>But we aren't taught how to negotiate, question authority, organization (the real kind, not the following orders kind)

From my experience the far majority of companies want the "following orders kind", or to put it differently: they want you to be flexible enough to be both the independent leader and the great follower when they desire, without any sign of rebellion.

For obvious reasons, this doesn't work. Most of these attributes have some semblance of correlation or causation which makes anyone fitting the above a unicorn. You continuously stamp out rebellion and any sign of independence in teens, you get meek adults who will follow orders and are afraid to take independent actions. Society can scratch its head all it wants, these are the kind of people it trained for.

>Workers tend to underestimate a couple of things: Their value, their ability to work out and improve a workplace situation

I tried this multiple times. It's difficult enough to change things together, now try it in an environment where you're essentially alone. Your fellow worker bees aren't revolting with you, they are far too comfortable and afraid to lose their comfort. Their risk/reward evaluation is screaming "no, don't do this, let them sink alone".

The above works when people learn different things and understand rebellion together does work and it works really damn well, which again, starts all the way at school.

> From my experience the far majority of companies want the "following orders kind", or to put it differently: they want you to be flexible enough to be both the independent leader and the great follower when they desire, without any sign of rebellion.

Traditional capitalist companies are not democracies, they're dictatorships, or plutocracies at best. It makes sense an authoritarian regime would want problem solvers but not challengers to the status quo. A cooperative would be the closest to a democratic company.

> There is another way, which is negotiating and clearly stating one's goals. Workers tend to underestimate a couple of things: Their value, their ability to work out and improve a workplace situation, and often also the ability of their superiors to change perspective and collaborate on moving forward.

Anecdata, but I’ve seen this backfire tremendously. My wife worked for a skilled nursing facility. They had 18 therapists (pt, ot, and st). 6 decided to stand up to management and demand a lighter case load, a 3% raise (hilariously low I know), and increased transparency from management. They all got put in pips for various “other issues” and eventually all of them were fired. These jobs aren’t that low paying either ($70-$100k / year), so it’s not like finding a new warehouse crew.

Eventually the place ended up downsizing and eventually merging with another facility. The rumor on the inside is that they never really recovered and saw more attrition across other parts of the organization.

I say this backfired because the employees ended up getting fired. Even though in the end the company ended up not doing well.

I guess my point is that never underestimate the stupidity of management. They will let their companies fail in order to not succumb to employee demands, regardless of how benign they might be.

I was gonna say, this is absolutely untrue:

"Workers tend to underestimate [...] the ability of their superiors to change perspective and collaborate on moving forward."

They do however underestimate the ability of their superior to manipulate them into thinking they have a clear understanding of what going forward means and that said superior will honor that agreement.

Never has questioning the status quo in a workplace not ended me in an "Apocalypse Now" type of situation. Best of luck.

As a late friend put it: "Everything I know about leadership I learned from Colonel Kurtz."

Everything I know about negotiation I learned from Don Vito Corleone.

Everything I know about long term relationships I learned from Peggy Sue Got Married.

Everything I know about programming, I learnt it from CSI.

yeah but all the other references were to Francis Ford Coppola movies - you've broken the chain, man.

:( My bad, I've been doozing off today! Damn work.

In my case it was La Femme Nikita (not too different from CSI).

> I say this backfired because the employees ended up getting fired

Did they struggle to find new work because of this termination, and/or had to accept much worse conditions? If not, this didn't really backfire

Concur. I've seen more than one company self-destruct, because they weren't able to address crucial people problems. This was caused by their management prioritizing their own comfort at all times...

Said people problems were there classics : unwillingess to retain key people ; salary inversion ; hanging on to toxic people ; etc.

> They had 18 therapists (pt, ot, and st). 6 decided to stand up to management and demand a lighter case load, a 3% raise (hilariously low I know), and increased transparency from management. They all got put in pips for various “other issues” and eventually all of them were fired.

The way to handle this without backfiring would have been to contact a union about organizing, and let them help with the organizing process. You'd need to get more than 6 people on board, and the employer would fight it, but the organizing employees would have had legal protections against retaliation during and after the process.

I understand this comment comes from a good place but it falls into the same bucket as "well they can just sue" for me.

As-in, sure, technically they could do all of that but some people just want to work and not take on a huge fight that they themselves may not survive. I'm very pro-union but organizing one sounds miserable and thankless. I want to create software, not herd cats and I assume most people feel the same way. I have huge respect for union organizers and would support them but it's not a simple thing.

These people wanted to do their therapist jobs and they asked for the bare minimum and it was rejected (and the were effectively fired for it), I think that tells you how management would react to a union-effort. You might have legal protection but legal protection doesn't put food on the table.

> I guess my point is that never underestimate the stupidity of management. They will let their companies fail in order to not succumb to employee demands, regardless of how benign they might be.

It seems like they exposed a major weakness. My hope is that your wife and her colleagues are better off now.

Do you feel like they still did the right thing?

Alternatively, this fact set could suggest that the facility was not in a financial position to lower case load and give out raises.

From a pure "what we've budgeted" standpoint you're likely correct. But that budget included paying their CEO several million in salary, and several more million in bonus structure. Not to mention other executives who were making relatively similar pay. This wasn't some big company either. They had 12 facilities in the state, and each maybe had 50 employees. So at the most, including corporate, they had just north of 600 employees.

For these small market healthcare-focused companies (not really hospitals, not really clinics) they're always barely making money. But it's not because they aren't bringing money in. It's because they're incredibly poorly managed. They're super top heavy, and they always pay frontline staff like shit. It's why we saw the incredible rise of the traveling nurse in the past 10 years (and especially during covid), where nurses could make 5x traveling than what they could with a typical FTE job.

You tell me why a facility would rather pay a traveling nurse the equivalent of $300k per year + fees to the placement company for 12 months instead of hiring an FTE at slightly above market rate, which is more like $100-$120k? It's because they have zero ability to make long term decisions and middle management is completely powerless. Managers in these types of business are 100% middle men. They have no autonomy to do anything. Even hiring and firing takes several layers of corporate oversight.

I largely agree that it sounds like these problems are business/management problems.

It seems that there is also a labor shortage for good managers.

If a business is already top heavy, how do you get better managers? The traditional argument would be to pay more and get better talent. This honestly seems like a hard problem to solve.

How likely is it that those therapists don't have new jobs making more money?

For speaking up and negotiation to work you need a reasonable person on the other side of the conversation, and not having that kind of person is one of the most common problems to begin with.

A lot of businesses simply don't make a profit under reasonable conditions. So managers at those businesses need to be unreasonable by definition.

Sounds like those businesses aren't viable, and should fail.

In other words, if a business cannot be profitable _and_ pay it's staff a livable wage, then the answer is to make adjustments so it can do both, or close the business. Paying staff a non-livable wage, while perhaps making/retaining a profit, is still hard on the business (high turnover rate, constantly retraining new people, etc), and is nearly untenable for the staff (required to work multiple jobs, 1 paycheck away from not making rent, etc).

As a business owner, I know "close the business" sounds ludicrous to business owners, and isn't even on the table, but this so-called "labor shortage" is going to force things to go one way or the other.

Is there a case for an "unlivable wage" when a family member wants to add to the family budget, even though other family members (a spouse, or parents) provide the bulk of it but not exactly enough?

Clamping the lower bound of wages may put many of such people out of an opportunity to make some money. In other words, should a summer job for a teenager pay a livable wage?

This, of course, works best if the job is not taking 8 hours a day. I don't see why working multiple jobs, each of which takes a part of the day, should be considered bad; actually, my son worked this way for some time, which allowed him to pass a rough spot in job market in 2020-2021.

In a vacuum, the ability to pick up multiple jobs and do different things would be a net gain to individuals, yes. Plenty of people would like to do different things throughout the week rather than having to change jobs for a change of pace. This also assumes it's an opt-in, so if you like working on the same thing 40h a week, you can continue to do so.

Problem being, things today are indicating what is happening is not for the good of employees, but for the good of employers. Which brings with it a whole other slew of issues which disenfranchises the worker class. Which historically is a really bad idea if one's goal is to maintain a peaceful, functional society.

It's why the question of "should X be able to make a livable wage" is one which has to be answered very carefully, as this question is slowly slipping into the territory of "should people who spend most their lives doing what others want be able to afford living". That's how revolutions start.

> In other words, should a summer job for a teenager pay a livable wage?

Yes. Many teenagers of working age are head of household and shouldn’t have their wages undercut by the dependent children of others.

> I don't see why working multiple jobs, each of which takes a part of the day, should be considered bad

Because it makes life unnecessarily stressful. Transportation costs, typically borne by the worker, increase dramatically. It’s more efficient to work a single job, if possible.

If you want a 17 year-old lifeguard in San Francisco to be able to afford a mortgage San Francisco, you end up with no pools in San Francisco and unemployed teens.

It may be hard to believe, especially for the typical Californian, but there are other kinds of housing than single-family homes. It wasn’t so long ago that a single 17-year-old making minimum wage could afford to house themselves outside of a family unit.

I believe it. I think zoning and building codes are most of the problem. Allow 200 sqft apartments like you find in NYC and you will see a stark reduction in the working homeless.

But aren't 200 sq ft apartments banned because they are unlivably small? The guys who enacted that should take a look at Tokyo and Seoul, and maybe actually listen to the reasons of people who rent tiny apartments there.

They are objectively livable in a literal sense. But, yes I agree that some policy makers decided that they would rather have people homeless than in unpleasant living accommodations.

Studio apartments of that size (sometimes even smaller) are bought by university students in Norway all the time, sometimes for as much as $200.000. They can be quite comfortable.

Not sure how they’d be priced in SF, but to my intuition that seems out of working homelesss range. In cheaper cities though, definitely.

These places are illegal to offer in sf. There is a minimum allowance for size

The efficiency of human labor in a lot of these industries hasn't increased enough to justify the full cost of the labor. There's next to no efficiency increase you can get out of a truck driver or a waiter. Getting all of these people into industries that do have a better human labor efficiency is going to be hard.

You make a claim that there's no way to pay them according to their value. But there's several ways I can say that this is not true. First, a waitress is often a little bit of a salesperson so yes, she can up her skills to be more valuable. Second, the food or the goods being transported can be more or less valuable. A trucker might haul packing peanuts vs. iPhones. Restaurants can be more expensive or have higher margins. Third, we know it's possible to pay people a living wage because almost every other developed countries does it.

>First, a waitress is often a little bit of a salesperson so yes, she can up her skills to be more valuable.

This is true on an individual level, but I don't believe that there has been much efficiency increase here that has permeated through the industry. There has been no shovel to digger moment that has improved the ability for most waitresses to do their work much more efficiently. I think it's going to happen with self-checkout though (you will still need someone to staff self-checkout).

>Third, we know it's possible to pay people a living wage because almost every other developed countries does it.

But workers are better paid in the US than in almost any other country in the world: https://data.oecd.org/chart/6JwY

Spain has an unemployment rate of 15 percent. Its safe to assume that actual rate is higher than official rate. So no, "almost every other developed countries does it" is not true.

Also look up part timers in Japan, and the kind of capitalism there.

People that haven't looked for work in the prior 4 weeks aren't counted as unemployed even when they are.

Utterly baffled by this comment.

If you can't make a profit under reasonable conditions you have a cult, or perhaps a crime syndicate. Or a slave plantation.

What you don't have is a business run by balanced functional adults.

I'd pay good money if you or someone were to attempt an objective assessment of whether the next company I plan to work at "is a business run by balanced functional adults".

Do you have a strategy for paying your employees or are you planning on people working for you "for the exposure"?

Do you have a strategy of implementing feedback from these highly skilled workers that you have hired, or is your feedback loop pointed at a black hole?

Do you have high employee turnover?

Do you feel like as the boss, you are allowed to sexually harass your staff?

Reasonable does a lot of heavy lifting.

At least the slaves don't have to do it.

Conversations about labor are a weird area where people are both commodified and also simultaneously shamed for acting like a commodity.

Imagine opening up a shoe factory, finding out that the price of leather was too high to make a profit on leather shoes, and instead of reworking my business to match my expenses I instead demand that the leather be sold to me at a lower price. When the leather providers refuse, I go complain to a bunch of newspapers that nobody wants to sell leather anymore and that we're in a leather shortage.

If your business requires all of its supplies and inputs to be sold to you below market value, then you don't have a business, you have a charity.

Everyone would be able to make a profitable construction business if they got their lumber for free. Everyone could run a department store profitably if all of their inventory was given to them. But sustainable business is about learning how to build a product/service that generates more profit than the costs required to make it. If the initial costs are too high or it's a question of scaling, then that's what investments and/or subsidies are for. But either way, it's silly to try and shame suppliers (employees) for setting their own prices.

Be careful with that notion. There are more businesses that do make profit under reasonable conditions or can at least afford it and will win down the line. There are businesses who _think_ they can't afford it, but they might just be lacking imagination and long term thinking. Think of Henry Ford as an illustrative example of someone who had the imagination and holistic view, and thus improved working conditions.

> simply don't make a profit under reasonable conditions.

Profit is simply income minus expenses, accounting nonsense aside.

The problem is not that businesses cannot make a profit. Rather, its that we've build in worker exploitation into our economy. Our prices should be higher than they are.

When prices go up consumers substitute. Offshore labor is cheap. Why would consumers pay extra for domestic products instead of just buying cheap imported ones?

Aye, there's the rub. It's the same as saving. One person saving more is a good decision. _Lots_ of people saving more is a recession.

Externalities.

Or, employment taxes should be lower.

This is really a very complex problem and equation. There is also the question of "worker exploitation" in the sense of "is it reasonable to assume a McDonalds cashier should earn enough to support a family?".

In some, maybe even many, cases workers are likely underpaid. However, in many other cases, workers are paid relative to their overall value, but those same workers want to have a standard of living that is simply not practical with the job they hold.

> employment taxes should be lower.

I am unconvinced that this is the reason that businesses don't pay workers more.

Workers are usually paid according to their _replacement_ cost not the value they bring generally. In an ideal equilibrium, where the worker can push back against the employer equally, sure. However, that's seldom the case.

Businesses also push back harder by hiring _definitely_ exploited workers, e.g. in agriculture and meat packing, or by hiring contractors.

To be clear, I am not saying it is the reason for sure, just that there are a lot more factors to this than the direct wage.

Part of "lower wage taxes" would roll down to "less government support", which would theoretically roll down to "more people seeking gainful employment", which would affect the supply/demand curve of the labor pool, etc.

> theoretically

I mean, we've run these experiments. There's no need for "theoretically." You can compare outcomes in countries with more and fewer social programs. Spend a couple hours comparing healthcare outcomes, poverty rates, unhoused rates, etc across various first-world nations, compare that to tax rates and social program availability, and see if you can come to any conclusions.

I am not sure it is so easy to make direct comparisons to other countries. What country that has a similar population, economy, etc. are you referring to where increased social programs result in a net-better environment? Even more locally, is there an example of a state within the US where there are indicators of success in this regard?

I will say I have not studied this deeply, but I've also given it much more than just casual thought, so I am genuinely curious to know what your sample examples of successful countries are.

With high employment taxes and benefits an employee cannot pay for the work of another. That causes huge problems in industries like care or medicine where prices will explode. An interesting economic metric isn't just the level of prices, it is how many hours you have to work to get an hour of work from someone else for yourself.

Part of positive inflation metrics is that it was reinforced by cheaper electronics. But what about anything where human labor is involved that isn't outsourced to low wage countries?

This is not like a retort but more an addendum - Just like healthcare, 20$ flights and shitty food, EVERYONE around that individual or item is paying for the rest of the actual value (or the environment, aka our offspring).

> A lot of businesses simply don't make a profit under reasonable conditions

Reasonable conditions of today include supporting wealth inequality (ridiculously top heavy salaries) to the point of being unstable.

Then if those businesses shut down because they can’t find people to hire, that should be lauded, not feared.

Reasonable is subjective. I have seen a developer borderline lose their job because they didn’t like the terms and conditions of a library that management wanted to use on the app. Even after management confirmed they are ok with the terms.

Sometimes you do just need to accept decisions and move on. Or find a middle ground.

Was this Richard Stallman’s first job?

Not even that. It was some weird idea that the terms would expose the company to legal risk, despite the legal experts confirming its OK and them having no real financial stake in the company. Some people pick weird hills to die on. They absolutely see management as being evil and unreasonable over this despite anyone else looking at the situation seeing it as normal day to day business.

Is no job better than bad job?

I would say if you have the proper social safety net, then yes. It gives you time to think about innovative new work, rather than shitty wage slave work.

Proper social net is probably less than 0.1% of worlds population.

Almost all interpersonal conflicts are founded upon the belief that you are reasonable and others are not.

Often this belief does not stem from arrogance, but from fear or helplessness. That's the main motivation of my post further above.

No judgement here, and in fact I understand it's reasonable to believe others are unreasonable. But if you can overcome that fear, you can (sometimes) unlock great things.

I'd say this is a corollary of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

> There is another way, which is negotiating and clearly stating one's goals.

I did this once back when working crap jobs. I knew I had leverage because the store was having issues hiring anyone to do the work so I utilize that leverage to try to negotiate a raise and control of my schedule.

Which I got… well sort of. The raise the the most pathetic I ever got, and I was told “that’s all the computer will let me give”.

Regardless though, I had successfully negotiated something, sadly it didn’t matter, despite slightly bumping my pay and gaining better control of my schedule, corporate came down with an idiotic merge and a plan to get rid of all full time employees that backfired, and they all left.

Suddenly, the manager begins to shift more and more responsibilities to us, to the point where I control what days I work but I am now working 12 hours nights because the only other people good at their job left.

After one night, I said fuck it and just abandoned the job, didn’t even give any notice, and I never felt particularly bad about it. Surprise, the genius moves pulled by corporate ended up pushing the company into bankruptcy.

There are two conflicting business cultures. One is genuine profit culture, and one is an imitation of profit culture which is really about hierarchy and status.

Most businesses are balanced somewhere between the two extremes, although I suspect in the US businesses tend more towards hierarchy.

The "labor shortage" is a symptom of a hierarchy culture that has become too rigid. Workers are supposed to know their place - which is at the bottom of the hierarchy - and are not supposed to expect a more equal power distribution.

The fact that some businesses would rather die than relax their grip on power differentials shows how dysfunctional and self-harming this culture is.

Anecdotally the only place I heard doing the opposite "consistently" is Japan, and I highly suspect these reports are still select blue moon cases. Cases where executives themselves took the hit to keep the ICs at their current level, or at the very least share the burden equally.

Everywhere else, I've heard both a near universal reluctance for executive types to take any kind of pay cut ("we can only go up"), and a near universal reluctance for anyone higher in the hierarchy to earn less than their subordinates, no matter how rare their skillset. Which also creates the massive bureaucracy problem where everyone wants to go into some form of management or pseudo-management, and no one is able to prove whether this was at all beneficial for the company as a whole.

I even had a personal experience where HR was describing a new career advancement strategy, confirmed developers were paid under market rate, but bluntly said "no, this doesn't mean we'll increase your salaries right away". I was more surprised people in the room didn't react with disgust at this obvious "haha we got you by the balls" move.

In Japan it's very, very important to maintain the appearance of such things.

What actually happened is more complicated. There are few traditions of a huge press expose.

The executive MIGHT get a pay cut. Or they might take a pay cut, but the company ALSO steers a fat discretionary contract to the CEO's brother in law, with a different last name.

Not a uniquely Japanese stitch up, but that's how it's done.

Or, they might be perfectly honest. And outside appearances are exactly what happened.

The tl;dr of doing business in Japan is, you NEVER know the full story. Unless a personal relationship clues you in. Personal relationships are E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G. Particularly because everyone lives in Tokyo.

Thank goodness for the free market - may it rid us of these organizations that love bureaucracy over results

The government always come to rescue.

Sounds like that negotiation was good practice for you, and probably ended up a net positive for you and the management in the long run

I have seen this occasionally work, but far more often not work. There can be several reasons for it to fail:

1) the supervisor is responding to their own bad work situation from above, and since they don't know how to do that, the bad supervising strategy is their adaptation to a bad situation.

2) the supervisor is just plain not good at being someone's boss, by temperament or aptitude, and they may know at some level that they're not good at it but don't appreciate their direct report telling them the specific ways in which they are not. However politely and respectfully it is put, if the supervisor knows they're not good at being a supervisor, then being told by the person they're supervising that the situation is not working, just makes them mad.

3) the supervisor believes that their direct reports need to be cowed in order to be productive, and they respond to any feedback of the sort you describe by taking it as a challenge which must be beaten down.

In fact, almost the only times I have seen management's attitude really change, is when they have too many people leave (although even then, sometimes they just aren't capable of managing well, and cannot seem to improve). Most often, leaving for a better job is the best way of communicating that the situation needs to improve.

In large organizations, obviously case (1) above is the most common, and in small organizations (2) and (3).

> There is another way, which is negotiating and clearly stating one's goals. Workers tend to underestimate a couple of things: Their value, their ability to work out and improve a workplace situation, and often also the ability of their superiors to change perspective and collaborate on moving forward.

Path of least resistance. Changing an organization and/or employee organization (union or otherwise) is essentially a full time job and I already have one of those. Why would I stay and fight what will almost certainly be a losing battle when I can just leave AND make more money?

I'm very pro-union and employee rights but I've tried to fight this fight before. It was draining, thankless, and ultimately unsuccessful. I wasted years "trying to change the company", I should have just moved on.

Often the person best suited to lead organizing employees is not an employee. What I mean by that is programming (or insert your profession here) and organizing people are two very different skillsets that not everyone has (I would go as far as to say few do).

  > Freedom and power come from realizing that you already have it.

Reposted to emphasize. Improving a worker's condition is often cheaper than replacing him.

There are a lot of companies right now letting people leave who asked for pay rises only to find that not only is it going to cost them 10k to hire someone new but that person will be 30% more than the old employee even asked for and will be starting from scratch.

I wish there was more data on the "from scratch" bit. I just cannot believe that companies are willing to let experienced devs who know your system and have proven that they can ship just walk out the door with all that value simply because you won't pay them more. It is a ubiquitous problem and my bosses have shared this view. My current firm is the only place that has proactively increased compensation, and guess what, the other ICs I started with six years ago are still with the team.

The upside is that the old employee now got a 10k raise.

However, many companies will eat the cost, because once you improve one person's condition all the rest start asking for it as well. Some managers like sending the message that workers are disposable and will be disposed of if they make trouble.

I'm sure they exist, but I've not encountered any. Most managers are there to manage, not intimidate.

I believe it. But for a lot of companies the standard playbook is everyone is replaceable and they probably wouldn't even consider meaningful change unless attrition hits a certain percent. They'd rather cut a new hire a fresh load of RSUs than refresh you to keep you from looking around.

Varies by company, but IME, bringing issues of pay and stuff up are often hit with the standard "we consider raises in November" or whatever arbitrary time period they've chosen. Then they're shocked when people leave.

I think I understand what you're saying but your example is somewhat nonsensical. Your first phrase indicates a person is in a bad job, your second phrase and description of the solution of the problem in the first phrase indicates a person hasn't accepted said job yet.

If you're in a bad job and can afford to leave, without knowing additional information, you probably should.

In all my experiences ranging from the trades (construction), investment banking, and software development, the overwhelming consensus as I have understood it, is that companies/managers/presidents/etc want you to be that good worker bee and not step out of line.

Good leaders generally respect you if you can show those skills you mentioned, in the context of the narrow band of their work.

A previous manager I had said the following (in regards to hiring lower-level management positions): "we love ex military folks because they're good at following orders and not taking an independent approach to a problem" i.e. they're drones in this respect.

Include more worker protections, something akin to what many European countries have done and I think we'd find ourselves one step further towards a more harmonious/happy society.

With all due respect, this is a quite naive viewpoint. I've been fired from multiple jobs from trying exactly the items you are suggesting. Sometimes, management just wants you to shut up and do the job, and not try to change anything.

Wisdom is knowing how to find out which you're dealing with without getting fired

> management just wants you to shut up and do the job, and not try to change anything.

Yeah I'd agree especially for example a company with constant short deadlines. Complaints about the short deadlines and making a big fuss about it is not going to work as those deadlines are imposed by someone with ultimate power in the org. In their mind you're just a piece of dirt under their shoe, someone who cranks the handle and complaints are not welcome.

If you're in an org where something like this is happening it's often best to move on to another job. Trying to make any sort of change in these orgs is like pissing in the wind.

They don't care and will often fire you as a trouble maker.

Just move on.

I'm not saying it always works. I'm saying it is possible, and definitely worth considering and even trying. You said you failed multiple times, would you do it again?

The way to do this without being fired, of course, is to have a union.

Or a good way to all get fired at the same time, depending on the situation.

Well, depending on the labor laws in your country, of course.

Listen, that works in engineering but I know people who try this all the time in more replacable occupations and it just gets shut down.

And that's why we should wait till engineers are replaceable before we try to unionize....

In Sweden, they have no labour laws. But they also have no restrictions on unionization. A proper free market! And it works pretty well.

In Sweden there are plenty of labor laws. E.g you have to lay off workers in the opposite order they were hired.

https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagen_om_anst%C3%A4llningssk...

In the US, maybe.

> There is another way, which is negotiating and clearly stating one's goals.

There is also the collective variant of this, which is _unionization_. It's hard to do, but still much easier than every one person in a workplace "uplifting" themselves, and possibly facing retribution or termination. The overall outcomes are more promising - again, on the whole.

Indeed, we aren't taught these self-administration and collective-self-administration (autogestion) skills. Paradoxically, we mostly have to teach ourselves that - at least collectively if not personally. When this happens, from my own personal experience, the rewards are quite significant - emotional and material :-)

I don’t buy this narrative, I’ve tried in orgs which relied heavily on me (as half of my tiny team quit) and it backfired. Then I was laughed at during interview asking for a certain salary. Then I got a much higher salary than what I asked for from… big surprise a startup whom made significantly less money than the other two mentioned.

I’ve seen this backfire in “less prestigious” jobs too. The advice I was given was to work your way into a position of leverage within a company and then do this. But I learned that finding a company who will pay you what you want outright is a better strategy. You will be infinitely more respected and trusted.

I love the optimism and in a lot of jobs (especially the jobs filled by folks who read HN), it's mostly true.

> Their value, their ability to work out and improve a workplace situation, and often also the ability of their superiors to change perspective and collaborate on moving forward.

This just is not true for so many jobs. Middle management in many industries (hospitality, personal care, child care, etc.) are not empowered to have these sorts of conversations and the only option is to quit, or be fired.

That's quite a defeatist viewpoint and just not true. Plenty of working conditions have improved because workers didn't put up with the issues and fought them head on.

Edit:

My first sentence is out of place. What you say is obviously true to a large extend. The second part of my comment however as well.

> Good leaders respect you if you have these skills

Most workers will have to deal with an adversarial manager. Most will need a union or some kind of collective bargaining.

Yes, you did mention collective bargaining. But collective bargaining is much more important than having leaders^H managers that respect you, or relying on your own individual gumption and confidence. Maybe they respect you but it’s often their job to keep you in your place.

It's often faster/easier to ((change your) company) than to (change (your company)).

> Good leaders respect you if you have these skills

but

> almost always comes down to (at least seemingly) bad management

So this solution, while it sounds wonderful, doesn't seem to follow the problem.

Without democracy in the workplace and collectivisation the economic forces are purely on the side of the employer. We're taught that individual action is the only way to improve one's situation in life, but it's impossible for this to improve living standards at a societal level. Workers coming together is the only way employees can have real leverage.

But can we have meaningful democracy in the workplace with the current education system[1] that trains docile workers? Or with our political and judicial system outright owned by corporate interests?

[1] https://www.thesouljam.com/post/the-ugly-truth-about-the-edu...

The US education system was designed and built to serve industrialists and disempower future employees.

> Workers tend to underestimate a couple of things: Their value, their ability to work out and improve a workplace situation, and often also the ability of their superiors to change perspective and collaborate on moving forward.

I have several first hand experiences where a core developer (or original inventor) would leave the company after being refused a raise or a promotion only to be replaced by two or three less efficient (but not cheaper) developers. And we are talking supposedly ration and egalitarian IT companies here.

Most companies are internally run like communist dictatorships. Leadership is only marginally interested in the conditions of their underlings but they compensate for that with spreading a ton of propaganda. They send out mission statements ("We believe in..."), company newsletters, hold motivational meetings. But it's almost always a one-way street. Lots of information comes from top down, but almost nothing trickles up.

In the end you just have to accept that below a certain level you are not part of the "in" group and the "in" group has no interest in your opinion. They are only interested in what benefits them.

It's always the first thing I try. Last time I asked for a raise they said not even the team leads make that much. I leveled up into the same job at a different company for the same pay I was asking for, plus better benefits. And the job turned out to be much less stressful too because of how management ran the department.

> There is another way, which is negotiating and clearly stating one's goals.

Negotiation of every form (whether it is for buying a car or a trinket at the flea market or for pay or promotions at work) only works when the option of walking away from the negotiation is also a viable option and both parties know it.

For someone who is independently wealthy and can walk away from the job any moment, there is great power in negotiating their way up. But one must be ready to walk away.

For us regular people who need a paycheck, negotiating with current job is very risky. It's much safer to find a potential new job and negotiate with them before accepting it (when you can still safely walk away).

> And it is understandable. We tend to get taught how to be good worker bees. Reading and writing, math, discipline, shallow/propagandized politics and skills that prepare for work.

This reads like we are conditioned since a very young age, but it's not true. Large corporations design their basic training curriculum precisely for this.

Standardised levels, responsibilities, and wages, also remove leverage from individual workers, who are left with collective bargaining, which is harder to achieve.

Good people really don't have much of a choice other than leaving crappy jobs.

It’s not impossible but jumping ship usually results in better conditions with less effort.

When your asking for more but 99 of your colleagues aren’t the answer is usually “no, because no one else is complaining”

>But we aren't taught how to negotiate, question authority, organization (the real kind, not the following orders kind), collective bargaining, solving conflicts and compromising as equals etc. These are _essential_ life skills.

It's against "the system's" interest to teach these things to any useful degree.

At the bare minimum the institutions that are responsible for the bulk of the teaching in our society would be making their own jobs harder if they taught that stuff.

It's not "the system" but particular political interest groups. It comes in the form of disallowing certain books and teaching practices, emphasizing dominant/mainstream culture and subordination and a traditional sounding, distortive narrative. This is fueled by a lot of money and emotional propaganda. The counter reaction has increasingly become bureaucratic and moralizing instead of empowering and democratizing, which doesn't help the issue IMO.

Voice, exit, or loyalty. That’s it.

> Good leaders respect you if you have these skills, they love to solve problems and improve situations.

If? So people without these skills deserve no respect? Seems like a toxic workplace to me. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

No of course not. It is an encouraging statement which comes from experience. People (and past me included) tend to _underestimate_ their managing superiors, business owners, big clients and so on and think they will not respect a push for improvement, but I found that the opposite is true just as often. It's often a win/win whether you fail or succeed.