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How to unionize your tech workplace
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4192438/how-to-unionize-your-tech-workplace.html
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Many people, like myself, can only get contract work as a software dev these days. Getting employment with any real benefits is harder and harder (often near impossible). How do you handle contractors? Completely avoids that answer. All of software devs need to unionize, not just your employee co-workers. Also, I’m going to be unemployed in a few weeks. This article leaves out completely how to get unemployed tech workers into a union. Thousands of devs are getting laid off with zero unions there to help them. Completely avoids dealing with them, as well.
Employment beholden to a single corporate entity and limited only by that corporate entity’s desire to keep employed humans on payroll is not the road to a unionized workforce. Software engineers are often not profit centers. Anything not a profit center to a corporate entity will ultimately get outsourced. Solidarity across the entire industry is the only way to lasting change. You don’t see carpenters or electricians or plumbers or welders being employed by a single corporation for 30 years and then retiring on a 401k. Those skillsets have industry-wide unions behind them.
because unions are the wrong tool for the problem. If you’re unemployed, consider to reach out to WhatWeWill: https://wwwrise.org/
notgoldYou don’t have to start your own union. You and your colleagues can on masse join another union.
And when you get a job somewhere that is unionised, join the union.
Don’t be a scab.
With US Unions being that strong its dumb to not join one. My country dictates which union you may join and the negotiated wages are laughable. It’s just for show. Last time a train union tried to strike, government TV started to discuss if the union boss should be jailed. However small niche unions are very successfull because paying members have a common goal. Hard to align a software dev with a cashier’s goals..
I’ve worked in a vast range of tech sectors over the years, with people being laid off and companies shutting down. I cannot think of a single time in 25 years where someone was let go for a reason that a union could have prevented. The whole “righting the ship” concept is what took nearly all of the jobs. Poor planning by management, failures in the industry and global economics were the causes and for that reason all those workers had negative ROI.
I like the idea of a union. Especially in an industry where businesses are lowering the requirements for entry (i.e. bootcamps replacing degrees). The problem is that tech can be fly by night. Especially when it is a purely software based solution. The money and time investments to start up and maintain aren’t comparable to those of manual labor. Building a factory puts a company in far more of a bind than renting some cubical space. Meeting OSHA standards, logistics, permits, etc. All things that force companies to the negociation table. When your company is software and you outsource hardware to a product mill in China it is way easier to fire a ton of people because the projections look bad.
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I think you touch on some realities that are often ignored. As far as I am concerned unions are only effective in redundancy situations in so far as they are able to keep the company honest with regards to their legal obligations.
Agreed. But there are essentially preasure points in manual labor that compell contracts to be written pro-union and to follow contractual rules. I don’t see that happening in the development side of tech. The only fear these companies have is that in a walkout they would lose money for a very short time. Tech is already a high turnover sector. Most companies use turnover to reduce costs.
The companies can also uproot themselves much easier and with everyone working remotely and the economy sucking, what tech company couldn’t have you replaced in 48hrs?
The only reason many of these companies even allow unions is for PR. Either to sound good or fear of backlash. Today people get angry but then the next story comes on the news and we all move on.
Again I’m pro-union in many cases. I just don’t see the forces that would make this work for the vast majority of tech companies.
I’d be interested to hear any first hand examples of tech workers here that have successfully gotten their union recognized.
Some of the employer tactics described here sound very familiar. One thing that isn’t really touched on are those colleagues that are vehemently anti-union. I have experienced some very vocal people and countering their misinformation is exhausting.
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Nuts, didn’t realize Trader Joe’s was on the evil list.
Lots of useful examples in the article though, thanks for sharing.
My tech department is unionized
Hell yeah ✊
Do you work in the public sector?
yes
Checks out.
10/10 article. For folks that want more directed guidance, I recommend the CODE-CWA Organizer Training
I tried to get my highschool leftist group to do a guerilla union rights leafleting campaign, specifically targeting Walmart, teaching all workers of how to unionize, what their rights are, and what anti-union lies to look out for.
They said “unions aren’t leftist” and kicked me out.
that’s why you do union organizing with organizers and not with edgy teenagers.
Jesus Christ.
Tech unionization is something that kind of makes me want to start another company.
It would be interesting to go union by default from the get go. Yes I’d be setting up conflict, but I expect everyone that would join would be very into the experiment and we’d all want to make it work well.
are you thinking of a cooperative?
That is absolutely one model, but I think it might be better to have an explicit union setup to avoid the co op elements being perverted into old school capitalism over time and nobody wants to unionize there because it is nominally a co op.
It might be more interesting to setup an explicit capitalist vs union structure where the capitalist side has strict bylaws in place to enforce union negotiation and support. That would probably be more honest over time as I think systems tend towards power for those that are running things one way or another.
A co op could work really well though if the company stayed smaller and had strict guidelines for membership and clear processes for removal of bad actors.
Definitely worth a lot more thought.
both coops and unionized companies operate within a capitalist structure and on the market (usually). Neither model can emancipate itself from its context. So I’m not sure about what aspect you expect to be different. And coops can be run with good governance where power structures are explicit, managed and democratically altered to reflect the values of the members. The case where you have few people controlling everything is a dysfunction, it’s not part of the model (and also can happen with unions).
I work in a self-organized tech coop that we made by ourselves, and I do agree with your. This is a lot of concern to deal with unstable future, and it’s prevent ourselves to be active with others; some people left for stability, and reduce stress.
We are unionize too; and we think about modifying our rules to give the final word to union.
A worker owned cooperative would be more ideal than a unionized but otherwise standard corporation, and is less likely to have internal conflict.
Oh I bet a cooperative would have plenty of internal conflict. No group of humans gets together without conflict even when incentives are really well aligned.
The points above on the governance model I think are ideal, but another reason to do this would be to encourage other companies to look at the model and be encouraged to adopt it. If you start with a co op I think it’s less likely other companies would look at that and say he lets convert to a coop. I want to find ways to help improve the system currently running not just make one just company.
A great outcome in my mind is a story where you say look at this software company that’s fully unionized and they are killing it on growth and productivity, even higher than those non union shops.
This would make everyone pay attention because people don’t really care about anything but long term growth independent of the company’s operating system.
A co op would be so different from existing systems that I fear people would think hey that’s neat but we can’t replicate it unless we started over.
I didn’t say there would be no conflict, but significantly less.
If everyone is an owner, there is no incentive to withhold labor and strike, as they can simply come to a consensus with the other co-owners instead. The only reason unions exist and strike is because of an imbalance of power between the capital owners and the workers that generate the capital, so the unions must leverage their labor as a bargaining chip to try to get a slightly more fair deal. That dynamic is not present in a worker owned co-operative, since everyone is an owner and has the same incentive to increase profit, since it benefits all instead of the few.
All traditional companies have an incentive to fight the formation of unions, even if they do generate more profits, as CEO’s and shareholders do not wish to split up those profits to the workers any more than is absolutely necessary to retain those workers to begin with.
CEO’s and Shareholders are virtually all extremely self interested, often times combined with dark triad traits which both encouraged and enabled them to reach those positions to begin with.
They do not act rationally purely in interest of profit, as if that was the case, then they would’ve already adopted lower working hours, work from home, better benefits, and given partial ownership of the company to the workers voluntarily. Instead, history has shown time and time again that they would much rather let an entire company be destroyed rather than give up power to workers.
You will not have any success whatsoever of convincing existing corporations to embrace unions by proving an example.
There are plenty of examples of worker owned cooperatives, even huge successful ones like Mondragon, which is a multi bullion dollar coop that employs 70,000 workers.
Virtually no existing corporation nor its shareholders would want to become a co-op, because it would mean the inability to exploit and profit from their labor force. Just as they do not wish for unions to impede on their ability to exploit their labor force.
Hmm so I guess the challenge is create co ops that outperform c corps so much that investors give up trying to invest in regular c corps because they lose in the long run.
That might be worthwhile to try…
Ultimately worker coops by their design limit the amount of excess money that can be siphoned off and concentrated to CEO’s and shareholders, so capital holders would likely refuse to invest in co-ops in fear that were they to become the standard way of organizing businesses, they would get a smaller and smaller piece of the pie globally, as more wealth is distributed to the workers themselves instead.
The current system of capitalism is inherently designed to oppose all forms of more equal distribution of power and wealth.
If co-ops were to become successful in spite of that, the capital owners would likely attempt a military coup to literally fight back against it, just as they attempted during the Business Plot in response to FDR’s economic reforms.
The capital holders hold a tremendous amount of the power to influence the globe to their will due to their concentrated wealth, which is only possible to accumulate due to the accepted exploitation of labor. They will do everything in their power to prevent the loss of that power, even if it means sub-optimal profits.
I’m a 4th year computer science student, what can I do to support tech Unions?
you can volunteer in some alt-albor organization that supports unions externally, like Tech Workers Coalition: https://techworkerscoalition.org/
Looks promising! Glad to see there’s a group active in Canada!
yep, it’s one of the new chapters and it’s pretty active and growing fast. You should join.
Looking at my non union job where idiots make millions and it has taken years to get even the basics of ci/cd implemented.
When they make comments like that, they always assume that they are the “top performers”, getting the best deal already (edit: or on track to be one of them in the future). That assumption is usually wrong.
I think it is more the opposite. They have worked with some people who are terrible at their job. And the idea that those terrible people would get the same pay angers them. And that is the trick. How does a union ensure the people who do a good job actually get paid better than those who don’t. The answer is of course that they can’t. This is because there is no objective standard for doing a good job in tech. Everyone’s idea of a good job is different.
They also can’t do that in countries with workers rights. This should be a standard right, not something that requires the workers to unionize.
Edit: I understand that unions make it easier to enforce.
A lot of legal protections for workers aren’t enforced, or are difficult to enforce due to standards of evidence and other factors. A union is a worker-controlled means of enforcement. Instead of appealing to power from above, workers can exert their own collective power from below. In other words, it’s better than having rights on paper, because the government can’t just sign a piece of paper to take them away from you or decide not to enforce the rights.
redundancy good, more attacks on bad guys good, more problems for bad guys good, hurt bad people hurt bad people
Makes sense.
With strong unions it’s easier to make it standard
What if I like my workplace being ionized?
Definitely unionized, but in a revolutionary union. Those people have a very positive mindset
Serious question from an idiot: I work in tech but I’m the only guy in the company doing so (solo IT) so there’s no chance of a Union, right, because I’m all alone and no one to unionize with? Or are unions able to cover multiple companies, like The IBEW or something? I guess I’ve never really looked much into it. I do actually like my job and have successfully negotiated better pay on my own behalf, so maybe it’s not necessary? Minus I am in an at-will state so might be not worth it?
you can unionize with the rest of the workers. They are called “wall to wall unions” when you do not organize by department/profession but by company. In some countries they are the norm.
OK than you, I just realize I responded to someone else asking this very same thing.
You can find unions that you can join as an individual in circumstances like yours. The one that comes to my mind is the IWW.
Ah, thank you! I’ll check that out!
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Nice! Looks like I’ve got some work to do to get people on board. So, it doesn’t seen to matter the position then, is not like a Union needs all 1 group, it could be anyone from that job it sounds like?
Edit: nvm, I just realize another comment answered this question.