Comment by topkai22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by topkai22 | Hacker News Reader

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You can end up with insane rules that ultimately benefit no one. An old boss of mine told me about a time he was working for a big auto manufacturer. They were rolling an update to a major system. It looked like everything went well, so people started to go home.

Pretty soon though, the team started to see issues with the update, up to and including a major LoB system going down. They immediately rolled back the update but found they had a problem- they needed some servers restarted to pick up the update, and the sole person who by union rules could restart the server had left for the day and wasn't picking up the phone.

Now there were people who technically had permissions to restart the server, but they couldn't cross the union rules. They spent over an hour (with the major LoB, business critical system down) trying to get in touch with the people who were allowed to restart the server until they finally convinced the physically datacenter ops people (who were still on duty) go physically unplug and replug the servers in question.

He couldn't disclose the total cost of the outage, but I was lead to believe it was in the millions of dollars.

A functioning owner/management/worker relationship might fight over how the earnings of a company might be split, and even how or what to invest in, but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole. An adversarial relationship prevents the sort of cooperation and good-faith assumptions that allow the different parties to collaborate and work to everyone's benefit.

That being said, that non-adversarial relationship is a two way street, and ownership+management need to be participating in good-faith as well.

It’s not really clear to me why all the blame for the adversarial nature of American unions is placed on the unions themselves. Shouldn’t some of the blame be also blamed on American businesses too? It does after all take two to tango.

If businesses simply acquiesce to employee demands unions would not be necessary. However and instead, the moment organized employees submit their demands, they are met with resistance so both sides have to engage mono a mono until the entirely unnecessary conflict is resolved.

I mean, bosses literally hired armed thugs to shoot labor organizers. There’s a damn good reason why labor activists don’t trust the bosses; they shouldn’t.

By this logic, the average person shouldn't trust union bosses, as there are incidents where union bosses commit violence to achieve their ends (the mob/racketeering history).

If you can prove that violence among labor organizers was more prevalent than violence by bosses towards workers, I’d like to see it. I personally am quite dubious.

This sounds more like someone who just wants to blame a series of poor management decisions on those damn unions.

It's management's responsibility to make sure they have the right people on hand when they roll out an update to a major system. It's also their responsibility to come out of union negotiations with the right contracts, which would have at the very least included some sort of force majeure clause to account for technical disasters.

It is impossible to account for every edge case without infinite resources. Being flexible is very important when resolving things that you didn't consider.

> but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole.

Unless workers own equity this is not at all as much of a truism as it sounds. Could be rephrased as “but they should all be working to enrich their bosses”.

Alternatively, it could be rephrased as "if the company pays its workers an amount they [the workers] are happy with, then working to keep the company successful is in the the workers best interest, because they are likely to continue to be payed well". Alternatively, "If a company is paying you well and help cause it to fail, you are sabotaging yourself".

Sounds like management dropped the ball of having the appropriate number of trained people in that position.

Alternately: sounds like the point about adversarial relations stands; a more collaborative culture prioritizing the success of the business (the collective interest) might have yielded a less expensive reboot.

If American businesses wanted a collaborative culture then they would share the rewards. As it stands for most work in the US you make the same amount of money whether or not you make the company succeed. The businesses could easily rectify this by including stock as part of compensation so that incentives have aligned.

Tech has realized this and as an industry hands out a good amount of shares of the business to employees. I can’t really empathize with businesses who cry for the need for labor to care about the success of the business but refuse to hand out anything but the minimum of rewards

Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks (you can't restart the server, but you can unplug it or you can plug in a lamp but you can't change a light bulb)? That's not a management failure. Sounds like they had people who were trained and had the technical ability. It was bureaucracy that caused the problem.

> Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks

It's just an exclusivity clause. The employees and management willingly entered into a contractual agreement containing a provision that management ostensibly understood and then completely failed to account for.

If I sign an employment contract that explicitly says "I will be your exclusive provider of X service, I am not available on weekends", the employer shouldn't be surprised when I refuse to come in on Saturday and Sunday or sue them for breach when they hire a second service provider.

and this would be the core of the "hostile unions are suboptimal" argument you are trying to sidestep.

If the core of your argument is that contracts are suboptimal for people who want more than what is in the contract, it's not hard to sidestep.

It's also suboptimal for the employee not to get paid twice as much, or work half the hours.

> Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks (you can't restart the server, but you can unplug it or you can plug in a lamp but you can't change a light bulb)? That's not a management failure.

On the contrary, that's a two-sided negotiation and if management have failed to protect their interests then that's on them. I've heard plenty of stories like this where it turned out the real reason was that management's own rule was that anyone who touched that server without that certification became personally liable for damages, and management had been warned about their lack of certified people but refused to send more people on the xyz server training course, and or something on those lines.

Because otherwise your boss could tell you to sweep the floors while your software was compiling.

The negotiation of specified work duties resulted in an agreement between the company and the union representing the employee. If that doesn't matter, then why negotiate at all? Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?

If you want flexibility, you negotiate flexibility. You don't negotiate the reduction of work duties against wages, and then demand that employees do whatever they have the technical ability to do. If I have the technical ability to do accounting, but I'm employed as a bus driver, can my employer demand that I balance the books?

Employers don't own employees. There's a contract that promises specific wages for specific work.

> Because otherwise your boss could tell you to sweep the floors while your software was compiling.

And if the floor was really dirty and he had a good reason (showing off the office to a visitor and nobody else was available), I'd be like "sure thing, lets get the place nice for the visitor; I'm not busy". Or, if he was just a neat freak and constantly asking people to do work they weren't hired to do like that, I'd say no.

> Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?

Generally, you're hired with a job description. Anything outside that description is up for discussion. I mean, I'm a software developer, but if I had to have a union contract that said I wasn't _allowed_ to empty my own garbage when it annoyed me that it was full... I'd go elsewhere.

I don't expect the owner of the company to prioritize my interests over those of the company or his own. But I do expect him to consider my happiness and well being when making decisions that effect me (or, more generally, groups). And, along the same lines, I prioritize my well being over that of the company, but the well being of the company matters to me, and I'm willing to be flexible to help it succeed.

First, as others have mentioned, the union did not unilaterally choose how the job specs at this plant were written.

But to answer your broader question, the reason unions sometimes point for seemingly narrow job specs is to prevent management picking and choosing titles in a way to keep pay and membership down.

Let's say that in this situation, you have 5 Server Janitors and 1 Sysadmin, with corresponding pay rates of course. Maybe the janitors have the skills to turn on the server, but the spec says only the sysadmin can. Whose fault is it that there's just one sysadmin? And if the job spec says anyone can turn the server on, why give anyone the sysadmin title?

Exactly the scenario I had in mind with my comment. A lot of places are now "two tier" where the newer employees have no path to the higher rate. You have one guy hanging who can press the button for $43/hr, and anyone who replaces him will top out at $32/hr.

Not to mention the history of labor battles (actual fisticuffs) and police departments in many parts of the country... talk about adversarial!

Say I enter into a contract with a hosting provider who only offers support between 6am and 10pm.

There's an issue with one of my servers at 3am and I'm pretty sure it just needs a physical reboot.

No chance they'll let me into their data centre to fix it myself. Even though in this specific scenario I might be able to solve the problem with no cost to them.

I can also think of a lot of reasons why I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to restart my servers.

Sure this sucks, but maybe I accepted the terms of the agreement because I figured there was a low chance of having the issue and I wanted to save a few bucks.

Sounds like the business wasn't willing to pay vital staff to be on call, so why should the worker have their life outside work be impacted without suitable compensation?

Having 24hr operations without adequate technical support is 100% the fault of management.

This is why on call exists. What if their worker had been drinking, or awake for 36 hours, but decided to head into the office to help out the team? There is plenty of caselaw on this very circumstance when people are killed or get arrested.

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