everyone benefits from Tesla's progress [0], they may be an outlier but I think they are leading the way. More importantly, the progress helps society as a whole. I see their progress as directly benefiting every human and the planet.
you have changed your original comment a few times so it is difficult to respond to, but I'm not sure large tech companies would succeed with unions, people need to educate themselves and learn how to negotiate in highly skilled areas, I look at a local railroad company near me that employs a lot of people and does not invest money in improvements because they cannot afford due to how the union has negotiated, it has stopped innovation entirely. Engineers are still learning light switches, this should be completely automated so we stop having mistakes of train engineers texting people and causing accidents... what a shameful loss of life.
I have to wonder. What percent of Tesla's success is attributable to not having legacy union baggage. Unions are the tech debt of the manufacturing world.
It starts with a good idea, but if you let it fester, then it quickly becomes more of a drag than a productive addition to your organization.
Unless you have strong unions who can wrestle with the tech strong-arms, tech companies, or any company, don't have to pander to your basic necessity for a decent working life.
The unions in the US are pathetic, and corrupted by the mafia, and workers are suffering humiliations because of that.
Here's a tragicomic anecdote that illustrates my point:
Recently in Germany, Tesla has been struggling with the German unions because Tesla has been paying below union wages to a German company they bought. So far, Tesla offered each employee a one-off €1,000 ($1,090) bonus, an extra €150 a month, and €10,000 of Tesla shares distributed over four years to calm the situation, but the negotiations are still on-going.
In the US, where they're facing worker revolt for the low wages and bad working conditions but currently aren't unionized, they promised free frozen yoghurt and, Musk claimed this is his favorite, a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster.
Think about the mentality of your fellow workers... they're very happy if as an individual, they are paid three or ten times what you are. They don't have a hard time explaining to themselves that it is because they are 'better' than you.
They might be self-aware enough to acknowledge it's because they'll trade adherance to their ethical or moral system for money more than you will. But that's it. They will never rock the boat to unionize. At least many people trying to be first down that road will get shed and blacklisted and few people are brave enough to risk it.
Chances are better first with Tesla that straddles business that's normally unionized with tech, they might open the door eventually.
While not union myself watching how IBEW (international brotherhood of electrical workers) works, it ends up working well for all involved parties. For workers pay is kept higher, benefits stay active between jobs, and benefits stay unchanged between jobs at different companies. Companies also gain the ability to support surges/drops in manning requirements (without ruining life's of workers), and know workers have a minimum level of training (along with that training not leaving workers a debt addled depressive). I also see the best workers rising through the ranks, and bad ones either never actually entering the union or quitting when they realize they're not going anywhere.
Not every union strangles their company like automotive unions. Though those unions start to look better looking at nonunion companies like Tesla which somehow manages to pay their workers less, in one of the most expensive areas in the world, and maintaining an accident rate that would shut a union shop down.
Also it makes sense that Google would fight unions. Since the current implementation of unions for SV companies has been Kickstarter. And that union mostly exists to drive profit to their competitors by choosing what is allowed on Kickstarter. Something like that for Google would just end up making an easy paper trail for a prosecutor to follow for SV platform bias.
What if adversarial systems result in asymmetric arms races and the game theoretic best move is to work for a corporation that is so short sighted as to go to battle against their own employees and to work for them diligently and intelligently?
Because I see a whole lot happier employees at Tesla than I do at General Motors.
I'm not saying this is an all-or-nothing thing. I'd join a union if I was working for a certain type of employer (company town, federal government, etc) but when it comes to technology companies, I got to say it's pretty good here.
I should have just left out the "Silicon Valley" part of that, true. Unionization of developers and technology workers is starting, but remains slow because unions are usually formed when the cost of speaking out becomes worth more than enduring the negatives and unreasonably low pay is usually one of the biggest issues for workers and we don't really have pay issues. Musk's approach to treating his employees as cogs in his machines, to the point of becoming belligerent when they assert their human individuality, could be an accelerant in forming unions even in this high-pay sector.
That's a really unusual approach. The union has to represent the interests of the WORKERS, not the companies they work for, but one could argue that the workers benefit by not having their employers profits sucked away by patent trolls. At any rate, I can't imagine small technology companies encouraging their employees to form unions for ANY reason so I doubt it would be popular.
I'm not a big fan of unions. Certainly not in this case. I think where they are more effective is where the workers are largely interchangeable and do not possess abilities that are unique from other workers - or at least an environment where uniqueness is not valued by the company. Think highly regulated industries or an environment where you need a highly reliable and consistent baseline more than you need high performers or creativity. Unions can protect those workers that are largely interchangeable from the company throwing them out like garbage in favor of someone cheaper or who will put up with more crap for a paycheck. Unions are good at establishing consistency at the expense of innovation.
I think unions are the wrong answer in tech. Knowledge workers are not equal, their innovation and uniqueness is valuable and they should not be lumped together into one class where there is little to no incentive to stand out. Frankly, I'm surprised these types of people would be interested in a union in the first place because they are the likeliest beneficiaries of there not being a union and the most equipped to successfully go out on their own.
I want this assault on unionisation to lose, purely on the merits of unions and collective bargaining. I am sure a lot of responses will be about the defence of the German motor industry, or oppositional to Musk/Tesla as goals in themselves. Musk, and Bezos seem to have remarkably clear goals regarding collective bargaining, and they are highly oppositional.
I don't think we (the wider we, the societal we) can afford to have their view succeed. Either they are legislated into the room, or they are forced into the room by collective labour action. If they wind up succeeding in watering down unionisation of the workforce, we will all be the net losers.
IT workers need to think about this: The status we hold as individuals on professional rates of pay, individual contracts, are propping up the assumptions Bezos and Musk bring to the table negotiating with warehouse and factory floor workforce.
I truly believe we need to show some solidarity. There is a lot at stake here.
Not everyone in the US likes unions. Union-driven high labor costs are one of the reasons why lots of auto manufacturing left Michigan for various points foreign and domestic. Some unions do a great job negotiating benefits for workers. Others do a great job only for union leadership, to the ultimate detriment of companies' profitability and workers' salaries and job security.
If tech unions are new organizations by, for, and of tech workers, they might result in positive change for tech workers. If they fall in line with AFL-CIO et al., stand by for trouble.
Though it may not seem like safety is a big concern in tech right now, there are areas where it will be of concern. For example, Unions may be a good method to force safety concerns in self-driving cars and in IoT devices. Unions may help with health-care data and privacy. Unions may help with other forms of sensitive information like in judicial work and military work.
I'm not saying that unions are the only way to force safety, but they have been an effective force for safety in other areas in the past. Their effectiveness should not be discounted out of hand.
This is an industry founded upon the principles of innovation and invention, is it not? Perhaps tech can invent a union that can overcome issues found in the unions of the past.
I know it's an unpopular opinion around here, but it's worth considering if forming tech unions could help. Tech companies are making huge profits per employee but holding wages down.
We can build unions based on our democratic interests - what do we care about? Salary, benefits, paid oncall, IP restrictions, open source, etc.
We don't have to sign up with one of the giant calcified corrupt US unions, there are plenty of shops out there that are more modern and give local groups much more autonomy.
I guess my comment can be read both ways, but for what it is worth I support unions. It is just that people tend to discuss it like it is a choice of equal difficulty. The tech companies now are so large, and have so much capital and influence that it might take 10 years in the best case scenario to even have a choice to sustain a union. Unions just like any other organization are effective because the things they have. You would have to build the capital, institutions and influence in face of the companies. And that only happens when they are afraid of conflict. But the only thing they are afraid of is losing is influence so the might for example have to tax their offshore earnings to contribute to infrastructure spending and social reforms. So they will fight unions at all cost, because that is one of the few ways that could happen.
Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology?
The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personned" due to pressure from unions). Or, imagine if we had them in research (drugs discovery) --the added bureaucracy researchers would have to manage and devote valuable time to.
I am not saying unionization is absolutely bad --they have brought good things about to workplace improvement, but they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.
There is no proof that unions actually contribute to the common welfare for a labor force such as tech. In fact, it's the opposite. Silicon Valley has been doing so well and enriched so many people that everyone else believes that tech workers have changed cities such as San Francisco for the worse. This was accomplished without a single union in Silicon Valley. It doesn't exist and yet hundreds of thousands of employees around here are disproportionately better off than everyone else.
Can you please explain how unions would make things better? Would we be making even more money? Or would they simply enrich themselves from union dues and create friction in every single process that makes this area great?
you have changed your original comment a few times so it is difficult to respond to, but I'm not sure large tech companies would succeed with unions, people need to educate themselves and learn how to negotiate in highly skilled areas, I look at a local railroad company near me that employs a lot of people and does not invest money in improvements because they cannot afford due to how the union has negotiated, it has stopped innovation entirely. Engineers are still learning light switches, this should be completely automated so we stop having mistakes of train engineers texting people and causing accidents... what a shameful loss of life.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
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