When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone’s pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I’ve probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.
A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.
A union could ensure that the company’s incentives are aligned with worker’s incentives around things like on-call.
I’d love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:
- If you’re woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
- Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn’t for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.
Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.
Or, regarding “unlimited PTO”. I’d love to see a union force companies to:
- “Unlimited PTO” policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this “yeah, we heave ‘unlimited PTO’; oh, we’re really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?”.
Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.
Unless unions work differently where you live, they are a democracy that will pursue whatever issues its members vote on. If members don’t think pay is a problem, why would they try to change it?
Had to explain this to my dad when he told me about the carpenters unions not allowing his brother to work after he retired.
1: Unions are the democratization of workplaces; for better or for worse.
2: Should you really be working when you’re claiming retirement checks from your union?
3: People are often falsely confident on their views about things. People love to complain about the government while hardly understanding anything about it. The same happens everywhere, including unions. Just because some dude is miffed doesn’t mean they have any right to be. They can be misinformed.
Should you really be working when you’re claiming retirement checks from your union?
As a carpenter? Yes and no. It shouldn’t compete with what union people are by and large doing for their steady bread and butter but completely outlawing earning any money is cruel to the type of busy-bees that many tradespeople are. Hand-craft chessboards or something, anything where skill and mastery is eclipsing the industrial aspect. Also teaching, training, and consulting. Retirement should be a role-change (if desired), not a kick to the curb. Also, accommodate for half-retirement: Half the cheque, half the jobs kind of situation.
A union lets you have leverage when negotiating for anything with the corpo. Individually you have a little if you’re top talent, and none otherwise. Very few people are irreplaceable, some are somewhat painful to replace, the rest are less so. We’ve been mistaking the tight labor market in this industry for our own self worth but hopefully the last couple of years have helped most of us snap out of it.
Speaking of pay, the structures I’ve seen at a union university for example have pay scales based on the job and defined pay increases in every job. You know what you’re gonna get paid for a position you’re applying, and you know what you’re gonna get paid years ahead in that job. With that said, a union can negotiate any sort of pay scheme. Perhaps most importantly a union can negotiate to get a much larger portion of the profits for the engineers. You think some folks in tech are paid very well, but if you look at the value they generate, they might not be paid nearly enough. If you think a union might take your 500K salary to 300K while raising some other people’s salaries you should consider that a union can take it to 800K or more. Assuming this is happening at one of the wildly profitable companies where this money exists.
And of course a union gives you the leverage to negotiate any other conditions like the ones that you mentioned. On-call, PTO, remote, etc.
Yeah the tech labor market has really proven that the idea of employment contracts being negotiated between equal parties isn’t true even in the best of circumstances.
Even when companies are desperate for talent, and willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on salaries and perks, they are not willing to negotiate on anything outside of that. They still have terrifying contracts with non-compete and damages clauses they could use to wreck your life, no workplace democracy, unpaid overtime and whatever other shit is legal.
But hey! You get free snacks and enough money to buy the dinners you don’t time to cook and save up to survive your inevitable burn out!
Another concern I have - which might also be anti-union propaganda - is that I won’t be allowed to do certain things because that job is supposed to be done by someone else according to the contract.
I hate doing that sort of thing because it makes me wait and by the time they get back to me another fire has started that I have to put out and it takes me a while to get back to the first thing.
I’d be happy to hear this isn’t a legitimate concern.
You’re unlikely to be told that you aren’t allowed to do this or that, unless it’s a safety violation of some sort. The idea that you can describe jobs to the letter and everyone is aware of what’s written there and only does that is absurd. What’s in the job descriptions protects you against abuse if someone makes you do things aren’t paid for trained for, capable of, etc. It’s a backstop. It doesn’t prevent you from doing other things. In fact doing extra is a basis for promotion, just like it works in non-union shops. That’s what how I’ve seen things working in a unionised university I have access to.
In any case, if a union card comes to my desk, I’d get the power first and worry about these details later. At least someone would ask me how I want these things to work, instead of telling me with the only alternative being to leave the company or be fired.
Thanks for the answer!
Honestly, the fact that junior folks won’t be allowed to do things would be great. I’d love to see IT getting proper engineering certifications. People wouldn’t allow their factories to be built by non-certified engineers, but they’ll let their nephew who’s good with computers build their network. Seems like unions could help with that, too.
While I agree it is absurd, it absolutely happens. See the Las Vegas convention workers union. I was told that one worker could not plug-in an extension cord that had been previously plugged in because it wasn’t his job. There were numerous other instances exactly like that, while working a convention center floor.
It does happen.
Those compensation requirements would basically make it financially impossible to have someone on-call or they’d just have to hire people for those hours and say they are normal working hours.
How would you force someone to take time off?
How would you force someone to take time off?
If I was their boss I would say something like “you’re job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time”. Easy.
As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that’s the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.
If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.
I’ve been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is “that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”. It’s not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.
I’ll say it again. It’s about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that’s pain for the worker, reward for the company; that’s wrong.
“that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”
Classic. Once I landed in a team who’s been woken up every night, often multiple times a night for several years. The people left were so worn down, burnt out and depressed that it was obvious just by looking at them. The company has cut the team to the bone and the only people left were folks that didn’t have the flashy resumes to easily escape. They had drawn up plans to fix the system years ago. BTW, none of that was disclosed to me until I had signed up and showed up for work and asked who are those miserable looking people over there. “That’s your team” the man replied.
“that’s not good, but we’ll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about”
If this is happening, sounds like you have a shit-ass Product Manager (or no PM).
Signed, not a shit-ass Product Manager
Those compensation requirements would basically make it financially impossible to have someone on-call or they’d just have to hire people for those hours and say they are normal working hours
These are not the only options. Here are some others:
- Ensuring the on-call load is shared more evenly so that everyone is woken up under the painful limit
- Fixing the broken shit that keeps waking people up, which they keep ignoring because “it’s low priority”
- Hiring people for a night shift, appropriately compensated for their diminished health and other life impacts. The union can ensure such positions aren’t paid the same as normal work hours while not being prohibitively expensive. Night shifts are a standard thing in some occupations
Something’s telling me most orgs where 2 is an option would go with that. Related to that - increases in labor compensation is what forces companies to spend money on capital investment that increases productivity - read new equipment, automation, fixing broken shit, etc. If there are cheap enough slaves to wake up during the night, doing this investment is “low priority” (more expensive) and isn’t done.
Damn, wtf are intuit and GM doing to their engineers?
Silicon valley is full of H1B visa holders who can’t speak up politically or risk deportation.
This makes a lot of sense. I can definitely see those companies at the bottom having way more H1B workers than the ones st the top.
Edit: cause some jackass is implying I’m a bot - I should have joined a union and a union would’ve protected me from the mass layoff in '23 but that doesn’t change that while there I never thought about needing a union because it was such a nice place otherwise.
As someone who previously worked at Google - they didn’t have any antiunion propaganda.
They just, like, paid well, had top tier benefits, great perks, and had a good work life balance.
I am a human being, and I enjoyed my employment at Google
which also references an effort to use the media to quietly disseminate Google’s point of view about unionized tech workplaces.
Bogas’ order references an effort by Google executives, including corporate counsel Christina Latta, to “find a ‘respected voice to publish an op-ed outlining what a unionized tech workplace would look like,” and urging employees of Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google not to unionize.
in an internal message Google human resources director Kara Silverstein told Latta that she liked the idea, “but that it should be done so that there ‘would be no fingerprints and not Google specific.’”
From the article posted by 100_kg_90_de_belin.
Google seemingly does care about their internal image, so they will only make their actions obvious when they fire you for bogus reasons after wanting to join a union.
Quite nasty in that they give you no hints about how extreme their efforts on this are. They monitor internal employee tools like they are cosplaying the NSA, but you wouldn’t know before you are fired out of the blue.
The union autoworkers get good benefits like overtime pay for work over 8 hours. Union working come in at 6, then take a fixed breakfast and lunch break and then leave at 2:30. Anything over that will need approval and overtime pay. I’m surprised Ford and Stellantis isn’t alongside with GM.
Funny, seeing them at the top gave me a favorable impression of them, but seems to have caused the opposite for you. My impression was probably due to, like someone else said, feeling like maybe they’re not being drilled with as much anti-union propaganda.
But I’m from a place where you have to go out of your way not to be part of a union.
If you want to read about this on a website that isn’t full of ads and doesn’t just present as an ad for their own news app, here is the source material by Blind.com.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to the raw survey data and I generally don’t trust surveys that aren’t accompanied by raw data.
I went looking for the data because 1901 respondents across 32 of the largest companies globally doesn’t seem like it would be statistically representative of any one company. If you assume the same sample size per company, which it probably isn’t but again that’s unverifiable because I couldn’t find the raw data, you’re looking at, what, 60 employees for a company the size of Google?
Look, I’m a recovering tech worker who left the industry because of the toxic work culture, having spent a quarter of my life at one of the good ones. Even there I saw the value of unions. No matter the industry, workers deserve the right to collective bargaining and fair treatment. But I don’t think surveys with unverifiable data help move that conversation forward.
Now, if I’m mistaken and someone finds a source link to the data that we can all verify, I’ll happily take another look and reconsider my opinion on it’s validity.
Look, I’m a recovering tech worker who left the industry because of the toxic work culture, having spent a quarter of my life at one of the good ones.
What are you up to these days? Which unicorn was that?
I spend most of my days working on healing myself with time in nature, and I’m developing a personal photography project connected to my natural surroundings. I also spend time working on my garden when weather permits and am learning to paint and draw when the weather is gloomy. All in all that keeps my days pretty packed and active, not even thinking about tech most days whereas before it was all consuming.
The majority of my career in tech was at Mozilla, followed by a relatively brief stint at Element. I’m lucky that I was able to spend my entire career working for companies whose missions and products I still champion. But even as good and well intentioned as they are, they cannot escape so-called “Silicon Valley” as they’re very much a part of it.
I think blind itself drives some interesting bias. The public posts are pretty incel. You need a critical mass of folks at your company to have a company private board so it attracts folks from bigger companies. It doesn’t seem to represent average folks well. Unless I have no idea what average is.
I’m not sure what to do with that instinct. The overall results say a thing I wanted to hear. It all feels weird.
How afraid are you of retribution if you tried to unionize?
How afraid of retribution is my manager/ hr because they’re all too fat to walk home when they get 4 flat tires.
Holy shit Intuit and GM better shape the fuck up or the workers should just hurry up and fucking do it.
