I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this?
Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?
While things can be bad in software in general, game developers need a union more than anyone. Conditions in that industry are horrendous. The entire period of a game's development is "crunch time". Everyone is exempt, so no overtime of course. And it is standard practice to downsize studios and have mass layoffs right after big launches. It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gaming.
This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
When people complain about game devs being exempt, I think they're usually not complaining that salaries are too low - they're generally fine these days - but the expectation of 80+ hour weeks during 'crunch' when crunch often lasts 6+ months. Doing hours like that for a long period of time is destructive to health and to family ties.
> This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate.
That's true federally, too, but the CA salary threshold is much higher.
If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
But given the continual decrease in job stability in tech, perhaps we’re headed toward more of a Hollywood model, where the skilled workers are nearly all free-lance and project-based, and have powerful unions with such provisions industry-wide.
> If you want that, you’d have to negotiate for it, and now doesn’t seem like a great time.
Software engineers can be pretty foolish. When we had more power, unions were unpopular because too many imbibed some libertarian propaganda, looked at their high salaries, and decided to cosplay as bosses. Now that power is slipping away, and will slip away faster because we did little to preserve it to our determent.
Also the technology union people were dumb, seemed to focus more on hot-button political activism than worker power, and thus undermined their own project. IMHO, a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue, because controversy around those issues allows the bosses to divide-and-conquer the union.
Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
I still suspect part of the reason Epic sold them is to ninja-bust the union (or at least get it out of the way).
> Look at bandcamp. They unionized successfully. Then the company got sold (again), and everyone but the union leaders (and prominent members) got job offers from the new parent company. Basically got reverse-fired.
That seems like something that should be illegal, if it's not already. It seems like a paper maneuver.
It should probably be expected that employers will play dirty, which is one of the reasons why I think the unions need to be hyper-focused on worker and workplace issues to the exclusion of all else.
Btw what was the outcome of that?
AFAICT the bandcamp union still exists and I don’t see any public news about the case from after December 2023, so wondering what happened
Edit: last news i see on their mastodon are from April 2024 and seems they negotiated some severance pay for the laid off workers and that it; so I guess the union busting was successful?
Unions should focus on worker power, but staying away form politics entirely is called "economism" and "opportunism". Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
Unions should do political education and work with issue based, socialist organizations, and invite speakers to facilitate discussions, while building consensus around what needs to be done in the workplace and fighting on behalf of their fellow workers ferociously.
> Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
Here's what I'll say. Every union is a democracy and has to decide what is right for it, but unions are the fighting organizations of the working class and we are the rightful rulers of this society by virtue of actually making it run and being the literal majority in a classic liberal sense.
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
> Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
But the primary job of a union is to represent its workers in the workplace, not to do any particular political thing that workers are "best positioned to do." Given the weak position unions are already in in the US, it's not the time to, say, alienate the fraction of the workforce who supports Israel from the union. You need those guys to vote to get the union certified, which is already a difficult uphill battle without their alienation.
The union and its organizers need to be able to say no, and be ruthlessly prioritize and be pragmatic. If they can't, I think their chances of accomplishing anything are slim.
That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
> That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
There's nothing about representing Palestinian in a workplace that means you have to take an official position on Gaza or even spend any time talking about it. Or any analogous thing for a member of any group.
> OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
But the problem is scope creep undermines the organization. All of what you said may be true, but Tech Union X isn't going to solve those problems and getting involved with them will make Tech Union X less effective at the things it can do.
Tech unions aren't even off the ground and unions generally are weakened and getting weaker, this is not a time to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> a union should be monomanically about representing worker interests and stay far away from any other kind of issue
So...should it pick and choose which kinds of workers to represent the interests of?
Or should it fight for the interests of all the workers?
Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
Either choice is a political choice.
You cannot avoid politics when one side of the political aisle has declared that the validity and ability to exist in public life of certain categories of people is against their agenda.
> Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers?
You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth.
Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
> If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it.
As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
If you focused any effort on addressing that, I suspect someone who isn't even in the union would come out of the woodwork to say "that union shouldn't be addressing policy like that, it's divisive and what about everyone else?"
Union workers' rights and interests are impacted by policy that discriminates, pretending that isn't so doesn't get us anywhere.
> As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases.
So? Not every organization has to take on every issue. And the idea that they must has been enormously damaging and kept us from having a lot of nice things.
Unions represent LGBT workers, of course they advocate on behalf of their members. It's quite literally why they exist.
Remember, unions are democratic organizations, they do what their members want. It turns out union members want comprehensive protections against discrimination in the workplace.
If the protection of workers' rights triggers someone, perhaps unions aren't for them and they'd be better off joining a club or something.
> Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race?
Because the political party currently in power in our country is an actual, literal, (Christian) White Supremacist party.
They are deliberately rounding up people that look like they might be Hispanic (and various other non-white ethnicities), declaring them to be illegal immigrants regardless of their actual status, and deporting them or putting them in camps.
> Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to?
The article here mentions the umbrella union that this effort was associated with, Communications Workers of America (which itself is part of AFL-CIO.)
IPFTE, I think, also organizes software developers along with other professional and technical workers, and SEIU has a lot in the public and nonprofit sectors.
That's how it works in other countries. Unions are per industry, not per business, because per business is... weird and not really helpful.
The union negotiates salary ranges for the entire industry, so it doesn't matter if one company is being difficult, their organisation (the one that organises the employers of that industry) have agreed to the ranges on their behalf.
If you need to go on strike, the union members employed at other businesses can help cover wages. Your union can also call for sympathy strikes at other businesses, putting additional pressure on the misbehaving company.
In the U.S. capital got sympathy striking illegalized as part of the Taft-Hartley Act around WWII, because labor exploiting network effects was just to unconscionable for the time.
People dramatically underestimate (or are outright unaware of) the effect of Elon's takeover of twitter had on the tech industry. Twitter needed to collapse, so everyone would see what firing 80% of the workers would do to a tech company.
Trying to keep alive 30yr old tech stacks and still pass security reviews, while doing stuff like manually compiling and packaging python 2 and jre6 tools. Ouch.
I've taken money to create software for most of three decades and I don't think I've ever actually worked on software that needed the people who created it to be near it while it was running, once it was working.
I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.
They don't - not the same way that farms or factories need laborers. Some small fraction of your software workers need to be around to handle the running software and hardware in case of failure. In the context of union bargaining power, the difference is important.
If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
They cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running)
Looking at Twitter's valuation, revenue, user count, uptime, new feature launches and really any other metric since the big layoff I wouldn't exactly consider the company thriving.
The claim isn’t that they’re thriving. It’s that it works. I’m not sure on any figures since it isn’t a public company. Where are you getting your numbers?
Losing devs that built a service, its infrastructure, build pipelines, tests, etc. Can sometimes mean losing deep knowledge.
Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.
Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.
Staring down the barrel of being primary on-call over Christmas for a dozen k8s clusters running thousands of nodes. How I wish it were true that we could trust computer programs to just keep running.
If your work place has a long enough history, try comparing incidents on work days versus weekends or holidays. Typically the incident rate is dramatically lower when no one is making changes.
Totally true, but we host other people's code (PaaS, etc). We don't get to dictate their working hours.
It also doesn't mean nothing breaks when people aren't making changes. Certificate expiration is the classic example of something breaking _because_ someone hasn't made a change. Or a slow memory leak. There's a whole classification of issues that get worse when nothing is redeployed for long enough.
You do realize that, um, software need hardware. And also security upgrades often require software engineers. And uh, software maintenance is what engineers actually do most of the time.
It only takes one bad deployment to bring huge swaths of the internet down nowadays, just look at Cloudflare, AWS, etc. costing millions of dollars in downstream economic impact.
Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.
Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?