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A comment on Kickstarter employees vote to unionize. Parent comment

Re:Kickstarter employees vote to unionize by throwaway894345 on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @04:49PM (#22360751)
Politics aside, I wonder if a tech union would have a strong incentive to make their individual workers irreplaceable--encourage them to hoard knowledge or make the code deliberately difficult for others to understand--such that the company would have a lot more to lose from a strike. As an outsider, most unions that I'm familiar with have employees that are more or less replaceable (one certified welder can fill in for another in a relatively short amount of time), but I don't think this is (as) true for tech. Thoughts?
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Re:Kickstarter employees vote to unionize by mrguyorama on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @05:00PM (#22360834)
There's nobody purposely making that kind of effort right now and it STILL takes something like a month for a new body to get up to speed.
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Re:Kickstarter employees vote to unionize by Apocryphon on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @04:51PM (#22360765)
It's not as if most companies- or at least most startups- are particularly good about preventing individuals or individual teams from becoming vital cogs, leading to tribal knowledge. Unions won't lead to less documentation that the existing poor organizational cultures already foster.
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Re:Kickstarter employees vote to unionize by throwaway894345 on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @05:01PM (#22360839)
My question was about whether unionization constitutes an increased incentive (and I would think that it would for the same reasons that unionization gives a collection of individuals more power than they would have as individuals); I don't think that depends on whether or not existing institutions are good or bad at preventing vital cogs, etc.

I might be wrong, but I don't think it's because of the efficacy of existing institutions.

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Re:Kickstarter employees vote to unionize by ptx on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @06:38AM (#22364705)
In which professions, then, would you say the employees are not easily interchangeable? Surely not exclusively programmers? But actors, writers, teachers, doctors and many other non-welding professionals all have unions.
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Re:Kickstarter employees vote to unionize by OJFord on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @09:29PM (#22362575)
It wouldn't occur to anyone, it would just be a problem afterwards with them gone.

If anything 'obscure code' would just be a reason to get rid; have less of it and what there is is new guy's problem.

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Re:Kickstarter employees vote to unionize by anoncake on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @09:27AM (#22365650)
If the potential workers in favor of such a scheme wanted to do that, they could just as well do it now individually.
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