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Comment by mawburn | Hacker News Reader

Maybe unionization needs a disrupt? I'm not against unionization in a lot of industries, but it just doesn't make sense in its current form for the tech scene or any other high demand position. It feels like an outdated mechanism used for people who were happy to sit in the same role, doing the same thing, for 45yrs.

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Modern unions that only represent one type of skill or workers in one company (or both!) are far less effective than historical unions that aimed to unionize as many workers as possible under the same umbrella. Being able to represent your members even if they switch companies gives you a lot more opportunities.

Unions are (at least supposed to be) democratically run, so if tech workers don't want to sit in the same position for 45 years until they can collect a pension, their union doesn't need to negotiate for that. They can use that leverage for something else.

Putting that together, your modernized union might be an industry-wide organization that acts both for collective bargaining and as a placement agency. They could bargain for making switching companies easier - maybe employers need to support specific benefits providers so workers don't need to switch. And they could use their network to improve bargaining - a big part of strike preparation is making sure everyone is taken care of ahead of time; the union could secure job offers for workers who can't afford to go on strike.

That's the difference between a craft union and an industrial union. A long time ago, there was the American Federation of Labor, the group for craft unions, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the group of industrial unions. The AFL had the Plumbers, the Electricians, the Machinists, etc. The CIO had the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers, the United Mine Workers, etc. They merged in 1955.

Nobody cares much about that any more.

If you want to see a modern union, check out The Animation Guild.[1] Local 839, IATSE. They represent most of the major studio animators in Hollywood. Although they've tried, they have not been able to organize game developers.

It's about fear. Try to organize a union in the US and you will probably be fired. Even though that's illegal. WalMart has closed down stores that voted in a union. Uber workers have a strike scheduled for July 15, but it probably won't do much in the US.

[1] https://animationguild.org/

It's hard for me to envision unions in a white collar environment when there's a pretty high likelihood of individual contributors being promoted to management. In factories, there's usually a separate management class of people who are engineers or college grads who are brought in to lead, so the whole worker vs management dichotomy is much clearer.

"pretty high likelihood of individual contributors being promoted to management"

1. Everybody's complaining about how they don't want to be promoted to management after a certain age and remain an IC.

2. Very few people, proportionally, are actually promoted to management.

3. Management vs worker is alive and well in all domains, this can be seen as the years pass in the attitudes of those promoted to management. It's the nature of the job, not the education.

Unions exist in high demand positions too - sports, entertainment etc. Can tech unions be modelled closer to those, and less on the style of jobs you mentioned?

These are not high demand professions. They are a very limited number of jobs available with many more people who would love to fill them.

Yes, and professional athletes don't get promoted to management at all. Some do become managers or other executives but that requires them to retire as a player and then negotiate an entirely separate contract for the management job.

"professional athletes don't get promoted to management at all"

Neither do most employees either, what does that have to do with anything? We can't organize because there's a 5% chance that we're promoted to management?

We can't organize because the people with good leadership qualities and other important organizing skills tend to get promoted to management. It's very difficult for people to spontaneously organize without a leader.

To me it seems that we can't organize because we're selfish and naive. I don't see anyone except you fretting because of our collective organization skills :)

Collective action has been the challenge of humanity since the dawn of time. We've only been successful with one strategy: picking a leader.

If you want to learn more about this phenomenon, read Meditations on Moloch [1].

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Startup idea: an app for employees to organize anonymously. Not a legal union. But an app that can send to an employer this message: "95% of your employees disagree with this issue" Basically centralized communication through voting without the need for union bureaucracy.

The app can optionally take the next step and help employees become a legal union but before that it can function as basically anonymous Slack with polls that allow for majority opinions to be discussed openly and safely.

Even issues like "95% of employees think the coffee machine is shit we need it fixed" can be addressed more quickly.

So a Blind or Glassdoor that actually serves the needs of workers within a company.

2 issues have to be solved to get this to work. The app and idea itself is trivial.

First I need a full updated roster of employees of a company to confirm that an anonymous user is actually an employee of said company. Not sure how to do this in a fully secure and updated way.

Second user engagement. If I can figure out how to get one full company to use this as aggressively as they use slack, we'd be good to go to launch this in other companies.

Both are hard questions that I'm not sure how to answer or execute.

Blind already solves the first by mandating you use your company email to register. Of course, that means privacy is paramount, and you'd have to prevent situations where say management floods your system with dummy accounts. But that's at least a starting point.

The second point is definitely important. The problem too with having an anonymized place where users can vent and gossip, is that it can quickly become a toxic dump of FUD, similar to how Blind is now. And the smaller the organization is, the less likely people will want to speak out, for fear their anonymous words will be traced back to them.

I don't know how to feel about it. There are some really bad employers out there. Tech culture is fairly liberal and new. I remember reading a book long ago where managers would sit on a higher chair in negotiations. It was a different atmosphere.

I agree. I think the answer is to improve salary transparency to help alleviate the information asymmetry between employer and employee. Things like https://levels.fyi are making good progress here.

I have no interest in joining a union but I absolutely take all of the salary information I can get my hands on into account when negotiating my pay.

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