Tech Workers Need More Than Sentimental Reasons To Unionize
from the workers-of-the-world,-compete! dept
Tony Long argues at Wired.com that it's time tech workers unionized. He uses the typical rhetoric about jobs being outsourced, wages stagnating, corporate profits soaring, and today's workers owing a debt to the labor movement, which won such benefits as weekends and vacations. Though organized labor has at times been an important and positive force, other sources of union power don't make sense today. Historically, a powerful union tool has been the ability to exclude non-members from the workforce. This is why unions are so vehemently against "right to work" laws, or these days, outsourcing labor overseas. Closely related to this is opposition to technologies that reduce the need for human employees, like in the example of the plumbers that were against waterless urinals. Though such a mentality is completely anathema to the tech world, it's not surprising to see it at a column called The Luddite -- the fear that technology would take jobs away from humans was the same fear that the original Luddites had. Even more important, perhaps, is that the delineation between labor and management -- central to the union ethos -- doesn't hold at most technology companies. Often, company equity is part of an employee's compensation package; so even if their wages seem to stagnate due to competition from Indian programmers, they benefit when their company saves money. Unions make sense when there's an extremely skewed balance of power between the employee and the employer; a coal mining town in West Virgina with just one employer would be a classic example. GM's monopoly on hiring in Flint Michigan was another one (though we'll ignore the thorny issue of why they chose to close that plant). But the tech workforce is mobile, it can go where the jobs are. It's never been easier for a few workers to start their own company. Companies invest huge amounts in recruitement and battling over the best workers. Indeed, the balance of power has shifted dramatically. Some argue that the decline of the labor force is due to unions having failed to adapt to the times, but that's like saying that typewriters failed to adapt. There isn't much need in the tech world for artifacts from the past.
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Unless
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Besides, a CEOs salary often includes stock options, meaning their pay is directly proportional to how well the company does under them. Poorly-performing execs automatically lower their own salary when stock prices fall under their bumbling.
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Re:
The fact that CEO's get stock options as part of their compensation means they literally devalue everyone else's holdings in the company. You'd think shareholders would have a problem with that...
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The purpose of a union...
All of that is pretty much moot in the technical world. The government has been pretty much bought and paid for by the folks interested in abusing the H1-b system (and I have seen some blatant and illegal abuse of that system up close and personal). Because of the government-encouraged abuse of H1-b's, programming is going to be mostly a minimum-wage McJob by the end of this decade, and any serious attempt at unionization will probably only hasten the day that all programming is done by H1-b's or offshore. Which is which I am busy building a business teaching music and selling instruments, which I hope will support me before that happens. The best part of my new career pursuit is that I have found that I really enjoy teaching young people how to play the violin (and viola); much more than I do putting up with the pervasive management attitude that programmers are fungible.
I still occasionally teach programming courses, and I advise all of my students to find something else to do for a living besides just writing software. I will probably write software for the rest of my life, but only for myself and my own business(es).
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Re: The purpose of a union...
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What drugs are Tony taking?
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Re: What drugs are Tony taking?
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Re: What drugs are Tony taking?
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the artifice of 'high tech'
Further, why should 'high technology' companies (really - that could be construed as anything from electric cars to web development to pharmaceuticals, couldn't it?) be treated differently than other industries?
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Re: the artifice of 'high tech'
http://www.qp.gov.bc.ca/statreg/reg/E/EmployStand/396_95.htm#section31
The Joe who wrote the article is wrong about why unionization happened in Flint Michigan. Unions have only been really successful when they have been able to capture or create a monopoly. The UAW was able to create a monopoly for the supply of cars to Americans - the monopoly was a UAW monopoly who were a single supplier of labor for cars for Americans.
Imports have broken that monopoly and the legacy costs of the union agreements which were negotiated when the companies and the workers asssumed the monopoly would last are going to bankrupt Ford and GM..
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Re: Re: the artifice of 'high tech'
Anyway, even a cursory reading of B.C.'s Employment Standards Regulation reveals that high technology professionals are not exempted by virtue of S.31 (which, oddly, you cited in support of your argument [?]). They are exempted from certain portions of the Act by virtue of S.37.8.
Additionally (since you were going there), the exclusions do not attach to whether they are considered "professionals" or "workers" but rather to whether the employee is deemed to be working for a company that is defined as a "high technology company". If more than 50% of the employees at a company meet the rather loose standard of what constitutes a "high technology professional", then all of the employees at that company are subject to the exemptions (with only slightly less painful conditions attaching to administrative and support staff working there). The amendments explicitly provide the same exemptions for "sales and marketing" staff as they do for developers [37.8(1)(d)].
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Monopoly???
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Re: Monopoly???
The American economy faces challenges but it has faced challenges for a long time. Trying to protect an isolated sector, like automobile manufacturing, just winds up costing every other American more.
There are studies done on the costs of protectionism which generally come out and say that it would be cheaper to pay the effected workers to stay home than to protect their jobs. Here is an interesting link to the federal reserve saying, as an example, that it is costing over $1 Million dollars per year per job to protect jobs in the softwood lumber industry.
http://www.dallasfed.org/fed/annual/2002/ar02f.html
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Re: Re: Monopoly???
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The Bottom Line
Now, why is it unfair to not pay these employees overtime when professionals and management are not paid overtime? It's a simple question of how much control over the employee's work does the employee have? Management and professionals generally are tasked with making strategic decisions that affect the way work is done. Non-professional employees cannot directly affect the hours that they are required to work because even if they perform above the expected norms for their position, there will always be more work that needs to be accomplished usually because of the decisions of management. So, if an employee is required to work more than 40 hours a day and more than 5 days a week and has no control over that, he must be compensated.
I've been on both sides of the issue, so I know there is a lot of gray area in this. I've managed a development team and have had to require overtime and weekends without compensation because deadlines that were based on their estimates of time were in jeopardy. But, I did give them comp time after the project was completed because I knew that it was also my fault for not seeing that the estimates were unrealistic. I've also been a support analyst and been required to work "on call" without compensation because the company I worked for sold our support as 24 x 7, but only staffed for 12 x 5.
The bottom line is that people should be paid for the time they work, especially if they have little to no control over whether they have to work overtime. It is not fair nor should it be legal to not pay someone overtime just because they are paid a salary or because they work in a certain industry. If a business is run so poorly that they can't afford to pay people adequately for the time they work then that business should fail. It should not be allowed to continue on making a few people a lot of money while exploiting the people that make it possible for them to make that money. That's why sweatshops are illegal in this country.
For those of you that are afraid of losing an exploitative job to outsourcing or the company going out of business because they have to pay fairly I can only say, "Grow a backbone!" The only way companies get away with doing these things is because people are afraid to stand up for what's right. Yeah, you may lose your job, but there are plenty more out there. If that's too scary for you, then go ahead and follow the herd even if you know the slaughterhouse is just over the hill. Personally, I would much rather die on my feet than live on my knees.
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Corporate governance
All nifty and fair, right?
Wrong. For tax purposes, you, the stockholder, own your pieces of companies through some kind of retirement plan, and the fund managers just vote with the Board instead of passing decisions through to you.
So you own the company but it's not run for you.
Where is the retirement plan that will let its customers vote their consciences, or vote down CEO-overpaying board members?
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Programming has the feel of a blue collar job these days, and you can feel it in the way people treat you in the company - almost like an unskilled laborer. Most sales idiots that i know make much more than I do now - and they didn't bust their ass for four years in college trying to understand calculus or EMag theory.
The joke is, the politcians are trying to figure out why science and math related graduation numbers are declining for Americans and all the jobs are going overseas. Big mystersy? How about - I'm not going to let my kid bust his ass to be undercompensated in comparison?
Some form of a union could be the answer here, although I am generally opposed to unions.
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...have skills, will travel...
Having worked for a recruiting firm for a number of years, it is safe for me to say that anyone can move to where the jobs are, but they use little things like a house, or land, or family to justify the need to stay and miss out on the growth potential and money that they would gain by the relo.
I've never seen any reason for tech workers to unionize, mostly because I was there in 1999 when they were whispering about it in Michigan, and we had a good belly laugh each time we quit a job and went to another for a 10% bump.
Unions? Intelligence need not apply.
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Re: ...have skills, will travel...
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Sad.
A union is nothing more than an uneducated, parasitic corporation that feeds off of other corporations.
Look at the various socialist websites on the internet and see how they back the reasons for their beliefs, references to a single book written close to a century ago.
Look at various libertarian websites on the internet and see where their research is. Economists, professors, historical statistics, empirical studies.
Tell me which group of these people has a better grasp of reality and what is better for everyone on a whole.
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Unions are simply democracies in miniature
As our society becomes less and less democratic, the need for the democratic protections that unions offer for high tech workers and almost all other workers, becomes greater and greater.
As a programmer with 9 years of experience who has survived this long recession we're in, I can attest to the dramatic need to belong to a union. To my fellow high-tech workers I would like to say: don't count your chickens before they're hatched: our society is moving towards a mega-billionaires-subsistence worker paradigm -- don't fool yourselves into thinking that your cubicle and high 5 figure salary will last forever. We must unionize now while we still can!
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