I absolutely agree with unions. When an employee quits a company of 100, the company loses 1% of their productivity. But when an employee is fired, they lose 100% of their income.
Barring unions, employees should constantly be looking for a workplace, and change them regularly. There is no other way to capture their work's productivity.
The proportion of money captured by workers has been going down for decades, at least in the US.
While the need for unions come from a good place, I disagree. What unions became is not what they were meant to solve.
I’d rather advocate for better work laws on federal level. Employees are treated like cheap labor, especially in the right to work states, where unions don’t have a grip anyway. There should not be need for unions to begin with.
Unions are extremely effective at solving what they were meant to solve,
There’s a reason Tom Brady is part of the NFL players association.
There’s a reason Tom Cruise is in the Screen Actors Guild.
These superstars join unions but engineers think they have’s negotiation power because they practiced leetcode.
Doctors have the American medical association. Lawyers have the ABA. Meanwhile the ACM releases some academic guidance.
Your comment says “we don’t need collective bargaining or organized labor” then says “we need society wide change that organized labor is most effective at implementing “.
Most programmers are convinced collective bargaining is a bad thing because of repeated propaganda from corporate America that highlights the worst parts of collective bargaining while ignoring that it’s virtually the only tool for advancing any sort of labor rights in any industry.
In a free money bull market perhaps it didn’t matter. But watching how Elon can turn Twitter into squid games and YCombinator can coach all their companies to discard you the second investors demand it should be a wakeup call. They don’t care if you are “default alive” in a recession. A union would.
When an employee quits a company of 100, the company loses 1% of their productivity.
In our line of work, sometimes, productivity is not an OR function. It's an AND function.
If I quit my team of 8 today my project wouldn't ship on time with 1/8 of the features missing. It will not ship. The money to locate and train a new resource would probably cost them five figures and impact revenue for months. The cascading effects would run even more than this.
I think you should read this not as a perfect mathematical fact but as a convenient approximation to help people see that losing a worker is much less impact than losing a job.
It's the fundamental asymmetry in power that underlies a lot of labor law and unionization.
It makes a lot of assumptions, such that all employees are equal in productivity. Of course that's not true, but it might not be far off either. The point is, a company is typically not significantly affected (and therefore has an easier time negotiating).
I absolutely agree with unions. When an employee quits a company of 100, the company loses 1% of their productivity. But when an employee is fired, they lose 100% of their income.
Barring unions, employees should constantly be looking for a workplace, and change them regularly. There is no other way to capture their work's productivity.
The proportion of money captured by workers has been going down for decades, at least in the US.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/