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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>My main objection to unions is that, once they're in a company, employees lose the right to negotiate their own compensation. I want to be able to skip my union dues and deal directly with the company. OR I want to be able to make a union of my own, especially for a functional or values-based subset of coworkers, and have us negotiate separately.

Bargaining collectively is the whole point of creating a union in the first place. This special snowflake mentality that permeates the tech sector and the myopic individualism is a giant problem.

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Contrarily, the special snowflake and myopic individualism is what MADE the tech industry. The hubris to say, "I see a better way" or "I can do it better than that person" is how we got here. In point of fact, this entire thing is basically another form of "snowflake individualism".

I am starting to think the giant problem in tech is really attitudes which are dismissive of our differences and our experiences. Tropes about "tech-bros" and "millennials" are rooted in the very same biases that they're railing against.

It's just another face of tribalism.

The moment someone removes my individual right to negotiate is the moment I hand in my resignation and go work somewhere that I do have that right.

I will NOT have my coworkers voting on what is "fair" for me to be payed, based on BS metrics like "seniority".

If unions were so great, then how come I make more money than any other union based engineering position?

I have done just fine negotiating my salary on my own, thank you very much.

>I have done just fine negotiating my salary on my own, thank you very much.

And many, many other people haven't. Those people will unionize and won't care a lick to see you go.

Awesome. They can do that, and I will work for the multitude of companies and startups out there that will not unionize.

You can't unionize every startup in the world, and non unionized employees will be able to demand a premium.

Other people are free to burden themselves with union rules, and I will be free to accept the higher salary that I can command because my competition is hindered.

It is a competitive advantage to not be burdened by union rules.

You seem to be operating from a world where there unionization in tech even exists, and making assumptions that tech unions behave exactly the same as they have in different industries.

It's people like this commenter who need to be won over if a union would have any chance in tech. But I don't know how to do it. At my first ever job everybody at the company was an automatic member of a union (it was a grocery store in my home town). I knew that when I took a paid break, or a vacation, or got time and a half for night work, I was benefiting from industrial action taken by those who went before me. I remember being a kid and seeing my aunt and her coworkers picketing over a pay dispute. I made better money because it was not just me negotiating on my own, other people went without pay to force the company to do better. It was and remains a successful chain. Currently I support people with disabilities who work in similar jobs and are protected by the "burden" of union rules.

I wonder if tech contains too many people who think they are too smart to get screwed to gain critical mass for a union. Maybe everybody thinks they have a competitive advantage... What's weird is that this is also how the employers like it. So is everybody winning, or does one side just think they are? I have never before heard the complaint that unions reduce wages. Maybe I'm missing something because employers should be all for that!

There's a difference between what's best for the group and what's best for individual members of the group. This conflict comes up over and over again, as it arises from straightforward principles from game theory.

If everyone bargains collectively, overall compensation goes up as companies have much worse alternatives to negotiated agreement. However, these companies are generally very willing to bribe people into breaking solidarity, and so it's often personally lucrative to be the scab crossing picket lines.

I don't know. Picket lines are a really specific situation. I don't think companies are motivated in normal times to pay more to non-union workers. What exactly would they be paying for? You are right about the general tension between group and individual rewards for choices. It goes beyond unions as you mention. I do think some unions do OK in this regard- actors and musicians are not held back on individual income but still benefit from industry standards negotiated by unions.

>It goes beyond unions as you mention.

Yeah, and it gets really interesting when you look at examples from evolutionary biology, too. There's a pretty common population dynamic that goes on between "punish non-cooperation with some version of tit-for-tat" and "always cooperate because others will punish defectors" and "exploit others because there's enough non-cooperators for this to work as a strategy".

In normal times, companies don't pay more to non-union workers - but the company pays the same, and non-union workers get the benefits that union workers fought for, and the non-union folks don't have to pay union dues and the like. There's a very real reason why unions work to make themselves non-optional, and why businesses favor laws that enshrine a right to not pay union dues.

Winning me over is easy.

Give me a better deal.

If the union job pays 50% more then I will take it. I'd have to be stupid not to.

But don't expect my loyalty to the union. As soon as it become a better deal to do something else, I am going to do that thing.

I don't care about solidarity, or "crossing the picket line" or whatever. I will take the best deal that is offered to me.

Crossing a picket line is kind of a moral choice where you decide how much value you place on A) the success of that particular strike and B) ever having anything to do with those picketers again. It is weird to talk about in terms of tech, but nevertheless, if there is a union that represents you, ignoring a strike would probably not be free, it would just be a different kind of cost. Maybe how many numbers you get at the end of the day is the only value you care about. I think, beyond a certain minimum salary, regard for your impact on other humans becomes relevant to many of us in the choices we make. Or things like work environment or hours, which unions safeguard. Would you work in a less safe environment to make your take home number 5% bigger? Or, indeed, tolerate greater risk to somebody else for more pay for you? "The best deal" can be a lot of things.

> if there is a union that represents you, ignoring a strike would probably not be free, it would just be a different kind of cost

To elaborate on what that cost would be: If a union represents you, it can compel you to go on strike (even for a cause to which you object on ethical or moral grounds).

If you refuse, they can terminate your membership. For a closed shop, that's equivalent to firing you.

Indeed- person I replied to does not care about that though, because they will get a better deal. Losing union membership doesn't matter in their imagined tech union.

While I am saying that collective bargaining is an important tool to increase workers' negotiating power, I'm not defending every specific implementation. I admire businesses who work with union employees because it implies that the power relationship is at least somewhat in balance, and workers are represented. I don't know if that also means I support "closed shops" where if somebody leaves the union they lose their job... But it sounds like maybe in supporting one I'm implicitly supporting the other.

Thanks for the comment.

That is really surprisingly self-sabotaging. People in labor movements don't spout slogans like, "An injury to one is an injury to all" because we're trying to moralize.

It's because when workers at one company have their salaries suppressed - by collusion in hiring, by wage theft, by death-march management - the market rate for their labor goes down overall. When any one company can abuse its workers, we all lose from that injury to the labor market we all share, as well as from the lost productivity from sub-optimal allocation of labor.

Then these people who don't want me to sabotage their movement shouldnt force me to join.

They should leave me alone and not get in the way of the contract that is between me and my employer.

If they force me to join with BS closed shop contracts, they can expect me to explicitly and purposefully sabotage their movement in any way that I deem fit.

They do not represent me. I do not want their help. I do not want them to negotiate for me.

And hopefully these people who do not represent me will learn their lesson with regards to forcing people to join their movement, knowing that they can expect purposeful sabotage in retaliation.

>You can't unionize every startup in the world, and non unionized employees will be able to demand a premium.

Empirically, this is completely untrue. Union workers have higher compensation than nonunion workers overall.

>It is a competitive advantage to not be burdened by union rules.

Doesn't look like that to me. Unions don't just have advantages in terms of salaries; they have the advantage of helping to grease the wheels between companies, between jobs for the unemployed, and between skillsets. Unions are an important source of job-training for an ever-changing field like tech.

Why pay for a web-programming bootcamp if your union dues entitle you to one?

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