I would hope not. I see tech-workers as professionals not as laborers. I think the great battle to be fought by tech workers is to stop having them treated as common laborers that perform some kind of rote process. Some times we call software development engineering, and if thats the case I would press anyone to show me an engineering discipline that parallels software engineering in terms of working conditions and relations.
Sure, boards which look after professional certifications do have more power, especially in jurisdictions that give those certifications legal power. But those boards still don’t typically negotiate wages or organize strikes.
Right, they manage wages with entry limits and what amount to extended hazing rituals. And the power offered by controlling entry shifts negotiating tactics - strikes would rarely have a point. (Although doctors have gone on strike[1] in the US, it is just rare.)
They are still labor unions with government-recognized powers, and they carefully look after their members' interests.
Those of us with more anti-authoritarian leanings don't relish the idea of having an organization with power over our entire profession...
As an alternative, anyone can start a company that puts into practice some of the employee friendly ideas you have, and use that to compete for workers, and try to move the market towards that ideal. I did that, and I really enjoyed the experience. I think my co-workers did too.
Totally get that. I wasn't trying to make a normative argument here, just pointing out that the state Bar and the SEIU are in the same business. For the record, I do consider some of the externalities generated by the professional guilds to be among the worst negatives of unions.
As far as where I'm coming from, I used to be more libertarian-ish. I guess I've come to a view that as population density and interconnectedness increases, maintaining societal stability requires ideologically impure and economically suboptimal compromises. Call it pragmatic socio-nihilism.
Heh fair, and I'm certainly not against the idea of government being necessary to coordinate in such large groups, I just don't envy doctors and lawyers for their professional organizations, and am a bit surprised that so many programmers seem to want more structure and intermediaries involved in their employment.
What's your point? The NLRA protects your right to organize over anything, not just wages. I agree completely that industry-wide wage controls are a bad idea.
> The NLRA protects any concerted effort among employees to improve workplace conditions. You don't have to be an "NLRB-governed union" to organize.
I understand that the NLRA contains provisions which protect employee activity in a non-unionized workplace, but this entire thread beings with the question "do you think tech-workers will begin to unionize?", not "do you think tech-workers will begin to make an organized effort to improve workplace conditions".
In that context, saying "Most professionals also belong to labor unions... called professional associations" implies a conflation of the two. And that's an important distinction, because most professional associations' activities don't even fall under the purview of the NLRA at all.
The NLRA broadly protects any concerted action involving two or more employees to improve any workplace condition or term of employment. You do not have to be in a "union" with "shop rules" and collective wage bargaining to take advantage of it.
> The NLRA broadly protects any concerted action involving two or more employees to improve any workplace condition or term of employment. You do not have to be in a "union" with "shop rules" and collective wage bargaining to take advantage of it.
I'm aware - but again, that wasn't the original question of this thread.
It seems silly to confine the question to Teamster-style unions. You want the answer to that? No, tech workers are not going to create the Tech Teamsters.
That's not the important question. The important question is, will tech workers organize, and, when they do, what will that organization look like? That's a question we can speculate productively about.
> It seems silly to confine the question to Teamster-style unions. You want the answer to that? No, tech workers are not going to create the Tech Teamsters. That's not the important question. The important question is, will tech workers organize, and, when they do, what will that organization look like? That's a question we can speculate productively about.
Any union that derives its authority from the NLRA and is overseen by the NLRB will eventually end up looking like the AFL-CIO, SEIU, etc. We have decades of experimentation done by other unions with other organizational structures - all of which have failed - testifying to that.
Most professional organizations do not derive their authority or power from the NLRA at all. The activities that they take, as organizations, are outside the scope of the NLRA. Put another way: if the NLRA vanished overnight, they would still operate in the same way, as evidenced by the fact that many of the largest and most successful professional organizations predate the NLRA by decades. The same is not true of most labor unions which derive their power from the NLRA - even the few surviving ones that predated the NLRA restructured in its wake.
The fact that the NLRA protects some employee activity in non-unionized workforces is true, but it isn't particularly relevant to answering the question "do you think tech-workers will begin to unionize?", because the professional organizations that you introduced to the discussion do not require the NLRA to function as they do today.
No, the NLRA doesn't protect "some employee activity" in "non-unionized workforces". The core elements of the law that enable "unions" are available to enable any workplace organization of any form. It's deeply misleading to suggest that a group of employees availing themselves of the protections of the NLRA are putting themselves on a slippery slope to becoming the Teamsters.
> It's deeply misleading to suggest that a group of employees availing themselves of the protections of the NLRA are putting themselves on a slippery slope to becoming the Teamsters.
That's not what I said.
What I said: It's misleading to suggest that professional associations require the NLRA to operate.
> What you appear to be arguing is that it would be better for tech workers if they could be fired for organizing.
I've done my best to explain why the NLRA and "labor unions" (as asked in the original question) are completely orthogonal to professional associations (which you mentioned in your reply). I've explained why the rights that the NLRA grants are relevant to labor unions, but are different from the ones that professional associations require and use in their operations. I've explained why bringing up professional associations in a thread specifically about labor unions is a red herring. I've mentioned some of the history, and I've proposed a thought experiment to try and illustrate this difference better.
If after all of that, you really, genuinely think the best summary of what I've said is "it would be better for tech workers if they could be fired for organizing," then I don't know what to say. That's an unbelievably uncharitable way to twist the things I've said in good faith.
If you would stop citing the NLRA and constrain your comments to just unions, we wouldn't have an argument. But you keep implying that the NLRA means unions, and in fact the NLRA is the law that prevents companies from firing their employees for any kind of organizing. It does other things, but you don't have to engage with those other things to get the protection I'm talking about.
So when you cite the NLRA as a bad thing, you are literally making the argument I just suggested you were.
> Without the NLRA, employees can simply be fired for attempting to organize.
Sort of, but not really. The NLRA does prevent the right to organize, which is mostly (though not exclusively) used in the context of labor unions. The NLRA was passed with the expectation that organization would generally take the form of labor unions. The ability to organize outside of a unionized workplace was specified largely to solve the "chicken and egg" problem of forming a union in the first place.
That said, the NLRA isn't the only thing (or even the primary thing) that prevents employees from being fired for joining a professional association. Which is what I've been saying all along: professional associations are notably different from labor unions which draw their power largely from the NLRA and are overseen by the NLRB.
I think you're just factually off here. It's the NLRA that federally prohibits the termination of employees for protected concerted action. Without the NLRA, you can indeed be fired for organizing --- any kind of organizing. Employment in the US is at-will.
> You'll have to provide some backing examples for this. And also an explanation for why you believe the Screen Actors Guild, for one, has failed.
SAG-AFTRA largely does operate this way, but aside from that, it also has received a number of special exemptions enshrined in law (both at the state and the federal level).
> I see tech-workers as professionals not as laborers.
Professional labor is a subset of labor, and unions representing (exclusively or alongside other) labor exist. (Of course, tech workers don't have much professional organization outside of the labor union kind, either.)
> I think the great battle to be fought by tech workers is to stop having them treated as common laborers that perform some kind of rote process.
“rote process” or not has nothing to do with the reasons for or against having a union; it has a lot to do with what you'd want a union to negotiate for in terms of working conditions.
> Some times we call software development engineering
Only because management discovered that labels are good way to distract from substantive issues, because developers eat up the empty status markers.
Actors and writers are not laborers either and they're also competing against the "crapification" of their industry driven by execs trying to undercut them (e.g. reality TV).
The Screen Actors Guild is an interesting model for professionals. They go much farther then most professional organizations in terms of protecting workers right, but they also don't have rules like you have to hire the actor with 20 years experience before you can hire one right out of school, or you have to pay everyone on the same scale. Also I don't think they have requirements like you must have attended 10 years of school and done 4 years of internship before your allowed legally to work in the field.
> Which is why I, for one, feel they're a far better model for a tech union than an AFL style one.
First, SAG-AFTRA is a part of AFL-CIO.
Second, over the years, SAG received a number of special exemptions in law that no other union today has received (and after 2012, that's very unlikely to change). So SAG-AFTRA is not really a realistic model for any hypothetically newly-unionized industry.
Add athletes to the list. The unions in the various professional sports leagues also provide an interesting model that still allows individual negotiation within the scope of the collective bargaining agreements. I could imagine a tech workers union negotiating a collective bargaining agreement covering non-competes, intellectual property concerns, working conditions and other such universal concerns while protecting our ability to differentiate ourselves from our coworkers.
