Comment on Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs
r0ertel@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI hear this argument against unionization all the time:
During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.
It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization). I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If an org, under union influence, would do 15% to 400% salary increases year over year for their entire company/department, they’d likely go bankrupt. Yet that was possible on an individual level without a union in place. I didn’t really mention it before but employers that treated their workers poorly were many times an asset to this method. That bad behavior drove away workers, meaning the bad employers would have to increase their salary offerings much higher to attract a worker to join even with the bad behaving employer. It also meant that the IT worker, who may not have been entirely qualified, would would have a shot at getting the position (and become qualified on the job). Once that that worker is qualified (after the year or two), they can take that knowledge and experience and jump ship to a good quality employer, gaining yet another with a big raise. The worker also just collapsed 5 to 10 years of slow career growth into 1 or 2 years.
I’m guessing those quotes are about salary gains across a the entire company/department. This was nearly mercenary-mindset IT work. As in:
Rinse repeat.
None of that is assisted with a collectivist union mindset or union implemented rules. Please correct me if I get any of the following union benefit bullet points wrong. As I understand it, the union would do everything to undo that situation. They’d:
IT has been a raging river, but if you were able to navigate it, you’d get to the end very quickly. You’d certainly come out with some cuts and bruises though. If getting to the end (comfortable money in our case) is what you were looking for, then it was the fastest way to it.
r0ertel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’d take those last 5 bullets. I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.
Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You’re proving my original point. Staying at a single employer for years, and you’ll get minuscule raises irrespective of the level of your efforts. Further, you get a sham of job security. When tough times come (as I’ve seen three cycles in IT), layoffs can come and take your job anyway. Without having built up a war chest of savings to live on, your living situation and that of your family is at risk.
You’re trying to fix employers. You’re welcome to go that route. In the original article Doctorow posited that “vocational awe” was the reason IT people put up with such conditions. Apparently that’s true for some. However, I also know it was not true of others who preferred to make the money they needed to eventually stop working for someone else.