Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

> I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers...

Interestingly, there was a really good article in the NY times yesterday that made that exact point: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/business/economy/doctors-...

Basically, the article was talking about how being a doctor or pharmacist used to be a very respected profession, and most doctors/pharmacists didn't previously see the need to unionize. With all the consolidation that's gone on in medicine over the past couple decades, though (the article talks about how many of them used to be partners in small doctor groups, that is increasingly rare these days), they now realize they're wage slaves just like the rest of us, and their management has been treating them like interchangeable widgets to squeeze the most productivity out of.

If doctors are unionizing, maybe software developers should rethink their historical aversion to the idea.

Quite a stretch from "This company hired too many people and ended up having to lay off some" and "Hmm, maybe we're not as irreplaceable as we like to think" to "Let's all make ourselves less attractive to our employers by threatening to gang up on them."

But I guess unionization is the universal solvent for every HR problem around here.

How is that a stretch? If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage in this transaction that we lose by being replaceable.

it's not even ganging up, it's just hiring a middleman to do your negotiation for you, and they take a cut.

I'm good

> it's just hiring a middleman to do your negotiation for you, and they take a cut.

That's a bad take. I can understand reasons for not wanting to join a union, but that's a pretty ridiculous assessment of what goes on.

The thing is, all of us like to believe we're special snowflakes and uniquely valuable. What many are realizing is that some of the only real power most of have is if we act collectively. It's not just "a middle man doing the negotiation for you", it's union members acting together, and organizing that way, that gives unions any power at all.

Just look at the recent Hollywood strikes - the only reason they got anywhere is the strong power of their unions (e.g. union members aren't allowed to work for any struck employer, worldwide, while a strike is ongoing). And actors and writers really do have special snowflakes, the big stars that make millions per film, and they're all union members, too.

Don’t forget all the “oh yeah I’m not allowed to fix that, that’s a CSS bug and I’m a JS Developer. You’ll need to bring in a CSS development team to look at that one”.

You understand that that only happens in unions when the union assents to those divisions, right? You understand that you get to vote about whether your union operates that way?

You understand you’ve removed all personal agency from the worker? They must now do what the thousands of others have decided is best for their job security, not what that individual actually wants to do. My gf used to be a split artist/technical person at her job, she loved it. It got unionized, and now: “Sorry bub, union says you aren’t allowed to make art any more. Keep your head down and script your scripts, we’re getting a real artist for the other parts. Oh yeah and it will be way more work to integrate with them than if you were doing the full stack, but we still want it done in the same amount of time so work late or whatever. Thanks!”

If that's an accurate representation of what happened, that sounds like a shitty union that's insufficiently understanding of the reality that efficiencies improve the bottom line in ways that workers can benefit from, too. Maybe, then, one should engage in that dreaded politics and make it better--because on the flip side, "personal agency" for a worker is just as likely to be "RTO and work late and no raises this year".

Only outliers ever win by atomization--and as somebody with a track record of being an outlier and operating successfully in atomized environments, I'd certainly rather not have my entire technical career be a high-wire act because companies can get away with it!

I do not know what RTO is, but her union is certainly shitty - and still doesn't give raises. And your advice of "in addition to taking on the job of training these artists, and doing extra work to integrate with their sub-par assets, you should take on the job of a politician too, then you'd see how great unions are!" doesn't really gel. Some people want to just have a conversation with their boss about what work they want, not take up three new jobs they don't want because "The Guild" gave them a shitty contract.

If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage

Let's say I have a company with an R&D budget of $1 billion. $100 million goes into robotics and AI, $900 million goes into core business interests. You form a union and demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own.

What will happen when budgeting for the next fiscal year? Replacing you is a core business interest now, and so is avoiding the need to hire your replacement. The R&D budget will be adjusted accordingly.

If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.

> demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own

The union oughtn't seek "ridiculous" accommodations then. It should seek at least reasonable ones, and possible aspirational ones, and negotiate it out from there. The problem we're seeing now is that even demands that most would find reasonable are cast as ridiculous by management. And if a union has trouble getting employers to listen, there's no hope that someone on their own can.

I've personally lost faith that a typical employer is capable of recognizing the value of an individual employee. So many of the recent layoffs have not accounted for individual performance or criticality to the business (Twitter's being a good example). So my own value isn't as strong of a bargaining chip.

So many of the recent layoffs have not accounted for individual performance or criticality to the business

And you think a union will?

Unions make more sense when the workers actually are interchangeable. Are you?

It doesn't matter, if my employer would treat me as interchangeable anyway.

And even interchangeable employees deserve reasonable accommodations. I do think a union can highlight those needs more effectively than individuals (especially for interchangeable ones, to your point).

> If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.

In today's world, making yourself valuable gives you a pat on the back, maybe a pizza party and a $25 Chipotle gift card if your employer is generous.

CEOs are sitting on massive piles of money while telling workers that their greed is bad for the economy.

Presumably the union should calibrate its demands to the point where the cost to the employer is lower than the cost of replacing the workers but higher than what they get without the union.

Surely there is some room there. If the cost of labor were already equal to the cost of replacing the labor, then the employer might as well just replace them now. So it must be lower by some amount. The point of a union (it seems to me) is to capture a larger portion of that surplus, but leave the employer with enough that the arrangement is still worthwhile.

> If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.

This is really irrespective of union membership. Sometimes people have this odd view of unions as "Now you're basically consigning yourself to 'lowest common denominator' employee", but that need not be the case. There are many unions that have vastly different pay scales and include "stars" (think actors' unions, sports players' unions, etc.) Even Tom Cruise joined the negotiations as a SAG member, and my guess is he's got plenty of leverage all by himself: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/07/tom-cruise-repo...

One thing the Hollywood people have in common with each other, but not with us, is that they move from one employer to the next frequently as a matter of course. Those employers explicitly do NOT want to carry them on their books when they don't have specific jobs for them to perform.

Unionization makes a lot more sense in those cases. If I need a ship unloaded, I call up some dockworkers. If I need some heavy boxes moved, I call up some Teamsters. If I need someone to look good on a screen, I call up Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lawrence. If I need someone to feed the actors, I call the craft union. Etc. Like the old joke about hookers, I don't pay these people to come to work, I pay them to go away.

None of that is comparable to what I do, or (probably) to what you do. Your employer can only become less competitive if you join a separate outside organization that acts as a middleman for your labor. That's not the case in other industries.

That's certainly not the case with all unions like that, e.g. sport players' unions, where a player works for a team for a couple of years, then may go to another team, or (an area where I'm familiar) AGMA, the American Guild of Musical Artists, where many union members are employed by the same dance or opera company for years, sometimes their entire career.

(Shrug) Sports figures are just a case of apples and pears, rather than apples and oranges.

If Human Resources are just replaceable resources, you don't care about them outside of what they can do for you. If a company is consistently failing to recognize their employees as people who deserve dignity, maybe a collective group is necessary to ensure they start to. This can be government based or be a private union, but companies don't usually make changes beneficial to employees without some kind of outside pressure.

I'm just trying to understand why on earth you wrote "gang up" here.

The corporation has an HR department. Usually, this consists of more than one person. The corporation has a hell of a lot more money, legal resources, (money is speech, my friend) and so on than you do. Why isn't it obvious... the most natural thing in the world... That you would also want more than just you on your side?

This is like saying "why did you join an army instead of just fighting the bad guys single-handed?"

I must be missing something here, because you said this and everybody just went along with it like "oh yeah why would we do that? when this seems like asking "Why did you start a company with your friend to gang up on that new project you guys were talking about instead of just doing it yourself?" Totally, completely confused.

I've been lucky, I guess. I've never felt like I was working for the "bad guys."

As usual, the anti-union argument on HN is "The rest of you shouldn't put up lion defenses to protect you because I'm strong enough to fight off a lion and the fences would just get in my way".

Hopefully for you, your luck holds, and you never get ill/weak/sick/unable to fight lions. Like everyone else does eventually.

(Shrug) The site is run by a VC fund, and is intentionally (but increasingly ineffectively) geared towards an audience of people interested in, or actively working on, startup companies. Is this really the best place to sell the whole "dark Satanic mills" schtick?

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