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Comment by jupp0r | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to break it to you, but a shortage of software engineers is what brought all these perks in the first place, not unions.

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The five day work week has entered the chat.

We'd still have people dying from keyboard accidents in mine tunnels too.

This is funny on two levels. On it's face, it's absurd and clever.

It's also funny because when you or someone you know falls ill or is injured and is unable to work you'll realize that all the boot licking you did when you were able bodied means precisely nothing without worker protections. This comment will be in your history and maybe you'll even remember writing it. There will be no safety net for you - private or public - because before you needed one you made efforts to ensure it wouldn't exist for anyone else.

On second thought, it's not that funny.

I know where you are coming from. I migrated from a European country with a very robust public safety net (14 months parental leave, long term disability, etc) to the US where similar protections largely don't exist. I don't think unions have played any role in the difference.

You are welcome to have your mind reside in an ahistorical fantasy world if you prefer, but please don't vote before at least learning the bare minimum about the history of labor organizing, and the political influence of workers' parties.

Maybe it's because I'm in my 30s and not in my 90s, but all good things I've ever seen unions do is from history books. Thanks for that I guess, but no reason to organize in the software industry in 2023.

No, it's because there's been a systematic effort for the past 70 years or so (in the US) to weaken the legal ability of unions to accomplish their goals. "Right to work" legislation is the most well known effort at the state level in the past 30 years, but there's also been repeated amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to weaken unions and eliminate their negotiating power.

1947: Taft Hartley Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act 1959: Landrum Griffin Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Management_Reporting_and...

One very concrete, recent difference between US Labor Law and Labor law in places with strong labor parties and unions is that US employment is almost entirely "at will" with each side having no contractual obligation to one another. That's why European Twitter tech employees could not legally be laid off en-masse with no warning and a couple month's severance - they had contracts, and those contracts stipulated terms on which they could be fired with or without cause, and those contracts were binding. They had time to find another job without a huge disruption to their lives and income.

'round these parts your safety net is your own damn responsibility, not mine. The default of life is nasty brutish and short, everything else is our efforts.

I would never even consider working in a place with fixed, tenure based pay, and have significant trouble believing anyone who has actually worked in a software engineer team would either.

Best of luck to you.

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