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Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work
- pewpewlaser 1mo agoWas part of the frontline effort to get our colleagues into UPTE. As we move towards AI automation, we need to make sure that workers have a seat at the table when we impact our students, patients, and our research across the state.
- Plasmoid 1mo agoMy ask for these is always the same. I just want to see how this union would work, specifically. Don't compare it to other unions or say it could be like X. Just write a few hundred words on what it would actually be like.
- romanows 1mo agoI agree in general, but this article claims that the unionized tech workers now have pay increases, cheaper health benefits, and layoff protections. There is also a discussion about the process. This article at least is not just "unions good" (waves hands).
- braiamp 1mo agoThe same way every other union works... I don't get your question? The unions that do work, are not the ones you see on tv. When something explodes, specially a union, it gets massive coverage. When a union works, any achivement gets burried while the negative press is the only one given coverage(1, 2, 3, 4). So, I will challenge the reader: unions win about 7 out of 10 elections to get certified/created. Does your mental image of labor news look like 70% wins? If not, ask why 1: https://www.benjnewman.com/uploads/1/2/2/1/122135844/kane_newman_organizedlaborundeservingrich_bjps.pdf https://www.benjnewman.com/uploads/1/2/2/1/122135844/kane_ne... 2: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv3s8mwx https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv3s8mwx 3: https://www.projectcensored.org/unions-won-more-than-70-percent-of-elections-in-2022/ https://www.projectcensored.org/unions-won-more-than-70-perc... 4: https://www.mediamatters.org/labor-unions-and-workers-rights/labor-day-cnn-and-msnbc-should-frame-2023-historic-year-workers https://www.mediamatters.org/labor-unions-and-workers-rights...
- ameliaquining 1mo agoPretend for a moment, then, that I've never worked in a unionized industry and everything I know about unions is from the media environment that you say is untrustworthy. I think it would be very helpful, in that case, to write the few hundred words about how exactly my life as an employee would change.
- braiamp 1mo ago[flagged]
- UncleMeat 1mo agoA union is a collection of workers who negotiate together against their employer using the leverage of strikes and other work stoppages. They are democratically controlled with regular elections for union leadership and votes for major actions like strikes. This means that the union can decide for itself what things it wants to extract from an employer. Through democratic control you will have some influence on its priorities. Unions typically extract a small portion of the pay of its members so that it can fund operations.
- hylaride 1mo agoThis is essentially a story about front-line traditional desktop support/sysadmins at a public university. It's not going to be the same story at much higher paid shops where workers often have equity, good benefits, and the market has provided access to other jobs if you lose yours (in my experience, there are still shortages of qualified and competent engineers). I would like a different method to deal with the pitfalls, but the politics, drama, overhead, and costs of unionization just don't interest me. I'm not interested in being at one job for life.
- mikojan 1mo agoFinancial equity, benefits and opportunities at other companies in my experience are not the determining factors for tech workers. Lack of or loss of self-determination and self-governance are. The tech workers who are unionized that I know didn't join for financial gain because there is none (except for a few who are bad at bargaining). They joined to exert control over their workplaces and help build companies they can be proud of.
- johnnyanmac 1mo ago> (except for a few who are bad at bargaining) Was this really necessary?
- mikojan 1mo agoWhat do you mean? What is the problem with that statement?
- johnnyanmac 1mo agoI don't like the implication that there are people who join a union because they are bad at their job. As you see in these comments that is still a prevailing sentiment despite the industry here laying off millions in the last few years with no rhyme nor reason. And despite soaring profits (so these aren't struggling companies who need to let go of talent). Apparently, if you can't make it on your own, you have to lean on unions as a crutch that lets you coast
- jjtheblunt 1mo ago[flagged]
- notyourwork 1mo agoWhat’s your point? Regurgitating the article isn’t useful nor why I come to the comment section.
- jjtheblunt 1mo agoi thought it interesting how clearly the authors and their interests are described.
- kbelder 1mo agoWell, it's jacobin.com.
- altcognito 1mo agoI'm pretty sure that everyone is aware that an article from jacobin has these biases. Perhaps it is notable because you're so frequently exposed only to billionare and corporate biases.
- glitchc 1mo agoNothing wrong with stating the sources up front. They are clearly pro-labour and pro-union. It helps to know where the authors stand. Would you rather the authors were buried under seven layers of shell companies?
- jjtheblunt 1mo agonot at all...i thought it was great how it's clear
- gdulli 1mo agoEnough of this passive aggressive quoting. If you have something to say, man up and say it.
- schlap 1mo ago[flagged]
- notyourwork 1mo agoThis is not a useful comment, please provide substance that contributes to a fruitful conversation.
- anon291 1mo agoFor some tech workers maybe but the issue is that for much of vc backed tech work, Marxist analysis a la Jacobin et Al do not work. Marxists delineate the working class from the owning class but in my experience in these vc backed startups and large public companies that come out of them, the working class quickly becomes part of the owning class. The union would only serve to make sure that transition never took place. No thanks, I'll take my seven figure options please.
- harimau777 1mo agoYou might want to read some more Marxist analysis. TLDR: Eventually the real owning class decides they no longer need to pretend that the professional class is one of them.
- lazzlazzlazz 1mo agoThis is the absolute last thing that tech needs. What a blow it would be, a nightmare.
- jamestimmins 1mo agoAs a California tech worker (where the article is focused), I have zero interest in joining a union and firmly believe that much of what has been possible as a tech employee (high paying, interesting career) is in part because we don't have unions, and instead employees own equity and get valuable skills. Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
- DiscourseFan 1mo agoYeah just wait until you get laid off
- alephnerd 1mo agoUnions don't help with that as can be seen with Volkswagen or much of Detroit. Or, from an IP-driven industry perspective, the offshoring of Hollywood following the SAG and WGA strikes in the early 2020s. And if IATSE couldn't stop VFX from being offshored back in the 2000s and 2010s, then tech unions wouldn't be able to either. Edit: can't reply > Without film industry unions, might the offshoring have been undertaken even earlier? Not really. VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s despite only starting as an industry in the 1990s. > Yeah but this is a limited perspective. If the union was truly international (like they _used_ to be) VFX workers could push for high wages wherever they worked. VFX workers in most countries are not unionized either, and much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
- Mountain_Skies 1mo agoMy experience has been that most tech employees are "exempt" employees, but other than being denied overtime pay, they're mainly treated by employers as non-exempt. Exempt was meant for organizations full of professionals who are generally autonomous, which rarely is the case in tech, especially software development where the micromanagement can be extremely high. Tech workers aren't treated like doctors and lawyers. Employment law shouldn't pretend that they are.
- Devasta 1mo agoUnionization of the industry is long long overdue, if for no other reason than professional ethics. A small town lawyer can fuck up paperwork badly enough that they lose their ability to practice law. A software engineer can fry the brains of hundreds of thousands of people and it's all ok so long as they managed to get a few of them to click ads. It should have the same requirements for personal liability like other professions do.
- phainopepla2 1mo agoUnions typically fight pretty hard to keep their members from facing professional liability (see police unions), so your comment is a bit at odds with itself. I'm fairly confident that a software engineer's union would not be lobbying to make it's members liable for things they did while legally performing their job duties at places like Meta or Google.
- redsocksfan45 1mo ago[dead]
- patternMachine 1mo agoThis article is really about IT support, not "tech" workers. What tech workers need, if they need anything, is a professional organization like lawyers, doctors, and architects have.
- missedthecue 1mo agoHow would that even work? The federal/state government would legally ban people from writing code (like they can legally ban people from practicing law or medicine) unless they have a certificate from the programmer industry guild? I think the low barrier to entry is something that makes the field so interesting and dynamic. Being interesting and dynamic are great things in tech whereas you might not want a real dynamic and outside-the-box doctor or estate attorney.
- Apocryphon 1mo agoTech workers have the IEEE, and the ACM. We need an IEEE/ACM with teeth.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 1mo ago> is a professional organization like lawyers, doctors, and architects have those don't serve to protect workers rights, but rather serve to artificially limit the number of people who can work in that industry; if anything they are anti-workers-rights
- Apocryphon 1mo agoFor all of the high compensation tech workers can make in specific regions, at specific firms, how is it that they lack the leverage to demand something as basic as remote work, or as simple as not working in open offices? Consider the ubiquitous distaste for the open layout, how it creates distractions, damages flow state, that "no one" actually likes to work in a bullpen. Yet for all the grousing that software engineers do about them, they're still the prevailing industry trend. For like two decades now. In the status quo, where's the worker power to stand against that?
- fnord77 1mo agoIt's funny, the DSA in SF has been very anti-tech worker, complaining we get paid too much. Imagine that - socialists complaining that workers get paid livable wages.
- ThrowawayR2 1mo agoWhen the American left says they want to eat the rich, you better believe that SWEs making $200k+ per annum feature prominently on the menu.
- pessimizer 1mo ago* [...]Could Have Saved[...] Cannot Now Save. Unions get power when labor is at its strongest, not when labor is at its weakest. When tech labor was at its strongest, it became super-libertarian, started discussing sous vide and $300 shirts, became YIMBYs, and told the flyover states to learn to code while creating the gig economy. FAANG colluded to fix salaries in the valley for years, and they just sighed and paid their $3000 rent to live with 3 roommates. I'd add shouldn't be saved. There were far too many programmers before AI, and everything was getting worse. They were mostly vastly overpaid, except for the extremely productive ones who contributed to society the most, who were vastly underpaid or worked on a volunteer basis. Their salaries were a function of ZIRP and quantitative easing, and their acquisition (and now their layoffs) were to juice the stock prices that were the engine of the entire thing. Learn to dig ditches. If we used less immigrant slaves, ditch diggers might be able to start a union. The reason AI is failing is because it's replacing programmers that were totally superfluous and bringing in zero marginal revenue. Laying off your programmers and not replacing them with AI is going to be the new black. edit: I got a lifetime subscription to Jacobin when it started (because I thought we needed a glossy lefty magazine) but I really hate it and keep accepting issues out of pure spite because I know it costs them money. I don't know what makes them think they can talk about economic issues yet avoid any math or actual discussion of economics. The suburban child of immigrants upper-middle class Liberal Arts majors on the left are its albatross. Please stop saying Gramsci.
- Animats 1mo agoThat is a public-sector union. That's different. Political power matters in that space. A useful private sector union to watch is The Animation Guild, IATSE local 639.[1] They represent traditional animators in Hollywood - Disney, Dreamworks, Marvel, etc. But they've never been able to organize a game company, despite years of trying. They have good contract terms - the contract is a floor on wages, not a ceiling, and overtime is handled well. Here's what purports to be a complete list of "tech unions" in the US.[2] Only six have a contract with the employer. That's pathetic. The six: - "Apple Shuttle Drivers Union". Not even Apple employees, but drivers for Compass Transportation. Teamsters. - "Gimlet Union". Gimlet Media employees. Writers Guild of America. 83 people. - "Glitch Union". Glitch platform defunct as of 2025. Communications Workers of America. - "Ringer Union". Affiliated with Spotify. Writers Guild of America. 65 people. - "Security Guards at Silicon Valley" Service Employees International Union. 3000 people. - "United HCL Workers of Pittsburgh". Google contractor. 20th largest H1-B visa sponsor in US. "HCL America INC has filed 60,667 H1B applications and 1,294 PERM green card petitions. Avg salary: $102,175." Steelworkers Union. 60 people. Only the last represents "tech workers", and that company is mostly non US citizens. Anyone know of other unions which, right now, contractually represent tech workers in the US? Just not finding any real tech worker unionization. [1] https://animationguild.org/ https://animationguild.org/ [2] https://data.collectiveaction.tech/unions https://data.collectiveaction.tech/unions
- tptacek 1mo agoThere was an opportunity to organize and exploit market power back in 2017-2018, when there was a frenzy of recruiting and growth in the industry. The field was also much more ideologically coherent, in the wake of the first Trump election, than it is today. But nothing came of it. It's less clear that any similar opportunity exists today, or why it would come together now when it didn't under more favorable circumstances then.
- johnnyanmac 1mo agoPeople already react when it was already too late and not as a preventative measure to prevent the crisis from happening. It is indeed way too late. But I guess late is better than never. It is foolish to try and push through this in an employers market, though.
- cyberax 1mo agoUnions sound great in theory, but they aren't working all that well in practice for high-paying fields that require specialized knowledge. It negates the main advantage of that: being able to move between jobs without losing the salary, because employers are paying _you_ for your skills. Unions also are terrible because they often artificially strangle the supply. For example, you can't become a licensed electrician without completing an apprenticeship, and unions control the number of apprenticeships. With all the corruption associated with that.
- jmyeet 1mo agoHere's a question I have for all the predictable "I don't need a union" SWEs out there: if unions were so bad, why do companies literally spend millions and break the law to make sure they don't happen? To borrow a George RR Martin'ism, there are a lot of children of summer of this space that have only experienced the 2010s, which were an unprecedented boom in tech hiring. Even now in permanent layoff culture they've been anchored to the 2010s as being "normal" and this is "abnormal". You are incorrect. What's going on now is normal and companies are aggressively working to claw back the compensation gains of the last 1-2 decades. A few key AI people are making insane money but I assure you that this is temporary too. You do not have negotiating power with a trillion dollar company. If you withhold they labor, it's no big deal. If they withhold your paycheck, you and your family are at risk of homelessness, bankruptcy and death. These are not equal positions. The very idea that unions will reduce your compensation is itself propaganda created by decades of McKinsey "research", billionaire-backed think tanks and money in politics as well as a healthy dose of the Red Scare. Many of the benefits you take for granted like weekends, PTO and sick pay only exist because people died for those benefits. Also, look at any industry and union employees get paid more than non-union employees. The Big Three automakers pay more than Tesla does, for example. Permanent layoff culture exists to disrupt your life, reduce your compensation and make you do more unpaid work. Unions would prevent that. Lastly, I have to note, it's pretty interesting that this submission got killed on HN manually. 2 hours, 60 votes and that would be on the front page. I went through the top 500+ submissions and couldn't find it. It's still on new but nowhere on the main feed. Interesting. That in itself is evidence that VCs don't want unions.
- johnnyanmac 1mo agoI definitely see a lot of "but tech (and I) am special, they need us" going on here. Clearly those employees have not had a significant layoff, or are running startups themselves (which isn't surprising at all given the site). And they haven't looked down at the current market for new grads, nor at the general state of the job market in general. I still regularly see other postings elsewhere on someone saying to the tune of "I just got laid off after 5+ years at [Company]. What is happening to the job market?". (Un)fortunately, being a laid off game dev making ends meet freelancing has given me a lot of time to learn economics. >Permanent layoff culture exists to disrupt your life, reduce your compensation and make you do more unpaid work. Unions would prevent that. And extended exposure to this culture is probably why my sector is much more receptive to unions. We've been in such an environment even in the "good times". It does suck not knowing if you'll have a job next week. At least contract work always has an end date and you simply bet on not having it continue. >I have to note, it's pretty interesting that this submission got killed on HN manually. 2 hours, 60 votes and that would be on the front page. I went through the top 500+ submissions and couldn't find i That behavior as of late is why I tend to just do a blank query on search and skim through the highest voted pages in 24 hours or a week. Helps me find blind spots like this that didn't make the front page.
- teravor 1mo agothe problem with unions is that they tend to enjoy legal protections not afforded to anyone else. as such they will distort the marketplace. as is often the case with such carve-outs those who can get in early tend to benefit at the expense of everyone else. it was a mistake to entrench unions because now you will never get rid of them, but it's not surprising as the alternative would have been aggressive anti-trust action and the corporate powers would much rather deal with unions (whose incentives they can model just as well as their own). note that the incentives of the unions are the incentives of the union organizers which much like in democracy are not aligned with the collective they purport to represent.
- braiamp 1mo ago> the problem with unions is that they tend to enjoy legal protections not afforded to anyone else Capital has higher protections than unions, what are you on about? You have the corporate veil whereas the liability stops at the organization rather than the individuals and that is very seldomly pierced (J&J is a neat case here, even while courts are being wise to that move now). Also, if carve-outs distort markets, that argument disqualifies the corporate form first. Because corpos have limited liability, corporate personhood, patent monopolies, etc. they also have political power on top, which is always fun. BTW, and I alluded to this in another comment, antitrust was used against labor, not capital. Labor had to work for decades to be excluded. Before that, union members got personally sued into the ground under antitrust, almost losing their homes and savings accounts. Maybe we should bring that back too, but with actual people that needs to be antitrusted.
- teravor 1mo ago> Capital has higher protections than unions, what are you on about? You have the corporate veil whereas the liability stops at the organization rather than the individuals the corporate veil does not protect capital, it explicitly makes capital be the vulnerable part. or are you decrying the fact that a human capitalist isn't made vulnerable? there are good reasons for that as in a standard corporate setting individuals may not have the requisite influence to dictate a course of action, if they are held responsible by what the emergent corporate entity embarks on then there will be no capitalism. if the unions become corporate entities and their members give up all labor protections (become contractors) then it will be more even but they obviously don't want that. a highly organized minority is always the elite for a reason.
- lispwitch 1mo agoI'm involved in a new workers cooperative, and I've been thinking about how organizational structures relate to the workplace. Cooperatives are fantastic, where they exist. In the tech world, two prominent examples are Igalia and Bocoup. (I worked on SpiderMonkey at Igalia, and collaborated with Bocoup on test262 tests.) Both are highly specialized consultancies, and both are internally democratic. To get some idea of what it's like to work at a coop, I recommend the 2023 FOSSY talk "Inside Igalia: Scaling a Co-Op Beyond 100 Members": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du7fC8VCbXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du7fC8VCbXg Workers coops have structural limitations, though: with some exceptions, they're new entrants to the market and have limited access to capital. Unions interact with existing businesses, which I think is why they're so much more controversial than coops, and they can bring some of the benefits of workplace democracy to a much larger group of people than coops presently can.
- newsomix9xl 1mo agoThe title should be "Good unions can save ..." Bad unions cannot. All unions are not the same. Doctors have a super powerful lobby and union (not sullied with the plebian name "union") and lo! Are super wealthy. They have mandatory laws restricting competition and licensing requirements, etc. If tech workers had a lobby like the AMA and doctors, they too would be super rich. Golf, anyone?
- erg0s4m 1mo agoIf unions are so great, just make them voluntary and give workers a choice. For some reason Union advocates always want them to be mandatory, because if workers are not forced to join them, most wont.