Ask HN: Would you support a unionization effort at your company?

I&#x27;m already in 2 unions. Pros and cons, with the biggest con obviously being pay since now you have to collectively bargain and most union leaders are selected based on popularity and political ambition and not their negotiating skills, so your wages and benefits will go down though your overall job security will increase, and they will have to pay you overtime.<p>A pro is the work environment is much more honest, you are free to speak your grievances about management in front of everybody without worrying about them trying to fire you or scheme to make your life hell. You will have employees elected as shop stewards to handle all employee disputes instead of bringing in the heavy hand of management to deal with petty personal issues. Anytime you are summoned to a meeting room for discipline you get to bring a representative, and you get to appeal every single bullshit disciplinary action they take and almost always win, managers have no clue of the collective agreement.<p>Your job also changes to being a contractor, as you are contracted to do specific things which of course means if you finish them early, you can leave and still get paid 8hrs. You can also refuse work you have not been contracted for, and this is of course the major complaint about union employees how &#x27;they&#x27;re lazy and won&#x27;t do what I ask&#x27; but if you asked the plumber you contracted to install a dishwasher to also mow your lawn for free they wouldn&#x27;t do it either. That&#x27;s how a collective agreement works, you have entered into an agreement to do X, unless there are special provisions for Y you don&#x27;t do it. One of my collective agreements has provisions for extra work, and every day we push software on time in a research lab without some manager hovering around.

Absolutely. I love where I work, and I love my coworkers. I want to make sure that the culture of openness and transparency stays that way. I believe that the best way to do this is to form a union and give the employees formal power in the corporate decision-making process.

Nope. I&#x27;m in the US. I have never seen benefits come to employees from unions. I&#x27;ve been in the teachers union. My wife has been in the grocery union, and my brother works at a place where the union started in a warehouse (Teamsters?). I&#x27;ve not seen anything work out for the employees, but lots of process and rules that mostly benefits the union leadership and the union as an org at the expense of everything else.<p>Edit. There is one case where I have seen benefits. My brother in law is a heavy machinery operator and works similar to a contractor does in tech. He goes in, does some work til the job is done, and leaves. He likes that he can get jobs through the union and that his wages were way higher in the last recession.

No, and I&#x27;d advise people not too. Unions had a purpose, and sadly still do in some isolated instances, but tech (professional work in general) is not one of them. I say sadly because businesses should have matured to the point by now to make unions unnecessary, and employees should have evolved further to see the problem. But some business&#x2F;industries have a lot of bad actors and the union does fill part of a need, but it isn&#x27;t what employees think it is.<p>I have dealt with unions as a leader, I have dealt with a union trying to unionize employees that worked in my teams and I have dealt with union based employees in a plant and non-unionized employees in a different plant within the same company. Guess who got better benefits and pay? Wasn&#x27;t the union employees, too much money had to go to pay the union dues, legal fees and unnecessarily inflated benefits, so we would fight every penny and ask on that side. And yes some states in the U.S. have rules around union employees can&#x27;t be paid less than non-union doing similar jobs, but trust me large corporations know how to work those rules properly.<p>While I have lots of opinions based on my experiences, in the end what I learned is that unions are honestly not there for the employee, they are there to raise employee wages&#x2F;benefits so that the union can collect more in fees (generally a percentage of total compensation, so salary + benefits). The sad fact is they honestly don&#x27;t care about you, your family or making it better, they get paid more by making the business pay more wages whether the market and work demand it or not.<p>There was a good reason unions existed in the past, and I am a fan for their reasoning at the time, not today. They are now nothing more than a big business putting their hands in your pocket to take money from you. By the way, did you know in many states, if your fellow employees unionize but you opt out that you can still be forced to pay union dues? Yea, this has been litigated in the recent past and some states changed that law, but just beware of what you ask for or support.

I work at a 5 person startup, so wouldn’t want to endorse that at this stage but maybe if we get to 200 or 2000 employees it’d make more sense. I highly value protecting workers and ensuring fair compensation.

I&#x27;m a co-owner of a company so you can imagine I wouldn&#x27;t. I don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;d do if I discovered something like this was going on to be honest, I&#x27;d be really disappointed that people apparently felt that working here was that bad and they couldn&#x27;t change it except effectively by force.<p>I don&#x27;t expect it would happen at my company or at others as the job market for software developers in London is excellent; typically if people don&#x27;t like the work they just leave.

Sure. Well, there&#x27;s no pressing need, for me because I&#x27;m self-employed (I&#x27;m member of a sort-of&#x2F;kinda union for self-employed people, but it&#x27;s not quite the same thing thing), and I&#x27;m currently contracting for a bank, and unions for bank employees already exist. Anyone who wants to join a union already can.<p>But in general, sure. I think it&#x27;s good for employees to organise and be able to present themselves in a united manner to the concentrated power of corporations.

Absolutely, without any hesitation.

Obviously it depends on the nature of the union but in general I think unions are good.

Yes, absolutely. I support the current unionization effort in my workplace.