this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone's pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I've probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.
A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.
A union could ensure that the company's incentives are aligned with worker's incentives around things like on-call.
I'd love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:
Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.
Or, regarding "unlimited PTO". I'd love to see a union force companies to:
Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.
Unless unions work differently where you live, they are a democracy that will pursue whatever issues its members vote on. If members don't think pay is a problem, why would they try to change it?
Had to explain this to my dad when he told me about the carpenters unions not allowing his brother to work after he retired.
1: Unions are the democratization of workplaces; for better or for worse.
2: Should you really be working when you’re claiming retirement checks from your union?
3: People are often falsely confident on their views about things. People love to complain about the government while hardly understanding anything about it. The same happens everywhere, including unions. Just because some dude is miffed doesn’t mean they have any right to be. They can be misinformed.
As a carpenter? Yes and no. It shouldn't compete with what union people are by and large doing for their steady bread and butter but completely outlawing earning any money is cruel to the type of busy-bees that many tradespeople are. Hand-craft chessboards or something, anything where skill and mastery is eclipsing the industrial aspect. Also teaching, training, and consulting. Retirement should be a role-change (if desired), not a kick to the curb. Also, accommodate for half-retirement: Half the cheque, half the jobs kind of situation.
Absolutely. I guess I just consider those things more in the realm of “hobby” rather than a job that might come to the union. No reason someone shouldn’t be able to make wood-whatever and sell it in their retirement. That was actually one of the things my dad argued, it’s sad to see someone work their whole lives to become a tradesman, only to have that same ability kneecapped because you’ve retired. And I agree. That’s why I also made point 3, because usually when things don’t make sense there’s a reason. Whether it’s a lack of information or just misinformation. We both had a lot of questions neither of us could answer, ya know?
A union lets you have leverage when negotiating for anything with the corpo. Individually you have a little if you're top talent, and none otherwise. Very few people are irreplaceable, some are somewhat painful to replace, the rest are less so. We've been mistaking the tight labor market in this industry for our own self worth but hopefully the last couple of years have helped most of us snap out of it.
Speaking of pay, the structures I've seen at a union university for example have pay scales based on the job and defined pay increases in every job. You know what you're gonna get paid for a position you're applying, and you know what you're gonna get paid years ahead in that job. With that said, a union can negotiate any sort of pay scheme. Perhaps most importantly a union can negotiate to get a much larger portion of the profits for the engineers. You think some folks in tech are paid very well, but if you look at the value they generate, they might not be paid nearly enough. If you think a union might take your 500K salary to 300K while raising some other people's salaries you should consider that a union can take it to 800K or more. Assuming this is happening at one of the wildly profitable companies where this money exists.
And of course a union gives you the leverage to negotiate any other conditions like the ones that you mentioned. On-call, PTO, remote, etc.
Yeah the tech labor market has really proven that the idea of employment contracts being negotiated between equal parties isn't true even in the best of circumstances.
Even when companies are desperate for talent, and willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on salaries and perks, they are not willing to negotiate on anything outside of that. They still have terrifying contracts with non-compete and damages clauses they could use to wreck your life, no workplace democracy, unpaid overtime and whatever other shit is legal.
But hey! You get free snacks and enough money to buy the dinners you don't time to cook and save up to survive your inevitable burn out!
When you learn that publicly traded companies are mostly obliged to squeeze as much work from you while paying as little, then all the all the puzzle pieces fall into place and all of what you said starts to make perfect sense.
Another concern I have - which might also be anti-union propaganda - is that I won't be allowed to do certain things because that job is supposed to be done by someone else according to the contract.
I hate doing that sort of thing because it makes me wait and by the time they get back to me another fire has started that I have to put out and it takes me a while to get back to the first thing.
I'd be happy to hear this isn't a legitimate concern.
You're unlikely to be told that you aren't allowed to do this or that, unless it's a safety violation of some sort. The idea that you can describe jobs to the letter and everyone is aware of what's written there and only does that is absurd. What's in the job descriptions protects you against abuse if someone makes you do things aren't paid for trained for, capable of, etc. It's a backstop. It doesn't prevent you from doing other things. In fact doing extra is a basis for promotion, just like it works in non-union shops. That's what how I've seen things working in a unionised university I have access to.
In any case, if a union card comes to my desk, I'd get the power first and worry about these details later. At least someone would ask me how I want these things to work, instead of telling me with the only alternative being to leave the company or be fired.
While I agree it is absurd, it absolutely happens. See the Las Vegas convention workers union. I was told that one worker could not plug-in an extension cord that had been previously plugged in because it wasn’t his job. There were numerous other instances exactly like that, while working a convention center floor.
It does happen.
That's not the case the parent was asking about though. They were asking whether they can do more than what's in their job description. Not whether someone else is obliged to do more.
I don't doubt your experience and it's totally fine by me. That's how they want to run their workplace, that's the way they run it. It doesn't mean you're gonna make yours like that. It's unlikely that a software org would be run like that. At the end of the day unions are democratic institutions where their members decide how to do these things. Because of that, your current org would likely be run the way you and your colleagues want to run it. Not in some bizarre way that Las Vegas convention workers do. :D
Thanks for the answer!
Honestly, the fact that junior folks won't be allowed to do things would be great. I'd love to see IT getting proper engineering certifications. People wouldn't allow their factories to be built by non-certified engineers, but they'll let their nephew who's good with computers build their network. Seems like unions could help with that, too.
Those compensation requirements would basically make it financially impossible to have someone on-call or they'd just have to hire people for those hours and say they are normal working hours.
How would you force someone to take time off?
If I was their boss I would say something like "you're job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time". Easy.
As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that's the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.
If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.
I've been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is "that's not good, but we'll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about". It's not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.
I'll say it again. It's about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that's pain for the worker, reward for the company; that's wrong.
Classic. Once I landed in a team who's been woken up every night, often multiple times a night for several years. The people left were so worn down, burnt out and depressed that it was obvious just by looking at them. The company has cut the team to the bone and the only people left were folks that didn't have the flashy resumes to easily escape. They had drawn up plans to fix the system years ago. BTW, none of that was disclosed to me until I had signed up and showed up for work and asked who are those miserable looking people over there. "That's your team" the man replied.
If this is happening, sounds like you have a shit-ass Product Manager (or no PM).
Signed, not a shit-ass Product Manager
While there are voluntary shit-ass PMs, you can only afford to be not a shit-ass PM because the org isn't squeezing you for all it can. Once it does, you'd have to make similar decisions. If you quit because you don't agree with the way things are going, a compliant shit-ass PM will take your place, or no PM, and the people would end up in the place the parent described.
Leadership definitely drives a lot, but even with bad leadership a PM can and should do a lot to help here. I spent 5 of my years of PMing with an operations org that drove every big decision and I still did everything I could to protect my devs. I ended up in major burn out from it multiple times, but I don’t regret it.
Alerts that are waking devs up in the middle of the night have a user impact too, and a PM can and should communicate that impact and risk to the business side as part of why it needs to be prioritized. Alternatively, there might be a reason that the UI change is ultimately more valuable, and it’s the PM’s job to communicate why that is the priority to their devs. If developers with a Product team ever truly believe the reason they’re building something is just “because [insert team here] is excited about it,” then the PM failed at a critical responsibility.
These are not the only options. Here are some others:
Something's telling me most orgs where 2 is an option would go with that. Related to that - increases in labor compensation is what forces companies to spend money on capital investment that increases productivity - read new equipment, automation, fixing broken shit, etc. If there are cheap enough slaves to wake up during the night, doing this investment is "low priority" (more expensive) and isn't done.