I don't know if spreading them around the workplace was a good idea
It could backfire, but will most likely dilute. Consider that a few Amazon workplaces chose not unionize even after the company has been exposed for appalling workplace practices. There are tradeoffs employees must accept for a union and not everyone benefits equally and not everyone is sold on paying a monthly fee tacked on to their check so that those few get a really good deal while the masses get varying degrees of what's left over.
If these guys want to organize an industry wide union like most nationals then I'd be on board for supporting them more. But just unionizing for their own local benefit isn't really what unions are about in my opinion so my thought is, "Mess with the bull, you get the horns."
We deal with the Teamsters and at one time I used to negotiate directly with them... in New York City. It was a show. Most things were agreed to behind the scenes but we would have to put on a theatre show during the "formal" negotiations so they could call us scumbags and we'd curse at each other while the employee reps were there. 90% of the give and take was pretty much settled before hand.
All they really cared about (3 different locals but all Teamsters) was taking care of the longer-term members and they regularly sold out the new guys for a song and a dance. We we had 2 sets of rules/benefits... one for the redlined folks and one for anyone else.
I haven't dealt with them for a long time now, but I suspect its similar.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
I dunno, some here are making it seem like working in technology is akin to laboring in a coal mine, my personal experience is life has been pretty good outside of excessive hours and some nights or weekend work.
Not saying there isn't room for improvement and certainly some folks have faired worse than me, but I'm not sure we're all in a place where it's time for a workers revolt.
I'd rather see government step in with some more rules and regs to protect workers everywhere, but here in the US that's probably not anything which could happen given the current political climate.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I don't know if spreading them around the workplace was a good idea
It could backfire, but will most likely dilute. Consider that a few Amazon workplaces chose not unionize even after the company has been exposed for appalling workplace practices. There are tradeoffs employees must accept for a union and not everyone benefits equally and not everyone is sold on paying a monthly fee tacked on to their check so that those few get a really good deal while the masses get varying degrees of what's left over.
If these guys want to organize an industry wide union like most nationals then I'd be on board for supporting them more. But just unionizing for their own local benefit isn't really what unions are about in my opinion so my thought is, "Mess with the bull, you get the horns."
We deal with the Teamsters and at one time I used to negotiate directly with them... in New York City. It was a show. Most things were agreed to behind the scenes but we would have to put on a theatre show during the "formal" negotiations so they could call us scumbags and we'd curse at each other while the employee reps were there. 90% of the give and take was pretty much settled before hand.
All they really cared about (3 different locals but all Teamsters) was taking care of the longer-term members and they regularly sold out the new guys for a song and a dance. We we had 2 sets of rules/benefits... one for the redlined folks and one for anyone else.
I haven't dealt with them for a long time now, but I suspect its similar.
Yeah, I've worked at a couple jobs like that. About 60% of the workers were "part time" and the rest "full time" according to union guidelines. The full time employees got benefits and the rest didn't but the part time still had to pay dues and strike when the full time employees didn't like their benefits. The golden carrot being that if you toed the line someday you'd get to be full time too.
Every major union operates differently though and some are a lot better than others. The IT/tech industry (admins and developers) desperately needs unionizing. When an industry is out of control with labor practices like, IT/tech, then unions are a net positive in my opinion.
The issue I have is that the entire tech industry needs unionizing and not just some small department in a company that currently has the spotlight. To me, that's as selfish as the management structure they're bucking. So, I have little sympathy for how they're going to get corralled.
The gaming industry likes to PR itself as especially burdened. They are, but so is the rest of tech. A weak analogy is pro sports. A few rockstars players make millions, the rest just get the shit beat out of the and enough money to pay the bills until they can't play anymore, then they're screwed. Tech is similar in that a few jobs pay bank with great benefits and reasonable conditions, but those are so few compared to the majority of the workforce.
My rule of thumb is always : Can your job be automated... or can it be done cheaper elsewhere.
Right now I'm ordering tons of robots because it is simply cheaper to have a robot pick up a package, read a code and put it in a sack than to pay someone $15 - $20 an hour to do that. Plus its honestly hard to find employees who want to do basic tasks like that. This is what you see happening with fast food and other similar jobs. It has now literally become cheaper and more dependable to have a robot cook your burger than to pay someone to do the same thing.
IT jobs in general do not fall into that bucket. But I think they CAN (depending on specifics) fall into what has happened in my company as well. We had a robust IT group based in Scottsdale AZ. Slowly but surely that group was shrunk and responsibility shifted to a global IT group housed in Prague. Eventually we shut down Scottsdale and some small percent stayed with us and relocated to the Atlanta area. This is where our IT "Directors" are housed, but they only have 1-2 direct staff there and all the rest are now in either Prague or... as Prague faces the same eventual fate as Scottsdale... now in India.
I try to keep an eye on these trends because my son is focused on CS right now. I'd like him to have a nice stable job someday... but I do have my doubts.
And I am not saying any of the above is "right" or moral. The problem is that competition is cut throat. 7 figure deals in my industry are regularly lost or won over a fraction of a penny cost per piece. At the end of the day, nobody wants to pay 5 cents more per package to support paying a person vs a robot... and that gap is going to grow not shrink. We operate at roughly a 5% margin. Not a ton of wiggle room there. It's just cut throat to squeeze every last penny. And I can assure you that if our labor force unionized, we would quickly accelerate to automation and robots so maybe the 25% that were left were better off, but the other 75% would not have a job.
I think it sucks. But I absolutely only see this trend accelerating in the future. The cost of technology comes down.. and the cost of human capital goes up...
With today's home based work force trend does it really matter if Programmer A is sitting in his house in Seattle or his house in Costa Rica? or Prague? or India? And if it does (and in some cases it sure might), will that always be the case?
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Unionized game workers? That may be feasible, maybe even necessary, but a division of the Communication Workers? The association with the Communication Union is going to put a bad taste in management's mind from the start. What do they expect potential Communication Union workers to do? Keep their industrial secrets and be happy?
Psst, hey buddy. Want some Blizzard corporate secrets?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I don't know if spreading them around the workplace was a good idea
It could backfire, but will most likely dilute. Consider that a few Amazon workplaces chose not unionize even after the company has been exposed for appalling workplace practices. There are tradeoffs employees must accept for a union and not everyone benefits equally and not everyone is sold on paying a monthly fee tacked on to their check so that those few get a really good deal while the masses get varying degrees of what's left over.
If these guys want to organize an industry wide union like most nationals then I'd be on board for supporting them more. But just unionizing for their own local benefit isn't really what unions are about in my opinion so my thought is, "Mess with the bull, you get the horns."
We deal with the Teamsters and at one time I used to negotiate directly with them... in New York City. It was a show. Most things were agreed to behind the scenes but we would have to put on a theatre show during the "formal" negotiations so they could call us scumbags and we'd curse at each other while the employee reps were there. 90% of the give and take was pretty much settled before hand.
All they really cared about (3 different locals but all Teamsters) was taking care of the longer-term members and they regularly sold out the new guys for a song and a dance. We we had 2 sets of rules/benefits... one for the redlined folks and one for anyone else.
I haven't dealt with them for a long time now, but I suspect its similar.
Here in Canada we tend not to think highly of any American based international unions, especially those with well known historical ties to organized crime like the Teamsters.
We have plenty of our own home-grown unions that don't engage in sweetheart deals behind the member's back - the vast majority of them, in fact.
We also don't bring up stories of sleaze in union negotiations every time a group of workers tries to organize, typically because they're treated like shit and try to do something about it, to either explicitly or implicitly paint all unionization efforts with the same sleazy brush stroke.
But that's just me, someone who was a union rep and negotiated contracts for 30+ years for professional and technical health care workers with zero sleaze.
Because of my lifetime involvement in unions I can tell you even more horrible stories about the mob unions operating in Canada other than the Teamsters and almost without exception they are international US-based unions.
But like I said, mob controlled sleazebag unions is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear about some small union I know fuck all about organizing gaming studio workers, but that's just me.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I don't know if spreading them around the workplace was a good idea
It could backfire, but will most likely dilute. Consider that a few Amazon workplaces chose not unionize even after the company has been exposed for appalling workplace practices. There are tradeoffs employees must accept for a union and not everyone benefits equally and not everyone is sold on paying a monthly fee tacked on to their check so that those few get a really good deal while the masses get varying degrees of what's left over.
If these guys want to organize an industry wide union like most nationals then I'd be on board for supporting them more. But just unionizing for their own local benefit isn't really what unions are about in my opinion so my thought is, "Mess with the bull, you get the horns."
We deal with the Teamsters and at one time I used to negotiate directly with them... in New York City. It was a show. Most things were agreed to behind the scenes but we would have to put on a theatre show during the "formal" negotiations so they could call us scumbags and we'd curse at each other while the employee reps were there. 90% of the give and take was pretty much settled before hand.
All they really cared about (3 different locals but all Teamsters) was taking care of the longer-term members and they regularly sold out the new guys for a song and a dance. We we had 2 sets of rules/benefits... one for the redlined folks and one for anyone else.
I haven't dealt with them for a long time now, but I suspect its similar.
Here in Canada we tend not to think highly of any American based international unions, especially those with well known historical ties to organized crime like the Teamsters.
We have plenty of our own home-grown unions that don't engage in sweetheart deals behind the member's back - the vast majority of them, in fact.
We also don't bring up stories of sleaze in union negotiations every time a group of workers tries to organize, typically because they're treated like shit and try to do something about it, to either explicitly or implicitly paint all unionization efforts with the same sleazy brush stroke.
But that's just me, someone who was a union rep and negotiated contracts for 30+ years for professional and technical health care workers with zero sleaze.
Because of my lifetime involvement in unions I can tell you even more horrible stories about the mob unions operating in Canada other than the Teamsters and almost without exception they are international US-based unions.
But like I said, mob controlled sleazebag unions is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear about some small union I know fuck all about organizing gaming studio workers, but that's just me.
Yeah. I know my perceptions are skewed by what I saw. The teamsters are all I have experience with.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
We definitely need a way to to keep people being treated and compensated fairly for their talents and labour.
Unions…..
Politics…..
I wish they could be separated, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
Wel, it all starts with managerial policy and implementation.
To paraphrase what you said earlier in this thread, when employees are treated well and compensated fairly, the farthest thing from their mind is bringing in some stranger to change things and have yet another deduction from their paycheque.
It's the shitty, miserly employers with arbitrary rules that bring either unions or complaints to the applicable employment standards govt. agencies down upon their own heads.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
We definitely need a way to to keep people being treated and compensated fairly for their talents and labour.
Unions…..
Politics…..
I wish they could be separated, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
Wel, it all starts with managerial policy and implementation.
To paraphrase what you said earlier in this thread, when employees are treated well and compensated fairly, the farthest thing from their mind is bringing in some stranger to change things and have yet another deduction from their paycheque.
It's the shitty, miserly employers with arbitrary rules that bring either unions or complaints to the applicable employment standards govt. agencies down upon their own heads.
We see the absurd on both sides of the spectrum.
United we stand, divided we fall.
I believe that. It’s true for family, it’s true for business and it’s true for country.
The only path forward is compromise and collaboration.
The only situation where unions really make sense is when both the employer and the employees need each other. Think of professional sports, for example: very few NFL players could get anywhere near their salary in some other line of work, while the teams would lose fans in a hurry if they tried to fire all the players and replace them with others who obviously weren't as good. Another classic example is the factory town where a single employer employs a large fraction of the working adults in a small town.
If there is a lot of demand for employees and a company is mistreating them, and it's easy for an employee to quit his job and get a comparable job with another company that will treat him better, then that's the sensible thing to do. In that scenario, for employees to unionize is a waste of time and effort. The employer will get what he deserves when all of his good employees quit, anyway.
Meanwhile, if there are plenty of qualified employees clamoring for a job so that a company could easily fire 10% of its workforce and replace them, then that's the sensible thing to do if some chunk of your employees tries to unionize. Even if this is prevented by laws, you certainly don't want to promote or give a raise to employees who are causing trouble for you. You want to try to find an excuse to fire them or nudge them toward quitting on their own. But that only applies to employees who are easily replaceable, and many aren't.
From an employee's perspective, if you want to unionize (or make any other demands of your employer, for that matter), then now is the time to do it, at least in America. A bunch of Americans have left the workforce since the start of the pandemic and not come back, which leaves a shortage of workers and companies desperate to keep the workers they have. That gives employees a lot more leverage than if they wait for a recession that makes them far more easily replaceable because the shortage is of jobs rather than of workers.
Here in Canada we tend not to think highly of any American based international unions, especially those with well known historical ties to organized crime like the Teamsters.
We have plenty of our own home-grown unions that don't engage in sweetheart deals behind the member's back - the vast majority of them, in fact.
We also don't bring up stories of sleaze in union negotiations every time a group of workers tries to organize, typically because they're treated like shit and try to do something about it, to either explicitly or implicitly paint all unionization efforts with the same sleazy brush stroke.
But that's just me, someone who was a union rep and negotiated contracts for 30+ years for professional and technical health care workers with zero sleaze.
Because of my lifetime involvement in unions I can tell you even more horrible stories about the mob unions operating in Canada other than the Teamsters and almost without exception they are international US-based unions.
But like I said, mob controlled sleazebag unions is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear about some small union I know fuck all about organizing gaming studio workers, but that's just me.
I don't know how this goes in other countries, but in America, much of the reason for unions to exist is to funnel money to the Democratic party. There is an implicit political bargain that something like 1/4 of the dues that union members pay will end up turning into political contributions for Democrats, and then when Democrats are in charge, they'll make concessions to basically give the unions what they want. That "1/4" figure isn't entirely pulled out of a hat, but rather, in states with laws that require unions to allow employees to opt out of making political donations through their union, that's about the discount that you get to union dues if you opt out. Of course, if most unions are regarded as part of the Democratic party, then when Republicans are in charge, they're likely to make decisions that are gratuitously hostile to those unions.
This also tends to mean that most Democrats are pro-union and most Republicans are anti-union. This tends to make union organizing attempts often successful in areas that are heavily populated by Democrats, but rarely successful in places that are mostly populated by Republicans. If 3/4 of a company's workforce is Republicans, then it's going to be very hard for a union to convince them that they should donate a small fraction of every paycheck to their political opponents.
There used to be a lot of private sector jobs that were unionized in America, but there aren't nearly as many anymore anymore. Union demands too often made their employers uncompetitive. The decline of private sector unions isn't so much a story of unionized companies becoming non-union as of them being replaced in the market by non-union competitors. Think, for example, of non-union Toyota and Honda capturing much of the car market from unionized Ford and GM. Meanwhile, public employees are far more likely to be unionized in America now, in part because a government can't be replaced by competing companies.
We definitely need a way to to keep people being treated and compensated fairly for their talents and labour.
Unions…..
Politics…..
I wish they could be separated, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
Wel, it all starts with managerial policy and implementation.
To paraphrase what you said earlier in this thread, when employees are treated well and compensated fairly, the farthest thing from their mind is bringing in some stranger to change things and have yet another deduction from their paycheque.
It's the shitty, miserly employers with arbitrary rules that bring either unions or complaints to the applicable employment standards govt. agencies down upon their own heads.
We see the absurd on both sides of the spectrum.
United we stand, divided we fall.
I believe that. It’s true for family, it’s true for business and it’s true for country.
The only path forward is compromise and collaboration.
Imho
Really its more an honest ratio and quality of work for an honest ratio of respect and wage. And it seems many on either side of the fence feel they are entitled to one but refuse to reciprocate the other.
We definitely need a way to to keep people being treated and compensated fairly for their talents and labour.
Unions…..
Politics…..
I wish they could be separated, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
Wel, it all starts with managerial policy and implementation.
To paraphrase what you said earlier in this thread, when employees are treated well and compensated fairly, the farthest thing from their mind is bringing in some stranger to change things and have yet another deduction from their paycheque.
It's the shitty, miserly employers with arbitrary rules that bring either unions or complaints to the applicable employment standards govt. agencies down upon their own heads.
That might be how things go for employees, but unionization efforts in America rarely start with what most of the employees want. Rather, it starts with an existing union seeing a non-union company that they think they could manage to unionize, and then trying to force or intimidate them into accepting a union, while management of the company usually pushes back in the opposite direction.
That's why one of the big controversies in recent years is over "card check", where if a union can convince half of a company's employees to sign something, then the company gets unionized without a secret ballot to gauge employees' true preferences. That's not the law today, but Democrats have been trying to make it so, while Republicans have tried to prevent it. That would allow union organizers to bully or threaten enough people individually, and if they convince half to sign, then the employees would all be forced into the union even if 90% of them were against it.
Oh man, I think IT jobs and development can most certainly be automated. Automated doesn't necessarily mean no workers, but it does many far fewer workers with those running and managing the automation at least at the beginning. I was talking with the application developer I work with and we were brainstorming ways our jobs could be automated. He was doing masters work in machine learning (he's a math/cs major) and switched over to being a paramedic. He wants out of the field altogether.
I'll be very surprised if in the next decade my job, both of my immediate coworkers, the jobs of these QA workers, and a hefty portion of infrastructure administration isn't automated. In fact I'll be surprised if a lot of jobs aren't automated. We're rapidly heading that direction in my opinion.
On the other hand; There is more automation then ever and yet the IT industry is bigger then ever. Automation, as far as my experience goes, has just shifted work to new tasks. At some point, automation will fully take over, but I've been hearing that it'll be "any day now..." for a good amount of time.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers. Do something wrong, no one forgets" -from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Oh man, I think IT jobs and development can most certainly be automated. Automated doesn't necessarily mean no workers, but it does many far fewer workers with those running and managing the automation at least at the beginning. I was talking with the application developer I work with and we were brainstorming ways our jobs could be automated. He was doing masters work in machine learning (he's a math/cs major) and switched over to being a paramedic. He wants out of the field altogether.
I'll be very surprised if in the next decade my job, both of my immediate coworkers, the jobs of these QA workers, and a hefty portion of infrastructure administration isn't automated. In fact I'll be surprised if a lot of jobs aren't automated. We're rapidly heading that direction in my opinion.
On the other hand; There is more automation then ever and yet the IT industry is bigger then ever. Automation, as far as my experience goes, has just shifted work to new tasks. At some point, automation will fully take over, but I've been hearing that it'll be "any day now..." for a good amount of time.
Automation replaces some tasks that used to be done by humans, which frees up human labor to do new tasks that there wasn't time to do before. That means that the old tasks still get done, and now also the new tasks, which makes society wealthier as a result.
It's often rough on the people whose jobs get replaced when they have to move to an entirely new industry in which they have no experience. But if it had never happened, most of humanity would still be working in subsistence agriculture and living in desperate poverty.
I once had a job that wasn't unionized when I started there, but became unionized while I was there. My entire experience with it had five components:
1) The union organizer from a large union whose original industry had absolutely nothing to do with where I worked stopped by while I was at work and tried to convince me that I should vote to unionize.
2) There was a secret ballot to determine whether we would unionize. The results were announced that the "yes" vote won.
3) A union organizer came to where I lived and threatened that I would be fired from my job if I didn't sign something agreeing that a little under 1% of my paycheck would now be sent to the union instead of to me.
4) The salary structure was rearranged to have a considerable seasonal spike right after the union contract was agreed to. This didn't affect my total pay on a per-year basis, but only how it was distributed within a year.
5) A union person bragged about what a huge raise they got us, not mentioning that it was just rearranging things seasonally as opposed to a year-round raise.
And that was it, really. I didn't see any positives for me as an individual. The only direct difference that it made is that some procedural stuff wasted a little of my time and (more importantly) I got paid less after union dues were deducted.
We definitely need a way to to keep people being treated and compensated fairly for their talents and labour.
Unions…..
Politics…..
I wish they could be separated, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
Wel, it all starts with managerial policy and implementation.
To paraphrase what you said earlier in this thread, when employees are treated well and compensated fairly, the farthest thing from their mind is bringing in some stranger to change things and have yet another deduction from their paycheque.
It's the shitty, miserly employers with arbitrary rules that bring either unions or complaints to the applicable employment standards govt. agencies down upon their own heads.
We see the absurd on both sides of the spectrum.
United we stand, divided we fall.
I believe that. It’s true for family, it’s true for business and it’s true for country.
The only path forward is compromise and collaboration.
Imho
What, where do live? Not here in the US certainly.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I can give a few negative examples of dealings with unions. I can give many negative examples of dealing with companies.
I can tell you guys some stories, you would probably find totally ludicrous.
Thankfully times have changed since those days, changed for the better in BC anyways.
We took big money out of Politics. I believe the maximum donation now is $100. It will be interesting to see how this recent change to our election system pans out over the coming years.
The biggest issue with any entity, regarding any kind of power. Left, Right, Up, Down, diagonals...
I can give a few negative examples of dealings with unions. I can give many negative examples of dealing with companies.
I can tell you guys some stories, you would probably find totally ludicrous.
Thankfully times have changed since those days, changed for the better in BC anyways.
We took big money out of Politics. I believe the maximum donation now is $100. It will be interesting to see how this recent change to our election system pans out over the coming years.
The biggest issue with any entity, regarding any kind of power. Left, Right, Up, Down, diagonals...
Corruption
Absolutely. I guess the question is: Did you really take big money out? Or did you move it into the shadows?
Here in the US it's just totally F-ed up with direct money, money via PACS (Political Action Committee), countless lobbyists, sweetheart deals in stocks and real estate, deals with family members.
I'm just gonna lay it out there that if you are a career politician you should NOT have millions of dollars more than when you started "public service". This goes for every political persuasion. I mention it because here in the US you have Unions that are allowed to make contributions to politicians, the same way companies do (or rich individuals). Both sides (left and right) just feed at the troth.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Unions were once very necessary in the US. That generally corresponds to times when there weren't laws to adequately protect workers from hazardous jobs and government didn't have the authority to act and legal recourse wasn't readily available to the common worker. The times have changed, the laws have improved, but unions stubbornly hang onto their role as self-appointed protector of workers, in spite of not being as necessary a function as it once was. There are still people willing to take advantage of others; the only real difference is that these people don't run railroads, steel mills and coal mines anymore. Instead, they run insurance companies, pharmaceutical concerns and technology firms.
Are unions still needed? Probably not nearly as much as the union organizers would like you to believe.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I dunno, some here are making it seem like working in technology is akin to laboring in a coal mine, my personal experience is life has been pretty good outside of excessive hours and some nights or weekend work.
Not saying there isn't room for improvement and certainly some folks have faired worse than me, but I'm not sure we're all in a place where it's time for a workers revolt.
I'd rather see government step in with some more rules and regs to protect workers everywhere, but here in the US that's probably not anything which could happen given the current political climate.
Bad time to try and schedule a revolt, anyways.
The pandemic has created a boon for employees. I just received a lateral job offer for 33% more pay from a competitor simply due to the Great Resignation/Retirement and, if we're being honest, the dead folks that unfortunately didn't make it through the pandemic. They're all no longer in the labor force.
If you tried to organize a revolt atm, a lot of your folks would simply find better jobs elsewhere, rather than fight that out.
Comments
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
All they really cared about (3 different locals but all Teamsters) was taking care of the longer-term members and they regularly sold out the new guys for a song and a dance. We we had 2 sets of rules/benefits... one for the redlined folks and one for anyone else.
I haven't dealt with them for a long time now, but I suspect its similar.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Not saying there isn't room for improvement and certainly some folks have faired worse than me, but I'm not sure we're all in a place where it's time for a workers revolt.
I'd rather see government step in with some more rules and regs to protect workers everywhere, but here in the US that's probably not anything which could happen given the current political climate.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Right now I'm ordering tons of robots because it is simply cheaper to have a robot pick up a package, read a code and put it in a sack than to pay someone $15 - $20 an hour to do that. Plus its honestly hard to find employees who want to do basic tasks like that. This is what you see happening with fast food and other similar jobs. It has now literally become cheaper and more dependable to have a robot cook your burger than to pay someone to do the same thing.
IT jobs in general do not fall into that bucket. But I think they CAN (depending on specifics) fall into what has happened in my company as well. We had a robust IT group based in Scottsdale AZ. Slowly but surely that group was shrunk and responsibility shifted to a global IT group housed in Prague. Eventually we shut down Scottsdale and some small percent stayed with us and relocated to the Atlanta area. This is where our IT "Directors" are housed, but they only have 1-2 direct staff there and all the rest are now in either Prague or... as Prague faces the same eventual fate as Scottsdale... now in India.
I try to keep an eye on these trends because my son is focused on CS right now. I'd like him to have a nice stable job someday... but I do have my doubts.
And I am not saying any of the above is "right" or moral. The problem is that competition is cut throat. 7 figure deals in my industry are regularly lost or won over a fraction of a penny cost per piece. At the end of the day, nobody wants to pay 5 cents more per package to support paying a person vs a robot... and that gap is going to grow not shrink. We operate at roughly a 5% margin. Not a ton of wiggle room there. It's just cut throat to squeeze every last penny. And I can assure you that if our labor force unionized, we would quickly accelerate to automation and robots so maybe the 25% that were left were better off, but the other 75% would not have a job.
I think it sucks. But I absolutely only see this trend accelerating in the future. The cost of technology comes down.. and the cost of human capital goes up...
With today's home based work force trend does it really matter if Programmer A is sitting in his house in Seattle or his house in Costa Rica? or Prague? or India? And if it does (and in some cases it sure might), will that always be the case?
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
We have plenty of our own home-grown unions that don't engage in sweetheart deals behind the member's back - the vast majority of them, in fact.
We also don't bring up stories of sleaze in union negotiations every time a group of workers tries to organize, typically because they're treated like shit and try to do something about it, to either explicitly or implicitly paint all unionization efforts with the same sleazy brush stroke.
But that's just me, someone who was a union rep and negotiated contracts for 30+ years for professional and technical health care workers with zero sleaze.
Because of my lifetime involvement in unions I can tell you even more horrible stories about the mob unions operating in Canada other than the Teamsters and almost without exception they are international US-based unions.
But like I said, mob controlled sleazebag unions is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear about some small union I know fuck all about organizing gaming studio workers, but that's just me.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Unions…..
Politics…..
I wish they could be separated, but I don’t know if that’s possible.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
To paraphrase what you said earlier in this thread, when employees are treated well and compensated fairly, the farthest thing from their mind is bringing in some stranger to change things and have yet another deduction from their paycheque.
It's the shitty, miserly employers with arbitrary rules that bring either unions or complaints to the applicable employment standards govt. agencies down upon their own heads.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
United we stand, divided we fall.
I believe that. It’s true for family, it’s true for business and it’s true for country.
The only path forward is compromise and collaboration.
Imho
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
If there is a lot of demand for employees and a company is mistreating them, and it's easy for an employee to quit his job and get a comparable job with another company that will treat him better, then that's the sensible thing to do. In that scenario, for employees to unionize is a waste of time and effort. The employer will get what he deserves when all of his good employees quit, anyway.
Meanwhile, if there are plenty of qualified employees clamoring for a job so that a company could easily fire 10% of its workforce and replace them, then that's the sensible thing to do if some chunk of your employees tries to unionize. Even if this is prevented by laws, you certainly don't want to promote or give a raise to employees who are causing trouble for you. You want to try to find an excuse to fire them or nudge them toward quitting on their own. But that only applies to employees who are easily replaceable, and many aren't.
From an employee's perspective, if you want to unionize (or make any other demands of your employer, for that matter), then now is the time to do it, at least in America. A bunch of Americans have left the workforce since the start of the pandemic and not come back, which leaves a shortage of workers and companies desperate to keep the workers they have. That gives employees a lot more leverage than if they wait for a recession that makes them far more easily replaceable because the shortage is of jobs rather than of workers.
This also tends to mean that most Democrats are pro-union and most Republicans are anti-union. This tends to make union organizing attempts often successful in areas that are heavily populated by Democrats, but rarely successful in places that are mostly populated by Republicans. If 3/4 of a company's workforce is Republicans, then it's going to be very hard for a union to convince them that they should donate a small fraction of every paycheck to their political opponents.
There used to be a lot of private sector jobs that were unionized in America, but there aren't nearly as many anymore anymore. Union demands too often made their employers uncompetitive. The decline of private sector unions isn't so much a story of unionized companies becoming non-union as of them being replaced in the market by non-union competitors. Think, for example, of non-union Toyota and Honda capturing much of the car market from unionized Ford and GM. Meanwhile, public employees are far more likely to be unionized in America now, in part because a government can't be replaced by competing companies.
That's why one of the big controversies in recent years is over "card check", where if a union can convince half of a company's employees to sign something, then the company gets unionized without a secret ballot to gauge employees' true preferences. That's not the law today, but Democrats have been trying to make it so, while Republicans have tried to prevent it. That would allow union organizers to bully or threaten enough people individually, and if they convince half to sign, then the employees would all be forced into the union even if 90% of them were against it.
On the other hand; There is more automation then ever and yet the IT industry is bigger then ever. Automation, as far as my experience goes, has just shifted work to new tasks. At some point, automation will fully take over, but I've been hearing that it'll be "any day now..." for a good amount of time.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
It's often rough on the people whose jobs get replaced when they have to move to an entirely new industry in which they have no experience. But if it had never happened, most of humanity would still be working in subsistence agriculture and living in desperate poverty.
1) The union organizer from a large union whose original industry had absolutely nothing to do with where I worked stopped by while I was at work and tried to convince me that I should vote to unionize.
2) There was a secret ballot to determine whether we would unionize. The results were announced that the "yes" vote won.
3) A union organizer came to where I lived and threatened that I would be fired from my job if I didn't sign something agreeing that a little under 1% of my paycheck would now be sent to the union instead of to me.
4) The salary structure was rearranged to have a considerable seasonal spike right after the union contract was agreed to. This didn't affect my total pay on a per-year basis, but only how it was distributed within a year.
5) A union person bragged about what a huge raise they got us, not mentioning that it was just rearranging things seasonally as opposed to a year-round raise.
And that was it, really. I didn't see any positives for me as an individual. The only direct difference that it made is that some procedural stuff wasted a little of my time and (more importantly) I got paid less after union dues were deducted.
Compromise and collaboration indeed.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I can tell you guys some stories, you would probably find totally ludicrous.
Thankfully times have changed since those days, changed for the better in BC anyways.
We took big money out of Politics. I believe the maximum donation now is $100. It will be interesting to see how this recent change to our election system pans out over the coming years.
The biggest issue with any entity, regarding any kind of power. Left, Right, Up, Down, diagonals...
Corruption
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Here in the US it's just totally F-ed up with direct money, money via PACS (Political Action Committee), countless lobbyists, sweetheart deals in stocks and real estate, deals with family members.
I'm just gonna lay it out there that if you are a career politician you should NOT have millions of dollars more than when you started "public service". This goes for every political persuasion. I mention it because here in the US you have Unions that are allowed to make contributions to politicians, the same way companies do (or rich individuals). Both sides (left and right) just feed at the troth.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
The pandemic has created a boon for employees. I just received a lateral job offer for 33% more pay from a competitor simply due to the Great Resignation/Retirement and, if we're being honest, the dead folks that unfortunately didn't make it through the pandemic. They're all no longer in the labor force.
If you tried to organize a revolt atm, a lot of your folks would simply find better jobs elsewhere, rather than fight that out.