It is irrelevant. But somehow companies have convinced most that unions are a bad thing. They have leveraged their greater influence to further their power. They are now in an essentially unassailable position. For the great majority of the workforce they have no bargaining power. This toxic modern world should pop like the noxious little bubble it is. We need a new 60s only this time we need to win.

> "companies have convinced most that unions are a bad thing"

I don't know why people keep saying this. Unions themselves convinced most that unions are a bad thing, through their behavior. In my case, it was watching the UAW and Teamsters for a couple of decades.

Unfortunately, I think unions are culpable as well. When they protect bad employees, act to extend their power for it's own sake, refuse to concede despite potentially ruining the company etc. Ironically, they can end up displaying the same qualities they originated to prevent.

They can but they don't always. Ascribing all unions to the flaws of the most culpable ones is something we don't do for corporations or even governments, and if we did do this we wouldn't get anywhere as a society. People used to beat each other physically over their votes in the village square, but this doesn't mean democracy is culpable for violence.

You're right that it's a broad generalization, but I would disagree that a lot of the same rhetoric isn't applied to corporations or governments.

I should have been more specific to say 'unions with bad reputations are often culpable for those stereotypes'

I will be honest I've never seen an across the board "but that's a corporation, we don't want anything to do with that" to corporations the way that's done with unions at least on HN. No one's languishing a "<startup> is a corporation? I don't know, look at nestle and its human rights abuses. I don't think we should support <startup>".

FWIW I don't think unions are a silver bullet. I'm just pointing out that if you look at it from a neutral/uninvested party the bias is weird.

It is probably becausd think companies and especially corporations have proven themselves too effective essentially for that in the pragmatic sense. Regardless of the many objections and insults to them in the generic, and claims made about the utopian alternatives and costs as better corporations and their byproducts are implicitly accepted as the most practical option even by their foes. As a category they are /never/ treated as an underdog in a comparison to any other entity and avoiding involvement in either goods or working for them is essentially treated as a luxury.

Of course the comparison doesn't quite work because unions are not standalone entities - they are linked to government or companies. If they were independent the labor organizations would be guilds.

In the U.S. at least, there are quite a few pockets who think corporate structures are bad in general. I know HN tends to skew towards the entrepreneurial-minded, so it's quite a bit less here.

To be clear, I deliberately use the word "can" in my previous statement i.e., they may abuse their power, but also may not

The bias isn't weird it's the result of propaganda from corporate interests

I am only qualified to speak about the tech sector in which I work. All of my coworkers make above six figures. We have every sort of benefit that we could want. Why would we want a union? Our company has convinced us that unions are a bad thing by giving us basically anything that a union could have, and more. Why would we want to agitate for more when we already have so much, and risk what we currently have (which is more than adequate)

Unions are meant to bring some balance to a very imbalanced power structure when that power structure lends itself to taking advantage of the employees. The fact that you and your fellow employees have it so well may indicate that isn't your case.

Unions aren't necessary but can help. I've worked in positions where the courts provided the same benefit via a different mechanism.

Edit: I accidently had "are" for "aren't"

I'm also a tech worker and I know plenty of things we can agitate for:

* Better treatment against the rampant ageism in our industry (eg. access to lawyers when IBM decides to do mass layoffs of people above a certain age...)

* Guaranteeing reimbursement for self-education materials, time off for self-education purposes like conventions and hacker spaces

* Better treatment for H1B visa holders, a political push to stop the abuse of workers who cannot leave employers or risk losing immigration status

* Support for and communal funding for OSS

* A group pushback against flagrantly unethical, insecure, or straight up illegal behavior on the part of companies (eg. that non-poaching agreement back in the day that kept people's wages from being as high as they should've been)

* Standard establishment of making sure remote workers are paid for the value they bring to the company and aren't stiffed purely because of where they are geographically located at the time.

To reply to your point about H1B: Unions are normally very nativist and would be the last group pushing for better/ more H1B visas. The Union reaction to the TPP should have indicated something. I feel as if the ageism is more on the worker's shoulders. Many of us are young, and the field is on the younger side on average

Unions can be nativist but a tech union shouldn't have to be just because another labor union might've been.

Ageism is on the worker's shoulders, but those workers are also managers who choose to do bullshit like lay off workers above a certain age across a company. We need ways to protect ourselves from that.

Unions are meant to increase wages for the workers. How will added X thousands of new workers (willing or forced to work for less) increase wages for the workers. It is by its design that unions are nativist.

Agree with the second point on ageism

> "Unions can be nativist but a tech union shouldn't have to be just because another labor union might've been."

There is no "might have been". It's pretty much a matter of historical record that labor unions were fiercely anti-immigrant.

Judging by nativist comments even on a heavily moderated forum like HN whenever the topic of H1-Bs comes up, the many, many immigrants in the tech industry would be have to be bonkers to trust that a tech union wouldn't become nativist.

Here is one big counter-example: The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, a union with two million members in the US. They call for comprehensive immigration reform tied with labor conditions. Teachers' unions like the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association also call for compassionate immigration reform.

The old stereotype of nativist unions is just that. It's true in some cases--see the Teamsters, who also supported Trump, or police unions--but the actual union movement in the US has long fought for better treatment for immigrants.

https://www.seiu.org/cards/solutions-for-immigration-reform-...

Tech workers are no more or less nativist, than anyone else.

>Better treatment against the rampant ageism in our industry

I don’t know your location, but in the US it’s already illegal to discriminate against someone’s age if they’re over 40

I'm in the same boat as you, but think about this: these cushy developer jobs in the Western world are on borrowed time. FAANG companies are investing billions to teach people how to code and brand it as if it's some noble humanitarian effort when it's really just to further lower wages. When the time of FAANG companies actually offshoring key development teams comes (and it is coming), I have 0 faith the federal government will give a shit to protect US workers. So maybe a union is the best way to stop this.

I heard this same narrative in 2000, and it didn't happen, in fact the opposite. If you want people to believe that more people coding leads to offshoring and thus universally low wages, you'll have to make a more convincing argument to convince us that history is wrong (and not just wrong, went the complete opposite direction).

Wealth isn't a single pie. When new engineers are trained - we bake a new cake, instead of slicing a thinner slice for your privileged position.

Wait how could Unions help against outsourcing? What do Unions do? Use strikes (withholding labor) to get concessions. What does outsourcing involve? Finding cheaper labor out of the country and laying off or firing existing workforce.

If outsourcing is the threat isn't the potentially outsourced threatening a strike kind of like responding to a mugger by putting a knife to your own throat? Except I think that might be more effective as a threat as it makes the mugger think of you as unstable and irrational.

A union can't help workers whose company is currently in the process of outsourcing them. However, it is often the case that a company isn't ready to completely shut down local operations.

It all depends on what your goal is. Unions take money from R&D and shareholders, and put it in their own pockets. That's totally fine, but it is a tradeoff. The negative side is it creates opportunities for other companies that aren't unionized to innovate with that capital. Or sometimes it just results in returning capital to shareholders. Tesla is a good example of where paying union members instead of investing in R&D offered Musk an amazing opportunity to outcompete some of the most entrenched and subsidized companies in the US. We are actually quite fortunate that this even happened in the US, because the opportunity was there for any company in any country to seize.

As an aside, I don't get why deng tolerates comments like yours, but will mod an equivalent comment that even moderately right wing. If we want real discussion here, it doesn't start with a reshashed Eugene Debs speech.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard that R&D angle before. But I wonder is HN would be so positive on TSLA if it were instead “Musk decided to pay his engineers less so he could innovate instead!”

Engineers are R&D

Not necessarily and it often depends where you work. Many (most even) are in support roles like maintenance, etc.

E.g., I’ve previously worked for an automotive manufacturer on controls software. I was attached to the maintenance team. The design engineers were a subset of the entire engineers population. In other places I’ve worked, R&D was mainly done by scientists and physicists, not by engineers who served to support the R&D effort