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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> urgency on the workers' part is to lock up contracts before the election in order to prevent mass layoffs right after.

If workers fear mass layoffs, going on strike is a bad idea. Instead, in such a situation the union should attempt to make an agreement with the employer of the kind "no salary increase (as it would be appropriate in consideration of the inflation), but job security for the next years".

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Well that depends - are the layoffs because there is no money left, or is it because the company wants to allocate resources differently?

In the former case, you can't get blood from a stone. However in the latter, strikes can still be effective.

Sure, but every time I see 'It has been a very lean year for us' from executives, I immediately see Simpsons Burns cash fight. It is annoying how well they captured some US time transcending rituals of the upper class.

> the union should attempt to make an agreement

They are literally striking because the company is refusing to negotiate with them.

> more than two years of bargaining

How is this a refusal to negotiate?

Saying "no" for two years is not a negotiation.

> Saying "no" for two years is not a negotiation.

What does the other side offer? If you want something from the other side, you better have something to offer which the other side wants:

"Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No."

What you say is very true, but you're still missing the definition of a negotiation. The example you gave isn't negotiation. This is:

"Give me a million USD, and I will smile!" - "No. That's unreasonable, I'll give you 100,000, and you'll dance each time you see me.".

"Make it 300,000,and I'll fake that I like you." ...etc

Negotiating goes both ways.

Blocking off the other side is also a negotiation strategy; one that one applies for example if one considers the demands of the other side to be nutjob insane.

Both sides have been saying no for two years. Not just one.

Which is a great way to have a company full of people who can’t be fired with no motivation, harming the parent organization

This is trade-off that a company (and thee employee, too) has to make:

- does the company want to be able to easily get rid of "undesired"/"lazy" employees? For this option, it will likely have to pay bigger salaries.

- on the other hand, for the option to have job security, an employee will have to accept that the expected salary is lower, i.e. the company can save money on salaries, but cannot easily fire the employee.

Both are economically sensible solutions.

Unless the company needs us more than we need it and we can have both better security and higher salary?

> Unless the company needs us more than we need it and we can have both better security and higher salary?

Employees typically only have such a strong negotiation lever in good economic times, which I guess is currently not the case.

this only applies to the very senior and experienced people, like staff+ engineers who are not easily replaceable + have so much knowledge that company will suffer if they leave.

the rest of your average tech worker who pushes jsons from front-end to backend does not have much leverage and is easily replaceable with new college grad with chatGPT

Presumably striking isn't a great sign of motivation already. If you think you're so unimpactful that your job is at risk, you probably aren't very motivated.

Layoffs at big companies have nothing to do with individual impact.

There might be exceptions, and with companies that are cash-strapped (or smaller companies in general) the situation might be different.

But for big companies, it's just a matter of the executives deciding that they don't want to invest in a specific org/project anymore ( or they want to offshore ) and if you're in one of the affected orgs/projects, you're out of luck.

But presumably NYTimes doesn't employ that many people, and even fewer tech workers

> it's just a matter of the executives deciding that they don't want to invest in a specific org/project anymore ( or they want to offshore ) and if you're in one of the affected orgs/projects, you're out of luck

This seems really simplistic. It's certainly happened before, but it seems ludicrous to just assume that executive whim is always the cause. Another reason is if a company is doing badly financially, something needs to change.

It's not an either-or. When the company's doing badly financially and something needs to change, the mechanics of figuring out what needs to change involve a lot of executive judgment, which is not necessarily correlated with facts on the ground as the members of specific orgs or projects might see them.

Exactly why I would run far away from any workplace that unionized.

Because you get paid less and have to strike for a small raise.

Hanging the threat of layoffs over employees certainly motivates employees, in much the same way stack ranking does, but it does it in such a way that is ultimately destructive to the organization.

Your strawman is on fire.

Usually people can still be fired if they aren't performing their contractual obligations. That might get tricky for stuff like code, but the same can be said of the current performance structure.

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