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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

What tangible benefits would the average tech worker get? What benefits would a FAANGer get?

Not surprisingly I work in tech. I'm not morally opposed to unions - I just don't see how they would make my life any better.

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Remember that time that most of FAANG and others were involved in a wage fixing scheme and we're fined way less than they profited from the scheme?

Just because you're paid well compared to other sectors doesn't mean that you're being properly compensated.

Yes, and I even got a check for hundreds(!) of dollars because of it. How would a union have prevented that?

I don't know about FAANG but definitely needed for small startups where exploitation is very real. For example, your manager should not be allowed to contact you in the middle of the night to discuss work. You should not have to come in over the weekend because you are afraid to get fired. You also should be able to negotiate better conditions in lieu of the "startup haircut" pay.

Of course this doesn't apply to well run startups with good leaders, but the truth is in my experience, they are rare and few.

The whole industry could benefit, much like the men who worked under American tycoons of the 18th century in steel mills, oil fields and other shitty conditions, software engineering is engineering period.

Just because you can't hold and physically touch the output from software engineers doesn't mean that it's somehow less demanding or not deserving of the same unionization that other laborers/engineers have access to.

I used to work at Google. Without going into specifics in this public of a forum, yes I've personally witnessed examples of unjustified pay disparities, due to arbitrary factors uncorrelated with job qualifications or performance.

At the very least, collective assistance could be very useful at Google in negotiating fair compensation for new hires and in sustaining that fairness over time based on performance data.

After all, Google has huge quantities of data to let them decide on compensation, the employees have extremely little and unevenly distributed access to similar data, and it doesn't feel like there is much opportunity to recover lost wages if you realize you've been underpaid compared to peers (aside from discrimination on illegal grounds).

I presume the same would help at other tech companies.

None of this requires the stereotypical fossilized rigidity that give unions a bad name, and I wouldn't want that either. Even in the US NLRA system that's not at all required.

Won't unions level out pay contrary to disparities in talent?

I think you're referring to the fossilized rigidity I intended to reject in my last two sentences. A rigid pay scale is merely common in US unionism, not required.

Also, be careful not to confuse talent with performance. A slacker with amazing talent can still underperform whoever works diligently to improve and apply their skills.

As with other situations such as the insistence on face-time rather than embracing remote work, "unions are bad" is a truism in the tech industry, and a weird selective attitude towards disruption. Can't we build a better union? Why can't traditional labor dynamics be disrupted, in a way that benefits workers? The rise of the sharing economy proves that the opposite is possible.

Here's some issues that a collective advocacy organization could help with:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596221

Also:

"Even if you don't believe in unions, unions are necessary to force the hand of government. Bismarck instituted a welfare state in Germany to undercut the popularity of socialism and the left. You need unions to get to a stronger safety net, even if the powers-that-be are establishing it in opposition to them."

As a single data point, I worked at a union shop once. It wasn't very good.

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