Technology

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:

1. If you're woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn't for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

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:

1. "Unlimited PTO" policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this "yeah, we heave 'unlimited PTO'; oh, we're really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?".

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.

How afraid are you of retribution if you tried to unionize?

Damn, wtf are intuit and GM doing to their engineers?

The US labor laws need to be updated too. They suck compared to the 1st World EU members. I fully support unions too.

If you want to read about this on a website that isn’t full of ads and doesn’t just present as an ad for their own news app, here is the source material by Blind.com.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to the raw survey data and I generally don’t trust surveys that aren’t accompanied by raw data.

I went looking for the data because 1901 respondents across 32 of the largest companies globally doesn’t seem like it would be statistically representative of any one company. If you assume the same sample size per company, which it probably isn’t but again that’s unverifiable because I couldn’t find the raw data, you’re looking at, what, 60 employees for a company the size of Google?

Look, I’m a recovering tech worker who left the industry because of the toxic work culture, having spent a quarter of my life at one of the good ones. Even there I saw the value of unions. No matter the industry, workers deserve the right to collective bargaining and fair treatment. But I don’t think surveys with unverifiable data help move that conversation forward.

Now, if I’m mistaken and someone finds a source link to the data that we can all verify, I’ll happily take another look and reconsider my opinion on it’s validity.

Holy shit Intuit and GM better shape the fuck up or the workers should just hurry up and fucking do it.

Apple, tesla, and Google suspiciously at the bottom three there

Absolutely. I've been laid off twice in my IT career. It would be nice to have someone on my side for a change.

My company is on there. I wish we had a union

Me too. I work for none of the above, but yes I would.

Not bad, I thought our heads were still further up our asses.

Anything using Blind as a "verified industry source" is going to be skewed to the type of person who uses Blind. Beyond that, it's low sample size, and there are suspiciously round fractions for some of the larger companies. Worse, because Blind is blind - this doesn't represent current employees, but merely people who worked at some point in the past at those companies.

Not saying it's not good - just saying not to get overly excited over a badly done survey

If more would join a union it would likely cause the other companies employees to find more interest or courage to join. Please join a union if you are not already. Support yourself and fellow workers, solidarity is key.

These numbers seem grossly inflated. How was the study conducted?

Edit:

However, on average 67% of those polled in the Blind survey said they were likely to join a union and 73% said that unions “mostly helped.”

Eh that's reasonable. Blind (the app) is pretty good, alibet toxic

Would a union be able to repeal this lame IT overtime pay expectation? This dumb rule was the $27.63 over ten years ago too. I once worked at a place and a co-worker was told by his staffing agency that they didn't have to pay overtime.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-computer#:~:text=However%2C%20Section%2013(a)(,duties%20and%20who%20are%20paid

If that happens, they are going to see a lot of things seemingly from the past connected to union activity though.

Not just strike breakers being hired (some of tech work is not that demanding in expertise, think typical Hindu web devs), but also actual spies, saboteurs, hitmen being involved, propaganda attacks, possibly legal attempts to bust unions and use of force. And, of course, crucial positions in union bureaucracy becoming attractive for organized crime (which likely has very few of people associated with it ever convicted, as in mostly invisible until it's too late).

Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Just the more adult level of the game. Considering that the tech industry is at the core of our civilization now, and considering its profits, this can get as historic as battle of the Blair mountain.

Now how do we do it? Especially with remote work, not sure how to organize.

Get ready for corporate announcing the layoff of 67% of the workforce