Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the reverse. You're assuming that a tech union would prevent people from being laid off and maybe it would to some degree. But more likely there would be rules on how you have to treat workers. And they would necessarily be rigid. For instance, layoffs would likely happen by some rule that favors how long you've been at the firm or some meaningless objective measure. That obviously doesn't make sense because layoffs are an opportunity to cut weaker performers or entire teams that don't really do anything. It would also hurt hiring and make employers more risk averse if they know they cannot get rid of poor performers easily. This impacts young inexperienced workers especially and is part of the reason places like France have youth unemployment is around 20% while US youth unemployment is around 8%

https://www.statista.com/statistics/460548/youth-unemploymen...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/217448/seasonally-adjust...

View on HN

> You're assuming that a tech union would prevent people from being laid off and maybe it would to some degree. But more likely there would be rules on how you have to treat workers. And they would necessarily be rigid. For instance, layoffs would likely happen by some rule that favors how long you've been at the firm or some meaningless objective measure. That obviously doesn't make sense because layoffs are an opportunity to cut weaker performers or entire teams that don't really do anything.

“weaker performers” is either (1) an objective measure that unions can be sold on, or (2) a cover for “management discretion”. Usually, what management wants is #2, which is why unions tend to oppose it.

Union agreements do often allow shutting down locations/functions with notice and sometimes meet/confer rules, but if people are laid off for that reason and not for cause, they tend to have rehire priority if the company hires for the same job classification, preventing closures being paired with new (but surprisingly similar) new units and discretionary rehiring to do bypass targeted firing rules requiring process and evidence of violation of rules/standards.

> “weaker performers” is either (1) an objective measure that unions can be sold on

Do you have any examples of unions accepting that?

What's an objective measure for weak performers? I haven't found any. When someone is not performing, is disruptive or just not a good fit, management usually starts building up a paper trail with poor reviews (subjective with documentation) and an improvement plan. I think it's reasonable approach.

Also the rehire thing sounds fine but its one of those benefits that would have to be negotiated but in practice almost no one would use.

Laying off locations and functions make a lot of sense. If it becomes prohibitively expensive or inconvenient for a location why would you want to make it harder for the employer to adjust?

A tech union doesn't necessarily have to behave like traditional unions that favor seniority, and not all unions prioritize seniority anyway.

It doesn't have to, no, but it probably would. Certainly most unions seem to.

[EDIT] I'm poking around the sites for various unions for technical workers and engineers outside the software industry and, at a casual glance, many seem to factor in seniority as well. Are there examples of technical or engineering unions that are not seniority-based? Seems like those would be better indicators of what a software workers union would look like than the usually cited actors or sports player unions.

Why "probably"? A union is whatever its members make of it, and most engineers at any given tech company have relatively little seniority. It's hard to imagine them voting to join a union that would so obviously not prioritize their interests like that.

My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped, and perhaps include an option for everyone to take a pay cut instead (which might be bad! but it's an idea I've heard floated by engineers way more than seniority based protections).

What's wrong with employees just voting with their feet, instead of mandating rules like this? If a company behaves horribly just go somewhere else

Doesn't seem to happen in tech judging by Amazon horror stories about PIP culture and the like.

I think it's pretty easy for an average US citizen or green card holder engineer who gets pipped at Amazon to get hired elsewhere.

The people who really get screwed are the OPTs/H1-Bs who have a very short grace period to get a new job or leave the country.

Sure, but 1) it goes to show that tech workers won't necessarily "vote with their feet", 2) in the event of an industry-wide downturn, that ability to vote becomes far more limited.

Amazon pays software engineers very well (compared to software engineering jobs in general). Perhaps people don't vote with their feet because they like the money.

Amazon comp was entirely predicated on stock, wasn't it? Because they uniquely have a salary cap that's not particularly high.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/amazon-salary-negotiation.html

It seems like there is more Amazon non-warehouse employees interest in unionizing now anyway:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-layoffs-corporate-emp...

Not exactly - while the initial stock they grant vests on a 5/15/40/40 schedule, they also have a large cash "bonus" which "vests" monthly for the first two years. With their assumption of 15% stock growth per year, you should have equal TC per year for your first 4 years. Of course, assuming 15% annual stock growth is silly, but you can run the numbers however you want. The point is that compensation for the first two years is predominantly cash.

No? I've definitely heard stories that Amazon is having a harder time hiring people because many workers are churning out.

> an option for everyone to take a pay cut instead (which might be bad! but it's an idea I've heard floated by engineers way more than seniority based protections).

We already do that, it's called RSUs. If a portion of your compensation is in RSUs and the market goes down, you automatically get a paycut. Better than being laid off, isn't it?

This is like doing the same thing but expecting a different result. You think unions follow some optimal logic but I’ve seen no examples that do. The only real expectation you can have is that it would end up roughly like existing unions.

I have had personal experience with men in leather jackets giving you the “better vote x or you might have an accident” unions. So I’m a bit biased.

> This is like doing the same thing but expecting a different result.

Tech culture, and Silicon Valley in particular, is so obsessed with recreating things from first principles and experimenting for the sake of it, that you would expect that they'd give reinventing unions but under a different name a shot.

There are a few problems with unions, many of which can be summed up as principal/agent problems. But another issue is that unions are fundamentally democratic, which leads to some misaligned incentives.

Seniority is a completely legible and unambiguous criteria, and it’s one that most workers can eventually benefit from in the long run. Merit is more of a judgment call. Management at least has the incentive to get that judgment call right (which isn’t to say they do get it right, but at least they have the incentive to, modulo the same principal/agent problems that unions also introduce), but unions don’t. So if I’m part of the top 20% of workers at a firm, or part of the top 20% that the firm could reasonably hire, my incentives are actually better aligned with management than with the other 80% of workers who would dominate the union. The classic union solution to this problem is closed shops, but that’s hard to achieve without specific legal and regulatory moats.

Also:

> My guess is in most cases you'd still end up with an avenue for merit based layoffs, they just wouldn't start until new hiring had been completely stopped

This is another common failure mode of unions. People who already work in a given field are in the union, but people trying to break into the field are not. So it becomes harder to hire new people, which actually leads to longer tenures and makes seniority seem like a better deal for the union members.

I tend to imagine that tech unions would be different from organized labor cultures in the past. Partly because it's a newer industry with different culture, and actively seeks to use technology to try to invent new social relationships, from the FOSS movement to the gig economy. But perhaps that's being overly optimistic towards tech/Silicon Valley's pretense of disruption, innovation, and doing wildly different things from the past, and naive towards its hypocrisies.

What way would be ideal? It would have to be an objective measure applied universally. I challenge you to come up with a reasonable measure. In reality, front line workers and managers (the good ones) know ability of people and how much they contribute. In my experience it was very obvious and agreed upon for the most part. But none of the (in)effective people could be discerned in an objective way.

My point isn't that unions could necessarily protect layoffs, and thus I am agnostic about how they should respond to layoff criteria. My point is that unions could protect benefits that might go away in the event of a market downturn, when tech labor power is similarly weakened.

Right, but everything has tradeoffs. If the org chooses to protect benefits, then it may mean more cuts. For instance, to save $X a non-unionized firm may have to cut 5% of the workforce, and it would likely choose weaker performers. But if they have to provide more benefits and severance to those they let go, they may have to cut 10% of the workforce instead. In my experience layoffs were always measured. The people affected were usually weaker performers or in functions that weren't practical anymore (e.g. recruiter during a hiring freeze).

For me the tradeoff is not worth it. I understand that there will be ups and downs and I may one day be a victim. But I appreciate the flexibility that likely led me to be hired in the first place without a traditional background in tech. Basically they took a chance and luckily it worked out. But if the firm had a much higher cost to get rid of someone, they likely would have went with a more traditional candidate

By benefits I don't mean simply TC pay package items or employee perks, I mean not being subject to games industry-style unpaid overtime crunch, or forced RTO for those who had moved hours away from the nearest office during the pandemic, basic QoL "luxuries" who might be put into jeopardy as labor power weakens in poor economic situations.

> It would also hurt hiring and make employers more risk averse if they know they cannot get rid of poor performers easily. This impacts young inexperienced workers especially and is part of the reason places like France have youth unemployment is around 20% while US youth unemployment is around 8%

Youth that are in post-secondary education and not looking for work are included in that 20% figure you cite, and France has a much higher post-secondary education rate than its neighbors. I don't think your assessment that it's caused primarily by unionization holds up.[0]

> You're assuming that a tech union would prevent people from being laid off and maybe it would to some degree.

A primary goal of such a union would be to negotiate better separation terms in a layoff scenario, not necessarily avoid layoffs altogether. Markets are unpredictable and things happen, but people should be taken care of in the event that it does happen.

> Youth that are in post-secondary education and not looking for work are included in that 20% figure you cite, and France has a much higher post-secondary education rate than its neighbors. I don't think your assessment that it's caused primarily by unionization holds up.

That's incorrect. Unemployment is defined below and includes only those that are available and seeking employment. You're thinking of workforce participation rate.

> Youth unemployment refers to the share of the labor force ages 15-24 without work but available for and seeking employment (modeled ILO estimate).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLUEM1524ZSFRA

Traditionally, unemployment measures exclude those in education and those not seeking work. Are you saying Statista is using a peculiar measure that includes these people for some reason? Are you sure you’re not thinking of the “workforce participation rate”, a different statistic entirely?

People that make statements about what the primary goal of such and such a union would be seem to implicitly assume that the union would be run according to their particular vision, when in fact it would be run by majority rule at first, and later (once employees don't have a choice about whether or not to join) to satisfy whatever hidden constituents hold the new levers of power.

I've heard before that in France it's basically impossible to fire people and due to that, some tech companies stopped hiring there, is that true?

Either way, I think people who advocate for tech unionization blindly (not those who consider it carefully, I'm talking more about people on the internet who likely have never been in a union) should understand that it's not without tradeoffs, it's not always a net good depending on what the higher order effects are.

The thing about tech unionization is that too often the conversation is to assume that such an phenomenon would be exactly resemble that of mid-century heavy industry labor unions, when that is neither predestined nor even feasible. Given how relatively new the software industry is, how its production processes differ from those of manufacturing or mining, and how tech seems to embody its own unique Silicon Valley culture of its own. Not to mention, a sweeping all-encompassing unionization of tech is unimaginable given how for a long time now, unions have been seen as completely unthinkable, due to libertarian sentiments in the industry and employer relations favorable to labor.

Thing is, tech unionization is most likely to happen in gradual patchwork efforts, as it is now, and is far from the bogeyman that critics pose it as. Not to mention, there are different halfway compromises that could be a good initial step, such as introduction co-determination or bringing back board ombudsmen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367243

> The thing about tech unionization is that too often the conversation is to assume that such an phenomenon would be exactly resemble that of mid-century heavy industry labor unions, when that is neither predestined nor even feasible.

I’d definitely welcome more comparisons with professional guilds or similar, and especial non-English sources. For example, I’ve been told by multiple people German and Scandinavian unions are quite different culturally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com