people just have different opinions than you do? Unions are a charged topic for lots of people.

_sbrk3• 6 years ago

gasp You mean that all comments should be pro-union or neutral, otherwise we're being anti-union?

My goodness, I guess you should go find the steward and file a grievance.

username906• 6 years ago

I am pro European style unions where membership is optional, but anti American style unions where you have to leave your job if you don't like the union.

(I live in Europe)

erik9986• 6 years ago

I would not be surprised if there is some low level effort amongst some of the larger companies in silicon valley.... especially after the whole issue of not bidding up talent or stealing talent from each other...

bluedays2• 6 years ago

Yeah all of the language here feels very contrived.

aty2689• 6 years ago

This is why the rest of the United States thinks tech is full of a bunch of entitled pricks.

fogetti3• 6 years ago

I on the other hand think that the comment as yours is why the rest of the United States thinks tech is full of a bunch of entitled pricks.

vasco• 6 years ago

I'm not going to express my opinion on unions because to be honest I don't know where I stand, but it's certainly interesting that the most talked about tech companies seem to be investing heavily in diversity and we hear from boards getting behind the idea that bringing different ideas to the table is positive, but when the new diverse crowd chooses to unionize this is taken as a bad surprise. Insert a surprised pikachu picture here, I guess.

matrix7372• 6 years ago

Test

matrix7372• 6 years ago

From my work at a major consulting company the way to fix this is to rebuild the offices over ~150miles away (the exact miles is NY law). Rehire all the positions and then let go of the employees in NY.

B008L355• 6 years ago

Where's my Coolest Cooler?

gok• 6 years ago

Kickstarter is essentially a microcap stock fraud platform with a slick UI, so this is a good fit.

angel_j• 6 years ago

Hipster Local 153

lasky2• 6 years ago

We hereby declare the following as Scabbing:

- drinking starbucks coffee - wearing new clothes that’s not patagonia - owning a car. renting ok. - eating animal products that aren’t wrapped in expensive paper and rope packaging - discussing any views that aren’t first endorsed by a jezebel staff writer or hollywood star.

tarr11• 6 years ago

Does this union cover a global workforce?

rpiguy3• 6 years ago

The most fascinating thing to me about tech worker unionization is that it is less about working conditions and more about input on moral decisions made by company management.

At Kickstarter the moral divide started with the Punch a Nazi incident. You see this at other technology companies as well, as employees agonize over free speech, what to censor, whether or not to work for China, whether or not to deploy surveillance tech, etc.

This is a new era for union organizers. Ideology has become a "workplace condition" that people are organizing to change. It is an interesting concept.

I am not for it or against it, I need to think about it more.

lasky2• 6 years ago

agree, this is by far the most interesting part of all this. it’s not about “my working conditions” but about whether or not my employer “agrees with my views.”

I think this is partly because people understand the power and influence their organizations have in the world.

When many migrant restaurant workers are working 80 hour weeks or don’t keep their tips, it makes it easier to see the radical privilege of tech workers, and their unawareness.

rpiguy3• 6 years ago

I think it is also generational. We now have in the workplace a few generations of workers who grew up being told their opinions mattered and that speaking up is a virtue. I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing.

Us old-timers were taught the opposite, your opinions don't matter much, no one will listen to you until you prove yourself, etc.

So I think the generational shift has something to do with it.

I also think labor organizers are exuberant because they finally have a way to build a wedge between highly-paid employees who were formerly resistant to unionizing and their management.

elicash8• 6 years ago

1. Why do tech workers need a union?

If you want to improve your workplace, you have additional leverage to fight for changes if you're in a union. There's often very little you can do alone. This might be things like pay, or it might be something else entirely.

2. But aren't tech workers elite coddled rich kids who are lucky to make what they receive?

I mean, no. But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from joining a union. Folks who run these companies are even more elite than the person who codes. Why not negotiate for a better workplace? Why be a weak negotiator? Isn't that especially important to do when you have flexibility to go somewhere else?

3. Why don't they just leave their job?

Some issues are systemic across an industry. Additionally, some people like to improve their jobs rather than just leave. People are wired differently. Creating lasting change at a company can be rewarding. Some also care about the mission of the company they work for.

pimmen• 6 years ago

A comment on #2 would also be that you should organize and enshrine your rights when you have the power, not when you're weak. Developers are powerful now, can possibly become weak later.

carapace9• 6 years ago

1. Why do tech workers need a union?

I don't know if a union is the answer, but tech workers aren't immune to management hi-jinks:

"Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees"

https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...

save_ferris2• 6 years ago

It’s not just wage-fixing, tech companies wield an absurd amount of power in other aspects of people’s lives.

I was once let go due for “performance” reasons that involved major company politics behind the scenes. I’d just gotten my annual review from my boss emailed to my work email about a week before my termination, which showed stellar performance across the board.

When I looked into filing for unemployment, I discovered that I needed to dispute the reason for my dismissal since I was let go for cause, which required me to submit evidence. Who doesn’t have access to work emails? Fired people don’t.

My employment agreement stipulated that the employer maintained all rights to my emails, so I was completely SOL.

shadowgovt2• 6 years ago

This is an excellent example, because the key thing is: the companies involved weren't even thinking of it as wage-fixing. They were thinking of it as avoiding disruption to launch schedules by not churning people with low bus-factor.

Employees and management have different perspectives on the work agreement and management's is over-represented because they set most of the company policy. An amplified employee voice can lead to better workplace design in general.

bearmcbearsly2• 6 years ago

I dunno... I was a victim of this wage-fixing scheme, as were all of my coworkers at the time. And I don't know of a single one who would have preferred to have a union collectively negotiating wages.

The whole scheme was that the companies stopped their recruiters from cold-calling each others' employees. That kept wages down by reducing the opportunities for people to get a better salary by moving between companies (or threatening to). If wages were collectively negotiated, those opportunities would not exist in the first place.

lawnchair_larry14• 6 years ago

That’s already illegal and was punished accordingly, so no need for a union. Labor laws are a better tool.

linuxftw2• 6 years ago

The number 1 reason to form a union in the tech world is so a company can't pull a Disney. Replace all your full time workers with imported 'contractors' and force you to train them.

Getting rid of the 'contractor' loop hole in tech will be better for everyone.

hinkley4• 6 years ago

I'm interested in someone setting minimum quality requirements for code, and I've no faith in my government to do that well. No, I said that wrong. I have every faith in my government screwing that up spectacularly.

From what I understand from other industries, the safety guidelines are often, at least initially, heavily informed by the professional bodies of those industries. Later on watchdog groups start to propose more stringent rules.

We haven't really discussed any of this stuff very concretely and we'd have to start somewhere (other than legislation please).

scarface748• 6 years ago

You really aren’t aware of all the union factories that picked up and moved their entire operations to another country to avoid unions?

As far as the contract “loophole”. Every time I’ve worked as a contractor, my net income including taking into account the loss of benefits was hire than I made as an FTE.

xur172• 6 years ago

The number 1 reason to form a union in the tech world is so a company can't pull a Disney. Replace all your full time workers with imported 'contractors' and force you to train them.

How do they force you to train your replacement? There are plenty of jobs in tech right now, you could (and should) just walk out the door if something like that occurs.

mdonahoe• 6 years ago

"Athletes unionize" is one of the better arguments I've heard for why devs should.

I'm curious to learn more about the origins of the players' union.

elicash8• 6 years ago

Wish I knew more about it.

Here's what the NFLPA has on their website: https://www.nflpa.com/about/history

One of the reasons I like it as an example is it shows how much more a union can do than simply negotiate raises, and that they don't even have to do that part at all! You can collectively bargain over anything, and also a union can theoretically serve as a type of association that has other benefits. There's room for a ton of innovation and creativity here.

You don't see people argue that their union means mediocre football players can't get fired. The values of the workers can absolutely be shared by the union (the players are the union) -- and if you want to negotiate for even higher pay rather than making it harder to fire folks, you can do that.

TazeTSchnitzel• 6 years ago

Athletics is not as luxurious you might think: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/07/olympic-games-...

cortesoft• 6 years ago

Part of the reason athletes unionize, though, is because they play for monopoly leagues; there are no competitors for the top leagues in most American sports, so it isn't like you can just leave and play in the other NBA if you don't like their practices.

arrosenberg4• 6 years ago

Baseball players unionized in the 60s for the same reasons any other group did - poor wages, poor working conditions, and owners who operated as feudal lords due to the reserve clause.

baron8166• 6 years ago

I disagree. Professional sports leagues are both monopolies and monopsonies (meaning they’re the only ones hiring those specialized athletes). So the market dynamics are very different from that of tech. If you’re a NFL linebacker, you don’t really have an option to switch leagues if you’re unhappy with how it’s run. If you’re a software engineer, you can switch companies very easily.

usaar333• 6 years ago

But even athletes have a clear distinction between management and "employee". The line is very blurry in engineering, esp. for senior devs which might go in and out of management frequently.

edmundsauto2• 6 years ago

Marvin Miller is the man who created these. There are some good accounts of his life.

When he started, MLB players hated hearing him out because they thought he was a communist. Talk about a situation where people cut off their nose to spite their faces!

lawnchair_larry14• 6 years ago

A quick google search will explain that history and will also tell you why it makes no sense to compare athletes with developers.

PeterisP• 6 years ago

Hollywood actors and screenwriters are also unionized.

yibg8• 6 years ago

Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy? I mean we’d like to think that the good ideas win and impact and outcome matters. We hold up the 10x engineers and those that make an outsized contribution to the industry / company / product right? Shouldn’t they get higher compensation compared to the rest of the work force? How do we square that with collective bargaining that has set salaries and annual increases?

new_realist• 6 years ago

The two ideas are not incompatible. You can set a company-wide curve for promotions.

commandlinefan7• 6 years ago

Actors are unionized (or “guildized”, which is basically the same thing), but their pay varies wildly and seems to be more or less relative to their objective value.

realityking• 6 years ago

It always depends how the union works and what they negotiate for. Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron and Tom Hanks are all members of a union (SAG-AFTRA) and it doesn't seem to have prevented them for making 10x the money of an unknown actor.

That said, there's a risk - even a high one - that Union Executives, over time, become rent seekers instead of advocates for their members. It's like government, every Union gets the executive it deserves.

eropple3• 6 years ago

the engineering ethos of meritocracy

You know what's pretty inarguably a real "meritocracy"? Professional sports players. And they're all unionized.

Tech does not meaningfully or significantly adhere to any ethos of meritocracy; it is exactly as political as anything else. The part that really melts your brain is when you realize that the "meritocracy" myth is peddled so the people who don't realize they're bad at politics are losing.

SkyBelow5• 6 years ago

Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy?

Only if one assumes that management pays based on the same ethos of meritocracy. They generally do not, which is why a force to oppose the management 'union' can result in a return to meritocracy. As with any balancing force, it is possible for the reaction to be far too strong and swing in the opposite direction, but that isn't reason to avoid any attempt to balance.

dktoao• 6 years ago

How does one go about measuring productivity in software? Because you can't have a meritocracy without an objective measure of performance. I think we all know by now that number of features shipped / commits / lines of code are not good measures, just the most visible. Also, I have come to learn that "10x developer", just means "OK developer with a greenfield project". Maybe I am just salty because my productivity is being impacted greatly right now because the software developed by our 10xer of 10 years past breaks every week and I have to fix it to get my job done.

paulddraper• 6 years ago

Unions can negotiate things other than salary, like health benefits, paid leave, policy issues, etc.

(Though in practice you're correct: unions rarely exist for jobs with more individualized pay.)

leto_ii2• 6 years ago

Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy?

I've seen that other commenters have already pointed out that the two are not incompatible.

However, with the risk of getting some downvotes, I would like to challenge the primacy of meritocracy itself.

I don't mean to say that people shouldn't do a good job at work or that they shouldn't try to continuously improve. But I think that an environment and a mentality of continuous competition between individuals is not necessarily beneficial. For one it can cause tensions, frustration, anger, alienation at an individual level, but I think in the long run it can actually harm the company itself.

I'm curious what you guys think about this point of view.

Seenso4• 6 years ago

Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy? I mean we’d like to think that the good ideas win and impact and outcome matters. We hold up the 10x engineers and those that make an outsized contribution to the industry / company / product right?

Not necessarily. I'd imagine that a union could negotiate its pay-scales any way it likes, which could take into account "meritocracy" in many different ways. That could include ideas that are totally foreign to existing for-profit company practices, such as a peer-controlled meritocratic bonus implemented via the union itself.

Shouldn’t they get higher compensation compared to the rest of the work force? How do we square that with collective bargaining that has set salaries and annual increases?

Here's a hypothetical: In a non-union shop, regular engineers get paid $100k, while 10x engineers get paid 120k. In a union shop all engineers get paid $150k. Should the engineers reject a union so the 10x engineers can get paid more than regular engineers, even though that means everyone makes less?

Also: Are the 10x engineers the people management chooses to pay more? Is management good at recognizing merit? When they recognize it, do they choose to compensate it accordingly? Or do they make the good business decision, and pay the meritorious employees the minimum amount of money they'll be happy with. For some 10x engineers, that could be 2x salary. For other 10x engineers, that could be 1.05x salary. For some 10x engineers, that could be 0.75x salary.

wolco2• 6 years ago

Don't most jobs have a range set by the company? Something like between 80/120k based on experience. A union wouldn't change that. I've never seen someone go in with 10x skills at 150k and make it past the recruitor filter.

The number of places that will pay you more than they decided beforehand is very small not matter if you are 10x better or not. You will get top of pay range.

Startups wouldn't fall under this because usually you need 20+ people. This would apply to get giants who have systems in place. If you are truly worldclass they invent a position. But for regular developers where there are more than one person sharing the same title this is who the union is for.

decebalus1• 6 years ago

Just in terms of salary isn’t an union somewhat contradictory to the engineering ethos of meritocracy?

Not to sound dismissive, but if you actually believe that working in tech is akin to a meritocracy, you're either fairly young or you haven't spent a lot of time in a corporation. Both of which being ok.

shadowgovt2• 6 years ago

The engineering ethos of meritocracy is a flawed model for management / employee interaction because it assumes a level playing field.

If anything, employees who believe their workplace should be a meritocracy can protect and provide force to that belief via a union.

mafuyu• 6 years ago

Tech work isn't a meritocracy, though. Even putting aside the issue of diversity and bias, there's a large gradient of working conditions and pay across the industry. There are plenty of really smart engineers online who have a popular following, and people are often shocked when it comes out that those people are severely underpaid relative to some college new grad churning out boilerplate for an ad company.

Also, do companies really value 10x engineers? Sure, the people who are truly at the top, well known, and know their worth have great negotiating power to work on interesting things and get paid a lot for it. What about everyone else? I'd say that most "10x" engineers aren't getting 10x the compensation. Most people who perform well will get a promotion or something, and that's it. The way tech companies manage workers and handle performance reviews isn't all that different from everyone else. Tech workers are capturing a fraction of the value they generate, and there's no reason for management to admit that.

ken3• 6 years ago

No, your salary depends on how well you negotiate, not how good a worker you are. Whenever I’ve shared salary information with coworkers (at non-union tech jobs) it never correlated with value or quality or productivity.

If you really want to go the “meritocracy“ route, drop salaries altogether. Make employees bid on features and maintenance, and pay them for accomplishing these specific tasks. Paying salaries at all (the same amount every month regardless of productivity) is anti-meritocratic.

Open source is a fantastic counterexample to this. Lots of people produce huge collective value to the industry for $0 incremental salary.

heavyset_go7• 6 years ago

Movie stars with multi-million dollar contracts exist in the same union as B-list actors you've only ever seen in the backgrounds of infomercials.

ieRei6ae4• 6 years ago

You need to define meritocracy.

There's plenty of excellent software engineers paid pennies to work on difficult problems because they live in countries with very low wages.

And plenty of people in silicon valley being wildly overpaid to copy paste javascript from stack overflow.

totaldude873• 6 years ago

I think the tech people/artists working on gaming industry , Uber's male chauvinistic culture and the problems associated with that can be a typical examples of "why tech needs to unionize".

So far , the medium.com has been the "systematic problems reporting tool" for tech and that just generates the views and small changes..

In the past decade, i hate to see that the word "unionizing" in itself has become a bad word to hear for anyone from Management.

MiroF• 6 years ago

I doubt the word "unionizing" was ever something management wanted to hear

whatshisface• 6 years ago

Uber's male chauvinistic culture and the problems associated with that can be a typical examples of "why tech needs to unionize"

Why wouldn't the same employees that are setting Uber's culture set the union culture? The union is a collective bargaining unit that acts on behalf of the workers, not the most moral and upstanding workers, or the most progressive workers, or the workers that represent you personally.

jcampbell12• 6 years ago

Unions have a terrible reputation when it comes to helping people in the minority. They have elections and tyranny of the majority is the natural outcome. Unions and Labor parties have a nasty history of racism. About 15 years ago I was present when a UAW rep called a gay salaried coworker the f-word at 150 decibels and the company could do nothing. He is now the plant union chairman.

I am sure this union will start off nice, but eventually the Bros will run it.

duxup6• 6 years ago

Athletic unions are generally there because the top leagues are monolithic, there aren't other places to go with similar compensation. It's sort of a different playing field.

onlyrealcuzzo• 6 years ago

Okay, so you have 2 options to make dollar money as an engineer: Google & Facebook.

Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon pay well, but 10-20% less for the same level. There's a handful of others that will pay about 20-40% less. The average startup is paying 40-70% less.

And, sure, you'll always run into some startup that's paying one or two engineers a million dollars.

Stephon Marbury made more money when he left the NBA to play in China. Doesn't mean the average player can or does.

Anyone making league average in the NBA could play in Europe or China for 40-70% less.

Not sure what the difference is...

epicureanideal• 6 years ago

In tech the monolithic nature arises differently.

The Top Companies pay X, and that sets the ceiling for most people's wages. The difficulty of getting into Top Companies means that most other companies know they can pay somewhat less than that.

Although it's claimed there's a talent shortage and in theory that would cause engineers to be able to negotiate for large salaries, most businesses just don't think that deeply about it. You can't negotiate with someone who just doesn't care that the math works out in their favor. Many managers in my experience have anchor points on salaries that they just will not go beyond regardless of the quality of the candidate. The salary spread for junior to super-super-senior developer is only about 50% (100k-150k or 120k-200k), whereas the productivity difference may commonly be much greater.

Lastly, there is de facto price fixing. Human Resources Departments do "salary surveys" of what all the other companies are paying and then try to pay their employees around the same amount. Even though this isn't official "collusion", the effect is the same. And if 1 or 2 small companies buck the trend, it doesn't change the overall market.

scarface748• 6 years ago

Athletes need unions because sports organizations are a legal monopoly. All of the employees - the owners - set rules in concert.

When you graduate from college, you decide what company you want to apply for. You don’t have to participate in a draft where different employers have already decided the order they are going to make you an offer.

Also all sports team share some of their revenue streams.

notyourday10• 6 years ago

But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from joining a union.

Most of athletes aren't high paid. You don't hear about them and the high-paid athletes via players unions do everything possible to prevent newcomers from joining their ranks -- that's why there are deadlines when the teams must bring the number of people on a team down to a certain number.

Most of SAG/AFTRA members only dream of a principal role again after using the exceptions while collecting tips slinging drinks in bars or carrying plates in restaurants.

If you are making over 100-250k while working in tech unions will push your compensation down. The companies won't be negotiating with you about your special deal when the union shows up in your shop.

triceratops5• 6 years ago

Most of SAG/AFTRA members only dream of a principal role again after using the exceptions while collecting tips slinging drinks in bars or carrying plates in restaurants.

And yet, they get healthcare through the union. Minimum rates for when they do find work. Residuals to get them through lean years.

ChuckMcM• 6 years ago

Tech workers could have effectively used the leverage associated with unionization since at least 1984 during the semiconductor recession.

Considering that the revenue per employee number is at an all time high, and the amount of money the company spends on the employee's working environment[1] is at record lows pretty much explains why this is going to be effective now when it wasn't before.

There is also the issue of the "big" tech companies piling up cash rather than compensating their employees. So giving a voice to that choice could be interesting as well.

[1] Most people I've had the discussion with will argue that "free food" and "bus service" is way more than employees in the 90's got. However on a per-employee basis, the typical professional employee (engineer) had 150 square feet of office space that was unshared, in an open plan office that is typically less than 18 square feet and can be a small as 9 square feet. 100 square feet in a class A office building is $1000/month for $10/sq ft. Food and bus service per employee totals to much less than that. The key is that with a union, the employee has a voice in whether they get compensated in office space or in free snacks.

kerkeslager16• 6 years ago

Also, frankly, fsk free snacks. Pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks, and I'll choose whether to spend it on snacks or not. And since the money spent on free snacks was probably about $20/week, it won't be a significant consideration in any of my decisions.

Bus service might be more significant in some places, but every place I've ever lived had that subsidized by the government, and long commutes are a toxic thing in themselves.

throwaway8943458• 6 years ago

Politics aside, I wonder if a tech union would have a strong incentive to make their individual workers irreplaceable--encourage them to hoard knowledge or make the code deliberately difficult for others to understand--such that the company would have a lot more to lose from a strike. As an outsider, most unions that I'm familiar with have employees that are more or less replaceable (one certified welder can fill in for another in a relatively short amount of time), but I don't think this is (as) true for tech. Thoughts?

jacquesm• 6 years ago

Food and bus service are also simply ways to control the amount of time an employee spends on premises.

wmil• 6 years ago

There's a great tweet about offices...

"Is it weird to be jealous of the corporate dystopia workspaces from 1990s movies?

Neo would be sharing that space with 4 people in an open office plan today."

https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1120433880593575936

Read the whole thread. It's disturbing how close the over the top dystopian joke offices from the film Brazil are to reality.

mprovost• 6 years ago

And the amount spent on actual hardware must be at an all time low. The first lab I interned at in high school in the early 90s, every programmer had both a Symbolics workstation and a NeXTcube on their desk. (In a private office, of course). That represented a pretty significant investment. At my first "real" job, I got a Sun Ultra 5 workstation. These days you get the same Macbook Pro that everyone else can pick up at the Apple Store. Often tech folk will have faster personal computers at home.

WalterBright• 6 years ago

There is also the issue of the "big" tech companies piling up cash rather than compensating their employees.

Big tech companies already do that in the form of stock options, grants, and employee stock purchase plans.

DoubleGlazing• 6 years ago

1. Why do tech workers need a union?

In my experience the normal dynamics of employer-employee relationships are broken in the tech sector.

In most cases where employees have a grief with an employer it's usually due to a lack of something, be it wages, safety, job security etc.

In the tech sector that doesn't apply. Wages are good, normal health and safety issues are non-existent and you have no problem finding a job if you need one - if you have the skills.

The problem is that the environment can be very, very toxic. My experience has been of employers offering me a big salary, but then expecting me to work very long hours. Couple this with an obsession with being the first to market and rushing to get the product out of the door and you end up with an unpleasant and stressful work environment.

There are health and safety issues, but they don't manifest in broken bones or bruises, but in stress, anxiety and nervous breakdowns.

And you can't opt-out. I've asked to have my contract changed so that the overtime clause has limits applied to it in exchange for a salary reduction - in three attempts every employer has said no. It's like overtime is expected as a normal thing and that you can't complain because your salary is so good.

But of course if you are putting in just an extra hour each day and you are contracted for a 37.5 hour week, you are actually reducing your salary by around 13%.

And if you are perceived as a troublemaker by your employer for standing up for yourself you;ll find that news gets around other employers faster than you'd expect.

Its that broken dynamic, combined with a lack of ethics that means tech employees need to unionize in order to reign in bad employers.

abledon• 6 years ago

Reduced salary of 13% —- that 8 week vacation, 37.5 hr hard cutoff gov job is looking not too shabby (to run a bunch of fun side projects alongside )

llcoolv• 6 years ago

Well. You can have all the free market leverage on the world, but without a union you cannot participate in regulatory capture and these days it is all that matters :)

austincheney3• 6 years ago

Some issues are systemic across an industry.

The biggest problems I have with this industry most developers don't want fixed. So unless a union offers something like a certification, licensing, or credentialing program for its members, like the security industry does, I don't see a union solving the software industry problems most frustrating to me. A license or certification is valuable because it provides a common platform of competencies that raises the value of the union members in the workforce, requires documented continuing education, and ensures a common criteria of best practices that reinforces the business value of the union to business entities.

kerkeslager16• 6 years ago

Developers don't want this because 1) at least in the US, our educational system is prohibitively costly, and your solution proposes putting the cost of that on developers, including not having time off for education, and 2) that's mostly a problem for employers, not developers--I'm quite capable of working with poorly-qualified and poorly-skilled developers and my work looks better by comparison.

You're proposing that developers pay to solve their employers' problem.

I don't think you'd find many developers who object to their employers paying for education and giving them time off to pursue that education.

chasd00• 6 years ago

if you want to unionize go ahead, i'm not though. I believe a lot of tech works would prefer not to be union and have to deal with all the BS plus dues. I can negotiate on my own pretty well so knock yourself out but i won't be signing up.

herbstein• 6 years ago

I can negotiate on my own pretty well

No, you can't. A union can collectively say "no programming will be done on behalf of the company if you don't give us what we want". You can't do that.

yumraj2• 6 years ago

1. Why do tech workers need a union?

1. Fight ageism (every 20 year old today will grow up someday)

2. Fight open office layout (my opinion, may not be shared by everyone)

3. Fight for equal pay, discriminations of various sorts

4. Fight for reasonable share in success and against the massive differential between CxO and others' pay

5. Resist outsourcing where it makes sense

....... the list goes on ....

sokoloff8• 6 years ago

Many of the most talented or hardest working engineers might rationally be opposed to equal pay measures.

MPSimmons• 6 years ago

2. Fight open office layout (my opinion, may not be shared by everyone)

This is, I believe, the biggest strike against unions. If the unions decide you don't get open offices, then that decision binds everyone, whether they wanted an open office or not.

You just have to hope that the many tradeoffs you make are worth the things you get in return.

skocznymroczny• 6 years ago

How about automation?

In Poland, worker unions at various companies strongly block any attempts at automation, because it makes less people are required to do the job so it leads to layoffs. But without adopting automation, in the long run the company can't keep up with automation-heavy competitors, so they go out of business, making everyone lose their jobs.

brianwawok3• 6 years ago

A union also tends to mean that you get paid for the # of years you worked your job, not how good you are.

This is a good thing for the bottom 50% of workers, and a bad thing for the top 50% of workers.

Does this union do anything to address that? Is pay still fully merit based?

Apocryphon36• 6 years ago

Why do unions have to have seniority rules? Certainly next-gen unions can pursue a different model.

gamblor95611• 6 years ago

This is completely false.

Union wage agreements are based on what union members want.

For blue-collar unions, this usually means seniority-based scales.

For white-collar unions, this usually means experience-based scales (which differs from seniority because it's not job-specific; any job in the field counts).

For talent-based unions like SAG or NFLPA, this means minimum scales with no cap on maximum potential earnings.

Aunche4• 6 years ago

Those may be the stated reasons for a union, but for some reason, in tech, workers just want a union because they want to inject their political views into their company:

But in 2018, a heated disagreement broke out between employees and management about whether to leave a project called “Always Punch Nazis” on the platform, according to reporting in Slate. When Breitbart said the project violated Kickstarter’s terms of service by inciting violence, management initially planned to remove the project, but then reversed its decision after protest from employees.
Following the controversy, employees announced their intentions to unionize

Aunche4• 6 years ago

The Kickstarter campaign was worse than I thought: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/282505033/always-punch-...

The back cover (near the bottom of the page) clarifies that "Nazi" includes everyone who is alt-right. It describes itself as "satirical," but you can say that about anything blatantly offensive.

GaryNumanVevo3• 6 years ago

And? the workers are the ones producing the platform, not the CEO or board members. It's well within their purview to inject politics if they communally agree upon it.

stale20022• 6 years ago

Why not negotiate for a better workplace?

Well, that depends on what the union is negotiating for.

I can think of many things that a union might democraticly negotiate for that I would strong oppose.

Things such as putting of barriers to entry, like requiring a degree, or keeping our bootcampers, might be "beneficial" to the union members, but would be an absolute deal breaker to me.

The moment a union tried to pull up the ladder, and do something like that, is the moment that I attempt to sabotage everything that they do, regardless of the union democratically negotiating to screw over new developers.

nhumrich• 6 years ago

some issues are systemic

I would unionize just to get rid of open offices, for example

lopmotr• 6 years ago

It's not clear that these are really tech workers who voted for it. Half of Kickstarter's employees are designers/coders and the other half work with the community [1]. Since one of the unionization organizers worked on Trust and Safety, I wonder if that's also how the vote was split.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/team

meerita• 6 years ago

In my opinion, unions are just a way to destroy property. If you want really improve your life, gather people and leave the company, start a business, the same business, why not and put all the improvements there. But unionize is plainly silly.

ryanmercer2• 6 years ago

I mean, no. But even if so, high pay doesn't stop athletes from joining a union.

I think athletes are more in unions because when the NFLPA was formed most of them had to go get real jobs to support themselves combined with the fact that sports like American Football have a history of causing life-changing injuries including pretty severe TBIs.

The wiki entry for the NFLPA even points this out

The new association's initial agenda also included a league-wide minimum salary, plus a per diem when teams were on the road, a requirement that uniforms and equipment be paid for and maintained at the clubs' expense, and continued payment of salaries when players were injured

Even then they didn't get that great of a deal

Rather than face another lawsuit, the owners agreed to a league minimum salary of $5,000, $50 for each exhibition game played, and medical and hospital coverage

Inflation adjusted from 1956 that's a minimum salary of $47,421.14.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_Pl ayers_Association

So there was a very real reason for that specific union to form and once a union forms, it's pretty unlikely to go away.

Trying to compare that to office workers needing a union doesn't really translate.

I'm not saying office workers need, or don't need, a union. I'm simply saying I don't think this is a fair comparison. I've never been part of a union and can't really speak to the benefits and downsides of them.

wirrbel2• 6 years ago

You may think you can do without a union if business is good and management OK. When shit hits the fan, that is when you'll learn that you need them.

I work in a German unionized company and I think unions can be quite well-aligned with workers and business interest.

ksr_throwaway5• 6 years ago

For those who are curious this union drive was really started by extreme incompetence from upper management. The former CEO hired ineffective status-seekers (including the current CEO) into many positions of power which created a super toxic environment. Accountability for internal problems has been extremely low. The "Always Punch Nazis" controversy was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

People in the bay area may not understand that most people working at Kickstarter truly believe in the company's mission. The money is not great and we've been willing to accept that to feel like we're making a positive change in the world. Unfortunately upper management has used this (as well as Kickstarter's reputation) as a bargaining chip to treat employees poorly.

Source: I work at Kickstarter

qtplatypus4• 6 years ago

extreme incompetence from upper management.

I don’t think that any unionisation has ever came about due to the management being competent and treating their workers well.

password1• 6 years ago

But didn't the same management also decided to make the company a PBC instead of becoming billionaires by going public? That always felt to me like a signal that the management believed the mission too.

cmod• 6 years ago

Somewhat tangential but perhaps of interest to anyone here curious about unions — the documentary American Factory [0] chronicles Fuyao Glass' creation of a factory in the US, and the subsequent attempts (and ultimate failure) of those workers to unionize.

[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/81090071

chillacy10• 6 years ago

It was interesting to see the lengths management went through to prevent a union from forming. The show ends with management getting excited about their now robotic arms. Robots don't unionize and complain about healthcare.

qwerty456127• 6 years ago

How many are there? Kickstater looks like something quite a small team can do and I always imagined a union to mean thousands of employees.

Waterluvian• 6 years ago

I'm excited by this. I hope they utilize this as an opportunity to improve employee well-being and force the employer to treat issues like climate change as an actual hard requirement and not a "nice to have."

I think the only concern I have, which I've seen with a lot of unions, is that they can evolve to become an us vs. them mentality, which enables absolutely mediocre people to keep their jobs at the cost of everyone.

eximius• 6 years ago

Professional guilds for maintaining industry-wide standards of competence and unions for corporate bargaining power.

Still waiting on the first one.

vitalus• 6 years ago

Is it normal for unionization votes to have this kind of opposition? 56.6% doesn't seem like an overwhelming majority, so I'm curious to see how it plays out for all of the employees there.

It would be interesting as well to know how/if the vote was drastically different based on role - it sounds like this was a company-wide vote, which would necessarily include many more roles than just software engineers.

quotemstr2• 6 years ago

Well, now we have a natural experiment on the effect of unionization on a tech company. I look forward to monitoring the results over the next few months and years.

pensatoio• 6 years ago

Perhaps I’m jaded by my experience working for employers that support change and transparency, but I, for one, would immediately pack up and leave if any part of my firm’s white collar workforce unionized. I have zero interest in participating in collective bargaining. I work hard to stand out, and I capitalize on that influence to negotiate raises and promote change on my own.

While I’m sure there are situations that merit such a decision, might I suggest that unionizing < finding another employer that meets your needs. The inability or lack of desire to do so indicates to me either fear of change or aversion to risk, both of which are unwarranted from anyone who is continually working to improve themself.

marcell• 6 years ago

I'm trying to understand what the employees hope to get out of this. The only substantial issue mentioned in the article is a dispute over whether "Always Punch Nazis" should be allowed on the site.

Does anyone have insight into what's motivating the Kickstarter employees here?

alec2dabreen• 6 years ago

I'm all for it. Congrats to them!

sjg0075• 6 years ago

Hospital doctors are unionized. Professors are unionized. Plumbers are unionized Dirt movers are unionized Police are unionized Figherfighters are unionized Public employees are unionized Teachers are unionized Actors are unionized the NBA is unionized the NFL is unionized the MLB is unionized the NHL is unionized And yet, software engineers should not be ?

pro-duct• 6 years ago

It being a common practice isn't relevant to whether it is best for this industry and its workers. I'm not saying I disagree, but your reasoning just doesn't support your argument

sjg0075• 6 years ago

What makes software engineering different?

fogetti3• 6 years ago

I think you didnt fully understand the parent poster. The point is that in this thread many people are questioning the case for unions in software engineering and the parent comment responds to that. He just gave examples that unions protect all kind of workers, software work included, to make a point in case.

So it's you who seem to be without arguments.

cartercole• 6 years ago

there goes the neighborhood

bobloblaw452• 6 years ago

So Kickstarter will be hiring more contractors then?

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

What's up with the satanic jacket in the picture?

https://teespring.com/shop/satanic-no-masters?pid=2&cid=2397

MuffinFlavored• 6 years ago

What are the cons of unionizing? All of the benefits always seem "too good to be true" to be.

manfredo13• 6 years ago

In a non right-to-work state like NY, it means you have to pay dues to a union that negotiates on your behalf. It can very well end up negotiating for things you don't want, or are even actively against. For instance, a teacher may be in favor of merit-based promotion and compensation while they are obligated to pay dues to a union that pushes for seniority based pay.

2019-nCoV• 6 years ago

The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.

knee-cartilage• 6 years ago

nearly half of them voted against it? americans are so amazingly propagandized against anything vaguely construed as 'socialism' it's honestly impressive

L-four• 6 years ago

I never understood why employees in America need to vote to join a union. In Australia employees can join/leave unions at will.

justlexi93• 6 years ago

These workers are setting an example for the entire industry. Tech employees deserve job security, strong wages and benefits, and a voice in their companies.

allsystemsgo• 6 years ago

Kickstarter employees vote to be unemployed.

thulecitizen2• 6 years ago

I see a beautiful symphony here. The fact that this is discussed is to me a sign that enough people are feeling pressured and stressed, and sharing how the current systems don't work for them.

Through sharing we can reveal our hopes and frustrations.

Dialogue is step 1. It's a brave, difficult first step.

Bravo Hackernews community.

What ever pains people have, I'd like to ask them to try and see it as temporary growing pains. That maybe those who disagree with this development can see that others are sharing their unmet needs, as a request to help get help in getting those needs met. Exploring new strategies.

I believe we will make it through and come out stronger.

cynusx• 6 years ago

I can't help but think that unions are very similar to code smells, it's when the management of the company isn't able to maintain cooperation and trust with their employees. I would never work for a company with a union

Miniso• 6 years ago

The same ol'shite that is ruining most of the workplaces nowadays. Wtf you want? A job right? You've got it now do it properly and earn your money the right way..

Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

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