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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

Almost every programmer I've met in real life, and certainly most of the folks on HN, are very liberal yet are largely anti-organized labor. Don't conflate a general disdain for one policy with an entire political ideology.

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That's because a decent programmer (especially one working at Google) has many companies fighting for him trying to offer more than others. It's usually easy to leave and that often comes with a hefty raise and it will be your former boss' problem that his direct reports are leaving. Unions are seen from this perspective as bureaucratic organizations run by not very smart people who want to get their piece of the pie by regulating what they don't understand. Unions are good for the opposite market situation when there are too many workers and they have to fight for the limit number of jobs.

Not all are. Unfortunately, the need to unionize period is a sign that employers are neglecting the employee side of the partnership, largely in a never-ending quest for growth of shareholder value.

No one WANTS unions. We would like to be dealt with individually in a fair manner. But when tithe business you want to employ you has an entire department intended to get you to sign on for the smallest cost possible... Well... Some union starts to look like a pretty good idea. Even if it does end up causing a lot of grinding since common sense goes out the window once lawyers and contracts come into the picture.

Liberalism is a right-wing ideology...

You are technically right yet still downvoted. These days these words have so many different definitions for different people that they've become nearly meaningless.

To be fair, I was expecting the downvotes. For two reasons:

1) For a long time, there was no "institutional" left in the United States; so in the US - liberalism was seen as the "left". This is slowly changing now...

2) The tech crowd wants really to believe to be progressive (because they work on "progressive" technologies); but in fact, I never saw so many real life liberals like among tech workers.

Tech workers seem to tend towards social liberalism, but economic conservatism bordering on libertarianism (if not actual, avowed libertarianism).

It's an interesting combination that doesn't fit super-well into America's dominant left-right political axis.

In every context besides economic journals it refers to social liberalism: the progressive left. No one is calling reagan or bush liberals even if they are by the economics definition of the word.

But "being very liberal" is not the same as "being very pro USA Democrats".

Liberals are often right wing parties in other countries. Basically you have a scale from socialism where everything in your life is dictated by social contracts to liberalism where almost nothing in your life is dictated by social contracts. The left in the US calling themselves liberals is kinda like the north korea calling themselves "democratic people's republicc". Their only liberal agenda is freedom from the Christian social contract.

Yet we are on a U.S. based website talking about a U.S. company and its American workforce and a story published in a U.S. newspaper, so we will stick with the common convention and not go on semantics tangents.

we are on the internet

You can be "socially liberal" and not be terribly progressive at all, and in fact that's what I usually see in the tech industry.

Eg. Support gay rights and environmental causes, but don't really give a shit about poor people.

That has been my experience as well

That's an equivocation. The word has been around for hundreds of years and represents many different things. For example, "Liberalism" in the US is both associated with American Libertarianism and with FDR's New Deal, and those two things have about as much in common as oil and water.

You can think of the political spectrum as a two dimensional plane, so you have the libertarian axis, but on the part of the economy you have a quite different dimension! Interesting that everyone is picking his favorite features when they define their political spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Greenberg_a...

It all depends on what you want to be liberal about. You could be liberal about gun rights and advocate laissez-faire capitalism, but not be liberal on social issues such as gay rights and religion. Liberalism is not technically left or right-wing. When someone on the right is saying they don't like "liberals" they mean they don't like social liberals.

Being pro-labour is one of the cornerstones of being leftist. I think you are using the word liberal differently than the antonym of conservative - which I am implying to be "right-wing". Maybe "social liberalism" is a good term for what you seem to be saying.

Being pro-employee does not necessarily mean being pro-union.

Technically no, but practically it does, so long as massive corporations exist. I think you can argue that with smaller scale business you can work to better employee conditions without collective action, but given the power and resources that a corporation can bring to bear it's hard to imagine effective bettering of employee conditions without collective action.

Most of us have no way of evaluating that. I don't WANT to be in a union, from what I know of them, but I've never worked in one, so I can't say. There's no control group.

My wife has worked the same job in and out of unions. She didn't want a union, it was a drawback for her. Her union job seems okay. Some things are better, some are worse. They've got some absolutely asinine policies that everyone hates that don't change and haven't changed for a decade or more despite the union "power".

Also, her job requires a masters, soon to be a Ph.D, and still pays less than most of tech (though it pays very well).

And of course because PART of the industry is unionized, it is impossible to say to what extent non-union jobs are free-riding on the "benefits" of a union.

> Technically no, but practically it does, so long as massive corporations exist

That's an interesting assertion that you seem to be accepting as universally axiomatic.

(... or perhaps, a self-referential definition. Maybe a company isn't "massive" until one observes behaviors that suggest the company is purposefully acting counter to employee quality-of-life wishes?)

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