If there is any room for an employer to make a judgment call then they can make it, and a union has limited ability to deal with that. US unions are often only concerned with the aspects of the job they can / have negotiated, or things that are already illegal (and you'd be surprised what comes out of the sausage factory when negotiations end). If the job allows for any judgment calls by the employer, they get to make them just the same as a non union job.
What is the answer then? You get the typical US union job where the job is hyper track driven as far as career path goes because the union feels that is the only way to control / have a say in those aspects. The employer doesn't have the flexibility to retaliate and hide it as a business decision.... but they also don't have the ability to promote someone over another for the same reasons (what is seen as retaliation by one person might be seen as a well earned promotion by someone else who got the job). Even then if your boss is a "jerk", often a union can't do anything.
The results are jobs where easy to identify things like seniority, some sort of certification system, and etc determine pay, progress and etc. That is a terrible trade off IMO.
There was a track very similar to the salary bands that you see in a F1000 company (<title>, senior <title>, staff <title>, <pricipal> title, etc), the only difference was that salary advancement within a band was time based, with only a small discretionary component. IIRC, you could get a 1% boost for exceptional performance identified by management, in addition to the schedule. Job titles were broadly defined.
Basically, unions that are oriented towards professionals vs. blue collar are less task and bullshit focused.
The union I was a member of provided generous training/tuition benefits, a platform for getting advice without potential retaliation, and dispute resolution. As a manager, it can be frustrating to deal with the dispute part, as the union is obliged to defend everyone.
The core issue here is that using employer resources to organize actions that could be perceived as against your employer is dumb for a variety of reasons.
If my coworker can spin up a new, valuable product, they should be able to multiply their comp as quickly as they can compound value. If my other coworker fell through the cracks and is a liability for the quality of the codebase and for regression of our talent pool, they should be able to be cut.
And the people here aren't actually going against their employer. They are the ones taking the long view in an increasingly myopic ecosystem that is more and more skewed towards the short game.
Google has a disproportionately skilled talent pool on the back of advertising a deal to employees where they are treated with respect, are allowed support for pursuing things that are good for the world, and aren't leaned on to accept evil. Smart, capable people tend to be thoughtful and have a vision for how they want the world to be, and tend to care about how what they're doing fits into the big picture.
If they reneg on that deal they will bleed top talent, which is problematic when your whole company is primarily constrained by the size and depth of its talent pool.
It's either idiocy or an inevitable game-theoretical degradation of institutions that will lead to its death, at least as a tech company by the thielian, pro-innovation, definition, if not of the company itself if it eventually lacks the talent to keep on top of new paradigms.
Either way, the company will end up as a shell of its former self or dead if Whittaker and company don't turn the boat, however unlikely that is to succeed.
That’s employee hostile. Effectively you’re creating a system where compensation is based on your ability to “engineer” placement on a hot team/product.
Ultimately it’s bad for a company as you’re signaling that political savvy is valued above skill, and less directly profitable teams become ghettos.
Maybe we could theorize of a magical system which deeply understands you and itself well enough to find an optimum mapping, but the reality is it doesn't exist, so you need to do that yourself.
In doing so you're making the system function better too, by voting with your feet and putting yourself where you'll give a shit and consequently get stuff done.
If you want to accrue resources, align your competencies and values with the surrounding system so that you create value. If you're an employer and want people to be happy and create value, give people freedom to rearrange themselves to fix the problems you create by not knowing the actual people well enough to figure out where they align and will be happy and create value.
Ignore that reality at your peril, whether as an employer, an employee or a policy-maker.
IIRC, this is how basecamp structures their team.
Unions for trades/gigs, where the union is more guild-like, operate a bit differently.
It would be interesting to see something more of that in the US, and would allow for flexibility.
I do worry though that the situations that folks cite as a reason to unionize follow the path to the less flexible options.
> If there is any room for an employer to make a judgment call then they can make it, and a union has limited ability to deal with that...
US-style unions are really only just once instance of "unions." I can imagine another instance, where the union itself is both independent of the employer but also has a significant power in promotion decisions, that could deal with these situations better. That's getting toward a decision-making structure that formally represents multiple stakeholder grounds instead of just capital and its representatives.
I would really hate to deal with a second level of bureaucracy when it comes to promotions and such.... let alone employer's having to accept "this guy is a senior X now" and realize he is not as opposed someone else who wasn't given that chance. That still seems like a very track type of career path situation where the technology world is still fast changing and has huge amounts of variety.
I was imagining it more as peer-accreditation and peer-participation, as the other union members would be your peers. Basically more democracy rather than bureaucracy.
"Based significantly on" is not the same as "made by" or "made in collaboration with." The problem here is an employer using their discretion as a hidden means of retaliation, and they can still do that with all the feedback in the world as long as the discretion is still all theirs.
e.g. Let the immigrants in! (But don't build any housing because then they could afford it here) Global warming is real and we should do something! (Ok - let's mandate solar panels on all /newly/ built homes) etc.
People here are very much self interested.
Anyway, leadership at these places tend to support the status quo, and maybe pay lip-service to a few issues to protect the corporate image. They're arguably the real "centrists" which in the US means a socially-permissive capitalist.
Plus like this example:
>In the email, Stapleton said that she arranged a meeting with Google’s human resources division after flagging changes to her job. She was told to go on sick leave. When she replied that she wasn’t sick, Stapleton wrote, the HR director said: “We put people on it all the time.”
Just drop a line to your state DoL and they would be all over that instantly with nail filled baseball bats.