Re^2: Should Programmers Unionize?

[dsheroh]

As has already been mentioned, it depends heavily on which side of the Atlantic you're on. Here in the US, I've never been a member of a union, but I've known a lot of people who have. I've heard their stories. And those stories consistently fall into two categories:

1) The union screws over those who are any good.
2) Those who should be fired manipulate union rules so that it's impossible to get rid of them.

"the crazy notion that being a member of a union makes you surrender your rights to, for example, negotiate your own pay deal"? I know teachers who work for a union which dictates that pay rates be determined solely by how many years you've been on the job. Skill, ability, and personal negotiation are completely irrelevant and disallowed.

"being a member of a union means you have to obey union officials"? What scope of obedience are we talking about? A couple years back, my dad's union (which he's a member of only because they've convinced the company to take union dues out of his paycheck whether he's a member or not) was considering a strike. They put it to the members for a vote - with the stipulation that, if you vote against striking and a strike actually happens, the union won't pay your wages during the strike. Is it at all surprising that the strike was overwhelmingly approved, since nobody could afford the risk of going against the union bosses? (Another fun story from my dad's job: The union has reprimanded him for being too efficient. It seems he was doing his job so well that it made his "brothers" look bad by comparison.)

So I'm obviously no fan of unions and tend to think of them as corrupt and even worse than the worst of the modern-day corporations operating in the US. But, on the flip side, my girlfriend, being from Sweden, has entirely the opposite viewpoint and sometimes seems to find it difficult to imagine that anyone might not want to be a member of a union. Apparently they operate very differently there than they do here.

[DrHyde]

Your local unions being corrupt is why I suggested that people in your unfortunate position start their own.

[dsheroh]

I am not in an unfortunate position, at least not with respect to unions. I've never been in one and I've never worked for any company which was associated with one. Which is a situation I'm quite happy with.

Perhaps part of the reason I've never needed a union is that I've long held the belief that I have the right to tell employers "this is what I'll accept and that is what I won't put up with". In theory, I've always been fully prepared to stick to my guns on such statements, but, in practice, I've never been challenged on them, even to the point of one (salaried) job where I told the boss up front that I don't believe in unpaid overtime and, a year and a half later, while he was telling everyone else that their 60-hour weeks weren't enough, he never said one word to me about my 40-hour weeks.

The people who provided the stories related in my previous post are indeed in unfortunate situations, however they are also in the even more unfortunate situation of working in "union shops", which is to say that the union has so thoroughly cowed the employer that you basically can't work there without being a member. While union shops are, AFAIK, technically illegal due to their incredible capacity to produce and preserve corruption, they seem to be impossible to get rid of in practice. e.g., At the local telco, where my dad works, you don't have to join the union... but you'll still pay the union dues even if you don't, you'll still be unable to work if the union decides to strike, and, as an extra bonus, all of your coworkers will go out of their way to treat you like shit for not being one of them, in some cases to the point of minor vandalism. How are you realistically supposed to start your own rival union in that situation?