Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte

Don&#x27;t unions work best in fields where quality is very uniform and expertise counts for very little? I&#x27;m thinking about low skilled jobs that can be mastered in months or years. Unions create salary progression, and benefits for seniority where there is otherwise no reason for them to exist. When no one does anything better than anyone else, it makes sense to negotiate as a block, individuals have no power.<p>Now compare that to tech where the 80&#x2F;20 rule is patently obvious to anyone in the field. The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers, but often get paid only 2-3x as much. 20% of the field, with 80% of the negotiating power, wants employers to find better and better ways to pay proportional to value-add, not to increase the floor salary, or working conditions across the board.

I don&#x27;t know whether we deserve a union or not. I do know that I emphatically do not want or need one. I make the amount of money I need. I have my pick of jobs if I feel undervalued by the place I work. Under no circumstances do I want to be forced to pay dues into a union that is unlikely to represent me in the company or politically.<p>Since I have no need or desire there is no reason for me to consider the question.

American scale and polarization make it impossible to have moderate conversations around social tools like unions.<p>A union doesn&#x27;t need to be a mediocrity enforcing, all-encompassing beaurocracy.<p>Programmers don&#x27;t need a union to ensure fair pay or minimum hours. Our concerns are different, and a limited union can help.<p>Eg:<p>1. Programmers need to be given 6 months heads up before big change in employment situation. (RTO, city change, etc).<p>2. On call hours on weekends need to be compensated as overtime.<p>3. Unused vacation must be compensated as overtime by year end. This also means that unlimited vacation policies should come with miminum compensable vacation days.<p>4. Standard minimum maternity &amp; paternity leave policies. Also, additional compensation if layoff occurs after notice of mat&#x2F;pat leave or soon after mat&#x2F;pat leave.<p>5. All meetings from noon-1pm should have compensated food.<p>6. Any meetings after 11pm (of contracted timezone) should be compensated as overtime.<p>7. If an employee has to live more than a 1 hour rush-hour commute from work AND a company cannot find nearer housing for them at some standard rental amount, then the commute should be fully paid for.<p>None of these are unreasonable and all will benefit everyone. You can have students get union membership in undergrad. Universities can enforce entry permissions to career fairs on union compliance.<p>Now, absolute power corrupts absolutely. As vital as unions are, limiting their powers to valid areas is just as vital. That portion I still don&#x27;t have figured out.

It’s absolutely incredible to me how much animosity unions have in the US and how self defeating the typical programmers attitude is (maybe this is just selection bias for HN?) — and I say this as someone who’s definitely <i>not</i> a laborer. But if I was one, I would hope I wouldn’t vote against my own class interests like it appears developers often do.<p>Luckily, even speaking openly against my own interests here is zero risk, I feel Americans are too far gone in their position against unions for it to ever be an issue for me personally.

With the recent vfx unionization at marvel and the QA unionization at ZeniMax, I hope we see more efforts to organize tech workers.

What about a union that spans companies something akin to the directors guild of america, whom almost all Hollywood creatives are apart of? I think it&#x27;s purpose is very similar to how software engineers work on practice.

Laborers need a union because their work is not differentiated. <i>Anyone</i> can dig a ditch. Most people can put grocery carts away. With a little training, most people can even drive a bus. Because of this, market forces drive businesses to treat them inhumanely and pay them so little money that they can&#x27;t support a family on it.<p>On the other hand, engineers are highly differentiated. I&#x27;m a DevOps engineer. I&#x27;m probably one of the most highly paid engineers in my company.<p>I can assure you, the market is not something that I&#x27;m afraid of. Engineers do not need a union. If they get good at their jobs, they are highly differentiated.<p>I&#x27;d go further and say that unions would be detrimental. I remember my sister working at a grocery store and having to pay union dues cut and it would cut into her paycheck. A necessary evil perhaps for that field, but in ours would be overhead and cost that didn&#x27;t need to be there. It would probably just make me poorer.

Many of the top replies are about &quot;I&#x27;m a top programmer, why would I need a union? change my mind&quot;<p>And, <i>you</i> don&#x27;t. Not right now. When you&#x27;re just &quot;a common worker&quot; you do. Because your bosses have convinced you <i>everybody</i> has to be a top programmer or they can die in a ditch even when it&#x27;s impossible. It&#x27;s called Stackhanovism.

&gt; After the 2016 presidential election, the tech industry saw a surge of activism when workers began to recognize the work they had produced could potentially be abused to harm people.<p>This is one more reason to be skeptical of tech unions. Often, they aren&#x27;t interested in securing higher pay and better conditions; they&#x27;re about politics.

Has no one heard of the CWA? They were huge back when I live in California.<p>Granted that was quite a long time ago and when telco&#x27;s were a major power.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Communications_Workers_of_America" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Communications_Workers_of_Amer...</a>

I would argue that in the US it will not work. An only acceptable model might be co-determination where workers have direct representation on the board. You can look across the board for barely functioning unions in the US, they are in some cases nearly adversarial with the people they are representing.<p>We must remember that any structure will require money to function, and I don&#x27;t think paying a bunch of people who don&#x27;t do what I do to &quot;represent me&quot; is for me. As people who are certainly making above average wages, we are now juicy targets for make-work organizers and griftlords who want to tell us how we should run our businesses and lives and to cut them in. The purpose of labor is scale, and in software we don&#x27;t have the same overheads.<p>As for our industry, we are not very uniform in what we do and so it will be hard to define. This is very different to say, trades, or services that are well defined. Of course we want to think we are special so maybe it isn&#x27;t true and I&#x27;m wrong. My guess is if you talked to five senior software engineers (to be explicit: someone who has been working for 10y) in software you&#x27;d have five different novels of war stories.<p>We are by far one of the highest paid and most coddled workers of all time. There is no kombucha on tap at the job site where you&#x27;re laying bricks. (Marshalltown forever!)<p>Don&#x27;t give me lines about &quot;solidarity with workers&quot; when you&#x27;re the same people ordering doordash&#x2F;instacart&#x2F;grubhub. Those models ship money from your neighborhood and area directly into ultracapitalist hands.<p>No one strip mined you into a six figure job. I have belonged to several unions, most of which could not do anything for me contractually and yet I still paid a large amount of my then tiny checks because I was &quot;part of the system&quot;. Not part enough to benefit. Maybe it&#x27;s sour grapes on my part!<p>We must swim with the tides, and maybe the industry will change.

I see no reason or benefit to unionizing tech workers.

The Physicians have a cartel, Pharmacists have a cartel, why can&#x27;t we create our own cartel?<p>The only way this would work, is if we entrench ourselves into US politics and spend hundreds of millions of dollars of bribery&#x2F;lobbying money.<p>Sure its definitely going to be bad for the rest of US citizens, but if the medical field is going to extort us, why can&#x27;t we join in?

I found it an interesting omission that the author completely failed to discuss H1B. There will be no tech union for the same reasons there is are no corporate unions for white collar labor. A significant amount of the core population are capitalists who are angling for middle management and executive roles, and&#x2F;or founder roles, and the companies source competent intellectual labor internationally. There is often no reason the demand cannot go offshore, and value of offshore talent doesn&#x27;t just come from labor arbitrage anymore.

I don&#x27;t read that title the same way other people read that title

In my country we had mandated unions for tech workers in various states. I paid the compulsory annual fee plus an additional fee that I didn&#x27;t understand and can&#x27;t properly explain what it was for.<p>Not once in 23 years in IT have they done anything for me. Not a single time. Every time we pushed for raises and someone contacted the union, nothing came back. When the company was not updating our salaries against inflation (that&#x27;s a thing here), the union made a deal in our behalf so the increase would be bellow inflation. Multiple times.<p>I&#x27;d like to see unions working but they are a joke.<p>EDIT: Just remembered that we constantly had issues with overtime and they didn&#x27;t care either.

I guess the trouble is that we don&#x27;t have any self-admitted exploited workers. Everyone is a temporarily embarrassed Founder&#x2F;CTO.<p>With thanks to Steinback - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hellyesjohnsteinbeck.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;23486952183&#x2F;commonly-misquoted-socialism-never-took-root-in" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hellyesjohnsteinbeck.tumblr.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;23486952183&#x2F;com...</a>

Until recently, tech had a large number of jobs and a shortage of competent workers - these workers don&#x27;t need unions pretty much by definition.<p>What kind of workers need a unions, esp. US-style unions? 3 types (I could give a ton examples for each, but I&#x27;d only give one in the interest of brevity):<p>1) Incompetent workers. If I wanted to chill at the expense of my coworkers or taxpayers, unions would be awesome for me. E.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2009&#x2F;08&#x2F;31&#x2F;the-rubber-room" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2009&#x2F;08&#x2F;31&#x2F;the-rubber-roo...</a> , many more examples, also e.g. police unions.<p>2) Exclusionary workers. If there are too many workers for the number of jobs, it&#x27;d be cool if I could exclude all those pesky other workers, to the fullest extent that it&#x27;s socially acceptable. While my favorite example is union racism during the Great Migration, as an immigrant I&#x27;d like to give honorable mention to Cesar Chavez running literal patrols to physically intimidate undocumented immigrants: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ambitiouscollective.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;news&#x2F;history-cesar-chavezs-history-of-anti-mexican-sentiment" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ambitiouscollective.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;news&#x2F;history-cesar...</a><p>For me as a tech worker, it would be pretty nice to prevent outsourcing and extra immigration - selfish and evil, yes, but pretty nice, go unions!<p>3) Unnecessary workers. If my job was unneeded, it would still be nice to keep it and have someone else (consumers, taxpayers) pay me. Lots of examples, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tunnelingonline.com&#x2F;why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tunnelingonline.com&#x2F;why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-...</a> &quot; the number of workers assigned in the tunnel in New York is significantly more than other parts of the country and as much as 4 times more than tunnel workers assigned to comparable projects in Europe&quot;<p>3a) Honorable mention, since this is HN after all - workers unnecessary due to innovation. If unions had power 200 years ago, we&#x27;d still be driving horse buggies - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;california-bill-to-ban-driverless-autonomous-trucks-goes-to-newsoms-desk" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;california-bill-to-ban-dri...</a><p>You could sit down to design messed up, pernicious, evil incentives all day, and you couldn&#x27;t come up with anything close to what unions already are.<p>Some say &quot;well, most historians agree that during one period of history, unions achieved great things and improved lives on the net!&quot; to which my response is &quot;so did nuking civilians; and?&quot;

I know European Union work quite differently than in the US.<p>My experience with unions in the US like the teachers unions where conditions are still poor, pay is poor, and everything based on seniority rather than skill, you’re stuck with whatever the union negotiates regardless if you’re in the union or not …. I want nothing to do with that.

Hard pass. I can do better without a union than with one, and I refuse to subsidise those who can&#x27;t.

Tech workers are usually so buried, heads hunched over the keyboard, focused on the latest project, that they aren&#x27;t even aware they are being used. They straiten their back one day, look around, and realize they&#x27;ve been working for 20 years and getting nowhere. They got good enough raises, but forgot inflation, and it was really nothing.