I used to work at Facebook, and it was always interesting to me to see just how many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions.
Whenever it would come up on the internal boards the arguments were usually along the lines of:
* "People who don't deserve to be paid more will get more money under a union"
* "I'll be paid less under a union"
* "Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic"
* "Unions are corrupt, and only care about themselves"
It was always clear that there was a huge misconception about what unions are, and how they work, based on the depiction of unions in popular culture or the past. When you talked about unions, people would think about the Teamsters, the police unions, etc.
Myself and others would end up pointing out that yes, that's true of some blur collar unions, but that's not what we're talking about. Think about the Writers Guild, or SAG. Dwayne Johnson earned $90 million last year - he still pays his union dues. You'd struggle to find any writer who didn't think the Writers Guild had actively improved their working conditions.
Are the various Hollywood unions perfect? No, they're not. But I think you would really struggle to argue that working conditions would be better for those in the creative arts without them.
Tech companies have spent a long time cultivating an image of benevolence towards their employees, but ultimately they are not your friends. You need somebody to fight your corner. Hollywood found this out years ago with the studios - hopefully Silicon Valley will discover it too, however unlikely it seems.
Unions would be much more attractive if US were an open shop country. Instead, we’re closed shop, which means that, once a union is in place, you can’t choose to join a different union. This routinely leads to situations where corrupt unions abuse their own members.
For an example of how this works in practice, look at the UAW’s conduct with UC’s grad students.
Years ago, they negotiated salary caps for grad students, and then negotiated contracts that severely cut health care benefits for women over their own members’ objections. Getting anything done involves baroque red tape, so even complaining about this sort of thing would take dozens of people multiple months (and almost certainly wouldn’t cause the union bosses to take action).
Recently, they ratified contracts when the rank and file protested at union meetings, and some UC campuses voted against the contract.
This led to illegal “wildcat” strikes where the students walked out because they couldn’t pay rent. The university then fired them.
This was only possible because of closed shops. If people want to switch unions, they should be allowed to.
Where did the closed shop restrictions come from, did it come from anti-union lobbying or some think tank somewhere? This smells completely like "the government is useless", then going in and defunding things that the government is responsible for.
The idea of having individual employees choose which union they want sounds a lot like the idea that consumer choice drives change (which usually does not work except in the case of huge boycotts, which are limited in their effects). Unions are about democracy in the workplace. If everyone is in a different union, there can be no legitimate democratic decisions on behalf of the workers.
EDIT: There's a bit of an exception. For example, in universities, sometimes graduate students have a union and faculty have a union. It doesn't make sense to place them both in the same union because the faculty boss graduate students around. However, it would make sense for the two unions to cooperate against the administration.
EDIT2: Another reason unions should be as concentrated as possible is so they form a united front against the bosses. If every employee is in a different union, how can they achieve anything without great difficulty?
I'll never forget the union at a convention center that forced vendors to pay them to move anything from their own car they couldn't carry. Nothing but extortionist bullies squeezing every cent of protection money they could out of the people there who actually make things and add value to the world. In contrast, these union employees were nothing but parasites. They did nothing the vendors couldn't do themselves, who WANTED to do it themselves and were fully capable of with their own dollies and carts but weren't allowed to for no other reason than greed. They could have just stayed out of the way and still gotten (over) paid by the convention center but that wasn't good enough. Most people including me justifiably hated those selfish monsters. Name and shame, this was at the Baltimore Convention Center.
And you hear about this all the time in other workplaces. Not allowed to move a monitor to the next desk over because the union guy has to be the one to do it. Not allowed to move a piece of equipment out of the way until the union guy finishes his lunch break and does it.
Unions can be good but unions like this are so bad for everyone around them that it cancels out any good.
Imagine a consulting firm that had a monopoly on all the architects in California. The only architects in CA are ones that you might bring in from this firm, and to prevent change, it's in the contract that you can't hire outside architects. It's a straight up anticompetitive monopoly. But that doesn't mean consulting firms are bad, it's just that monopolies are bad.
The biggest difference between this kind of consulting firm and a union is the accounting and the taxes, so I think the same logic applies. Unions can be good, but monopolistic unions are bad. When there's only one police union for your city, they have extreme bargaining power because it's a monopoly.
There needs to be a middle ground between completely independent bargaining and monopolistic collective bargaining. If we figured out a reasonable way to have multiple coexisting unions for a given profession and location, I'd bet unions would be much much more widely accepted as good.
This is an excellent example why unions are wrong solution to a bigger problem - lack of universal healthcare, free education and guaranteed pension. If we had the three above - there won't be a need for unions because you are not loosing _everything_ when you are loosing a job.
Until this bigger problem is fixed unions will remain one of the very few things workers can do to improve their odds in life. So you can't be for or against them - it is the only logical outcome of the current social order.
I hear this sort of thing a lot, but far more often than not it is from the point of view of "someone I know", "a mate a <company x>", or "this thing I read on The Register". I'm sure it really happens, just not nearly as often as people seem to think and/or suggest.
I've actually experienced it twice, but neither case had anything to do with unions.
One was officially a Health and safety matter (if you'd not been on the manually handling course you should not be moving heave expensive bits of equipment around) though I suspect it was really more of an insurance matter (only the relevant people should be moving the expensive equipment, or accidental damages won't be covered). Commercial arse-shielding, no unions involved.
The other was again commercial: in an outsourced IT arrangement where all equipment moves had to be done by someone on the outsourced team. This of course carried a charge for time, but if it wasn't done that way the contract said the charge could still be made with additional charges for the extra paperwork. Again, a purely commercial matter, no unions present affecting the matter in either company.
I not sure I understand the point of your comment. The parent comment literally said that there are many unions like that, but that this is not what a union has to be and that there are several unions that are a net positive.
The whole point is that the fight for protection of workers' rights needs some sort of organization. Traditionally, that has been called a "union", but if the problem you're pointing out is that the name has too many bad connotations, feel free to propose another one.
FWIW, it looks like most of the "good unions" are careful to call themselves "guilds".
Union rules are about making sure a management team does not subject employees to random jobs. It is a about adding a control over management.
In other words, in my office an employee is not allowed to hang a whiteboard on to a wall. Because building mandates only union employees can make such hardware modifications.
Fine you are protecting the job of the union but what you are really doing is prevent job creep or scope creep.
Another hypothetical example: no employee is allowed to work past 5 pm. Sure hardworking employees want to. But when they do, the put the pressure on other employees to do the same. This kind of culture is net negative.
> Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic
Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point.
At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work.
In principle, you might think that makes sense, until you need to get something very simple done - that you are willing to do yourself and cannot.
It becomes infuriating. Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job. But the new employee can't start if the new PC on his desk isn't plugged in? Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
Need that extra monitor moved between two adjacent cubes? Sorry, equipment relocation is union work. If you do it yourself, you'll be fired. But it's just a monitor, you say? Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
Oh, you want to move that folding table and a few chairs to the conference room so you can have a design meeting with the whole team? Sorry furniture movement is union-only work. But it'll take me literally 10 minutes and the alternative is to cancel the meeting. Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
These are real examples at my company - I didn't make them up.
So what's the ultimate outcome here? Employees obviously look for ways to circumvent the union. Then the union finds out and sends a few reps in to take pictures of things that have been touched/moved by non-union workers, and sends it to their lawyers (paid for by union dues). The lawyers then send formal notices that the company has violated the company contract, and notices go out to the whole company - union workers get all riled up that the company isn't respecting them, and non-union workers roll their eyes and vow never to work for another unionized company again. Bad feelings all around & Giant waste of everyone's time.
The alternative to carving out job functions for union workers, is to force everyone to unionize - and that's got its own problems.
Unions are great in unsafe industries in an unregulated market - ie. 1940's coal mines (extreme example). Six figured desk jobs can manage with some reasonable labor laws made at the State level. A union is a huge additional layer of bureaucracy.
Well, sorry to be blunt but that's fucking stupid.
Contrast that with my experience with Unions in Sweden; and that is that they basically don't exist except to ensure that workers rights are not infringed.
So they'll be involved in a termination, or help negotiate overtime pay.
There is no such thing as a "union job", it's just having what's referred to as a "collective agreement".
I'm in a union and see similar things, but instead of using lawyers, the union would note that the contract had been violated, and management will typically agree to pay the people who would have done the work. If it's just 10 minutes, the union probably wouldn't bother with it - unless it's a pattern, and in that case, they'd add up all the 10-minute transgressions. I often disagree with the focuses of my union, but I'm still happy to support it. As many have noted, the main thing a union does is balance the leverage. Without them, the employer has all of it.
For seemingly silly rules like the ones you're describing, the union is attempting to protect jobs and hours.
I wish my union was more like some European unions I've read about, where they're involved in the decision-making process. Mine fights for wages, positions, and conditions, but management decides how things work - so long as they're not violating the agreed-upon conditions. I expect your workplace is similar. Instead of mapping out a path with management, my union reacts to the path set out by management, and I think a lot of the weird rules come as a result of reacting, rather than helping to create.
I also think this sort of collaboration would be better for companies, particularly larger companies, where there is a disconnect from how things actually work and how corporate thinks they work. We have this particularly terrible piece of machinery that corporate is obsessed with justifying. We have other machines that do its jobs better, but it does the jobs of many machines - just much worse. It just wastes a lot of time, but corporate incentiveses management to use it, and when discussing the POS machine, management cites those incentives as reasons for why the machine is actually good. When you say, "Yes, but how does wasting all this time using this particular machine help the company?" management highlights the incentives.
This is definitely not unique to unions, nor are all (or many) unions like this. Of course the examples you list are ridiculous and shouldn’t happen, but the more boring instances of bureaucracy are just part of the mundane process of work in a large company (e.g. raising a ticket on a third party vendor to grant access to some service and the whole process descending into farce as no one knows how to/wants to do it and everyone has a problem with it). The benefits of unionisation almost always outweigh the negatives, and most of the time a union has some degree of member democracy so you can attempt to change internal processes.
I've worked plenty of union jobs that didn't have this problem. Like the original comment said: yes, some unions are bad. But it's ridiculous to pretend they're all like what you dealt with.
> At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work.
This is known as a 'closed shop' in the UK. Closed shops are not synonymous or required for unions to function.
This is really strange. Unions should be there to protect workers rights when they are abused from above, ie they give more strength to workers when necessary. In normal working conditions, unions should be invisible.
Case in point: my girlfriend's workplace has been recently purchased by a multinational. Everything fine and well, until they had to pay her. Her monthly salary was cut by about €400 because they refuse to pay past overtime work (which is perfectly legal here, was required by the old employer and was 100% documented). She then gathered with her colleagues and they decided to sign up with an union to put some pressure to the new employer. It happened last week so I have no more news.
Anyway, that's what unions are for, at least over here; they shouldn't be used to move furniture or things like that.
> A union is a huge additional layer of bureaucracy.
They can be, undoubtedly.
But don't forget the times when they go into bat to defend the rights of workers who have been treated badly by their employers - whether during employment or when they have been made redundant and procedures have not been followed correctly. When you're a part-time worker who is in a union who has very little input in your day-to-day work, but they come to your rescue with a considerable amount of legal muscle behind you in such a situation, the £10 a month you've paid them looks like very good value indeed.
I totally get that unions can be the embodiment of self-protection and bureaucracy, and can lead to expensive and crazy situations (indeed when I see some union leaders here in the UK it appears that is their desire). But that isn't all they are there for - they can also help the little guy out when their back is against the wall.
when i was in my early 20's and unaware of how the world worked i had a job as a contract IT guy at a very well known Power company. People would call me up with their problems and i would fix them. After a few months, somone took me aside and explained to me that they are really bad, as they are "using" me to avoid having to deal with other unions to do this work. I was simply unaware that "plugging in a network cable" was a union job and i just did it as it was easy enought.
The sad thing is it was union employees attempting to avoid other union employees...
In general I think unions are like governments - they need to be regularly overthrown and rebuilt to ensure that they always represent the best interests of their members.
That being said, there are some obvious counter-arguments to your experiences, however they tend towards "guilds" as mentioned in another comment more than unions as I understand them.
> Oh, you want to move that folding table and a few chairs to the conference room so you can have a design meeting with the whole team? Sorry furniture movement is union-only work.
Bob grabs the table and lifts with his back, in a twisting, jerking movement. Bob is then unable to come in to work due to back pain for the next two weeks. The union keeps Bob from hurting himself unintentionally.
> Need that extra monitor moved between two adjacent cubes? Sorry, equipment relocation is union work.
Someone notices that a bunch of monitors have gone missing. Have you been burgled?! Noone has any record of where these monitors have gone, however you eventually track then down to Alice's cube where she has finally completed her dream 9-monitor nest. Phew, false alarm!
> Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job
It gets cold in the winter, so Dan brings their own heater to put under their desk[1]. One day they forget to turn it off when going home and burns down the department;
On the other side new employees don't just materialise out of the ether. The organisation should have plenty of time to set up their working environment
[1] Funnily enough, if Dan was part of a union they would have enough bargaining power to make sure their employers provide adequate working conditions, however their manager simply filed away their request away under 'C', for "Complainers - Fire these people first"
I'm totally on your side about these examples being ridiculous, but I do like to steelman the other-sides arguments
Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job
For anyone who thinks that this is just hyperbole, it's exactly the sort of thing that happens.
When I worked at a unionized television station, I was watching an aircheck of a recent broadcast. When I was done, I ejected the tape and put it back into the archive.
The union filed a grievance against me for pressing the eject button. As a manager, I could use Play, Stop, and the shuttle controls, but not Eject. Only a union member could eject a tape.
At another television station where I worked, there was an employee retiring after 30 years with the station, and we thought it would be cute to show a ten-second clip of him working while the anchors said goodbye and thanks. It never happened. He worked upstairs, in the tech center, and the members of the photographers union weren't allowed to operate any electronic equipment up there because that was the province of a different union. This included working their own cameras. At the same time, the people who worked in the tech center weren't allowed to operate any of the station's cameras, because that was the domain of the photographer's union. As I said, we were never able to air a clip of this good employee doing his job.
At another television station, I worked weekends. Naturally, I was expected to work five days a week like every other employee. So I was assigned to help write during three weekdays. A union grievance was filed against me for taking a theoretical writer's job. The result was that for the next FIVE YEARS, I did nothing three days a week but look at lolcats, and the station had to keep paying me my full salary.
I'm not anti-union. I think unions are essential for coal miners, maids, janitors, and other people. But I'm not convinced that white collar people need unions. Or at least there should be a method of calling out and publicizing union abuses to let their members know what's going on.
The work rules are the thing that gets me. The idea of paying employees more? Great. Protection from discrimination and unfair termination? Collective bargaining? Great. But I can't imagine how it's possible to get anything done with the work rules.
Companies that operate this way must be in slow paced industries. To innovate you must be able to just do stuff. As soon as you add a bunch of hoops and sign-offs you lose momentum.
My own hypothesis on this is that it's not just a matter of high overhead but of slowing things down to the point that it breaks the dopamine reinforcement loop for the human beings involved. Humans need to be able to see results or at least movement toward them in a reasonable amount of time or it becomes really difficult to stay focused and engaged.
The work rules and bureaucracy element is like 100% of my skepticism about unions. Get rid of that stuff and I'd be all for them.
That being said, unions aren't the only source of inane bureaucracy of course. Many organizations without unions manage to invent worthless tar pits of their own.
If I told you that I once worked in a shop that didn’t use source control, didn’t have any formal testing, and builds came from dev desktop machines, would you:
1. Vow never to work in the software industry.
2. Allow that perhaps mine is a bad example, that there might be good software shops to work in, and wait for more data.
> The alternative is to force everyone to unionize - and that's got its own problems.
Does it really, though? Because literally every one of your complaints above would be solved, if your companies employees stopped actively fighting the union, and just simply joined it instead.
Not just unions though. The IT department in a company I worked for had similar slow processes. I needed more RAM in my desktop, to process really huge log files. "It'll take about a month".
I could have gone to Best Buy, bought what I needed, installed it, and been back at work in an hour. Sigh. So I limped along.
A month later, along comes the new RAM and gets installed. But I was long done with the project that needed it.
Anyway, no fan of unions that get their feelers into every crack, in an attempt to pad union jobs. I am definitely in favor of some feedback that helps them be useful and productive - time-to-response on tickets for instance, that affected their pay maybe. Then we might all be happier.
How does that work at a large company that's already bureaucratic? Where I work, I still have to open tickets for everything. I still have to wait a long time for new equipment. How does a union make that worse if I have to wait for cogs to turn anyway?
I also would like more realistic examples of bureaucracy, because yours are frankly bullshit. Yeah yeah the MTA is bad sure, and I've interacted with unions before that exemplified their stereotypes. But if you really think employees would suddenly not be able to plug in a monitor or move it across the room because there's a union, I think you're completely incorrect.
> "At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work."
That's not a union, that's a guild. A medieval-style guild has a monopoly on a certain type of work. A union merely represents its members in workplace negotiations.
This is why you need a union for IT workers to - tell the blue collar union to piss off or more politely set demarcation boundary's.
I worked at a unionised company in the UK and the CWU would have got short shrift if they Tried that with my members (I was Branch's secretary For the M&P union)
Protecting work in this manner exists because the prevailing culture is that jobs solve social issues - we can't give the disadvantaged money directly because socialism, but we can pressure companies to make-work jobs because having a job means you deserve to be human, and it also creates situations where people want to protect their jobs for their income rather than any other reason.
A UBI can possibly help prevent this type of silliness.
This is true of many many unions, but it is neither a necessary part of a union, nor exclusive to unions.
At my company, the majority (all?) employees in my local office are un-unionised. We have the same system (it's just departmental). This is a system that emerges in large old bureaucracies regardless.
Which is why it's present in many unions tracing their formation back to the early 20th century. They're big and they're old.
There are certainly bad unions. But I think that often arises as a reaction to poisonous management behavior, a zero-sum mentality that treats workers as a cost center, not a value generator. It's a "fuck me, no fuck you" scenario.
Your point about the Hollywood unions is a great one. Like tech, in Hollywood everybody has clear incentives to create a great final product. Positive-sum thinking usually part of the culture. In that context, I think unions can be a big help, especially when there are such large wealth and power differentials between the bosses and the workers.
I also think your former colleagues' seeming lack of agency is weird. The union is something the workers create and run. If they think a union they create would be bad, what are they saying about themselves?
> The union is something the workers create and run. If they think a union they create would be bad, what are they saying about themselves?
They think a union would be a bit like a homeowners association - in principle owned and run by them and never acting against their interests, but in practice a threat as much as an opportunity.
I just assume that it's almost never going to be the case.
It might look like it's created by worker, but it's created by a sub group of workers which is unhappy with a status quo. This effort will be led by even smaller sub group of activists that have a drive and skillset to organise and weasel into a leadership positions.
Worker run union seems to be even more implausible. It's going to be run by a managerial body composed of said activists, which I absolutely expect to be self-serving, rent seeking and, well, parasitic. Occasionally their interests will coincide with interests of workers they represent, but that will be just some happy accidents.
Hollywood unions are a slightly special case: while the studios hold a huge amount of power, the staff are pretty much all contractors per-project, and the entity they're contracting with will be a special purpose corporate vehicle for that film. Most software doesn't look like that - except game development, which is notoriously abusive and can get away with it because of a fresh supply of enthusiastic young people.
I don't think it's necessarily based on misconceptions about what unions are, but also their own experience and from what they hear from people they know. We've already seen in this thread very different personal experiences with unions, often based on where they are. e.g. folks in Europe seems to have mostly positive interactions, where as folks in the US negative.
I personally don't want an union in my work place. It's not because I've watched too many movies, but because I've worked at unionized environments before and they are absolutely terrible for me. All the usual symptoms often talked about were there.
Maybe there are good unionized workplaces out there (Hollywood has been frequently pointed to as an example), but I've never experienced them. Out of my interactions with unions, they've been 100% negative, hence my views on unions. Until some of these underlying issues are resolved, I think we'll always have this very mixed to negative view of unionizing.
I live in a Romania - an European country - and I don't know of any good union, be it police, transportation, or healthcare. All they do is basically ask for more and more, while doing nothing else.
Their leaders earn a lot, so they have an interest in maintaining the status quo. As one parent mentioned, you can't do much without their approval. Take for example the underground. The commercial property from the subway stations was under the control of the union, all the kiosks and small shops paid rent to the union.
Also some of their former leaders went into politics and got involved in corruption scandals.
What I have learned from U.S. union interactions is that people who profit from bureaucracy love adding more bureaucracy to the system.
The "boxing match" analogy is reflective of the "us against them" power struggle between those trying to leverage their own hand at the expense of someone else in the U.S. corporate-union world.
This is contrasting to the concepts in Europe of labor stakeholders having a roundtable and coming to compromise as a group effort... not that it's perfect, just a different system.
> You'd struggle to find any writer who didn't think the Writers Guild had actively improved their working conditions.
Writing and acting are race to the bottom. There are plenty of people who would be willing to act for free. You can't say the same for working at Facebook.
In order to stop the race-to-the bottom SAG-AFTRA artificially constrains the marketplace by forcing studios hire a certain number of union actors. In this case, it doesn't really hurt newbies because they'd otherwise get paid peanuts anyways. However, that isn't something that people would want in tech expect perhaps in the videogame industry.
I'm in a union, and when I mentioned it to my work colleagues at dinner one day there was a kind of open-mouthed aghast shock similar to if I'd announced that I was a visitor from Mars.
Anyway, while you don't really get the benefit of unionisation unless a large number of people join at a workplace, it's still possible to join some unions as an individual, and there are some lesser benefits like free legal and employment advice.
Its even more surprising as the workplace team are mainly london based.
I suspect what actually happened is that a customer said: "my minions are organising on workplace, let me control most viral posts". The PM looked as what it was, and the posts the employer was complaining about, and made a scenario on that.
Knowing some of the engineers on workplace, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they didn't think about what they were doing, only whether they could do it, and what was the best design.
> Myself and others would end up pointing out that yes, that's true of some blur collar unions, but that's not what we're talking about.
I'm not totally against unions, but it seems like that's probably how all the messed up union situations started.
As far as I know, they probably all started with good intentions to improve conditions where change was really needed. None of them started with the intention of creating a bunch of bureaucracy, nor to negotiate wages higher than the market can handle, thus jeopardizing the financial health of their employer, etc.
But, like all organizations (every type in every sphere of life -- government, private sector, charity, religious, and more), there is always the danger that once the organization gets enough power to fulfill its mission, it then moves on to using the power for things it shouldn't.
That's not a reason to dismiss the idea of starting a union, but it is a hazard to be avoided. So it should probably be part of the discussion, just not in a way that's used to instantly shut down the idea.
1) A lot of the good PR individual professions have is the result of union PR. Teachers, nurses, cops, etc all have unions that put out endless propaganda (no negative connotation intended) about how great and vital to society they are. A lot of our nostalgia for jobs associated with heavy industry comes from old union propaganda.
2) Good PR can easily be outweighed by negative PR. Coal companies have excellent PR departments, but their opposition has invested a lot in negative PR.
3) PR images always exist in your head, but regular encounters with union workers can cause that image, rightly or wrongly, to crash against reality. People think relatively highly of scientists, partially because they never encounter them in real life; compare their image with lawyers or corporate managers.
- Spend 1 million to accommodate a union's demands e.g. raise salaries and improve working conditions
- Spend 999999 on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting organizations that are specialized on disrupting unions, tarnishing their reputation, and manipulate/threaten/sue/bribe/smear their members
In some countries unions has become corrupted, bureaucratic, ineffective. Companies benefit from that.
One hypothesis that may explain the bad perception of unions is if there has been continuing investment and efforts in anti-union propaganda by pro-business or pro-corporate groups.
A similar argument is put forward by Kerryn Higgs' book "Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet", to explain why society takes direction from economists, in pursuit of economic growth, rather than taking direction from science. Higgs' book is focused on trying to explain why society is failing to tackle climate change, not an analysis of unions, but some of the history that is presented regarding pro-business propaganda is eye opening. Here is an excerpt of an interview with the author:
> How did scientists lose credibility? When I was young, science was almost a god. A few decades later, scientists were being flippantly brushed aside. How did economists displace scientists as the crucial policy advisors and the architects of public debate, setting the criteria for policy decisions? How did economic growth become accepted as the only solution to virtually all social problems—unemployment, debt and even the environmental damage growth was causing?
> The new corporations of the early 20th century banded together into industry associations and business councils like the immensely influential US Chamber of Commerce, which was formed out of local chambers from across the country in 1912. These organisations exploited the newly emerging Public Relations industry, launching a barrage of private enterprise propaganda, uninterrupted for more than a century, and still very healthy today. Peabody coal, for example, recently signed up one of the world’s PR giants, Burson-Marsteller, for a PR campaign to convince leaders that coal is the solution to poverty.
> Back in 1910 universal suffrage threatened the customary dominance of the business classes, and PR was an excellent solution. If workers were going to vote, they’d need the right advice. No-one expressed it better than Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, who is credited with founding the PR industry. Bernays was candid:
>> The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the... masses is an important element in democratic society (he wrote). Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism ... constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
> PR became an essential tool for business to consolidate its power right through the century, culminating in the 1970s project to “litter the world with free market think tanks”. By 2013, there were nearly 7,000 of these, all over the world; the vast majority were conservative, free market advocates, many on the libertarian fringe, and financed by big business. They cultivate a studied appearance of independence, though one think tank vice-president came clean. “There is no such thing as a disinterested think tanker,” he said. “Somebody always builds the tank, and it’s usually not Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.” Funding think tanks is always about “shaping and reshaping the climate of public opinion”.
Ah, bingo: here's a bit out of Higgs' book that discusses how the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) campaign for the “American way” managed to get pro-business propaganda into the school curriculum in the 1930s, and lo and behold one of the early aims of the organisation is to fight against unionism:
> In 1895 the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was founded to lobby for business-friendly legislation and, under the leadership of David Perry, in 1903 it launched “a crusade against unionism.” [...]
> The NAM campaign for the “American way” was massive. It replicated Creel’s World War I model in establishing local cells, “Special Committees of Public Information,” which enlisted local Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, and churches, as well as lawyers, teachers, and local dealers of the appliances and cars made by the corporations. These committees of influential people were responsible for the regional face of NAM’s multifaceted “publicity program”; they funneled articles, features and films to newspapers, radio stations, and movie theatres; they sent speakers to the theatres as Creel had done, as well as to every local group of any sort (including women’s groups and what were then called “negro groups”); they distributed pamphlets and weekly bulletins to schools, clubs and libraries. Aware that the adult population was cynical about the corporate claim to “service,” they aimed specifically at schools where _Young America_, their weekly children’s magazine that portrayed capitalism as dedicated to looking after them and their communities, was sent to thousands of teachers, who used them in classroom assignments. _You and Industry_, a series of booklets written in simple language, linked individual prosperity to unregulated industry, and was distributed to public libraries everywhere. One million booklets were distributed every two weeks by the US Chamber of Commerce, which, along with the giant industrial corporations, was also involved in the campaign.
There is no broad support for unions not because of the bogeyman arguments your co-workers were raising but because for most US based software developers there is no acute problem they feel that unions would solve because almost all of us are doing pretty well. On the other hand no single developer really has that much leverage because the importance of even the best individual devs doesn't compare to an individual LeBron and/or there isn't the massive amount of money at stake that depends massively on the work of specific people. Unions for writers, actors, NBA players, etc are frequently representing for extremes of the totally destitute who are easily taken advantage of or groups of the ultra important where the Unions are essentially acting as high powered negotiators for those they represent. All very good reasons for unions, none of which is true for developers in the US right now.
I'm not saying there aren't things a union could help with, I'm just saying that for most devs, those things aren't pinching very hard. Also, you have to be realistic about the impact of unions, they are a double edged sword. Police unions aren't a straw man, they are a real example of the worst case scenario for abusive concentration of power and agendas at odds with the public good. The best examples always come with some bureaucratic overhead. So it is valid to consider the cost/benefit of unions. Again, I'm not taking a stance on what is right here, just saying unions are not as obviously a good idea in every case as you might imagine and the hesitance of your co-workers, right or wrong, is at least understandable.
Oh and to be clear how I feel about the larger question here, I'm not at all defending Facebook. Zuckerberg is the vilest piece of sh*t for allowing this and for profiting off Facebook as tool for misleading so many people. Recent events have really made it clear what a massively damaging thing Facebook's complacency really is.
> It was always clear that there was a huge misconception about what unions are, and how they work, based on the depiction of unions in popular culture or the past.
Police and teacher unions are very much current events in the U.S. between COVID and the protests.
Even on a professional level, anyone who has dealt with trade show unions or construction labor unions can attest to how awful it is to deal with these as a customer.
Many people assume unions are simply squeezing their employers, but unions also put the squeeze on customers. We had union members protesting in front of our office building and harassing our visitors for an entire month because our building owner refused to pay 3X the cost to use union labor for the drywall work.
From my personal (limited) research and observations. I am in no way an expert.
Unions originally seem to have made a very positive impact on the working conditions of workers. Just think of the horrible situation of steel workers (and others) during the start of the industrial revolution. Workers organized to make a change and improve their lot.
Fast forward a few decades: Unions seem to have become self-sustained entities whose incentive have switched from helping workers, to sustaining the union's economic interests. They also sometimes help some workers, but it's not free.
There is a very well known case in Quebec, Canada. It's the Gaspesia debacle:
"Work on the mill conversion began in the spring of 2002. From the beginning, the project -- established as a limited partnership 50 per cent owned by the Fonds de solidarité with the SGF and Tembec each holding 25-per-cent stakes -- was plagued by delays and mismanagement. The FTQ was accused of blocking workers affiliated with other unions from getting construction jobs on the site. Contractors complained that workers were paid for eight-hour days, but put in only three hours of productive labour."
This is only the tip of the Iceberg, and illustrates why there seems a negative perception of unions.
There's no oligopoly of tech companies like hollywood studios though. Even the salary-collusion BS was a very small group of companies and illegal without union protection.
Also the Rock may pay his union dues because (a) he's required to be a memeber and (b) the cost is immaterial to him. The top performers are usually hampered by unions they'd be fine without; he's not going to need the pension and health insurance the collective bargaining agreement gets him.
At the moment I negotiate my work against one entity: my employer.
If I had a union I'd have to negotiate my work against two entities: my employer and a union.
Why on earth would I want to do that? Seems more complicated and I'm less powerful in the negotiation.
Because the union would be 'on my side'? Lol I don't buy it. I think the union would be on the side of their management and whatever political hobby opinions they held, and possibly the majority of the members, but not on my side.
Many tech people have had very limited interaction with unions, and usually those interactions are negative.
For example, I was not allowed to run ethernet through the paneled ceiling to hard wire our conference rooms for the startup I was at.
Why? Well the building had a contract with a unionized cabling company so every cabling job in the building HAD to be done by them. We would have been charged thousands and had to wait weeks for a job I could do myself in 30 minutes.
Maybe pro unionists should focus on the possibility that they could negotiate for getting their members better internal tooling/more focus on tech debt. At all companies ive been at, ive seen sooo many managers ignore internal tooling and ignoring tech debt, leading to engineers having to be on call 24/7 for legacy stuff.
Then again, how many tech-workers at Facebook have previously been unionized employees?
Software development is rarely, if ever, unionized - and I'd imagine the majority of FAANG workers starting at said companies within 5 years of graduating from college.
For an example of how unions can get involved in unexpected ways, take a look at the SAG releases for participating in hobby projects (eg 48 Hour Film Festival). It's just an additional piece of paperwork, but it does demonstrate a dynamic that the union has a legitimate interest in overseeing and could just as well prohibit. A software union would surely become involved in bootstrapped startups, hackathons, and work on Free software. It's possible for these areas to be treated intelligently by a union, but it's also possible they wouldn't be.
This is a valid point. Your two examples are guilds not unions; they're inherently geared more towards contractors and individuals due to the nature of the work. While job hopping has become both more prevalent and more frequent among software engineers, it's certainly still mostly an employee-oriented field. It's very true that under unions, high performers specifically are paid a bit less and low performers a bit more. This is both the upside and the downside of collective bargaining and a fundamental characteristic thereof rather than a flaw of a specific union. As someone who's generally been promoted faster and paid more because I worked hard and put in long hours, unions are anathema to me. I'd likely be paid less and a less-productive peer paid more. I can see, however, why such a prospect would appeal to most people. But as an outlier among most employees, I see no reason to entrust my situation to majority rule as that takes it from a negotiation between me and an employer (a person who represents my interests and one who doesn't) to one between someone who represents the average employee and an employer, both of whom probably don't represent my interests.
Maybe it's one of those things where a good union is good and a bad union is terrible.
It's easy to say how good a union could be, but will it actually be that good? What kinds of things can go wrong? What weird laws are in place and how could that complicate things?
The bottom line is that if I am happy already, a union is more risk than reward.
I don’t think any of those examples are really misconceptions. You even admit that many people have this experience with “blue collar” unions. Most developers are not foolish enough to think they are immune to these foibles. We have a lot more in common with blue collar workers than big name actors.
many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions
“Union” is a trigger word but call it an association like BMA, BALPA, or a Federation (Police) or even a guild, and everyone would be if not on board, at least willing to have a non-emotive conversation.
You know unions are effective because all the most powerful groups have them—actors, athletes, doctors (AMA) cops, firefighters, and other professional guilds... America just seems against the working class being able to organize in any way.
how exactly would a union improve working conditions for engineers at Facebook? Engineers at Facebook are probably the most catered to and sheltered workers in all of capitalism.
I don't think its that clear cut. Unions add another system that you need to cooperate with, and over which you may have very little influence. Devs aren't cops, but they aren't artists either. You do not know how a union would work out. I don't think devs at affluent companies that are highly invested in tech workers stand to gain much. Especially in america, you have no recourse to "the union". You can't start a new union as an alternative organization.
Game devs and other subsets should probably unionize. But cushy FAANG dev jobs? Probably not. If you're in a shitty team there, you should just try to find a better team.
Support for unions is based on a basic misunderstanding of economics.
It is not mandates from the state that lead to wages and work conditions improving. It's rising demand from employers, as their revenue increases, and they compete with other employers for a limited pool of workers.
Unions obstruct the flexibility and freedom of the market, and thereby hamper economic efficiency and competitiveness. Firms will, all things being equal, see less revenue growth in a unionized labor market, than a non-unionized one.
Precisely. A union is a cartel. It exists to restrict supply of the product they sell (labour) in order to fetch a higher price. They work just like any other cartel, for instance OPEC. Cartels benefit at the expense of everyone who is not in it. They perform rent-seeking behaviour to extract more than the product they sell is worth.
From the perspective of an economist, all cartels are bad, whether they deal in oil or labour or anything else.
What if the person to fight in my corner is me? Unions drag everyone's wages to an average. Poor performers get paid more, top performers get paid less. No thanks, I can negotiate for myself.
Look at teachers and police unions for a prime example. Great police get paid the same as the police who racially profile. Great teachers get paid the same as the teachers who phone it in.
Additionally unions protect incompetent employees, which I don't want.
So the value prop for unions seems to be: get paid way less money, we'll make sure your incompetent colleagues never get fired and we'll make a stack of money for union bosses in the process.
I want to negotiate my own pay and benefits, and it's worked out excellent for me. A union only serves to harm my interests.
Seems to me like teachers and police like their unions.
As for the tech industry, remember, your already getting paid less because of companies like Apple and Adobe who had the non-poaching agreement. This stifled salaries for everyone involved.
Unions are so bad, but companies will collectively bargain if they can.
> "Poor performers get paid more, top performers get paid less. No thanks, I can negotiate for myself."
The two retorts to this are: 1) it's selfish arguing. "Fuck you got mine" style, dismisses what happens to everyone else as long as you're OK. Which may be fine for you, but why should the rest of us agree that you being wealthier is the thing we all want?
2) You negotiating against the resources of a multi-million dollar company who can hire any legal or negotiating team of experts against you? Can you, really?
> "Additionally unions protect incompetent employees, which I don't want."
Unions don't have to protect incompetent employees, but they can demand that the employee be proved incompetent and not falsely accused of incompetence and sacked without "trial" - which could happen to you. Unions protect exploited, abused, unfairly treated employees too, which you might become one day.
> "I want to negotiate my own pay and benefits, and it's worked out excellent for me. A union only serves to harm my interests."
Voting sure is worse than having me as dictator, isn't it? Democracy only serves to harm my interests. Surely you will agree that's a good reason for FaceBook to suppress talk of Democracy and voting in nation-wide FaceBook chat?
how do you know you are earning as much as you should?
I mean if we take facebook as an example, you can't negotiate pay. You're slapped on a scale and thats it. You might be able to up your share offer, but actual pay is fixed on a scale.
Which is the same as what it would be if it was unionised.
Also, you have chosen two professions that are run by public organisations, so pay is always going to be low[1] However in other countries, teachers unions are very effective at settling compensation. (The UK for example has reasonably well paid teachers)
I think the problem is that you seem to be labouring under the pretence that you are special, and earn a specially high wage. Statistics say that in practice your probably earning close to median for tech. Make of that what you will...
[1] well yes and no, depending on country, but lets assume the USA
Obviously, I have no idea how unions work in the US. But there was the example of Dwayne Johnson, earning 90 Million and being a union member. The collective bargaining I am used to, has the effect in some cases of maybe overpaying certain individuals. IMHO that always happens. It doesn't drag salaries anywhere but up so. And there is a cap on salary levels and job levels being covered by unions collective bargaining. Above these levels, it is what you negotiate with your employer.
> He added that the “oversight” was likely “lack of context versus bad intent from anyone on the team.”
What?! You're presenting a Workplace Chat tool and you're writing the slides for the feature of blocking certain topics and you use "unionize" as an example. How the fuck can you lack context here? Is the people writing the talks not aware what the talks are about or what?
Then there is not just the options of "lack of context" vs "bad intent", there is also "simply stupid", "some people at Facebook don't like unions", "wrong target audience" and "unexpected push back on something we care about". Instead they argue in bad faith that there is just two reasons here.
I've fought this feature in products for years - the product ppl always wanna ban bad words and I'm like - you can't, it literally never works, it just becomes a stupid arms race and it's not worth our time. I always lose this argument for some reason.
In apps targeted to kids I've found it to be often a useful deterrent. And can even shift the culture a bit; it makes it very clear what is "ok" and what is not.
Somewhat similar. I used to moderate a web forum and last summer I met someone from Scunthorpe. He said "yeah, its a small town, you've probably never heard of it." But I HAD heard of it because when I used to moderate that forum, we had someone from Scunthorpe sign up and the site blocked them for profanity. It was because their name contained the word "cunt". I've always found this funny and will remember Scunthorpe forever.
Facebook has one of the strongest AI research groups in the world led by Yann LeCun. They could build models that are quick good at finding all of these and similar versions.
And it doesn't need to be perfect. If you're an employee who may face severe repercussions if you mention unions, are you going to risk your job based on whether the filter catches your post?
The best AI in the world cannot currently understand the political and cultural context. Make up a slang and you win.
But the cost to process every single message with a powerful AI just to censor bad words would be way too much.
> And it doesn't need to be perfect. If you're an employee who may face severe repercussions if you mention unions, are you going to risk your job based on whether the filter catches your post?
You are conflating censoring and detecting. This is en different matter entirely which would necessitate a whole new debate.
>>Section 1: The policy of the United States is to be carried out "by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment..."
Section 7: "Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or bargain collectively through representation of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining..."
Section 8(a): "It shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer . . . to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in Section 7..."
The NLRB recently reversed itself and said companies can prevent their workers from organizing on the work email system. Expect the same would apply to FB Workplace.
That decision only applies when the company has a policy of no non-work conversations at all. If you allow planning a volleyball game on the weekend you can't turn around and then say no discussion of working conditions.
IANAL but I would assume FB is in the clear legally though as they're not actively blocking anything in particular, merely providing the tool with which admins can do the blocking themselves.
"it should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
This is reminiscent of how Facebook used to allow people to microtarget job and housing ads to people based on protected classes like race, age, and gender. They ended up reaching a settlement and being forced to change their filter criteria due to civil rights laws. So I wouldn't be so sure that "merely providing the tool" is necessarily an entirely legal action.
Pretty sure this interpretation would amount to compelled speech. They are not entitled to facebook or their employer broadcasting their messages. They can use their own resources to organize.
Here in the UK government is pushing no rights employment under guise of fairer taxation. People providing services will be taxed as employees but will not have any workers' rights, including no right to unionise, no equal pay, no maternity leave and so on. Currently this won't affect existing employees, but from April nothing will stop employers from terminating their staff and issuing new NRE contracts on a take it or leave it basis.
What's most bizarre is that even the unions are not too fussed about it, it's like they either don't believe this is actually happening or they just don't care. The legislation is in current Finance Bill and so far has met no resistance and likely is going to pass.
That's because it primarily hits contractors, who are typically not unionized and in fact tend to erode union presence.
Abuse of contractor agreements and temp-agencies has already been used for decades to effectively bust unions, that's really nothing new. Mass-rehiring could have been done already a long time ago, and likely was, by and large, where they could avoid the resulting bad press.
> The legislation is in current Finance Bill and so far has met no resistance and likely is going to pass.
Tories have a solid majority, and they are anti-unions as an article of faith. Even if Labour made a stink about it, tabloids would likely ignore it. The most pro-union Labour leader since the '80s spent 5 years being vilified precisely so he couldn't raise this sort of issue.
Workers re-hired on a contract could defend themselves against lack of employment protections by working outside IR35 and providing these protections themselves. The change takes this away as only the client will be able to decide how worker is taxed. This favour agencies over independent workers as agencies have more freedoms what business costs they can deduct from tax and what salaries to pay to their workers. This is a seemingly subtle change, that changes from benign to lethal.
In going to say it: you are probably a complete moron if you thought it was a good idea to put "unionize" on the slide for words you can block using your software.
I agree, having that specific word on a slide shows, whoever prepared it must have been out of touch - or, very in touch with what employers like Facebook want, but blind to the serious legal implications.
I don't think the idea of 'content control' is a bad one at all, as in you may want to filter out offensive content etc. It's just that it's very dumb to spell out the exact type of controversial words/content you can use to filter out, when just explaining the feature to the customer would be enough, they will get the idea.
Doesn't make a lot of sense. Unlike traditional blogs, Facebook isn't exactly a place that's creating rival news content. If anything, FB helps spread the news by being a platform for people to post articles and stories.
It's my general impression that the ones who say "Don't worry, we care about you" ARE the baddies, they're not aligned with their own public image (why? I don't know, they should be, maybe they can't overcome their own egos). The ones you should be trusting are the ones who go "Don't trust me, but these are my principles"
Isn’t that the equivalent of the New Yorker cartoon with the wolf saying “I will eat you” and the sheep saying “I like him because he tells it like it is”?
Workplace is very very very annoying to actually use, btw.
Workplace is basically "facebook, but in a corp"; but all the nags and annoying notifications that kind-of work in Facebook, because you can chose what pages and groups to follow, just flat out don't work there, because you have to follow certain group. And you keep getting these annoying notifications that you cannot easily filter.
So you still have one stream of notification, as on Facebook, which is both "funny pictures haha" and "important company-wide announcement". So bad!
Workplace Chat is just Messenger. And again, it sucks in corporate settings.
As a contrary opinion, I quite like workplace. I definitely feel that, for me, it provides a much more effective way of staying up to date on what's happening compared to mailing lists and such.
I don't understand how one stream of notifications is different from email - at least with workplace there's some ranking going on.
In all fairness, it is not as if anyone is going to put up a big protest in the current economic circumstances. Not even Facebook employees can find another job easily in the current environment.
With 40+ million or so unemployed, and no end in sight for COVID at the moment, Zuckerberg can get away with whatever he wants over the next few months. "Never let a good crisis go to waste", as the saying goes.
So FB employees will follow what I call MZM - Mark Zuckerberg Method. Pretend like you care for a while, wait for people's short attention spans to automatically move on to the next big scandal, and then make the scandal of the day as the "new normal".
This tool is something that Facebook is trying to sell. To other companies. So you're missing the point with your superficial speculation as to the balance of power between Facebook and its employees.
For that reason, I'll keep the rebuttal short: laws are still valid, as far as I know. And this tool is blatantly illegal. Facebook employees also don't typically face starvation if they can't find a new job right away. And considering how rare unions are in the tech sector, and how common they are in, for example, automotive, my hunch is unionisation is more likely to happen at companies facing economic pressure.
Whilst it may be distasteful, it is entirely legal.
An employer cannot inhibit the formation or function of a union but are under no obligation to provide the facilities or platform to form one. What FB have done is akin to not allowing an organizer to use the company photocopier to print union leaflets
While unemployment is high right now, I'm not sure it's affected most tech workers. I don't have numbers, so this is purely anecdotal, but almost all of my friends are in tech, no one has been laid off, and I just started job searching myself after being voluntarily out of the market since pre-plague, and I can barely keep up with interview requests.
I agree with the other reply to you, but to address your point directly, it is probably true that a lot of the frontline workforce can't afford to leave, but the people in leadership positions and very high-level/well-respected ICs still have options (including, given given FB's pay and recent stock performance, the option of not necessarily needing to work). That's a small group but each departure would be noticed and they'd have plenty of leverage.
Multiple things can be true.
1) It was incredibly stupid for anyone to use suppressing unions as an example.
2) Employers should have control over the content on their internal systems (people get fired for things they say over email/Slack/etc. all the time).
3) This headline is some serious click bait.
Did you reach Friday without having a good reason to dislike Facebook this week?
Well, here you are.
I'm not crazy about unions. I'm not convinced that software developers need one, despite regular revivals of the notion. But I do recognize that other people want them, and other industries even need them.
But this shit is Orwellian. As many things that have come out of Facebook -- and other big tech companies. I'm amazed that so many of these types of ideas make it as far as they do, and are generally met with tepid disapproval at best.
We're living in a Stasi wet dream, but many are trying to convince us that it's ok because these are private companies, rather than a government.
I guess we're past the point where codewords like "winnie the pooh" work but is NLP so advanced it can parse all the other ways human hint and indirectly communicate with each other?
Like can't I just send something like "hey coworker, lets do the thing that's opposite of ionized!". Or will the AI block my message (or more scarily, subtly rewrite it) and inform my manager?
This seems like tech with huge unintended consequences if perfected (even for their intended benign uses in workplaces) since it has the potential to be scaled up to censor society.
Or just... don't use your company's chat product to talk about unionization efforts?
I'm mostly agnostic toward unions for software workers. I think we need something closer to what professional engineers have than to what police/teachers have.
And then my employer started punishing people for talking about unionizing. That's when I became pro-union.
Often times, it's the clamp-down that turns people against you. "The tighter you tighten your grip..."
I find it incredibly unlikely that this tech has been perfected to such a degree. People have tried for a very long time to fix spam. It still gets through. I think that this is unfixable on a technical level, because people can simply change the meaning of words.
Facebook's goal is to make money. All the politics on the side are just virtue signaling for the purposes of recruiting, lobbying, and winning in the court of public opinion. When there's real money on the table, politics, privacy, etc. take a back seat for them.
Not saying that's the way it ought to be. But that's how it is for FB, and many of the so-called "progressive" companies.
You're right on the capacity to ban/control discussion around any word. However it is probably notable that Facebook chose to highlight 'unionize' and not 'football' or 'American Idol' in their sales pitch.
True but I think it was a bit tongue in cheek which I like in companies, would you rather them writing there Trump? From some reason I don't thing there would be such reaction if that what they wrote
There's one special aspect to "unionize": according to the article it was the word Facebook chose to use as an example in a presentation. If that's true, this title seems rather fair.
FB is known as a developer of censoring tech, so it makes sense that they try to monetize their expertise and sell tools to others who want to censor but can't or don't know how. I still find it pretty disgusting, though.
Not on the topic of Facebook, but on employers who fear these trends so much that they want this level of control:
Fundamental social shifts cannot be nipped in the bud. The best anyone can do is understand them and ensure the changes are gradual, rather than letting them build-up to a big bang.
This is an oversimplification, but: early 20th century rise of communism was a violent backlash against the presiding monarchies and oligarchies who suppressed all attempts at gradual reform. Dissatisfaction with growing wealth disparity at the time was a fundamental trend that could not have been "nipped in the bud".
The current trend seems to be very reminiscent of this. When those in power suppress all avenues of gradual reform, fundamental trends tend to boil over in abrupt and often destructive forms.
Only question is: is what we're seeing today just a passing trend or a fundamental shift?
> Facebook advertised to Walmart with union busting capabilities. Walmart has a union busting history going back 50 years minimum.
I am pretty certain this particular feature went the other way around: Facebook has to work very hard to retain customers on Workplace, because they're competing against Microsoft (who have extremely deep pockets, and arguably a better product in many regards).
I'm willing to bet Walmart went to Facebook and told them to implement this feature, or they'd jump ship. Certainly that's what's happened with other Workplace features in the past, such as the ability to control access for hourly employees.
> This is an oversimplification, but: early 20th century rise of communism was a violent backlash against the presiding monarchies and oligarchies who suppressed all attempts at gradual reform.
It seems to me that we are in a death spiral here. Our political class seems to only care about re-election, and actually fixing problems deprives you of polarizing wedge issues by which you can divide the voter base.
Even better if you can blame the other team for blocking you (whether true or not), and this is blatant on both sides of the political divide.
The expense of passing laws, mixed with ethical copenhagenism, compounds this. What we should be doing is science: making predictions, running small-scale tests, iterating and ramping what achieves the agreed, stated objectives, and discarding what doesn't work.
But because passing a law is expensive, we don't, and we get eternal programs that seem almost designed to do nothing other than make problems worse while funneling money to a preferred political party's funding machine.
It is also political suicide to only benefit a test group: New York once tested a homeless benefit program by randomly selecting applicants to be part of either the experimental (in the program) or control (left as-is) group.
They helped as many people as they had funds -- there was no withholding of possible aid -- and merely labeled those not accepted as being in a control group.
Not a single person in the entire experiment was worse off than they were before.
The resulting data would have provided evidence as to whether or not the program was effective, and thus worthy of expansion, but the public outcry painted the organizers as modern-day Nazis, "making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable."
And the program was prematurely shut down.
If you can't science, you can't effectively solve problems.
I don't see this resolving in any way but ugly, and I very much hope that I am wrong about that.
> Dissatisfaction with growing wealth disparity at the time was a fundamental trend that could not have been "nipped in the bud".
Well, this was the whole idea of "Fabian" socialism, named after Fabius the Delayer: bring in reforms now, otherwise revolution will happen outside your control. A big part of the foundation of the UK Labour party.
It seems to me that the BLM movement is just such a "big bang" against a slow increase in racism and very long term failure to resolve problems in Americna policing.
Aren't people at facebook paid really well anyway, way above the norm. What is the motive in unionising, is it the politics of it or the pay that you want to change?
Unions are not only about compensation but also terms of employment. I see enough discussions on HN about non-competes, forced arbitration etc. where unionising would help.
>What is the motive in unionising, is it the politics of it or the pay that you want to change?
IMO a software engineers union would accomplish things like productive social change. Most of the employees at facebook don't like Zucc's relationship with Trump? Well, strike. See how long it takes them to replace and onboard a bunch of scabs if 90% of your engineers aren't working.
I used to work at Facebook, and it was always interesting to me to see just how many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions.
Whenever it would come up on the internal boards the arguments were usually along the lines of:
* "People who don't deserve to be paid more will get more money under a union"
* "I'll be paid less under a union"
* "Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic"
* "Unions are corrupt, and only care about themselves"
It was always clear that there was a huge misconception about what unions are, and how they work, based on the depiction of unions in popular culture or the past. When you talked about unions, people would think about the Teamsters, the police unions, etc.
Myself and others would end up pointing out that yes, that's true of some blur collar unions, but that's not what we're talking about. Think about the Writers Guild, or SAG. Dwayne Johnson earned $90 million last year - he still pays his union dues. You'd struggle to find any writer who didn't think the Writers Guild had actively improved their working conditions.
Are the various Hollywood unions perfect? No, they're not. But I think you would really struggle to argue that working conditions would be better for those in the creative arts without them.
Tech companies have spent a long time cultivating an image of benevolence towards their employees, but ultimately they are not your friends. You need somebody to fight your corner. Hollywood found this out years ago with the studios - hopefully Silicon Valley will discover it too, however unlikely it seems.
Unions would be much more attractive if US were an open shop country. Instead, we’re closed shop, which means that, once a union is in place, you can’t choose to join a different union. This routinely leads to situations where corrupt unions abuse their own members.
For an example of how this works in practice, look at the UAW’s conduct with UC’s grad students.
Years ago, they negotiated salary caps for grad students, and then negotiated contracts that severely cut health care benefits for women over their own members’ objections. Getting anything done involves baroque red tape, so even complaining about this sort of thing would take dozens of people multiple months (and almost certainly wouldn’t cause the union bosses to take action).
Recently, they ratified contracts when the rank and file protested at union meetings, and some UC campuses voted against the contract.
This led to illegal “wildcat” strikes where the students walked out because they couldn’t pay rent. The university then fired them.
This was only possible because of closed shops. If people want to switch unions, they should be allowed to.
Where did the closed shop restrictions come from, did it come from anti-union lobbying or some think tank somewhere? This smells completely like "the government is useless", then going in and defunding things that the government is responsible for.
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I did not think all union contracts where closed shop in the USA.
And this case why on earth where professional roles being represented by an Auto workers union.
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The idea of having individual employees choose which union they want sounds a lot like the idea that consumer choice drives change (which usually does not work except in the case of huge boycotts, which are limited in their effects). Unions are about democracy in the workplace. If everyone is in a different union, there can be no legitimate democratic decisions on behalf of the workers.
EDIT: There's a bit of an exception. For example, in universities, sometimes graduate students have a union and faculty have a union. It doesn't make sense to place them both in the same union because the faculty boss graduate students around. However, it would make sense for the two unions to cooperate against the administration.
EDIT2: Another reason unions should be as concentrated as possible is so they form a united front against the bosses. If every employee is in a different union, how can they achieve anything without great difficulty?
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I'll never forget the union at a convention center that forced vendors to pay them to move anything from their own car they couldn't carry. Nothing but extortionist bullies squeezing every cent of protection money they could out of the people there who actually make things and add value to the world. In contrast, these union employees were nothing but parasites. They did nothing the vendors couldn't do themselves, who WANTED to do it themselves and were fully capable of with their own dollies and carts but weren't allowed to for no other reason than greed. They could have just stayed out of the way and still gotten (over) paid by the convention center but that wasn't good enough. Most people including me justifiably hated those selfish monsters. Name and shame, this was at the Baltimore Convention Center.
And you hear about this all the time in other workplaces. Not allowed to move a monitor to the next desk over because the union guy has to be the one to do it. Not allowed to move a piece of equipment out of the way until the union guy finishes his lunch break and does it.
Unions can be good but unions like this are so bad for everyone around them that it cancels out any good.
It's a monopoly problem.
Imagine a consulting firm that had a monopoly on all the architects in California. The only architects in CA are ones that you might bring in from this firm, and to prevent change, it's in the contract that you can't hire outside architects. It's a straight up anticompetitive monopoly. But that doesn't mean consulting firms are bad, it's just that monopolies are bad.
The biggest difference between this kind of consulting firm and a union is the accounting and the taxes, so I think the same logic applies. Unions can be good, but monopolistic unions are bad. When there's only one police union for your city, they have extreme bargaining power because it's a monopoly.
There needs to be a middle ground between completely independent bargaining and monopolistic collective bargaining. If we figured out a reasonable way to have multiple coexisting unions for a given profession and location, I'd bet unions would be much much more widely accepted as good.
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This is an excellent example why unions are wrong solution to a bigger problem - lack of universal healthcare, free education and guaranteed pension. If we had the three above - there won't be a need for unions because you are not loosing _everything_ when you are loosing a job.
Until this bigger problem is fixed unions will remain one of the very few things workers can do to improve their odds in life. So you can't be for or against them - it is the only logical outcome of the current social order.
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I hear this sort of thing a lot, but far more often than not it is from the point of view of "someone I know", "a mate a <company x>", or "this thing I read on The Register". I'm sure it really happens, just not nearly as often as people seem to think and/or suggest.
I've actually experienced it twice, but neither case had anything to do with unions.
One was officially a Health and safety matter (if you'd not been on the manually handling course you should not be moving heave expensive bits of equipment around) though I suspect it was really more of an insurance matter (only the relevant people should be moving the expensive equipment, or accidental damages won't be covered). Commercial arse-shielding, no unions involved.
The other was again commercial: in an outsourced IT arrangement where all equipment moves had to be done by someone on the outsourced team. This of course carried a charge for time, but if it wasn't done that way the contract said the charge could still be made with additional charges for the extra paperwork. Again, a purely commercial matter, no unions present affecting the matter in either company.
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So because you can't move a piece of furniture, you believe it cancels the amount of protections and good from unionization?!
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I not sure I understand the point of your comment. The parent comment literally said that there are many unions like that, but that this is not what a union has to be and that there are several unions that are a net positive.
The whole point is that the fight for protection of workers' rights needs some sort of organization. Traditionally, that has been called a "union", but if the problem you're pointing out is that the name has too many bad connotations, feel free to propose another one.
FWIW, it looks like most of the "good unions" are careful to call themselves "guilds".
Union rules are about making sure a management team does not subject employees to random jobs. It is a about adding a control over management.
In other words, in my office an employee is not allowed to hang a whiteboard on to a wall. Because building mandates only union employees can make such hardware modifications.
Fine you are protecting the job of the union but what you are really doing is prevent job creep or scope creep.
Another hypothetical example: no employee is allowed to work past 5 pm. Sure hardworking employees want to. But when they do, the put the pressure on other employees to do the same. This kind of culture is net negative.
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Just imagine complains after Silicone Valley unionisation - only SWE Union worker could spawn an EC2 instance or migrate a database...
Dystopian world ahead of us
So put in a provision in the tech union charter that allows anyone, unionized or not, to move monitors. Problem solved.
> Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic
Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point.
At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work.
In principle, you might think that makes sense, until you need to get something very simple done - that you are willing to do yourself and cannot.
It becomes infuriating. Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job. But the new employee can't start if the new PC on his desk isn't plugged in? Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
Need that extra monitor moved between two adjacent cubes? Sorry, equipment relocation is union work. If you do it yourself, you'll be fired. But it's just a monitor, you say? Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
Oh, you want to move that folding table and a few chairs to the conference room so you can have a design meeting with the whole team? Sorry furniture movement is union-only work. But it'll take me literally 10 minutes and the alternative is to cancel the meeting. Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
These are real examples at my company - I didn't make them up.
So what's the ultimate outcome here? Employees obviously look for ways to circumvent the union. Then the union finds out and sends a few reps in to take pictures of things that have been touched/moved by non-union workers, and sends it to their lawyers (paid for by union dues). The lawyers then send formal notices that the company has violated the company contract, and notices go out to the whole company - union workers get all riled up that the company isn't respecting them, and non-union workers roll their eyes and vow never to work for another unionized company again. Bad feelings all around & Giant waste of everyone's time.
The alternative to carving out job functions for union workers, is to force everyone to unionize - and that's got its own problems.
Unions are great in unsafe industries in an unregulated market - ie. 1940's coal mines (extreme example). Six figured desk jobs can manage with some reasonable labor laws made at the State level. A union is a huge additional layer of bureaucracy.
Well, sorry to be blunt but that's fucking stupid.
Contrast that with my experience with Unions in Sweden; and that is that they basically don't exist except to ensure that workers rights are not infringed.
So they'll be involved in a termination, or help negotiate overtime pay.
There is no such thing as a "union job", it's just having what's referred to as a "collective agreement".
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I'm in a union and see similar things, but instead of using lawyers, the union would note that the contract had been violated, and management will typically agree to pay the people who would have done the work. If it's just 10 minutes, the union probably wouldn't bother with it - unless it's a pattern, and in that case, they'd add up all the 10-minute transgressions. I often disagree with the focuses of my union, but I'm still happy to support it. As many have noted, the main thing a union does is balance the leverage. Without them, the employer has all of it.
For seemingly silly rules like the ones you're describing, the union is attempting to protect jobs and hours.
I wish my union was more like some European unions I've read about, where they're involved in the decision-making process. Mine fights for wages, positions, and conditions, but management decides how things work - so long as they're not violating the agreed-upon conditions. I expect your workplace is similar. Instead of mapping out a path with management, my union reacts to the path set out by management, and I think a lot of the weird rules come as a result of reacting, rather than helping to create.
I also think this sort of collaboration would be better for companies, particularly larger companies, where there is a disconnect from how things actually work and how corporate thinks they work. We have this particularly terrible piece of machinery that corporate is obsessed with justifying. We have other machines that do its jobs better, but it does the jobs of many machines - just much worse. It just wastes a lot of time, but corporate incentiveses management to use it, and when discussing the POS machine, management cites those incentives as reasons for why the machine is actually good. When you say, "Yes, but how does wasting all this time using this particular machine help the company?" management highlights the incentives.
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This is definitely not unique to unions, nor are all (or many) unions like this. Of course the examples you list are ridiculous and shouldn’t happen, but the more boring instances of bureaucracy are just part of the mundane process of work in a large company (e.g. raising a ticket on a third party vendor to grant access to some service and the whole process descending into farce as no one knows how to/wants to do it and everyone has a problem with it). The benefits of unionisation almost always outweigh the negatives, and most of the time a union has some degree of member democracy so you can attempt to change internal processes.
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I've worked plenty of union jobs that didn't have this problem. Like the original comment said: yes, some unions are bad. But it's ridiculous to pretend they're all like what you dealt with.
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> At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work.
This is known as a 'closed shop' in the UK. Closed shops are not synonymous or required for unions to function.
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This is really strange. Unions should be there to protect workers rights when they are abused from above, ie they give more strength to workers when necessary. In normal working conditions, unions should be invisible.
Case in point: my girlfriend's workplace has been recently purchased by a multinational. Everything fine and well, until they had to pay her. Her monthly salary was cut by about €400 because they refuse to pay past overtime work (which is perfectly legal here, was required by the old employer and was 100% documented). She then gathered with her colleagues and they decided to sign up with an union to put some pressure to the new employer. It happened last week so I have no more news. Anyway, that's what unions are for, at least over here; they shouldn't be used to move furniture or things like that.
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> A union is a huge additional layer of bureaucracy.
They can be, undoubtedly.
But don't forget the times when they go into bat to defend the rights of workers who have been treated badly by their employers - whether during employment or when they have been made redundant and procedures have not been followed correctly. When you're a part-time worker who is in a union who has very little input in your day-to-day work, but they come to your rescue with a considerable amount of legal muscle behind you in such a situation, the £10 a month you've paid them looks like very good value indeed.
I totally get that unions can be the embodiment of self-protection and bureaucracy, and can lead to expensive and crazy situations (indeed when I see some union leaders here in the UK it appears that is their desire). But that isn't all they are there for - they can also help the little guy out when their back is against the wall.
THIS!
when i was in my early 20's and unaware of how the world worked i had a job as a contract IT guy at a very well known Power company. People would call me up with their problems and i would fix them. After a few months, somone took me aside and explained to me that they are really bad, as they are "using" me to avoid having to deal with other unions to do this work. I was simply unaware that "plugging in a network cable" was a union job and i just did it as it was easy enought.
The sad thing is it was union employees attempting to avoid other union employees...
In general I think unions are like governments - they need to be regularly overthrown and rebuilt to ensure that they always represent the best interests of their members.
That being said, there are some obvious counter-arguments to your experiences, however they tend towards "guilds" as mentioned in another comment more than unions as I understand them.
> Oh, you want to move that folding table and a few chairs to the conference room so you can have a design meeting with the whole team? Sorry furniture movement is union-only work.
Bob grabs the table and lifts with his back, in a twisting, jerking movement. Bob is then unable to come in to work due to back pain for the next two weeks. The union keeps Bob from hurting himself unintentionally.
> Need that extra monitor moved between two adjacent cubes? Sorry, equipment relocation is union work.
Someone notices that a bunch of monitors have gone missing. Have you been burgled?! Noone has any record of where these monitors have gone, however you eventually track then down to Alice's cube where she has finally completed her dream 9-monitor nest. Phew, false alarm!
> Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job
It gets cold in the winter, so Dan brings their own heater to put under their desk[1]. One day they forget to turn it off when going home and burns down the department; On the other side new employees don't just materialise out of the ether. The organisation should have plenty of time to set up their working environment
[1] Funnily enough, if Dan was part of a union they would have enough bargaining power to make sure their employers provide adequate working conditions, however their manager simply filed away their request away under 'C', for "Complainers - Fire these people first"
I'm totally on your side about these examples being ridiculous, but I do like to steelman the other-sides arguments
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Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job
For anyone who thinks that this is just hyperbole, it's exactly the sort of thing that happens.
When I worked at a unionized television station, I was watching an aircheck of a recent broadcast. When I was done, I ejected the tape and put it back into the archive.
The union filed a grievance against me for pressing the eject button. As a manager, I could use Play, Stop, and the shuttle controls, but not Eject. Only a union member could eject a tape.
At another television station where I worked, there was an employee retiring after 30 years with the station, and we thought it would be cute to show a ten-second clip of him working while the anchors said goodbye and thanks. It never happened. He worked upstairs, in the tech center, and the members of the photographers union weren't allowed to operate any electronic equipment up there because that was the province of a different union. This included working their own cameras. At the same time, the people who worked in the tech center weren't allowed to operate any of the station's cameras, because that was the domain of the photographer's union. As I said, we were never able to air a clip of this good employee doing his job.
At another television station, I worked weekends. Naturally, I was expected to work five days a week like every other employee. So I was assigned to help write during three weekdays. A union grievance was filed against me for taking a theoretical writer's job. The result was that for the next FIVE YEARS, I did nothing three days a week but look at lolcats, and the station had to keep paying me my full salary.
I'm not anti-union. I think unions are essential for coal miners, maids, janitors, and other people. But I'm not convinced that white collar people need unions. Or at least there should be a method of calling out and publicizing union abuses to let their members know what's going on.
Every time someone brings this up I can only imagine some horrible version of of something like SCRUM being given the force of law.
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That's absurd, laughable and not how a single union works in Sweden and essentially the enrire country is unionized.
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The work rules are the thing that gets me. The idea of paying employees more? Great. Protection from discrimination and unfair termination? Collective bargaining? Great. But I can't imagine how it's possible to get anything done with the work rules.
Companies that operate this way must be in slow paced industries. To innovate you must be able to just do stuff. As soon as you add a bunch of hoops and sign-offs you lose momentum.
My own hypothesis on this is that it's not just a matter of high overhead but of slowing things down to the point that it breaks the dopamine reinforcement loop for the human beings involved. Humans need to be able to see results or at least movement toward them in a reasonable amount of time or it becomes really difficult to stay focused and engaged.
The work rules and bureaucracy element is like 100% of my skepticism about unions. Get rid of that stuff and I'd be all for them.
That being said, unions aren't the only source of inane bureaucracy of course. Many organizations without unions manage to invent worthless tar pits of their own.
If I told you that I once worked in a shop that didn’t use source control, didn’t have any formal testing, and builds came from dev desktop machines, would you:
1. Vow never to work in the software industry.
2. Allow that perhaps mine is a bad example, that there might be good software shops to work in, and wait for more data.
Though I would not fault anyone for choosing #1.
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> The alternative is to force everyone to unionize - and that's got its own problems.
Does it really, though? Because literally every one of your complaints above would be solved, if your companies employees stopped actively fighting the union, and just simply joined it instead.
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Not just unions though. The IT department in a company I worked for had similar slow processes. I needed more RAM in my desktop, to process really huge log files. "It'll take about a month".
I could have gone to Best Buy, bought what I needed, installed it, and been back at work in an hour. Sigh. So I limped along.
A month later, along comes the new RAM and gets installed. But I was long done with the project that needed it.
Anyway, no fan of unions that get their feelers into every crack, in an attempt to pad union jobs. I am definitely in favor of some feedback that helps them be useful and productive - time-to-response on tickets for instance, that affected their pay maybe. Then we might all be happier.
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How does that work at a large company that's already bureaucratic? Where I work, I still have to open tickets for everything. I still have to wait a long time for new equipment. How does a union make that worse if I have to wait for cogs to turn anyway?
I also would like more realistic examples of bureaucracy, because yours are frankly bullshit. Yeah yeah the MTA is bad sure, and I've interacted with unions before that exemplified their stereotypes. But if you really think employees would suddenly not be able to plug in a monitor or move it across the room because there's a union, I think you're completely incorrect.
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> "At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work."
That's not a union, that's a guild. A medieval-style guild has a monopoly on a certain type of work. A union merely represents its members in workplace negotiations.
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This is why you need a union for IT workers to - tell the blue collar union to piss off or more politely set demarcation boundary's.
I worked at a unionised company in the UK and the CWU would have got short shrift if they Tried that with my members (I was Branch's secretary For the M&P union)
> > Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point.
What about the Writers Guild and the NBA players union? Would the people in those unions say that?
Semi-genuinely asking? ;)
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Protecting work in this manner exists because the prevailing culture is that jobs solve social issues - we can't give the disadvantaged money directly because socialism, but we can pressure companies to make-work jobs because having a job means you deserve to be human, and it also creates situations where people want to protect their jobs for their income rather than any other reason.
A UBI can possibly help prevent this type of silliness.
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This is true of many many unions, but it is neither a necessary part of a union, nor exclusive to unions.
At my company, the majority (all?) employees in my local office are un-unionised. We have the same system (it's just departmental). This is a system that emerges in large old bureaucracies regardless.
Which is why it's present in many unions tracing their formation back to the early 20th century. They're big and they're old.
There are certainly bad unions. But I think that often arises as a reaction to poisonous management behavior, a zero-sum mentality that treats workers as a cost center, not a value generator. It's a "fuck me, no fuck you" scenario.
Your point about the Hollywood unions is a great one. Like tech, in Hollywood everybody has clear incentives to create a great final product. Positive-sum thinking usually part of the culture. In that context, I think unions can be a big help, especially when there are such large wealth and power differentials between the bosses and the workers.
I also think your former colleagues' seeming lack of agency is weird. The union is something the workers create and run. If they think a union they create would be bad, what are they saying about themselves?
> The union is something the workers create and run. If they think a union they create would be bad, what are they saying about themselves?
They think a union would be a bit like a homeowners association - in principle owned and run by them and never acting against their interests, but in practice a threat as much as an opportunity.
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> union is something the workers create and run
I just assume that it's almost never going to be the case.
It might look like it's created by worker, but it's created by a sub group of workers which is unhappy with a status quo. This effort will be led by even smaller sub group of activists that have a drive and skillset to organise and weasel into a leadership positions.
Worker run union seems to be even more implausible. It's going to be run by a managerial body composed of said activists, which I absolutely expect to be self-serving, rent seeking and, well, parasitic. Occasionally their interests will coincide with interests of workers they represent, but that will be just some happy accidents.
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Hollywood unions are a slightly special case: while the studios hold a huge amount of power, the staff are pretty much all contractors per-project, and the entity they're contracting with will be a special purpose corporate vehicle for that film. Most software doesn't look like that - except game development, which is notoriously abusive and can get away with it because of a fresh supply of enthusiastic young people.
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Hollywood unions are a prime reason lots of movies are made in Vancouver/Georgia/Other Countries now. Hollywood will end up like Detroit.
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I don't think it's necessarily based on misconceptions about what unions are, but also their own experience and from what they hear from people they know. We've already seen in this thread very different personal experiences with unions, often based on where they are. e.g. folks in Europe seems to have mostly positive interactions, where as folks in the US negative.
I personally don't want an union in my work place. It's not because I've watched too many movies, but because I've worked at unionized environments before and they are absolutely terrible for me. All the usual symptoms often talked about were there.
Maybe there are good unionized workplaces out there (Hollywood has been frequently pointed to as an example), but I've never experienced them. Out of my interactions with unions, they've been 100% negative, hence my views on unions. Until some of these underlying issues are resolved, I think we'll always have this very mixed to negative view of unionizing.
I live in a Romania - an European country - and I don't know of any good union, be it police, transportation, or healthcare. All they do is basically ask for more and more, while doing nothing else.
Their leaders earn a lot, so they have an interest in maintaining the status quo. As one parent mentioned, you can't do much without their approval. Take for example the underground. The commercial property from the subway stations was under the control of the union, all the kiosks and small shops paid rent to the union.
Also some of their former leaders went into politics and got involved in corruption scandals.
What I have learned from U.S. union interactions is that people who profit from bureaucracy love adding more bureaucracy to the system.
The "boxing match" analogy is reflective of the "us against them" power struggle between those trying to leverage their own hand at the expense of someone else in the U.S. corporate-union world.
This is contrasting to the concepts in Europe of labor stakeholders having a roundtable and coming to compromise as a group effort... not that it's perfect, just a different system.
It’s usually a symptom more than the cause.
Unions are formed in environments where people feel it’d bad enough to pay the price.
The same way if we looked at jobs hiring bodyguards, most would look pretty dangerous, but we wouldn’t blame the bodyguards.
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> You'd struggle to find any writer who didn't think the Writers Guild had actively improved their working conditions.
Writing and acting are race to the bottom. There are plenty of people who would be willing to act for free. You can't say the same for working at Facebook.
In order to stop the race-to-the bottom SAG-AFTRA artificially constrains the marketplace by forcing studios hire a certain number of union actors. In this case, it doesn't really hurt newbies because they'd otherwise get paid peanuts anyways. However, that isn't something that people would want in tech expect perhaps in the videogame industry.
I'm in a union, and when I mentioned it to my work colleagues at dinner one day there was a kind of open-mouthed aghast shock similar to if I'd announced that I was a visitor from Mars.
Anyway, while you don't really get the benefit of unionisation unless a large number of people join at a workplace, it's still possible to join some unions as an individual, and there are some lesser benefits like free legal and employment advice.
Its even more surprising as the workplace team are mainly london based.
I suspect what actually happened is that a customer said: "my minions are organising on workplace, let me control most viral posts". The PM looked as what it was, and the posts the employer was complaining about, and made a scenario on that.
Knowing some of the engineers on workplace, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they didn't think about what they were doing, only whether they could do it, and what was the best design.
> Myself and others would end up pointing out that yes, that's true of some blur collar unions, but that's not what we're talking about.
I'm not totally against unions, but it seems like that's probably how all the messed up union situations started.
As far as I know, they probably all started with good intentions to improve conditions where change was really needed. None of them started with the intention of creating a bunch of bureaucracy, nor to negotiate wages higher than the market can handle, thus jeopardizing the financial health of their employer, etc.
But, like all organizations (every type in every sphere of life -- government, private sector, charity, religious, and more), there is always the danger that once the organization gets enough power to fulfill its mission, it then moves on to using the power for things it shouldn't.
That's not a reason to dismiss the idea of starting a union, but it is a hazard to be avoided. So it should probably be part of the discussion, just not in a way that's used to instantly shut down the idea.
I'm endlessly surprised that unions are collectively as bad at PR as their image suggests.
1) A lot of the good PR individual professions have is the result of union PR. Teachers, nurses, cops, etc all have unions that put out endless propaganda (no negative connotation intended) about how great and vital to society they are. A lot of our nostalgia for jobs associated with heavy industry comes from old union propaganda.
2) Good PR can easily be outweighed by negative PR. Coal companies have excellent PR departments, but their opposition has invested a lot in negative PR.
3) PR images always exist in your head, but regular encounters with union workers can cause that image, rightly or wrongly, to crash against reality. People think relatively highly of scientists, partially because they never encounter them in real life; compare their image with lawyers or corporate managers.
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Not much money and rich enemies will do that.
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What would a company chose between:
- Spend 1 million to accommodate a union's demands e.g. raise salaries and improve working conditions
- Spend 999999 on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting organizations that are specialized on disrupting unions, tarnishing their reputation, and manipulate/threaten/sue/bribe/smear their members
In some countries unions has become corrupted, bureaucratic, ineffective. Companies benefit from that.
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The media companies are employers and their ad revenue comes from employers.
One hypothesis that may explain the bad perception of unions is if there has been continuing investment and efforts in anti-union propaganda by pro-business or pro-corporate groups.
A similar argument is put forward by Kerryn Higgs' book "Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet", to explain why society takes direction from economists, in pursuit of economic growth, rather than taking direction from science. Higgs' book is focused on trying to explain why society is failing to tackle climate change, not an analysis of unions, but some of the history that is presented regarding pro-business propaganda is eye opening. Here is an excerpt of an interview with the author:
> How did scientists lose credibility? When I was young, science was almost a god. A few decades later, scientists were being flippantly brushed aside. How did economists displace scientists as the crucial policy advisors and the architects of public debate, setting the criteria for policy decisions? How did economic growth become accepted as the only solution to virtually all social problems—unemployment, debt and even the environmental damage growth was causing?
> The new corporations of the early 20th century banded together into industry associations and business councils like the immensely influential US Chamber of Commerce, which was formed out of local chambers from across the country in 1912. These organisations exploited the newly emerging Public Relations industry, launching a barrage of private enterprise propaganda, uninterrupted for more than a century, and still very healthy today. Peabody coal, for example, recently signed up one of the world’s PR giants, Burson-Marsteller, for a PR campaign to convince leaders that coal is the solution to poverty.
> Back in 1910 universal suffrage threatened the customary dominance of the business classes, and PR was an excellent solution. If workers were going to vote, they’d need the right advice. No-one expressed it better than Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, who is credited with founding the PR industry. Bernays was candid:
>> The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the... masses is an important element in democratic society (he wrote). Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism ... constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
> PR became an essential tool for business to consolidate its power right through the century, culminating in the 1970s project to “litter the world with free market think tanks”. By 2013, there were nearly 7,000 of these, all over the world; the vast majority were conservative, free market advocates, many on the libertarian fringe, and financed by big business. They cultivate a studied appearance of independence, though one think tank vice-president came clean. “There is no such thing as a disinterested think tanker,” he said. “Somebody always builds the tank, and it’s usually not Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.” Funding think tanks is always about “shaping and reshaping the climate of public opinion”.
-- https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/l...
Ah, bingo: here's a bit out of Higgs' book that discusses how the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) campaign for the “American way” managed to get pro-business propaganda into the school curriculum in the 1930s, and lo and behold one of the early aims of the organisation is to fight against unionism:
> In 1895 the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was founded to lobby for business-friendly legislation and, under the leadership of David Perry, in 1903 it launched “a crusade against unionism.” [...]
> The NAM campaign for the “American way” was massive. It replicated Creel’s World War I model in establishing local cells, “Special Committees of Public Information,” which enlisted local Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, and churches, as well as lawyers, teachers, and local dealers of the appliances and cars made by the corporations. These committees of influential people were responsible for the regional face of NAM’s multifaceted “publicity program”; they funneled articles, features and films to newspapers, radio stations, and movie theatres; they sent speakers to the theatres as Creel had done, as well as to every local group of any sort (including women’s groups and what were then called “negro groups”); they distributed pamphlets and weekly bulletins to schools, clubs and libraries. Aware that the adult population was cynical about the corporate claim to “service,” they aimed specifically at schools where _Young America_, their weekly children’s magazine that portrayed capitalism as dedicated to looking after them and their communities, was sent to thousands of teachers, who used them in classroom assignments. _You and Industry_, a series of booklets written in simple language, linked individual prosperity to unregulated industry, and was distributed to public libraries everywhere. One million booklets were distributed every two weeks by the US Chamber of Commerce, which, along with the giant industrial corporations, was also involved in the campaign.
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There is no broad support for unions not because of the bogeyman arguments your co-workers were raising but because for most US based software developers there is no acute problem they feel that unions would solve because almost all of us are doing pretty well. On the other hand no single developer really has that much leverage because the importance of even the best individual devs doesn't compare to an individual LeBron and/or there isn't the massive amount of money at stake that depends massively on the work of specific people. Unions for writers, actors, NBA players, etc are frequently representing for extremes of the totally destitute who are easily taken advantage of or groups of the ultra important where the Unions are essentially acting as high powered negotiators for those they represent. All very good reasons for unions, none of which is true for developers in the US right now.
I'm not saying there aren't things a union could help with, I'm just saying that for most devs, those things aren't pinching very hard. Also, you have to be realistic about the impact of unions, they are a double edged sword. Police unions aren't a straw man, they are a real example of the worst case scenario for abusive concentration of power and agendas at odds with the public good. The best examples always come with some bureaucratic overhead. So it is valid to consider the cost/benefit of unions. Again, I'm not taking a stance on what is right here, just saying unions are not as obviously a good idea in every case as you might imagine and the hesitance of your co-workers, right or wrong, is at least understandable.
The tech industry in general might not need unions yet, but game dev industry is a clear example of where they're sorely needed.
Oh and to be clear how I feel about the larger question here, I'm not at all defending Facebook. Zuckerberg is the vilest piece of sh*t for allowing this and for profiting off Facebook as tool for misleading so many people. Recent events have really made it clear what a massively damaging thing Facebook's complacency really is.
> It was always clear that there was a huge misconception about what unions are, and how they work, based on the depiction of unions in popular culture or the past.
Police and teacher unions are very much current events in the U.S. between COVID and the protests.
Even on a professional level, anyone who has dealt with trade show unions or construction labor unions can attest to how awful it is to deal with these as a customer.
Many people assume unions are simply squeezing their employers, but unions also put the squeeze on customers. We had union members protesting in front of our office building and harassing our visitors for an entire month because our building owner refused to pay 3X the cost to use union labor for the drywall work.
From my personal (limited) research and observations. I am in no way an expert.
Unions originally seem to have made a very positive impact on the working conditions of workers. Just think of the horrible situation of steel workers (and others) during the start of the industrial revolution. Workers organized to make a change and improve their lot.
Fast forward a few decades: Unions seem to have become self-sustained entities whose incentive have switched from helping workers, to sustaining the union's economic interests. They also sometimes help some workers, but it's not free.
There is a very well known case in Quebec, Canada. It's the Gaspesia debacle:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-comme...
"Work on the mill conversion began in the spring of 2002. From the beginning, the project -- established as a limited partnership 50 per cent owned by the Fonds de solidarité with the SGF and Tembec each holding 25-per-cent stakes -- was plagued by delays and mismanagement. The FTQ was accused of blocking workers affiliated with other unions from getting construction jobs on the site. Contractors complained that workers were paid for eight-hour days, but put in only three hours of productive labour."
This is only the tip of the Iceberg, and illustrates why there seems a negative perception of unions.
There's no oligopoly of tech companies like hollywood studios though. Even the salary-collusion BS was a very small group of companies and illegal without union protection.
Also the Rock may pay his union dues because (a) he's required to be a memeber and (b) the cost is immaterial to him. The top performers are usually hampered by unions they'd be fine without; he's not going to need the pension and health insurance the collective bargaining agreement gets him.
At the moment I negotiate my work against one entity: my employer.
If I had a union I'd have to negotiate my work against two entities: my employer and a union.
Why on earth would I want to do that? Seems more complicated and I'm less powerful in the negotiation.
Because the union would be 'on my side'? Lol I don't buy it. I think the union would be on the side of their management and whatever political hobby opinions they held, and possibly the majority of the members, but not on my side.
No thanks.
Many tech people have had very limited interaction with unions, and usually those interactions are negative.
For example, I was not allowed to run ethernet through the paneled ceiling to hard wire our conference rooms for the startup I was at.
Why? Well the building had a contract with a unionized cabling company so every cabling job in the building HAD to be done by them. We would have been charged thousands and had to wait weeks for a job I could do myself in 30 minutes.
Maybe pro unionists should focus on the possibility that they could negotiate for getting their members better internal tooling/more focus on tech debt. At all companies ive been at, ive seen sooo many managers ignore internal tooling and ignoring tech debt, leading to engineers having to be on call 24/7 for legacy stuff.
Then again, how many tech-workers at Facebook have previously been unionized employees?
Software development is rarely, if ever, unionized - and I'd imagine the majority of FAANG workers starting at said companies within 5 years of graduating from college.
For an example of how unions can get involved in unexpected ways, take a look at the SAG releases for participating in hobby projects (eg 48 Hour Film Festival). It's just an additional piece of paperwork, but it does demonstrate a dynamic that the union has a legitimate interest in overseeing and could just as well prohibit. A software union would surely become involved in bootstrapped startups, hackathons, and work on Free software. It's possible for these areas to be treated intelligently by a union, but it's also possible they wouldn't be.
> I'll be paid less under a union
This is a valid point. Your two examples are guilds not unions; they're inherently geared more towards contractors and individuals due to the nature of the work. While job hopping has become both more prevalent and more frequent among software engineers, it's certainly still mostly an employee-oriented field. It's very true that under unions, high performers specifically are paid a bit less and low performers a bit more. This is both the upside and the downside of collective bargaining and a fundamental characteristic thereof rather than a flaw of a specific union. As someone who's generally been promoted faster and paid more because I worked hard and put in long hours, unions are anathema to me. I'd likely be paid less and a less-productive peer paid more. I can see, however, why such a prospect would appeal to most people. But as an outlier among most employees, I see no reason to entrust my situation to majority rule as that takes it from a negotiation between me and an employer (a person who represents my interests and one who doesn't) to one between someone who represents the average employee and an employer, both of whom probably don't represent my interests.
Maybe it's one of those things where a good union is good and a bad union is terrible.
It's easy to say how good a union could be, but will it actually be that good? What kinds of things can go wrong? What weird laws are in place and how could that complicate things?
The bottom line is that if I am happy already, a union is more risk than reward.
I don’t think any of those examples are really misconceptions. You even admit that many people have this experience with “blue collar” unions. Most developers are not foolish enough to think they are immune to these foibles. We have a lot more in common with blue collar workers than big name actors.
If you want to be a unionized software engineer you could always work at Boeing. God knows they need the help.
Aerospace engineers at Boeing with PhD's are part of the union SPEEA. It seems to work well for them.
I wonder if significant part of their compensation is stock as in FAANG companies
many engineers were actively against - aghast, even - at the idea of unions
“Union” is a trigger word but call it an association like BMA, BALPA, or a Federation (Police) or even a guild, and everyone would be if not on board, at least willing to have a non-emotive conversation.
I have no doubt in my mind that most programmers would at least listen to the pitch if it was to join a guild.
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You know unions are effective because all the most powerful groups have them—actors, athletes, doctors (AMA) cops, firefighters, and other professional guilds... America just seems against the working class being able to organize in any way.
> Are the various Hollywood unions perfect? No, they're not.
How are they not perfect?
how exactly would a union improve working conditions for engineers at Facebook? Engineers at Facebook are probably the most catered to and sheltered workers in all of capitalism.
I don't think its that clear cut. Unions add another system that you need to cooperate with, and over which you may have very little influence. Devs aren't cops, but they aren't artists either. You do not know how a union would work out. I don't think devs at affluent companies that are highly invested in tech workers stand to gain much. Especially in america, you have no recourse to "the union". You can't start a new union as an alternative organization.
Game devs and other subsets should probably unionize. But cushy FAANG dev jobs? Probably not. If you're in a shitty team there, you should just try to find a better team.
Support for unions is based on a basic misunderstanding of economics.
It is not mandates from the state that lead to wages and work conditions improving. It's rising demand from employers, as their revenue increases, and they compete with other employers for a limited pool of workers.
Unions obstruct the flexibility and freedom of the market, and thereby hamper economic efficiency and competitiveness. Firms will, all things being equal, see less revenue growth in a unionized labor market, than a non-unionized one.
Precisely. A union is a cartel. It exists to restrict supply of the product they sell (labour) in order to fetch a higher price. They work just like any other cartel, for instance OPEC. Cartels benefit at the expense of everyone who is not in it. They perform rent-seeking behaviour to extract more than the product they sell is worth.
From the perspective of an economist, all cartels are bad, whether they deal in oil or labour or anything else.
> all things being equal
The whole point of unions is to affect change, so what does that sentence even mean?
All else being equal means the union did nothing to change anything, and therefore is 100% overhead.
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What if the person to fight in my corner is me? Unions drag everyone's wages to an average. Poor performers get paid more, top performers get paid less. No thanks, I can negotiate for myself.
Look at teachers and police unions for a prime example. Great police get paid the same as the police who racially profile. Great teachers get paid the same as the teachers who phone it in.
Additionally unions protect incompetent employees, which I don't want.
So the value prop for unions seems to be: get paid way less money, we'll make sure your incompetent colleagues never get fired and we'll make a stack of money for union bosses in the process.
I want to negotiate my own pay and benefits, and it's worked out excellent for me. A union only serves to harm my interests.
To me it seems "top performers" are not really recognized and job jumpers are the ones that are paid more.
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Seems to me like teachers and police like their unions.
As for the tech industry, remember, your already getting paid less because of companies like Apple and Adobe who had the non-poaching agreement. This stifled salaries for everyone involved.
Unions are so bad, but companies will collectively bargain if they can.
> "Poor performers get paid more, top performers get paid less. No thanks, I can negotiate for myself."
The two retorts to this are: 1) it's selfish arguing. "Fuck you got mine" style, dismisses what happens to everyone else as long as you're OK. Which may be fine for you, but why should the rest of us agree that you being wealthier is the thing we all want?
2) You negotiating against the resources of a multi-million dollar company who can hire any legal or negotiating team of experts against you? Can you, really?
> "Additionally unions protect incompetent employees, which I don't want."
Unions don't have to protect incompetent employees, but they can demand that the employee be proved incompetent and not falsely accused of incompetence and sacked without "trial" - which could happen to you. Unions protect exploited, abused, unfairly treated employees too, which you might become one day.
> "I want to negotiate my own pay and benefits, and it's worked out excellent for me. A union only serves to harm my interests."
Voting sure is worse than having me as dictator, isn't it? Democracy only serves to harm my interests. Surely you will agree that's a good reason for FaceBook to suppress talk of Democracy and voting in nation-wide FaceBook chat?
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ok, but hear me out on this:
how do you know you are earning as much as you should?
I mean if we take facebook as an example, you can't negotiate pay. You're slapped on a scale and thats it. You might be able to up your share offer, but actual pay is fixed on a scale.
Which is the same as what it would be if it was unionised.
Also, you have chosen two professions that are run by public organisations, so pay is always going to be low[1] However in other countries, teachers unions are very effective at settling compensation. (The UK for example has reasonably well paid teachers)
I think the problem is that you seem to be labouring under the pretence that you are special, and earn a specially high wage. Statistics say that in practice your probably earning close to median for tech. Make of that what you will...
[1] well yes and no, depending on country, but lets assume the USA
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Obviously, I have no idea how unions work in the US. But there was the example of Dwayne Johnson, earning 90 Million and being a union member. The collective bargaining I am used to, has the effect in some cases of maybe overpaying certain individuals. IMHO that always happens. It doesn't drag salaries anywhere but up so. And there is a cap on salary levels and job levels being covered by unions collective bargaining. Above these levels, it is what you negotiate with your employer.
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> He added that the “oversight” was likely “lack of context versus bad intent from anyone on the team.”
What?! You're presenting a Workplace Chat tool and you're writing the slides for the feature of blocking certain topics and you use "unionize" as an example. How the fuck can you lack context here? Is the people writing the talks not aware what the talks are about or what?
Then there is not just the options of "lack of context" vs "bad intent", there is also "simply stupid", "some people at Facebook don't like unions", "wrong target audience" and "unexpected push back on something we care about". Instead they argue in bad faith that there is just two reasons here.
Clearly, they don't play online games with a chat lobby. They would have quickly learned that such features is useless, as it's easily bypassed:
- in novembre, we should cost them the electrons. Ionize!
- It's time we u_nionize
- un10n1z3 people !
- let's fetch the U:\N\I\O\N\I\Z\E file
- all go to http://unio.ni/ze
- so we should do the u-thingy
- what about talking to Mr Ulysse Nionize
- never too late to ｕｎᎥｏｎｉｚｅ
In fact, it actually creates a sense of community by fostering a culture, make the movement stronger, and give it more visibility.
I'm assuming on this one that FB employees know this, and are just giving idiots what they ask for.
I've fought this feature in products for years - the product ppl always wanna ban bad words and I'm like - you can't, it literally never works, it just becomes a stupid arms race and it's not worth our time. I always lose this argument for some reason.
Here’s a good article to show people:
http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
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In apps targeted to kids I've found it to be often a useful deterrent. And can even shift the culture a bit; it makes it very clear what is "ok" and what is not.
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It's like the button at traffic lights that does nothing: it's not about actually working, it's about giving the user a feeling of control.
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Waiting for the western version of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures
Somewhat similar. I used to moderate a web forum and last summer I met someone from Scunthorpe. He said "yeah, its a small town, you've probably never heard of it." But I HAD heard of it because when I used to moderate that forum, we had someone from Scunthorpe sign up and the site blocked them for profanity. It was because their name contained the word "cunt". I've always found this funny and will remember Scunthorpe forever.
It's in the Big List of Nauthy Strings for this reason:
https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings/blo...
It's the same thing fb does to avoid ad-blockers, though of course it's easier to evade than detect it
Or you could get round the block by just spelling the word correctly.
That's incredibly naive.
Facebook has one of the strongest AI research groups in the world led by Yann LeCun. They could build models that are quick good at finding all of these and similar versions.
And it doesn't need to be perfect. If you're an employee who may face severe repercussions if you mention unions, are you going to risk your job based on whether the filter catches your post?
The best AI in the world cannot currently understand the political and cultural context. Make up a slang and you win.
But the cost to process every single message with a powerful AI just to censor bad words would be way too much.
> And it doesn't need to be perfect. If you're an employee who may face severe repercussions if you mention unions, are you going to risk your job based on whether the filter catches your post?
You are conflating censoring and detecting. This is en different matter entirely which would necessitate a whole new debate.
>>Section 1: The policy of the United States is to be carried out "by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment..."
Section 7: "Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or bargain collectively through representation of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining..."
Section 8(a): "It shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer . . . to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in Section 7..."
From https://www.ueunion.org/org_rights.html
Looks like that would be illegal to my non-lawyer interpretation.
Worse happens every day, this would be extremely evident though.
The NLRB recently reversed itself and said companies can prevent their workers from organizing on the work email system. Expect the same would apply to FB Workplace.
https://www.reuters.com/article/labor-disclosure/workers-can...
That decision only applies when the company has a policy of no non-work conversations at all. If you allow planning a volleyball game on the weekend you can't turn around and then say no discussion of working conditions.
IANAL but I would assume FB is in the clear legally though as they're not actively blocking anything in particular, merely providing the tool with which admins can do the blocking themselves.
"it should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."
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This is reminiscent of how Facebook used to allow people to microtarget job and housing ads to people based on protected classes like race, age, and gender. They ended up reaching a settlement and being forced to change their filter criteria due to civil rights laws. So I wouldn't be so sure that "merely providing the tool" is necessarily an entirely legal action.
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Kind of odd that they would choose to promote their product by touting a feature that is illegal to use.
The tool itself is generic, somebody at FB just thought it is a bright idea to use "unionize" as an example in a marketing pitch.
Pretty sure this interpretation would amount to compelled speech. They are not entitled to facebook or their employer broadcasting their messages. They can use their own resources to organize.
Here in the UK government is pushing no rights employment under guise of fairer taxation. People providing services will be taxed as employees but will not have any workers' rights, including no right to unionise, no equal pay, no maternity leave and so on. Currently this won't affect existing employees, but from April nothing will stop employers from terminating their staff and issuing new NRE contracts on a take it or leave it basis. What's most bizarre is that even the unions are not too fussed about it, it's like they either don't believe this is actually happening or they just don't care. The legislation is in current Finance Bill and so far has met no resistance and likely is going to pass.
> even the unions are not too fussed about it
That's because it primarily hits contractors, who are typically not unionized and in fact tend to erode union presence.
Abuse of contractor agreements and temp-agencies has already been used for decades to effectively bust unions, that's really nothing new. Mass-rehiring could have been done already a long time ago, and likely was, by and large, where they could avoid the resulting bad press.
> The legislation is in current Finance Bill and so far has met no resistance and likely is going to pass.
Tories have a solid majority, and they are anti-unions as an article of faith. Even if Labour made a stink about it, tabloids would likely ignore it. The most pro-union Labour leader since the '80s spent 5 years being vilified precisely so he couldn't raise this sort of issue.
Workers re-hired on a contract could defend themselves against lack of employment protections by working outside IR35 and providing these protections themselves. The change takes this away as only the client will be able to decide how worker is taxed. This favour agencies over independent workers as agencies have more freedoms what business costs they can deduct from tax and what salaries to pay to their workers. This is a seemingly subtle change, that changes from benign to lethal.
In going to say it: you are probably a complete moron if you thought it was a good idea to put "unionize" on the slide for words you can block using your software.
I agree, having that specific word on a slide shows, whoever prepared it must have been out of touch - or, very in touch with what employers like Facebook want, but blind to the serious legal implications.
Probably some 24 year old intern with zero political nous
Deciding to implement such a feature is a bit weird too. Sometimes you must say no.
I don't think the idea of 'content control' is a bad one at all, as in you may want to filter out offensive content etc. It's just that it's very dumb to spell out the exact type of controversial words/content you can use to filter out, when just explaining the feature to the customer would be enough, they will get the idea.
> Facebook is quietly helping to set up a new pro-tech advocacy group to battle Washington
> The employee noted that many Facebook team members are now questioning the moral compass of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
At some point you need to look at the skull emblems on your uniform and ask yourself, "Hans, are we the baddies?".
IMHO I've never heard one of these stories where I thought Facebook was doing the right thing. Not once.
> IMHO I've never heard one of these stories where I thought Facebook was doing the right thing. Not once.
It's almost like the media is pushing some kind of narrative here against an entity they compete with.
Doesn't make a lot of sense. Unlike traditional blogs, Facebook isn't exactly a place that's creating rival news content. If anything, FB helps spread the news by being a platform for people to post articles and stories.
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It's my general impression that the ones who say "Don't worry, we care about you" ARE the baddies, they're not aligned with their own public image (why? I don't know, they should be, maybe they can't overcome their own egos). The ones you should be trusting are the ones who go "Don't trust me, but these are my principles"
Isn’t that the equivalent of the New Yorker cartoon with the wolf saying “I will eat you” and the sheep saying “I like him because he tells it like it is”?
Workplace is very very very annoying to actually use, btw.
Workplace is basically "facebook, but in a corp"; but all the nags and annoying notifications that kind-of work in Facebook, because you can chose what pages and groups to follow, just flat out don't work there, because you have to follow certain group. And you keep getting these annoying notifications that you cannot easily filter.
So you still have one stream of notification, as on Facebook, which is both "funny pictures haha" and "important company-wide announcement". So bad!
Workplace Chat is just Messenger. And again, it sucks in corporate settings.
Workplace is really, really bad UX.
As a contrary opinion, I quite like workplace. I definitely feel that, for me, it provides a much more effective way of staying up to date on what's happening compared to mailing lists and such.
I don't understand how one stream of notifications is different from email - at least with workplace there's some ranking going on.
With e-mail, you don't get an avalanche of "funny memes" pictures that some people tend to post to Workplace. (At least from my experience.)
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Interesting
I love workplace and hate that I have to use Slack at my current gig
In all fairness, it is not as if anyone is going to put up a big protest in the current economic circumstances. Not even Facebook employees can find another job easily in the current environment.
With 40+ million or so unemployed, and no end in sight for COVID at the moment, Zuckerberg can get away with whatever he wants over the next few months. "Never let a good crisis go to waste", as the saying goes.
So FB employees will follow what I call MZM - Mark Zuckerberg Method. Pretend like you care for a while, wait for people's short attention spans to automatically move on to the next big scandal, and then make the scandal of the day as the "new normal".
This tool is something that Facebook is trying to sell. To other companies. So you're missing the point with your superficial speculation as to the balance of power between Facebook and its employees.
For that reason, I'll keep the rebuttal short: laws are still valid, as far as I know. And this tool is blatantly illegal. Facebook employees also don't typically face starvation if they can't find a new job right away. And considering how rare unions are in the tech sector, and how common they are in, for example, automotive, my hunch is unionisation is more likely to happen at companies facing economic pressure.
Whilst it may be distasteful, it is entirely legal.
An employer cannot inhibit the formation or function of a union but are under no obligation to provide the facilities or platform to form one. What FB have done is akin to not allowing an organizer to use the company photocopier to print union leaflets
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While unemployment is high right now, I'm not sure it's affected most tech workers. I don't have numbers, so this is purely anecdotal, but almost all of my friends are in tech, no one has been laid off, and I just started job searching myself after being voluntarily out of the market since pre-plague, and I can barely keep up with interview requests.
I agree with the other reply to you, but to address your point directly, it is probably true that a lot of the frontline workforce can't afford to leave, but the people in leadership positions and very high-level/well-respected ICs still have options (including, given given FB's pay and recent stock performance, the option of not necessarily needing to work). That's a small group but each departure would be noticed and they'd have plenty of leverage.
Multiple things can be true. 1) It was incredibly stupid for anyone to use suppressing unions as an example. 2) Employers should have control over the content on their internal systems (people get fired for things they say over email/Slack/etc. all the time). 3) This headline is some serious click bait.
Did you reach Friday without having a good reason to dislike Facebook this week?
Well, here you are.
I'm not crazy about unions. I'm not convinced that software developers need one, despite regular revivals of the notion. But I do recognize that other people want them, and other industries even need them.
But this shit is Orwellian. As many things that have come out of Facebook -- and other big tech companies. I'm amazed that so many of these types of ideas make it as far as they do, and are generally met with tepid disapproval at best.
We're living in a Stasi wet dream, but many are trying to convince us that it's ok because these are private companies, rather than a government.
I guess we're past the point where codewords like "winnie the pooh" work but is NLP so advanced it can parse all the other ways human hint and indirectly communicate with each other?
Like can't I just send something like "hey coworker, lets do the thing that's opposite of ionized!". Or will the AI block my message (or more scarily, subtly rewrite it) and inform my manager?
This seems like tech with huge unintended consequences if perfected (even for their intended benign uses in workplaces) since it has the potential to be scaled up to censor society.
Or just... don't use your company's chat product to talk about unionization efforts?
I'm mostly agnostic toward unions for software workers. I think we need something closer to what professional engineers have than to what police/teachers have.
And then my employer started punishing people for talking about unionizing. That's when I became pro-union.
Often times, it's the clamp-down that turns people against you. "The tighter you tighten your grip..."
I find it incredibly unlikely that this tech has been perfected to such a degree. People have tried for a very long time to fix spam. It still gets through. I think that this is unfixable on a technical level, because people can simply change the meaning of words.
[used by] Walmart ... used by the Singapore government, Discovery Communications...
It's like a star studded cast of open-minded, benevolent enablers of the free flow of information...
>> [M]any Facebook team members are now questioning the moral compass of [its] chief executive ....
Nothing about FB or its chief executive indicates they're using a 'moral compass.'
I'm surprised anyone is surprised by this.
Facebook's goal is to make money. All the politics on the side are just virtue signaling for the purposes of recruiting, lobbying, and winning in the court of public opinion. When there's real money on the table, politics, privacy, etc. take a back seat for them.
Not saying that's the way it ought to be. But that's how it is for FB, and many of the so-called "progressive" companies.
As politicized as unions can get, to engage in union busting isn't just picking a political side, it's unethical. But yeah, your point still holds.
"to make the world more open and connected"
Clickbait title. The tool allows banning any word. There's nothing special about unionize in the tool.
You're right on the capacity to ban/control discussion around any word. However it is probably notable that Facebook chose to highlight 'unionize' and not 'football' or 'American Idol' in their sales pitch.
True but I think it was a bit tongue in cheek which I like in companies, would you rather them writing there Trump? From some reason I don't thing there would be such reaction if that what they wrote
There's one special aspect to "unionize": according to the article it was the word Facebook chose to use as an example in a presentation. If that's true, this title seems rather fair.
Maybe there needs to be a new concept of union. A police union is different from a writer’s guild.
Using mass moderation tools for keeping the workplace chat clean is the wrong solution in any case.
FB is known as a developer of censoring tech, so it makes sense that they try to monetize their expertise and sell tools to others who want to censor but can't or don't know how. I still find it pretty disgusting, though.
This feature isn't going anywhere, but they'll be much more careful in the examples that they use.
It will be like Q-tip ads that never show them being used to clean ears.
It's one thing to offer a censorship tool, it's another to specifically suggest "unionize" as a word to censor.
Facebook is the harbinger of the techno-dystopia of the next decade
Unionize!
It's the only way to bring inorganics down to parts-per-billion.
(what do we want? 18,2 MΩ cm! when do we want it? on demand!)
US looks more and more like China or Soviet Union. One difference is that the oppressor is not the communist party but corporations [0]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-walmart-union-survei...
We're going to have to start communicating in emojis to get around the censors just like in China.
Not on the topic of Facebook, but on employers who fear these trends so much that they want this level of control:
Fundamental social shifts cannot be nipped in the bud. The best anyone can do is understand them and ensure the changes are gradual, rather than letting them build-up to a big bang.
This is an oversimplification, but: early 20th century rise of communism was a violent backlash against the presiding monarchies and oligarchies who suppressed all attempts at gradual reform. Dissatisfaction with growing wealth disparity at the time was a fundamental trend that could not have been "nipped in the bud".
The current trend seems to be very reminiscent of this. When those in power suppress all avenues of gradual reform, fundamental trends tend to boil over in abrupt and often destructive forms.
Only question is: is what we're seeing today just a passing trend or a fundamental shift?
>>is what we're seeing today just a passing trend or a fundamental shift?
Facebook advertised to Walmart with union busting capabilities. Walmart has a union busting history going back 50 years minimum.
Looking at public opinion on unions, it seems to be rising the past few years, while membership keeps going down (in the US).
> Facebook advertised to Walmart with union busting capabilities. Walmart has a union busting history going back 50 years minimum.
I am pretty certain this particular feature went the other way around: Facebook has to work very hard to retain customers on Workplace, because they're competing against Microsoft (who have extremely deep pockets, and arguably a better product in many regards).
I'm willing to bet Walmart went to Facebook and told them to implement this feature, or they'd jump ship. Certainly that's what's happened with other Workplace features in the past, such as the ability to control access for hourly employees.
> This is an oversimplification, but: early 20th century rise of communism was a violent backlash against the presiding monarchies and oligarchies who suppressed all attempts at gradual reform.
It seems to me that we are in a death spiral here. Our political class seems to only care about re-election, and actually fixing problems deprives you of polarizing wedge issues by which you can divide the voter base.
Even better if you can blame the other team for blocking you (whether true or not), and this is blatant on both sides of the political divide.
The expense of passing laws, mixed with ethical copenhagenism, compounds this. What we should be doing is science: making predictions, running small-scale tests, iterating and ramping what achieves the agreed, stated objectives, and discarding what doesn't work.
But because passing a law is expensive, we don't, and we get eternal programs that seem almost designed to do nothing other than make problems worse while funneling money to a preferred political party's funding machine.
It is also political suicide to only benefit a test group: New York once tested a homeless benefit program by randomly selecting applicants to be part of either the experimental (in the program) or control (left as-is) group.
They helped as many people as they had funds -- there was no withholding of possible aid -- and merely labeled those not accepted as being in a control group.
Not a single person in the entire experiment was worse off than they were before.
The resulting data would have provided evidence as to whether or not the program was effective, and thus worthy of expansion, but the public outcry painted the organizers as modern-day Nazis, "making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable."
And the program was prematurely shut down.
If you can't science, you can't effectively solve problems.
I don't see this resolving in any way but ugly, and I very much hope that I am wrong about that.
> Dissatisfaction with growing wealth disparity at the time was a fundamental trend that could not have been "nipped in the bud".
Well, this was the whole idea of "Fabian" socialism, named after Fabius the Delayer: bring in reforms now, otherwise revolution will happen outside your control. A big part of the foundation of the UK Labour party.
It seems to me that the BLM movement is just such a "big bang" against a slow increase in racism and very long term failure to resolve problems in Americna policing.
> It seems to me that the BLM movement is just such a "big bang" against a slow increase in racism
Over the last few decades, there has been rapid _decrease_ in racism throughout the West.
Aren't people at facebook paid really well anyway, way above the norm. What is the motive in unionising, is it the politics of it or the pay that you want to change?
Unions are not only about compensation but also terms of employment. I see enough discussions on HN about non-competes, forced arbitration etc. where unionising would help.
It's not about unionizing at Facebook, but about unionizing at companies which use Facebook's product Workplace.
>What is the motive in unionising, is it the politics of it or the pay that you want to change?
IMO a software engineers union would accomplish things like productive social change. Most of the employees at facebook don't like Zucc's relationship with Trump? Well, strike. See how long it takes them to replace and onboard a bunch of scabs if 90% of your engineers aren't working.
Let's yewnionize.