Because if an employer already treats you well it just adds unneeded bureaucracy. I'm a big fan of unions, but I'm also a big fan of treating employees well. I would hope that my employees would never feel the need to unionize because I already hear their feedback and give them the benefits they want.
Unions create an adversarial relationship between labor and management. That shouldn't be necessary if labor and management are already allies.
> Unions create an adversarial relationship between labor and management
Isn’t there still an adversarial relationship between non-union labor and management?
So the story goes: Management wants to pay as little as possible for the most work and labor wants to get paid as much as possible for the least amount of work?
> Management wants to pay as little as possible for the most work and labor wants to get paid as much as possible for the least amount of work?
Well for example, at Netflix, management specifically paid extra for good labor and offered interesting problems, and in return we did extra work because we were motivated by the interesting problems and the great co-workers.
And at Google back in the day, they gave significantly more benefits than necessary to attract great talent.
So no, I'd say it's possible to create a non-adversarial workplace. The trick is keeping it that way as it grows, which is usually when unions come in.
What about Netflix's practice of using an employee until they aren't of any use then disposing them? A practice that applied to an employee that helped draft it?
Or how, when the pandemic hit, people realized even with all the perks a Google/Apple campus gives you it was still preferable to stay at home, or even move to a more preferable place, and avoid the tour bus commute? Not to mention the lack of transparency in pay which will stagger individual negotiation efforts when employers apply, or attempt to apply, a WFH tax.
Unfortunately management and labor have never really been allies. Even at companies I super, super love to work at and treat their workers well.. they still will do things like shocking layoffs directly from the board-- because the board doesn't care even if my manager and manager's manager etc. does.
Regardless of how adversarial it is, all work relationships are contractual negotiations. Without a union, one side of the equation has a boatload of money and expertise, and the other side is... you. Unions are about balancing that equation.
Sometimes employers use that money and expertise for good by figuring out ways to get employees extra benefits, for example inventing the 10 year option, which costs the company more but is better for the employee.
When two people who get along negotiate a contract they don't need lawyers if they aren't trying to take advantage of the other party.
> Sometimes employers use that money and expertise for good by figuring out ways to get employees extra benefits
A union doesn't prevent that. With a union, the employees have the power and expertise to have a say in those improvements too, instead of being at the whims of their bosses.
> When two people who get along negotiate a contract they don't need lawyers
I don't really know how to respond to this... above like five employees, every employment contract is drafted by a lawyer. My employment agreement at the big company I work for now is many dozens of pages long. I tried reading it, but it's just not my area. With a union, I would know that someone on "my side" of the table, who I pay and who works for me, has had a hand in drafting it.
And in the case of Fastmail, it’s already an employee-owned business (not sure on the AU/US split from the Fastmail/Pobox merge, but I believe that all shareholders are employees except one who is a brother of an employee). As a former employee of Fastmail (AU, 2017–2020), I’m a bit puzzled by this, and curious about it.
Because they shouldn't start their own union. Unions are across companies, having a single union for a single company doesn't make much sense. Take the UAW, they don't just cover General Motor, they cover all workers in that sector, giving them more power and influence.
It's the same with a Star Bucks union, that's silly and not cost effective. You have a "restaurants (and cafe's)"- union. Take McDonalds, they have an agreement with a union in Denmark, 3F. 3F covers fast food staff, construction workers, factory workers, paramedics and many more. They are hugely powerful.
There's a very strong, anti-union sentiment in HN IMO as it's contrary to the "bootstrapping" image venture capitalist that drives so much here. But if fellow readers put aside any resentment and look at it objectively: we prosper in ways due to past unions, and hopefully see it as a tool to push back on broken hiring/firing processes, at the least.
Low hanging fruit: We all think we are strong or can bounce back to a new job easily. What happens when we cross that line of ageism we hear about often? Not everyone is going to be able to retire in their 40s/50s. A union can push back in this practice.
What about not being granted lengthy paternal leave to spend with new family members and the state you reside in doesn't offer assurances?
What about the lengthy contracts we all fool ourselves into signing, thinking the companies won't come after us as long as we treat and be treated as "part of the family" and we leave it to luck and withstand unfair practices to not rock the boat?
We even tell ourselves "HR is not our friend, they are there to protect the company" and in the same breath say "unions are useless"
Like I've been hearing: It's better to start and be in a union when you don't need one.
Because software workers should start looking to form unions as large companies take to stagnate wages with large hire/layoff cycles that flood the employment market.
It’s not about unionizing to a better economy, it’s about protecting workers and preventing c-suite from making irresponsible decisions. Wage negotiation is just a benefit.
If the government doesn't protect your wages, you are left at the mercy and greed of capital. I can guarantee you that means you will be thrown under the bus the first opportunity they see fit, as soon as it makes a financial sense.
Look at the avalanche of layoffs that started with Twitter. Now the market is flooded with engineers, which makes our individual bargaining position worse. Employers notice this, and decide to stagnate your wages, saying: "well, there are many unemployed people that will be glad to be hired, just be happy you still have a job".
All of this is happening in the background of them racking in record profits and awarding their c-suite tremendous bonuses. And you are supposed to be grateful for the scraps. Does that seem fair? The government is too slow and pressured by lobbyists to act, and you are on your own.
By the way, the current cost of living crisis and the insane levels of inflation were both caused by the corporations' greed and the government's inability (or incentives to turn a blind eye) to curb them.
The mega corps used every excuse under the sun to increase their prices AND to fire people: bad macroeconomic situations, the wars in Ukraine/Palestine, high price of energy, and in that way they drove inflation up and unemployment up (thereby reducing the cost of labor). But when it comes to your salary, they don't care, as if you yourself are not impacted by inflation or layoffs.
Luckily, with unions, together, we are strong, and can at least partially retaliate to corporate greed. If anything, it's the unions that can bring the economy back, by allowing a reasonable salary for their middle class members. Thereby they are keeping funds within the country and not allowing the funds to be diverted towards the 1%'s offshore accounts.
This is why, contrary to what you claimed, you can unionize to a fairer, better economy, and this is EXACTLY how it works.
The megacorps created a situation in which thousands of people are jobless and with stagnating wages, while they hit record profits.
What is stopping Fastmail to employ the playbook of the megacorps and do a couple of rounds of layoffs? Or to simply stagnate the wages of their employees, citing "bad economic headwinds"? Or to fire some high earners and replace them with cheaper ones from the huge pool of the qualified jobless? That's right, nothing stops Fastmail, unless its employees are protected either by law, regulation, or belonging to a union.
In Australia labor protections, while not as woefully inadequate as in the US, are still not enough to give workers a good guarantee of safety and bargaining power. Hence, they formed a union. It's as simple as that.
I mean, you can be certain the big heads of companies are unionizing / conspiring against you (meeting behind closed doors to keep wages down, not poach, fix prices / rent, etc.).
It's fascinating how the lower class has been indoctrinated against them.
Yes, I can swear that we either have professional union busters among us, or people have been heavily indoctrinated to willingly take it from their corporate overlords.
I simply can't believe why even the high paid workers like the software engineers that we are are okay with a single grandpa on the top to take millions or billions of profit while we slave our days and nights creating value for them. They are nothing without us, their workers.
We deserve a much better share of the profits, and since our individual bargaining positions are weakened now, the only way we fight back is by doing it together.
Tell me how Tesla, then Spotify, then AWS, then Microsoft, then Facebook flooding the market with devs that THEY hired is not a coordinated (you could say "unionized") collective action from the corporations?
That created an ideal climate for the corps to stagnate wages, cut costs, bump their stock price, and for you to be competing with other fellow engineers for the few positions that they so gracefully bestow upon you.
How about WE also do some collective action and fight back?
I am anti-union, but not because of any indoctrination, but because when I was younger I worked in union shops before I got my first tech job and I saw how corrupt the union was, it was a complete racket, and it encouraged people to do mediocre work and mess around all day.
In theory I support all the goals people say a union has, but in practice most unions are a way to protect slackers and incompetents while bilking money from your paycheck to do little to advance your interests as an individual. One of my primary interests as a high-performer is working with other high-performers, meanwhile when I was at a union shop I'd get chastised by coworkers for doing /too much/ and being /too good/, because it made the rest look bad and increased expectations. There was a heavy heavy amount of bureaucracy caused by the union insisting on working to rule most of the time, which lead to everything being much worse every day in the workplace and generally being miserable as someone that just wants to get shit done.
I have been burnt out in my life a few times, but never by the workload, always by the work environment. Working in a union environment was a recipe for burn out, because I can't take a lackadaisical approach to my work, that's not my personality or who I am as a person. Anything worth being done is worth being done right and well.
My direct experience is that unions are run by, attract, and retain people who like to lolly-gag around with their thumbs up their asses and get paid for it, and basically have zero ambition or desire to improve the world around them for themselves or for others.
This doesn’t sound like a union issue this sounds like a company culture issue. I’ve worked in a company of slackers too and that’s usually the case when leadership doesn’t have defined deadlines or opportunities to work hard. Yes the majority are going to slack if the work place incentivizes it but I don’t see how that’s a reason to be against organizing around workers rights. There are entire divisions of Google for example that do nothing but churn out meaningless work and yet they are not unionized.
Can you expand on that? Because as an outside observer it seems that the Nordic model is primarily propped up by public-owned natural resource extraction enabling near-endless funding for universally available services and industry-wide (rather than company-wide) guarantees enforced by the unions, but nothing about the unions or their economic model drives their way to a better economy, rather they have the advantage of an external economic input unaffected by unions propping it all up.
I view unionizing as less about making the overall economy stronger, and more about sharing the rewards of a strong economy more equally.
The US economy is, for instance, quite strong overall. GDP per capita is high, substantially higher than other large nations like Japan, Germany, or France. The problem the average US worker faces is not that the economy overall is bad, but rather many issues of varying severity related to inequality and job security, like how they could be fired for almost any reason, legally speaking.
When you are in a Union, part of your money goes to the union in order to, hopefully, make things better for you. This means the relationship between Union leadership and the Union members is just as important as between Union leadership and the company.
Historically, we have seen Unions bring things like worker safety to the forefront and do numerous things to help people out.
More recently we have seen more of a mixed bag. For example, I was recently talking with someone where the Union negotiated pay/benefits they got was less (before and after union dues) than the surrounding non-union competition.
Note, I'm not saying I'm pro or against unions. Just that they are fascinating to look at and what you see can be nuanced.
Yes, unions are super nuanced and have their pros and cons. I think the writers strike on hollywood forcing them to pay for using written work in streaming is a good choice. I think gatekeeping participating in studios on union work effectively gatekeeps tv writing to the already-connected, also. Overall I guess unions are only as good or as bad as the people in them.
The writers' and UPS strikes were a good juxtaposition of where (private sector) unions work and when they don't. The writers got, approximately, squat. Most of them got laid off. The pay raises don't compensate for the months of lost work. The advantages of hedging with foreign content was laid bare. They struck when they had no leverage and it showed.
The UPS strike, on the other hand, was a resounding success. Swiftly resolved. Material pay and safety improvements. And a stable workforce for UPS in the midst of a broader labor shortage. Win win. (Yellow got fucked, but that's a different story.)
I would always rather be in a union than not. Sometimes unions can be opaque or byzantine especially in older industries, but what is always opaque is management. Having fair pay and time off is something I’d rather not leave to whoever happens to sit in the chair above me, because who sits in the chair above me can change on a whim.
I’m forced to pay taxes to the government and can’t opt out. Can still recognize that on balance it’s better in terms of building a larger, stable, more robust society than we’d have otherwise even with all the downsides that come with that coercion.
And yet, if you disagree you can still opt out of paying those taxes...by moving.
Don't like the way your city, county or state spends the tax money? You can vote to change it or you can move. You can even do it nationally by moving to another country that you think does it better.
We still get a choice.
On balance, having a choice is always better than the alternative.
That’s a specious argument because you can equally say “You can choose by switching industries or going to a non-union employer or starting your own company”. In fact all of those can be easier than moving. Have you actually tried emigrating? Often not so easy unless you’re rich or have links to another country. In fact, it’s easier to join a non-union job than it is to move to a country without any form of taxation.
Without unions, the logic of supply and demand favors larger businesses because they have greater purchasing power - they are already operating as a collective!
> They have to compete against other businesses to hire skilled positions.
Yes, but because they are a collective when they "purchase" skilled positions they are usually asking for more than one hire. Yes they are competing against other businesses, and the perspective hires are competing against the other hires. By the numbers, there are fewer businesses hiring then there are workers looking for that position. In other words, the businesses have more leverage then the workers in the form of purchasing power. The laws of supply and demand favor the business if there are no unions.
Edit: FYI: supply and demand for labor is equal when unemployment is at 0%.
I'm not sure if you mean that generally or just around employment and unions.
If you mean it generally then, just as a random example, should we make emission control on cars an optional extra? Let the free market customer decide if they want to pay extra for a catalytic converter.
The evidence doesn’t support this claim, and is why over 1000 VW workers in Tennessee indicated their intent to join the UAW after the UAW won historic benefits from automakers.
It's not a free market. Corporations perform collective bargaining.
Eliminate collective bargaining for a corporations, and then it would make sense to see things on an equal playing field.
The reason why employees jump from one company to another for salary boosts is because a corporation collectively bargains for salary, and this happens less so between different companies.
When an employee can just as easily pit one manager at a FAANG against another manager to bid for their salary to get a boost, as they can get a higher offer at another company to get a boost then this situation will be resolved.
As long as companies can say "you'll keep the same level and pay regardless of where you transfer within the company" because they've agreed to not complete against each other and instead collectively bargain for salary (and benefits) it will be an imbalance. And the only counterbalance is for employees to do the same.
The need for collective bargaining of labor is to balance the presense of collective bargaining by management.
Companies coordinating pay and benefits, anti-poaching agreements, etc. are all anti-competitive and illegal. So I'm not sure "corporations perform collective bargaining" is accurate.
Have you not seen the coordinated layoffs in tech the last 1.5 years? How is that not collective bargaining against tech talent?
They all used every excuse they have: overhiring, wars, inflation (which they partially helped create) to flood the market TOGETHER, thereby reducing the price of our labor. All while racking in record profits. All that perfectly legal, all that a form of them collectively bargaining to lower our labor value.
Seeing layoffs as a coordinated effort by companies to reduce labor value across the entire industry is so incredibly disconnected from reality I'm not even sure it's worth responding to.
I am not sure if it's worth explaining it either if you don't get it straight up, but I will try.
I am not hinting at a conspiracy here. I am merely pointing to the fact that when the megacorps saw an opportunity to:
- reduce spending by cutting off positions
- boost their stagnating stock values
- lower the bargaining power of their workers and have an excuse to keep their wages low
they immediately, did it, in a uniform fashion, in 3 big waves in the last 1.5 years. That tanked the developer market and boosted their stock.
We can only speculate how much it was coordinated, and how much they all saw the same opportunity after the unstable right-wing man-child that is Elon Musk burned Twitter to the ground. While probably nothing that they did was provably illegal, nevertheless, it was at least amoral and had the effect of dramatically cooling the market and stagnating our wages.
> reduce labor value across the entire industry is so incredibly disconnected from reality
YOU have to be very disconnected from reality to not acknowledge that there are 1000s of things that companies agree behind closed doors that we are just hearing about:
So what makes you think that they didn't have some friendly chats over the pesky tech workers, or "laptop class" as Elon so lovingly calls us. Somebody gotta put those ingrates back to their place, no?
While you might be happy to accept being downtrodden by your corporate overlords, and worship the psychotic man-children that Musk, Bezos, Branson and
Zuck are, in other countries we don't want to become like the US. A country where capitalism rages unchecked and throws workers rights, nature, and eventually the world under the bus in a never ending chase for growth is not how we want for us.
> How is that not collective bargaining against tech talent?
Well you see, there are these things called interest rates which effect the cost of borrowing.
And when those interest rates go up massively, like they did, this causes a completely predictable effect of it being more expensive to borrow and spend money.
And this has economy wide effects, that are what bog standard macro economics predicts.
You know who caused raised the raised interest rates?
The same megacorps that borrowed and overhired like insane during the pandemic to boost their stock price, now scream bloody hell and cut major portion of the people they just hired during the pandemic. That also boosted their stock price.Oh, and it allowed them to crank up their pricing models to the max, again boosting their stock price. I'd argue that it's the megacorps and their greed that are the major cause of the inflation that we experience recently worldwide.
And please, stop using "macroeconomic factors" as an excuse for bad management (who made them overhire during the pandemic), greed, and lack of vision.
When a CEO makes 300 times the salary of their median employee (https://www.wsj.com/business/auto-ceos-make-about-300-times-...), the best way for the company to save money is to fire their C-suite for the "leadership" that brought it to be influenced by "bad economic headwinds" in the first place.
Stop defending corporations, what they do is inexcusable, amoral, and probably, some day, and with some scrutiny, illegal.
First of all, the Phillips curve, really? That's a flawed boomer way to correlate inflation and employment percentage. Tell me you are like 3000 years old and out of touch with economy and the world as a whole without telling me. It's not related at all to my argument.
My point is the megacorps (especially in the energy sector) are one of the major causes of the current surge of inflation, regardless of borrowing, (un)employment or other macroeconomic factors. Below is some reading for you in an accessible format for your level of comprehension.
It's okay, you don't have to be well informed yourself if there are well informed people like me who can compile you some material to read in language understandable to you.
> First of all, the Phillips curve, really? That's a flawed boomer way to correlate inflation and employment
Economics 101 always starts from the basics.
It is indeed the case that all things about the economy can get more complicated.
But, when starting out from the beginning, it is important to learn the baseline foundations before moving on to more complicated special cases.
Kind of like how in physics they start you off with frictionless, spherical cows.
The same way of learning applies to economics as well.
Also, if is important to note how wildly different your statements are from what you were saying at the beginning.
If you agree that companies aren't just all deciding together to have layoffs at once, and it is instead a complicated result of interest rates (feel free to say it is the result of the models that come after the Philips Curve!), then I am glad to have moved you on your position.
> If you agree that companies aren't just all deciding together to have layoffs at once, and it is instead a complicated result of interest rates (feel free to say it is the result of the models that come after the Philips Curve!), then I am glad to have moved you on your position.
The companies did all decide to have their layoffs at the same time frame, it's a fact, because that's what happened. You can claim they all acted in unison, because they all faced the same macroeconomic environment so they were bound to make the same decisions. And I agree, partially.
However, what I miss is the admission that the very same companies very much created the very same macroeconomic environment that now "forces them" to do the layoffs. They can't just simply claim it's the invisible hand of the market that makes them do what they do, and they are merely poor passive and unwilling participants. The whole idea of the free market is a funny one. There is no such thing as a "free market", there is already (not enough) a lot of governmental and financial institutions oversight, otherwise it all will collapse in days, just based on greed and speculation.
Let me ask:
- Who made them overhire?
- Who made them overborrow?
- Who led them to believe that free money is always going to be there?
- Who made them chase potential growth instead of financial soundness?
You can claim it's the market which caused all this, and that's partially right, but that kind of claim absolves their "leaders" of the responsibility for their lack of vision and foresight and putting their workers into unemployment, stagnating their wages, and having the ultimate effect of tanking the industry.
My claim is that the same way the poor corps were forced by the almighty market to let go of their workers en masse and stagnating their wages, the almighty market's conditions are forcing us, the employees, to band together in unions so we can counteract that. If you replace "market" with "corporate greed", in my statement, it's all the same to me, it's what I meant.
You can think that the robotic sameness with which they all played the same layoff playbook is due to it "being the logical thing to do at the time", but all I see is a bunch of stupid, amoral douches without any governmental scrutiny or oversight in search of a payout who wouldn't hesitate to use any opportunity for a buck.
And yes, most likely they didn't have a Machiavellian meeting in the dark, behind close doors to discuss how to trod on the working class. The banal truth is probably that once the insane manchild Musk started trashing Twitter, the other ones just followed suit, simply because it benefited them at the time.
This is still coordinated action from employers, and the best way to counteract that is government oversight, worker protection laws, and unions.
> You can claim they all acted in unison, because they all faced the same macroeconomic environment so they were bound to make the same decisions. And I agree
Ok part 1 solved! People did layoffs exactly as econ 101 predicts, because of interest rates increase. Glad I got you there.
Now on to part 2!
> Who made them overhire?
If interest rates being high, causes companies to do layoffs, well then we should also be able to figure out that interest rates being low (as well as injecting large amounts of money into the economy, like what literally happened), causes them to overhire.
Exactly my point! When Econ 101 enters the room, humanity and morality are gone. reduced to mere numbers on a spreadsheet.
The fact that you try to explain away some of the worst examples of human greed as the companies simply following the market shows that in your head following the market trends absolves one of any moral wrongdoings. While in reality, the companies you so staunchly defend suffer from the problem that their executives can make bets on the future without bearing the responsibilities of being wrong. That's the problem of not having your skin in the game (same as the cause of the 2008 financial crisis).
- Overgrow? Stock goes up, cause we are growing.
- Layoffs? Stock goes up, because we are streamlining.
Nowhere in that cycle is the CEO held accountable or is the company inspected on actually being profitable or a bonus good for society.
> Who made them overhire?
Right, low interest and borrowing rates COULD be a great incentive if one wants to grow their company, but that's not an imperative, you don't NEED to do that. You can use the money for other things: as R&D or as part of a war chest, or simply raise the salaries of your workers (lol), or simply not borrow at all. You know one company that didn't overhire during the pandemic? Apple. Were they stupid? Did they not know about the wonders of economy 101? No. They simply were staffed enough, and knew there are other ways to bring shareholders ROI rather than growing like a bloated cancer.
You know why the rest overhired? Because there were no repercussions for their executives if their bet went wrong. Money was basically free, so why not? Econ 101 says it's the right thing to do in the pre-2023 market where value of the company was determined by potential of growth, and not as it should: by the simple formula of revenue - expenses = profits. If their bet was wrong (and it was very wrong), nothing could go wrong for them. Why not have 3 rounds of layoffs after the overhiring, it's not like the executives are ever held responsible, and it really can bump up the stock price and leverage better negotiation position with those pesky expensive developers. And that, my friend, is why you need unions and heavy governmental oversight, to counteract that Econ 101 means all humanity out of the window.
- Econ 101 would simply lead you to the conclusion that if your US workers are too expensive, the right thing to do is to replace them with cheaper overseas workers, UNLESS there is regulation or union stopping you to do so
- Econ 101 will lead you to the conclusion that when your offshore support team can be replaced with a chatbot, you'd throw them under the bus within a second.
- Econ 101 will lead you to the conclusion that overhiring to increase market value for shareholders is the right thing to do, despite you having no clear plan what to do with those workers, nor projects to put them on. "They'll figure out the details later, let's grow for now. Stonks go upp"
- And when the balloon pops, econ 101 will lead you to the conclusion that it's time to cancel the visas and destroy the livelihoods of the same people they hired a year ago.
All this in the chase of the dollar! It's disgusting.
That's why we need far bigger government control over these companies, and stronger, multinational unions than we have now. Recently I've been very happy with the unions in the nordics sticking it to Tesla: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-.... That's more of what we need to do, because it's better for us, the workers.
Otherwise, left on their own within the invisible hands of the free marker (what a load of crap, conjured by a mentally limited, jealous, angry and totally inhuman Scotsman, no wonder economists are psychos), the megacorps will race themselves to the bottom and drag us with them.
What in the world have you been reading to believe any of this?
There were a whole lot of factors involved in the subprime crisis, partially free market and partially government. At it's core, the banks were taking on risky loans. Banks package and sell loans as investment vehicles and in order to get these loans off of their books they mixed the risky loans in with the safer ones to sell them. As they sold and passed ratings approval from the institutions that were supposed to identify these risks for investors, other banks did the same in order to compete effectively because the free market incentivizes competition.
When businesses discover a new way to make money, others will adopt and impersonate that technique. That was the free market hand in the housing crisis because these investment vehicles were sold everywhere.
But the root cause was the risky loans in the first place. All banks had to do to remain stable was continue loaning money after verifying a high level of confidence that the borrowers could pay it back. But their hand was forced.
Similarly, if you look at the cost of higher education today it's entirely due to student loans. Supply of admissions at colleges remained relatively the same but demand was sky high. Normally increasing prices would slow demand, but the unlimited supply of student loan dollars allowed it to continually increase in price year over year. As prices go up, income goes up, compensation and construction increases and other institutions have to do exactly the same things to compete. So they do.
But all of that is enabled through the firehose of federal money tampering with the free market.
I don't know what you have been reading to believe all that, but this is mathematical in its consistency. Yes, regulations are sometimes needed but 9/10 times when there is a financial issue aligned around skyrocketing costs it is due to government interference. Whether housing, healthcare, education or otherwise it's always the same.
> But the root cause was the risky loans in the first place.
AKA not enough regulation from the government to the business.
> As they sold and passed ratings approval from the institutions that were supposed to identify these risks for investors, other banks did the same in order to compete effectively because the free market incentivizes competition.
All I read here is that the government needs to regulate financial institutions more and to put some guardrails on investments. And that the market competition is a race to the bottom where you end up everybody selling garbage to the public in order to cut costs, and then tank the economy. Sounds about right.
> Similarly, if you look at the cost of higher education today it's entirely due to student loans. Supply of admissions at colleges remained relatively the same but demand was sky high. Normally increasing prices would slow demand, but the unlimited supply of student loan dollars allowed it to continually increase in price year over year. As prices go up, income goes up, compensation and construction increases and other institutions have to do exactly the same things to compete. So they do.
Thought patterns like that is why the US has inaccessible higher education, while the rest of us in the civilized world have pretty affordable one.
> I don't know what you have been reading to believe all that, but this is mathematical in its consistency. Yes, regulations are sometimes needed but 9/10 times when there is a financial issue aligned around skyrocketing costs it is due to government interference. Whether housing, healthcare, education or otherwise it's always the same.
This is the funniest take I've read in a while! You surely can't be serious. The US has arguably the worst healthcare system in the civilized world, it's the whole premise of shows like Breaking Bad and the butt of many jokes.
Don't know what copium you've been smoking, but every time when there is a financial crisis, it's caused by the cowboys in the free market getting greedy, lazy or downright stupid, and it's always the government and the taxpayer that has to bail them.
That doesn't jibe with reality. Tech companies are making record profits at the same time they're laying off workers by the thousands.
Companies have been using "macroeconomic" conditions as an excuse for increased prices and job cuts, but it doesn't hold up to the most basic scrutiny. Their profits have been increasing far beyond inflation. Whether it's FAANG or Big Egg[2], the fix is in.
Anyway, good on Fastmail employees. Makes this customer feel better about the company sticking to its principles.
Are you saying that when interest rates are high, a company making record profits HAS to engage in price increases, wage freezing and layoffs, to satisfy a made up instrument explaining basic economy?
This is is like companies' belief that all employees are always on the bell curve, so the bottom x% has to get culled each year.
Anything to fit in the stats, right? I am actually inclined to believe that C level do think like that. This is both sad and terrifying, and also the reason why we need strong unions in the first place, so we don't end up merely a statistic on some boomer economy cultist's spreadsheet.
If you think collective bargaining has happened with corporations, why has pay at all these non union companies skyrocketed in the last five years? You're evidence is showing things are going extremely well and that the market is working wonderfully, especially for software engineers.
If the market is free, why can't employees decide to group together and negotiate a contract with a company that precludes the hiring of non-union employees?
Sounds like freedom of association with me.
You wouldn't complain about a corporation signing an exclusive contract with another corporation (even for supplying labor), why is it a problem when it's a collective of workers imposing that restriction rather than a corporation?
Is the free market only for corporations? Does everyone else have to just take what they can get individually?
In the United States, that only applies to specifically discriminating against protected classes. It would not apply to my hypothetical, except that "right-to-work" laws in many states specifically prohibit unions and corporations from making exclusive hiring agreements.
Federal law and jurisprudence prohibit unions and corporations from making exclusive hiring agreements. So called right to work laws allow non members to opt out of paying for the representation unions are compelled to provide.
> If the market is free, why can't employees decide to group together and negotiate a contract with a company that precludes the hiring of non-union employees?
> Sounds like freedom of association with me.
Hey as long as it goes both ways. It would equally be freedom of association to fire any union employees.
Oh wait, that's illegal.
So instead of that, a fair compromise is that it should be equally illegal for firing someone either if they join or don't union a union.
That's what right to work laws do. They give equal protections to both union and non union employees.
> That's what right to work laws do. They give equal protections to both union and non union employees.
No. Federal law and jurisprudence prohibit making union membership a condition of employment but compel unions to represent non members. So called right to work laws allow non members to withhold payment for the compelled representation.
So the whole point is that the other person who I was responding to was wrong on the freedom of association angle.
If is not freedom of association to only give protections to union members.
Instead the fair thing would be for it to be illegal to fire either union members or non union members for their choice of whether they join the union or not.
Also, laws that merely make union or non only shops disallowed would be the fair and equal freedom of association way to do things.
When employees have as much power as employers, there can be a free market. Without some form of employee power structure, that will never happen. Alas - only the very top percentage of employees in top industries can demand practically anything from an employer. Otherwise, why would so many workers be working for low wages without time off?
Unions are really powerful in corrupt and underdeveloped countries. Correlation is not causation, but still, it's frustrating for workers in those regions.
US-Finland expat here, and yes, I quite like my union. But I especially like my unemployment fund: 100 euros a year gets me 50% of my pre-tax salary for a year if I lose or leave my job.
Unemployment insurance plans
seem underrated in general by FTEs, both in the US and elsewhere. Without it, your ability to exercise both halves of "voice or exit" in the corporate world are severely curtailed. Like life insurance, it's relatively hard to game as a policy - it's usually pretty clear when you lose your salaried job, just like it's usually pretty clear when you die. I see few downsides, especially if you live cheap enough to pay all of your bills on that X% of your income anyway.
$100 euros a year does not get you 50% of your pre-tax salary for a year. That 100 might be what you paid, but that is not anywhere close to what that costs. Do not confuse the cost of something with the price you pay. At 100 per year they should just make it free. I'm not sure what the real cost of unemployment is per year (there are people who's job it is to figure this out - they have more data than me), but it is thousands per year.
Not totally sure what argument you're making here. Say you're a professional making $100k per year, with a 1% chance per year of losing your job. A 50% unemployment insurance policy like I described in a private market should cost you a little over $500/yr. That still seems like a good deal to me, and probably to most people.
What we need are Unions Squared. It’s a union for the union. If the first level union isn’t fighting for the workers they lose their membership. But… what if the second level union fails…
Unions tend amalgamate in much the way companies acquire.
In Britain we've had, and still have, some quite powerful unions that
formed from smaller groups in the 1970s, notably the Transport and
General Workers' Union [0].
Also, unions naturally cooperate and support each other forming a
formidable power bloc. My 1980s memories are of Flying Pickets and
Solidarity. Indeed, in Poland, Lech Walesa's Solidarity [1] was
arguably a key domino in the events leading to the overthrow of
communism in East Europe.
Or have elected officials. If the union isn't fighting for you...elect someone who will.
To me, unions are a lot like democracies. They can function very well, but need constant oversight by their constituents to ensure that they are working towards the interests of all members.
Not coincidentally, the strongest democracies are the ones with many laws regarding transparency to eliminate corruption.
There's a whole societal level aspect too, most Unions are net positive imo (better wages and conditions is better for everyone), but some definitely aren't. The FOP is the absolute epitome of this, if you've ever wonder how we ended up where we are in the US with our cops, look into what their Union does for them.
The SAG-AFTA and WGA strikes should be a signal to knowledge workers that not everything has to look like what they think a union contract is. Competitive pay and benefits can be individually negotiated while unions can represent their interests in the industry at large instead of just looking at compensation.
> where the Union negotiated pay/benefits they got was less (before and after union dues) than the surrounding non-union competition.
Yeah, that's a common anti-union tactic. Another one is passing on any better terms negotiated with a union to non-union workers to make it look like union membership gains you nothing.
Of course, when the union is gone, the largesse tends to end.
How is "I give my negotiating rights away to a union and they did a worse job negotiating than I did" a "common anti-union tactic?" It sounds like just something that happens from time to time.
Typically because the company is more benevolent to non-union workers in this case so to try to incentivize workers to not join or leave the union. If there was no union involved, then the company wouldn't be so benevolent to non-union workers.
It depends on the Union and where you're at. Some unions negotiate everything from vacation time to pay bands to how raises happen.
There are many places where the hardest worker and the laziest worker make the same. There are places where what you make is solely based on how long you've had the job and it's not negotiable.
A union that does right by its members means you have leadership who does that. I’ve seen numerous cases where that didn’t happen across several industries. The leadership ended up making bad decisions for the members.
Is the goal to improve wages and conditions for workers or is the goal that everybody's in a union? If companies improve wages and conditions for workers to deter then from forming or joining a union, then there is no need for a union. Unless you've fallen for partisan faith.
The goal is to improve wages and conditions for workers in a sustainable way so that the improvements are guaranteed to persist over time and not be a one time thing.
Basically it's important to not lose the war by winning one battle.
While I'm pro-union in general, not all unions are equal. Some are powerful. Some are weak. Back in the 1990s I worked part-time for a unionized grocery store chain and was a member of the UFCW. There were four contract negotiations while I was there, and each time the union rolled over and approved pay cuts, decreasing the top pay rate and slashing insurance benefits. Long-time workers saw their pay cut from $11.11 an hour to $7.50 an hour over the course of a few years. Many left or took an offered buyout during the last pay cut. The last cut finally affected me as well and I took that same buyout.
No one at my store liked the union, and I have to admit that it turned me off of unions for a while. The UFCW was weak and had little bargaining power over a company that was losing money and, as we later learned, was being embezzled dry by its president.
I totally get your perspective given your experience. There are unions with bad leadership, but think those generally come about by a disengage union membership. As a member you and your coworkers ARE the union and have the power to affect what it does and who its leadership is.
Several unions have gone through democratic reforms in the last few years to make their leadership directly elected and accountable to the rank and file members. The Teamsters and UAW being to examples, and it turned them from weak company unions into powerful advocates for their members.
Unions are groups of people, just like all other organizations.
It's also interesting to note that they work differently in different countries. For example:
> I was recently talking with someone where the Union negotiated pay/benefits they got was less (before and after union dues) than the surrounding non-union competition.
As far as I know this wouldn't happen in the Netherlands - unions have the legal backing to negotiate on behalf of all employees, member or not.
As a Fastmail customer: great! More power to them.
If anything, any negative reaction by Fastmail, the corporation will act as a signal for me to start thinking about moving away. You know a company is morally bankrupt if they fight their employees unionizing. I don't think Fastmail will do that though.
As a Fastmail customer (and software developer who is unfamiliar with how unions would/will work in this space), why would I not already be concerned? My first impression is "man, they must not be treating their employees that well if they decided they needed to bring in a third party to help them negotiate."
However - I'm not well versed in this area and willing to learn - why is this a 'good' sign?
Unions don't always indicate there is a problem in need of solving. It's just a group of employees agreeing to bargain collectively with their employer, which helps balance out the negotiation power between employees and the employer and creates a stable, well-defined employment relationship.
I struggle to imagine a scenario where employees would unionize despite already feeling like they are treated fairly.
The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that unionized employees can threaten production/profits as negotiation leverage.
Choosing that path means the employees have already given up on cooperation based on goodwill. It must take a very sour relationship to reach that point.
That’s a very US centric view. It’s quite common to join unions in most European countries. It does not indicate mistreatment at all. In the US, unionisation happens when all else has failed.
The relationship you're describing is balanced, as opposed to non-unionized employment, where management can threaten employment and healthcare as negotiation leverage and employees can't threaten anything.
One more reason health care should not be employer subsidized. You want insurance (and you should), go buy it: same as you get car and house/apartment insurance.
I agree that healthcare should not be employer subsidized, but I don't think there is any country in the world where you just go out and buy it like car insurance. Almost everywhere in the world it is a baseline government service, and in some rare cases it is a private service but heavily subsidized by the government when necessary. If I could replace the US system with something I would choose one of those options.
You can just go out an buy health insurance in the US, but it is typically a horrible deal. If you have a job odds are your company is putting in thousands of dollars if you go with their plan, get any other plan and you lose all the money. Self employed people do this all the time (generally via the exchanges), as do people who don't work enough hours to get employer health care (the later often get low income subsidies not available to most people).
Yeah, me and my partner were both freelancing for a time, and shopping for health insurance was terrible. Health insurance wasn't the only reason I shifted from freelance to employee work, but it was definitely a very large reason. Now my whole family is covered under my employer's health insurance (and my partner still freelances).
It is wacky that my ability to see a doctor is depends on my job. Losing my job and experiencing a medical emergency is a scarier proposition than losing a month or two of pay for me, tbh.
This is wrong.
This is like saying that the whole relationship of employer/employee is inherently hostile because the employer can threaten wages/livelihood as negotiation leverage.
Unions are kind of like HR that serves the employees
Unions almost never negotiate in the long-term interest of a business, they're collectively overly-short-term-focused cash/productivity drags on a business. If unions were truly long-term focused they'd be negotiating things like employee equity, but you almost never see that. Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
> Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
Do you have any source for this? It seems hard to believe but I haven't been able to find any studies yet. The best I've found so far says unionization has no impact on business survival: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/unionbf.pdf.
I'm also skeptical that you could really study this effectively, since non-unionized employees tend to benefit when unions are formed elsewhere in their industry. You'd need to compare a group of companies that unionized against a group of similar companies in the same time and place that didn't unionize and also were completely unaffected by the mass unionization of the first population.
That’s a lot of hand waving around an assertion conspicuously missing any supporting logic or data. Do you have any citations? Say, for example, a study comparing the actions of unions versus senior management over time? It’s not hard to find examples of unions accepting cuts to help the future of a business during a bad economic downturn, or executives focused on juicing the share price before they sell, so I think something rigorous would be better than trading vague generalities.
Also I'm not sure what "supporting logic" is, I presented my logic and you can disagree with it if you want (usually using different logic, which you haven't presented), but there's no such thing as "supporting logic".
That’s paywalled but the abstract is talking about stock market pricing, not the health of the company. Lower equity would make intuitive sense if workers have better compensation, but that doesn’t mean the business is less competitive or likely to survive.
> I don't think you understand what the price of a stock means ...
Well, the context here was your assertion that unions don’t act in the “long-term interest of a business”. Now, most people understand that share prices are bets on the future value, but also that it’s not a direct relationship because there’s an inherent tension between long-term and short-term interests. That plays out in questions about how much or whether to pay dividends (which has seen a big multigenerational shift in investor preferences), and whether a move which raises share prices is a long-term detriment.
We’ve seen a lot of the latter discussed here lately with tech companies doing broad layoffs to satisfy activist investors, despite research suggesting that companies making unforced layoffs tend to underperform over the long term.
The union/management relationship is maybe inherently adversarial in the sense that they represent different interests, but this doesn’t need to be hostile. The idea is that the unionized employees have the ability to threaten collective action, if they need to.
Maybe neither side is planning on doing anything hostile, and they are all happy to have things clearly defined.
It is hard for me to imagine a situation where I feel like I am being treated well at a company and then decide that I want to add another level of bureaucracy and additional fees by joining a union.
Edit: to add, I am not at all opposed to unions. They provide a valuable service in many industries.
Is it hard to imagine collective bargaining improving pay and working conditions above minimum satisfaction? Is it hard to imagine anyone purchasing any type of insurance?
It is hard to imagine those things if I feel like I'm being treated very well already, including above market pay, excellent working conditions, and 100% of insurance premiums being covered by the company.
I can absolutely see the benefits of a union if I felt I was being paid below my worth, if I was dealing with poor work conditions, or had no company provided insurance.
Which is the point of this conversation, when things are bad, you REALLY want a union. When things are good, it's hard to see the value of a union.
> The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile.
Definitely not how it works in Europe. Unions make it easier for companies to have predictable relationships with their workers, and sector-wide unions mean that a company doesn't have to worry about a labor agreement putting it at a competitive disadvantage.
Right, Unions work differently in different countries. Unions in the US spread the management is always evil message, and treats all negations as a hostile encounter. As a result many of us in the US have a bad impression of unions. However in Europe they tend to be less hostile and so make more sense both for the company and the workers. Different contexts mean different results from what looks like the same thing.
> The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that unionized employees can threaten production/profits as negotiation leverage.
The boss/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that bosses can threaten employment/wages as negotiation leverage.
I'd bet a lot of money that it's around a new on-call requirement with no pay increase that no one will put their name on promoting but managers are seeing appear on their all-manager meeting agenda.
The best time to form a union is when things are going well at a company. It’s easier to use your union to solidify existing benefits than to ask for new ones.
You unionize in the good times so you’re protected in the bad times.
(Not saying that’s what happened here, just saying you cannot really judge what unionization means from the outside)
As for why that’s a good thing in general, that depends on how you feel about unions. If I have the choice between union made goods and non-union made goods, I buy the union made goods. So I’m always happy to see a company unionize.
The decision to unionize isn't about a "third party." It's a decision to negotiate collectively versus individually. Collectively you have more bargaining power, it's a pretty straightforward and obvious calculation.
That is also why you might not want to join a union. If you can show you are better than someone else (or at least think you can show), the union is likely to force you to get the same pay anyway. Unions often have promotion rules that harm anyone seeking to move up. Of course if you are content this doesn't matter.
Which is why unions work well for assembly line workers: the line moves at the speed of the slowest person on the line, so there is no way to be better than average. (the company/union can fire someone enough slower than average)
You might in fact be as incredible as you think you are.
Even then, the lift from collectively bargaining probably outweighs your individual competitive abilities.
Also, the union doesn't have "promotion rules." The members themselves at those unions decided that's what they wanted to negotiate with their employer into a contract. There's no union rule that says that's what members on the bargaining team have to prioritize. The bargaining team can even prioritize performance pay! I will, however, grant that the very nature of democracy (in this case, workplace democracy) means some people will disagree about what to prioritize.
It is potentially a good sign if Fastmail management voluntarily recognizes the union - that would imply that management and employees are on relatively good terms and the union is not asking for enormous changes.
Even if you love your company, love how you're treated, and don't want anything to change, forming a union still gives you two big advantages. First, it gives employees more influence and voice over the future of the organization, and second it protects the current conditions you love so much and makes it much more difficult for management (which can change at any time) to take them away in the future.
> “We want to establish certainty and codify all of the things that we like about E&E into this new world order,” said reporter Emma Dumain. “E&E News is the most family-friendly newsroom I’ve ever worked in,” she said. “I feel supported by my editors as a working parent and that support helps me be a better journalist.” She wants to make sure everyone has the same support, no matter who their editors are or who owns the company.
> Leah Nylen, who has been involved in four company sales over 15 years, said that each one led to changes in benefits, bosses and sometimes layoffs. The day the Politico sale to Axel Springer closed, management informed workers that because of an oversight their 401K would be frozen for the rest of 2021. “If employees had had a seat at the table, I doubt something as important as our retirement and healthcare savings would have been missed,” Nylen said.
> With union recognition nailed down, Organizing Committee members immediately began informing coworkers about the new rights that brings. A legal protection known as “status quo” requires management to maintain the same wages, hours and working conditions that existed when the union was formed, unless they negotiate an agreement with the union or reach a final contract. “Just a week-and-a-half after going public, we have all of these new protections,” Snyder said.
How's it going two years later? Well, not great honestly, they still haven't agreed on a contract, but Politico is still going strong and I imagine most people there are still happy with their decision to unionize.
Here's an article about voluntary union recognition: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/voluntary-recogniti.... This is not an unbiased source, but you can ignore the framing if you want and just use it as a big collection of links to voluntary union recognition examples.
"quit or stfu", not being able to meaningfully bargain at place of employment or anywhere else, is not dignified. If you got better solution for this than unions, fine, just say.
That's not what I said nor was responding to. The GP asserted that companies have a fiduciary duty to avoid unionizing, and my counterargument is that such activity could be illegal which is actively detrimental to a company's fiduciary duty.
No. The post represents a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of what fiduciary duty is, but that isn't surprising. It seems to be misapplied or misunderstood in the overwhelming majority of times it comes up in conversation.
I mean that any competent CEO would oppose a union forming at their company because it will objectively be bad for the shareholders of that company. Any CEO who encouraged or did nothing to resist a union forming because of their own moral convictions would be breaching their duty to do what is best for their company. I would argue it would be grounds for firing them
Fiduciary duty is the requirement that the managers of a company act only in the best interest of that company and its owners. It would be clearly against the interests of the company and the shareholders to allow the employees to unionize
No, fiduciary duty is broader and more subtle than that.
Your second statement is categorical enough to be silly. In some cases it is true, but if you think a bit on it you'll soon realized it's not hard to construct cases where it is false.
As for fiduciary duty, there are several aspects in this context, which applies to all of your D&O's not the CEO particularly (and less concretely so employees). One is a duty of care (you have to do the job properly). The aspect you are talking about boils down to a duty to act in the best interests of the corporation as you understand them as a professional. That means that you cannot act in the best interests of any stakeholder, third party, or yourself at the expense of the rest. You can't collude with the employees to screw over the shareholders, or the with the majority shareholder to screw over the others, or with your brothers company for a contract, etc. etc. etc. This is commonly mistunderstood to mean "maximize short term shareholder value", but that is not correct. Now as the CEO the board has the right to fire you if they can (majority) agree that they don't like the strategic or tactical direction you are going and you refuse to change tack, but none of that means you have failed a fiduciary duty. If you make a decision and can back it up with experience etc. in some way that other people in your position would likely agree with being a viable plan, you are not in breach of fiduciary duty.
There are a bunch of other things, e.g. disclosure & loyalty, good faith action, etc. but you are getting hung up on the one that is usually misunderstood as a narrow interest in the shareholders.
You would have to be collosally incompetent or disingenuous if, as a CEO, you believe that it is in the shareholders best interest to allow your employees to unionize. Any competent board would fire such a CEO
This lacks imagination, the world is a more complex place than that. At any rate, a) this is not fiduciary duty and b) we hit diminishing returns a while ago.
The author does not mean "fiduciary" in the sense of legal obligation, but rather that of protecting the owner's interests. In the case of Fastmail however the two are much the same, the company being to some extent employee-owned.
Do you have any examples of case law to support this claim you’ve made? As a layman my understand of fiduciary duty is not very good, it is easy to imagine how things might in the long term interest of the business, or might not be, and it seems like it would be extremely difficult to prove either way in court.
I think people just come at it from an odd point of view. Would trying to minimize AWS bills seem morally wrong to people? No, it wouldn't. But when you try to lower bills of other suppliers, say labor rather than compute, it is suddenly evil.
I'd say that's because reducing labor costs almost always directly affects the employees' quality of life.
This does not apply to reducing your material or compute bills. I can see how in the long run, a third-party making less money from you might affect their employees, but that's more of a long-term, weak and indirect effect.
Corporations aren't people, they don't need food, healthcare and happiness.
What is the point of the economy? To benefit capital exclusively? If you believe that is the case, then I can understand your point of view. If the point is to benefit everyone (albeit to varying degrees), then minimizing labor costs any more than necessary is a moral failing.
Congrats to the team! This might be the reminder I needed to finally subscribe. Gmail’s spam filter has been nonexistent for the past month (300+ clearly spammy email reaching my inbox).
I'm a happy Fastmail customer, but I would not recommend them on the basis of their spam filter. It's competent but makes at least a few mistakes a week. Google's was better for me.
I had the opposite experience. Gmail's filter was useless, letting in tons of spam, and then putting normal emails from family members, also using gmail, and who I have emailed many times in the past, into spam. Fastmail's is drastically better for me.
For me Gmail takes way too much legitimate email and sends it to spam. Fastmail strikes a better balance by sending little ham into the spam box, but letting a little bit of spam into the inbox.
for me both are far better than o365, which even marked legit business mail (o365 invoices :)) from microsoft itsef as spam!
I'm generally content with fastmail, but the webmail would need some polish. (and by polish I do not mean the user hostile react rewrites MS and Google are pushing)
- Hungarian translation is not the best (they provide it, thus I use it). It has missing parts, and sometimes problematic mistranslations. Localization (date format and date conventions) is sometimes incorrect in the calendar.
- Some calendar workflows are clunky and unintuitive.
- some other similar UX papercuts (don't get me wrong, others have theirs too, but it would be nice if fastmail would be better).
- The most annoying: if I'm logged in I need to open a private browser session to see their main site, as it instantly redirects me to the app, and I cannot access resource from within.
I can’t speak to the spam filter itself, but having masked emails goes a long way to sandboxing potential spam sources. I’ve been quite happy with fastmail.
I just had the reverse problem - gmail decided to stuff half of the mail for 2 days into spam, and I had to spend half an hour manually extracting them back. No idea what happened, most mails were from previously known good addresses. That said, I rarely get spam that's not intercepted nowadays, no more that 1-2 per day.
LinkedIn says Fastmail has 116 U.S. based employees. I may be completely off base here, but if you're that small an org and employees feel the need to form a union, wouldn't that indicate a significant problem with company culture?
There's power in bargaining as a collective, whether you're a collective of ten or ten thousand. Either way, it helps with the power imbalance between employees and management.
There's also cost in coordination and agility--this is fundamentally true of any new bureaucracy, company, system or process.
I'm reading this as a sign of cultural stress unless we have evidence to the contrary. (EDIT: I didn't realise Fastmail has almost 1,000 employees, with many remote. That comes closer to where structure is merited, though I'd still argue that this points to dysfunction in the U.S.-HQ bridge given only the Americans are unionizing.)
> kind of coordination that requires less representation does not have your interests in mind
Take this to an extreme: a start-up. A union is overly bureaucratic. I’d wager a union doesn’t start making sense until the lowest-ranking employee ceases to have on-demand access to senior management.
That's quite small. Having worked at a few companies in the 30-50 employee mark, while it is true that I could speak to management almost any time, it was also obvious that they were very busy.
> companies in the 30-50 employee mark, while it is true that I could speak to management almost any time, it was also obvious that they were very busy
Sure. But if you had a grievance, you could voice it. And if you needed to pull some like-minded coworkers together to underline it's shared, that could be done ad hoc. If a 50-person company needs a union (because e.g. management refuses to listen) that's a problem. That's my point.
I don't know where the delineation is. But there is very obviously a point below which unionization is a sign of dysfunction. For the same reasons a middle-management layer or expansive C suite, below a company of a certain size, is a sign of dysfunction [1].
> But there is very obviously a point below which unionization is a sign of dysfunction.
FWIW I don't think that's obvious at all. Even a small group of happy employees could form a union to set the current policies everyone is happy with in stone and protect themselves and future employees against potential changes in ownership or a downturn in company health.
> Even a small group of happy employees could form a union to set the current policies everyone is happy with in stone
I'm not arguing it couldn't be done, nor that it doesn't have benefits. Just that it has costs, and those costs at a small level should outweigh the benefits. While they're doing that, and maintaining that structure, they could be doing something else. (Something more enjoyable and lucrative.)
Sure, but now you've changed your point from "very obviously" to "it's a cost-benefit analysis." It's not hard to imagine how someone else's analysis might end up different from yours (say, based on their previous experience, or experience of others in their industry).
Wow. Considering they're not a US-based company this seems amazing (yes, I'm aware that unicorn startups need a zillion people because...reasons, but this is Fastmail not a unicorn).
Down voting for disagreement is base behaviour. Of course nothing is stopping somebody from being base on HN, neither in real life. We've all met our fair share of rude and ignorant people. They're not going anywhere.
No, you're on a site whose norms include using votes to express agreement, with good reason (to avoid cluttering otherwise curious conversations with rote and superficial objections). You're stridently ignoring those norms. The arrow of rudeness isn't pointing the direction you think it is.
Whatever norms doesn't change the fact that it is simple minded behavior to down vote somebody's opinion. That's the answer to the question he/she asked. Being base is the norm - online and offline. That doesn't mean I'm going to strive for that behavior.
If you don't understand the norms, you should take the time to learn about them before composing these diatribes. You're a guest at the party who's entered the living room and decided to start haranguing the furniture arrangement.
I was having a conversation with the other poster, in fact just answering their question. I am a guest, as everybody else here, just don't care much for base people.
I am a software engineer who used to work in a "unionized" workplace. It was quite nice, and the union would negotiate increases in time off and fight against policy changes that were worse for us. The union leaders were elected every few years (very important IMO) and the union was only within the (rather large) company; there was no affiliation with a larger union.
Which country were you in at the time? Union laws vary substantially by country so I think this is relevant to understanding different unions and people's experiences with them.
Yeah, I have the choice of about 3 unions where I work, all of which are big unions because there can only be one per industry in Australia. All three have wasted way too much time and members' money on vanity projects that I don't want to join.
Don't know about "designed to" but corruption and abuse of power is absolutely a consequence of this, indeed. Almost feel that this was designed to decredibilise unions (which are essential to democracy in my view) because they ended up strongly reassembling mafias: pretending to protect the people while actually only looking out for your own interests...
It was Germany. I put the union in quotes because the direct translation is Works Council.
I think that some software engineers in Germany are covered by the larger unions like IG Metall and Verdi, but my understanding is mostly for those that work in companies that make physical goods like Mercedes, Siemens, etc.
Bron seems like a good CEO. He's come up through the ranks at FM, so hopefully he's fully onboard with the workers. I had an account when they first got off the ground, survived the Opera days, and built their little email empire. I followed Bron and RobN on Twitter and on blogs.
Not necessarily; maybe it's worth it to establish the union during good times so that if/when bad times occur later (under a less-friendly CEO) they'll be ready?
Slightly off topic, but could someone explain why employees in the US keep having to form their own union at each company, rather than the employees just joining an existing union? If I wanted to join a union where live, I'd just pick a relevant union, go to their home page, and click 'join'.
And then what other than paying the fees? I'm not pro union, but without organizing with your peers in the same company I even see less point. The main aspect that I could see in unionizing is representing the voice of the workers of the company together. If you're alone working with an external entity or if your colleagues all join different ones I can't see any way of it working.
At least in Germany we have "sectoral bargaining" enshrined in law. The relevant union and the coalition of employers negotiate a deal (sometimes this process involves strike actions, if common ground can not be found initially). This deal automatically applies to all employees in the sector (i.e. metal workers).
Some sectors do not have sectoral bargaining but certain unions have agreements with some subset of employers in that sector to have all their workers covered by any deal that is struck. The incentive for employers in those sectors (i.e. automotive) to join these agreements is that desirable employees usually prefer unionized shops, as they have better overall compensation packages and perks. Also they might not want to become the target of strikes.
Not directly tied to unionization, workers in companies above a certain size have to be included in decision making (i.e. in public companies worker representatives get board seats) so a pro-union position often has a certain groundswell of support within a shop.
For historic reasons, in some sectors union membership is part of the "culture", as well. Historically, unions have had an important role in upwards social mobility, popular education, culture, etc.
That's how unions work by default everywhere else too. It's just more common for entire industries to be unionized (through momentum, not outright obligation) outside the US.
The way US system works, even when the entire industry is unionized, your union membership is generally through the "local" associated with your employer, not something independent of your current employment, with very few exceptions. That local may be part of an umbrella union that also covers the rest of your industry (or even a wide range of different industries, e.g., AFL-CIO or SEIU.)
My employer (Irish company) states in the employment contract they only recognise one union here in Ireland. I'm not familiar with Irish (or EU) law on unions but it did surprise me they were so specific.
Edit: although I'm in tech I understand it covers everyone regardless of role
If you are the only member of a particular union in your company, what additional leverage does that give you? You don’t gain any ability to do collective actions, right?
I'm not GP, but we're from the same country. There's multiple benefits from being unionized, even if you're the only one in your company to be in that particular union:
- Your union is likely to negotiate salaries and benefits with the umbrella organization that the employer is part of. Strikes are usually some employees across a range of companies, rather than everyone at a single company.
- If not, then the union can help you negotiate.
- The union will give you legal aid if needed, whether it's advisory or for a court battle. We have very strong worker's rights, but sometimes companies try to bend the rules.
- The union will arrange relevant seminars, courses etc. which are usually pretty cheap.
- Several parts of the Working Environment Act only apply to workers whose unions have agreements (tariffavtale) with the employer. For example, if you have such an agreement you're entitled to 5 weeks of vacation instead of just 4 weeks and 1 day.
There's a process you have to go through for a union to gain collective bargaining rights, I can go and join a union today, but they won't have the legal right to bargain between me and my employer unless they've gone through the process to become recognized. (Companies can voluntarily recognize a union but they are legally not required to, so they don't)
Also usually when you hear that some group has 'formed their own union' they're still affiliating with an existing Union take the recently formed VFX Union, they're affiliated with IATSE.
Since it's more all-or-nothing per workplace, your membership is basically tied to the shop. And for some of these newer workplaces, they might not want the baggage that comes with some of the older unions.
Some US unions work on a "hiring hall" model where your membership is not tied to a workplace. This includes electricians and plumbers and other tradespeople. And also actors and writers. But you cannot just join them if you want to. Generally you have to follow a several-year application or apprenticeship system.
Also of note is that the US doesn't really have sectoral bargaining like, say, France does. This would prevent scenarios where nonunionized companices in a sector can start up and outperform established unionized ones just by hiring desperate people and paying them below the fair rate.
The people who get hurt the most in that case would be the employees who aren't hired and the customers who are not served by the business that therefore does not start.
Yeah and then all the companies that pay their workers well are undercut by those that don't and all the now-unemployed workers have no choice but to work for less than a fair wage. Many such cases.
The US does in some sectors! But this traces all the way back to when two competing union organizations in the US (the AFL and CIO, before they merged) had major beef about how unions should operate. In the end, the CIO's model mostly won out.
It would be really hard to do sectoral bargaining in the US because there are vastly different costs of living across the country but each state is required to have free trade with each other. So to have New York workers bargaining for Alabama workers or vis versa would be a disaster.
It should also be worth pointing out that countries with sectoral bargaining also have huge number of self-employed and sole enterprise people. France has something like 2-3 times the number of self-employed people, and my understanding is that it's one of the only ways people in these economies can "opt-out" of bargaining agreements.
In the US unions only exist as a legal entity after a collective bargaining contract has been reached.
In most other countries, before that point workers can still be union members “at large” get support from members in other workplaces and from the central union in their quest to gain recognition in their workplace.
Many US unions only represent you if you're in a unionised shop, but unions can represent you without a collective bargaining contract. The only issue is that legal rights are more limited.
The IWW is an example of a union that accepts members from non-union shops both in the US and many other countries.
Does anybody know what motivated the unionization effort? This is relevant to me as a Fastmail customer, because if the employees aren't being treated well that's a very poor reflection of the company.
I don’t know anything special about it, but I wouldn’t interpret it necessarily as saying anything negative about Fastmail. For example, lots of perfectly nice companies get bough by giant behemoths. For all we know, Fastmail might have perfectly nice management that understands that future owners, rather than them, are the enemy.
Top-level management doesn't even have to be "the enemy" for a union to be very nice to have—companies of more than like 30 people are gonna have a shitty, abusive middle-manager somewhere and a union gives employees cover to resist their bullshit at far lower personal risk.
"No, I won't be (coming in on Sunday/'just doing this one extra thing before leaving after hours'/breaking company policy and legal requirements for safety or waste disposal or whatever), please see [section of union agreement], if you'd like to continue this discussion I can bring in my rep and, as required by policy laid out in [other section of union agreement], your boss, and we can all have a chat about this" will get a lot of abusive pricks to tuck tail and STFU in a hurry, with low risk of effective retaliation.
I wouldn't read too much into it. Unions are just a counterweight to corporate interests in the best case. The places that union bust out in the open are usually the worst offenders, and Fastmail doesn't seem to be that.
Fastmail is, IIRC, employee owned. A lot of works on employee-ownership (coop or otherwise) suggest using union structure as a mechanism for procedurally protecting workers (both for things like negotiation and for due process purpose for adverse action, etc.) preemptively as a check against problems happening in the top-down the employees-as-owners -> top management -> line management -> employees-as-workers chain, rather than in reaction to problems.
It is not necessary for a company to be especially bad for a union to be desirable. Some workers simply like a fair bargaining arrangement and having more say in their workplace.
I don't have any insider knowledge at Fastmail, but the fact that a labor union could get organized and come into being without any drama from the company probably indicates that the upper levels of the company respect their employees enough to not fight its creation. Seems good, imo
Does anyone have any resources for stopping unions from being formed? I've started taking steps to join the "Union" at my FAANG, in hopes of sabotaging it.
I can't think of anything worse for software developers than having some politically motivated organization to deal with in addition to management.
You can see how well unions have gone for software engineers in the past, (Boeing is one example that has a strong union) and compare it to the working conditions of non union places.
I understand it's 'en vogue' to support unions as a display of political affiliation, but the evidence is quite strong that it's bad for software engineers.
I could see value in unions in some industries, but I would actively fight against one as a software engineer. I completely agree with the rest of your comment, this has become a new virtue signal, and a way for the worst among us to leech away value and hold us back.
But I doubt you’ll get any advice for stopping it here. hn has turned into a midwit reddit when it comes discussion quality. I assume you should be allowed to continue working without joining the union or paying their dues.
How is it bad to have job security and collective bargaining rights?
> I can't think of anything worse for software developers than having some politically motivated organization
Unions are not politically motivated. They are a social collective response from workers to counteract the disproportionate power imbalance between employees and corporations. All great advancements in worker rights were done by some kind of collective organized pressure from workers vs employers.
> Does anyone have any resources for stopping unions from being formed?
Your servility wouldn't help you a thing if your employer decides to go through another round of layoffs. You are just a disposable cog in the machine for them. You could be next, and yet you are trying to disband the only group of people that are incentivised to help you: your fellow workers. It's also within workers full rights to unionize, this is something that your predecessors fought tooth and nail to obtain. Shame on you!
>How is it bad to have job security and collective bargaining rights?
Unions provide job security for low performers, but do not protect against layoffs. You can check and see that plenty of people were laid off by the large tech companies all across the world, many of which who were in strong unions.
>All great advancements in worker rights were done by some kind of collective organized pressure from workers vs employers.
I can think of plenty of things that weren't because of unions. Stock options and RSUs have literally changed millions of engineers lives for the better, that was done because of the free market, not unions.
>You are just a disposable cog in the machine for them
And yet FAANG companies have had very generous severance packages, despite not having unions.
>yet you are trying to disband the only group of people that are incentivised to help you
No, they're only incentivized to help me when I am helping them. If I decide not to be in the union, that same group are going to work against me to get me fired or make me literally unhirable (by not being in the union).
That's what you're not understanding, there is a cost. The cost is that the union decides who is in the union, and tries to LIMIT your ability to get work if you don't go along with what they want!
That's why I'm going to do my best to ruin their chances of forming.
> I am talking to a mid 20's conservative childless male from the US who recently managed to join FAANG (congratulations).
I'm in my early 40s, coding professionally since I was a teen, so over 20 YOE, lived through multiple downturns. Didn't vote conservative at all last election.
I have a child, and have extensive experience in both big companies and small startups.
>And I can guarantee you, your FAANG is just waiting to replace you with a cheaper, younger and more malleable version of yourself, ready to hustle for less money and put more hours in.
I mean, they're welcome to, but they could have hired someone for far far cheaper than me, and they didn't. What you might be thinking of is Boeing, the place with an engineering union. Why don't you talk about how it's better to go work there?
I think it's likely you're a lot less experienced than I am in tech, and once you get some more skill and experience you'l understand what the rest of us are talking about.
So all of the comments I've seen so far are (predictably) armchair snark from both sides of the political spectrum. Perhaps the reason for this is that there is a very conspicuous lack of information here. For all we _actually_ know, this could be a fake account posting a fake announcement to a fake twitter.
1. Why did the Fastmail employees decide to form a union? Were the working conditions poor? Was the pay below market rate? Abnormal working hours? Not enough vacation or maternal/paternal leave?
2. Has Fastmail released a statement on this? What is their position?
3. Who comprises the leadership of this union?
4. What is the charter or mission of the union? (What are they seeking to accomplish or remedy?)
5. What percentage of Fastmail workers are members of the union? (Does the union have a target membership percentage?)
6. Is the union seeking to renegotiate the employment contracts of its members at this time? If not, are they expecting to in the future?
7. Will it be possible to work at Fastmail in the future without being a union member, or will union membership be (formally or informally) compulsory?
8. Who are the members of the union? (By job type, I mean. Engineers? HR? Janitorial staff? Managers?)
9. Does the union charge dues and how much?
10. Are there union meetings and if so, how often?
11. What action can a union member take if they disagree with a union decision, or the overall direction the union is taking?
I am going to assume your questions are in good faith.
While I know nothing about this specific campaign, I am a member of the union they purport to be joining and have worked on a half-dozen new organizing campaigns. Local 13000 is a real local, and it would make sense for them to be joining it.
Most of your questions can be answered by reference to labor law and the union's internal "law" (i.e. the CWA constitution, sector and local bylaws), both of which are available online. Here is what we can say at a high level based on those resources (and in a few instances, my personal experience of the union).
#3 - Per CWA guidelines for locals engaged in new organizing, the leadership of the unit will be an organizing committee that represents each work group in the sought bargaining unit. The typical guideline is a committee of at least 20% of the sought unit. The CWA does not go public with new units without at least of 70% of the unit expressing interest in writing ("signing a union card").
#6 - The use of the term "renegotiating" is misleading. Collective bargaining agreements supersede individual employment contracts by definition. Typically, the CWA conducts an election of workers in the unit to choose a bargaining committee, which then bargains with the employer assisted by paid staff and/or lawyers. In any case, the contract must be ratified by a majority vote of the members for CWA to enter into it. Only then would their "employment contracts" be superseded. That said, the overwhelming employment contracts in the united states do not bind the employer in any meaningful way, and are not meaningfully negotiated. Where there are meaningfully bargained contracts, such as in broadcasting or entertainment, union members can and often do allow certain provisions to remain in force, using the union contract to set a floor on conditions. This is very common in Hollywood.
#7 - This depends a great deal on where Fastmail conducts its business in a legal sense, and is a somewhat unsettled area of law with increasing relevance due to remote work. In the United States, unions have a "duty of fair representation" to represent every member of their unit, have basic democratic processes, etc. This is typical in democratic countries. It is also typical for union members to equally share the cost of running the union to ensure that there is no free-riding. In the United States, federal law mandates that unions have a duty of fair representation, but some state laws allow people to avoid paying their share of the costs of that representation. These so-called "right to work laws" were proposed in response specifically to African American workers in the South seeking to form unions that could not be undermined by free-riding (cf. the Memphis Sanitation Strike).
#8 - The union may propose any unit. The employer may challenge that unit. If challenged, the National Labor Relations Board determines whether the workers in the unit represent a "community of interest." This standard evolves constantly as successive administrations appoint members of the National Labor Relations Board.
#9 - This is determined by the executive board of the local, which is elected by members according to procedures in the local bylaws. In some locals, this will be a fixed amount; in others, it will be a fraction of gross income. I pay 1.67% of my overall income in dues and saw a raise substantially greater than that when we ratified our first contract. Some members saw raises as high as 10%.
#10 - See the bylaws for meetings in the local. The unit meetings would generally be organized by the elected bargaining committee, and then by stewards. All locals of the CWA will have a business meeting monthly, but individual units (i.e. groups of workers at a given company) typically meet more often and delegate someone to go to meetings of bodies representing larger groups. Activity in unions is, generally speaking, highly uneven. In my unit, there is some sort of union discussion in our slack daily. Tech worker units are, as a rule, more active than those in other fields.
#11 - See the local bylaws, sector, and international bylaws, which lay out a comprehensive system of elected offices, delegation of democratic authority. The primary recourse is to petition their elected officers/stewards, many of whom will be their immediate peers and have an interest in maintaining good relationships. Failing that, they can support the candidacy of new officers in regular elections. Failing that, they can run themselves. Outside the elective process, all officers are bound by the decisions of collective bodies like the local's executive board (which are recorded in meeting minutes all members have the right to access). Major decisions about union policy go to a vote of delegates to the international convention (there was one last year), many of whom are rank and file members. If any officer (or member) violates the the bylaws, the CWA has procedures (laid out in the links below) that allow members to bring up officers up on charges. Charges are ultimately evaluated by juries with rank and file representation. Finally, under some circumstances there could be appeal through the courts under federal laws like the Labor Management Relations Act and Labor Management Reporting Act.
Thank you for the response. There is lots of interesting info here that the announcement doesn't even hint at.
I'll also note that I had no idea when I wrote this (as most probably do not) that Fastmail is apparently an employee-owned company, which changes the color of this dramatically. I'm still not totally sure I see the point of the union in this case, but it means that some of my questions are essentially not applicable here.
Yeah, that's an interesting detail. "Employee ownership" is not really a legal term, or rather, is applied to a wide variety of legal arrangements. Most of these do not actually give employees the powers the term suggests to many: to nominate and vote for board members, to recall them, etc.
I am a socialist, but I don't think it requires understanding of the socialist critique of capitalist social relations to see that worker ownership is not a generally applicable model for extending economic self-determination.
A bonus can exist. The contract has to allow them.
Generally individual merit pay isn't allowed though which is why so many in tech are against unions: we believe that some people are better than others and thus worth more.
I thought Fastmail was Australian? This looks like it's a US-based union. How big is Fastmail's employee presence in the US? Just a handful, or a major chunk of their operations?
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