There's a long case history in front on the NRLB about whether or not employees can use employer's resource (ie notice boards, email system, slack) for organizing. In general the rule has been that if employees can use something for general non-work purposes (e.g. setting up a baseball game on the weekend) then the company can't stop them from using it for organizing.
However the specifics (e.g. what if there is a policy about what topics are OK, but some OK topics are non-work, or what if there is a general work-only policy that is selectively enforced against organizing) have gone back and forth depending on the administration.
Apple's behaviour is probably a result of a 2019 ruling [1] which opend the door to this kind of thing. Given that the administration has swung back to being fairly labor friendly, it'll be interesting if this gets to the NRLB to see if they find a way to make this illegal.
Meanwhile in Germany an employer has to provide rooms and resources for a works council (Betriebsrat) to meet and organize, and has to pay all necessary trainings, including all related travel expenses.
The works council system in Germany and Switzerland (and some other countries) works a lot better than American unions. I'm not sure why. It seems they are more co-operative and have fewer BS rules.
Not starting out adversarial with management is a big part of it. Unions in the US feel like they need to have strict rules because otherwise management will take advantage. Management in the US is often very strongly anti-union. This is a situation where social conventions and government regulation could yield better outcomes than an adversarial system. But Americans love adversarial systems.
People get really confused when I say I am pro-union, but anti-american-union.
Workers deserve representation and protections. But American unions are still closely tied to organized crime and are effectively a form of rent-seeking (you must pay us a percentage of your earnings or you can't work here). As recently as 2017 the FBI arrested members of the Lucchese crime family and members of the LIUNA Local 66 for applying a "mob tax" to new construction projects. SDNY settled RICO charges against the Teamsters in 2015.
I think everyone understands the historical good unions did for the average worker. But, particularly for workers who most often frequent sites like HN, unions have not had much of a positive impact, contemporarily.
Perhaps that’s less about unions becoming less good, and more about the collapse of unionization rates? Union membership is at an all time low, Occam’s razor says that the fact that most people aren’t in a union is the most likely explanation for why unions haven’t don’t people anything good recently.
Possibly, but since we’re hypothesizing: it could potentially be that unions are better suited for aiding those working in some professions and not others.
Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns?
Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?
> it could potentially be that unions are better suited for aiding those working in some professions and not others.
Possible, but unionization rates are also down in industries that used to be unionized, such as manufacturing. This strongly implies that the issue is less “unions are bad” and more “unions were good, so bosses fought to get rid of them”. Companies wouldn’t need to hire anti-union firms if unions weren’t at least attractive to laborers, right?
After all, it’s not like life in those sectors has gotten so comfortable that laborers don’t think they need unions anymore.
> Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns?
Huh?
I think you’re calling union reps “hired guns”, which is deeply ironic given the history of bosses hiring actual men with actual guns to actually shoot labor activists.
> Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?
I mean, unequal professions do unionize all the time. Take a look at professional sports. Unions are extremely useful in negotiating between labor and capital about things other than just pay. Length of contracts, benefits, safety regulations, etc.
Regardless, it’s pretty silly to argue that unions are useless because “they’ve had no impact” for this crowd when this crowd has never really had the opportunity to join a union. Hell, even quitting software and finding a union shop to join would actually be very hard in any field, given the low rates of unionization in this country.
> unions were good, so bosses fought to get rid of them
It's also worth noting that "unions were good" doesn't necessarily mean "unions are good". It's entirely possible that most of the things unions can do to help works has already been accomplished and enshrined in law (osha, breaks, overtime, etc). While I believe that there's still good unions can accomplish, the cap on how much good is much lower than it used to be.
That’s plausible if you ignore pay. Pay is the one area where it’s self evident that something has gone horribly awry, which makes it hard to accept the “labor won” argument. Obviously other factors can be at play here, but it’s certainly not the case that everything is honky dory and that’s why workers stopped unionizing. The decline of union membership over this time frame is not conclusive, but it’s something worth investigating!
Well that and there’s Frito Lay workers striking to end “suicide shifts” that literally killed people from exhaustion. It’s kind of hard to argue that labor won these issues when they’re dragging the corpse of a worker off the assembly line of the potato chip factory after working 12 hour days for weeks on end without a day off finally killed them. That it took a strike to fix that also implies that labor law needs some more work.
Workers didn't "win". It's just that the conditions for workers are MUCH better now than they used to be in the past. So unions are able to do less for workers. That doesn't they're obsolete, just that the line for the decision for "are they worth it in _this_ situation" has moved.
The Frito Lay workers issue is a prime example of "in _this_ situation" mentioned above. Some places are greatly benefited by unions, some are/would not, some are gray areas. And, to a large extent, there's a personal opinion component to it, too.
> Workers didn't "win". It's just that the conditions for workers are MUCH better now than they used to be in the past.
Only if you ignore pay. Most workers pay has remained flat adjusted for inflation, while housing, education, and medical costs are growing faster than inflation.
> So unions are able to do less for workers. That doesn't they're obsolete, just that the line for the decision for "are they worth it in _this_ situation" has moved.
You’re ignoring the other possibility: the fear that unionizing will draw retaliation from the bosses that’ll make life worse. It’s not like we haven’t seen plants close down and move in response to unionization before.
Of course if that’s true, it implies that unions could help and bosses fear that.
> The Frito Lay workers issue is a prime example of "in _this_ situation" mentioned above. Some places are greatly benefited by unions, some are/would not, some are gray areas.
Right, but the original thesis was “labor activists got all their non-pay related demands codified into law, making unions less desirable”. The frito lay situation obviously disproves that.
Most highly educated knowledge workers also get stock options, which at best compensates them for business success, but at worst can trick workers into thinking that the business’ interests are the same as their interests.
I think there’s a persuasive story to be told about the slow change of how startup options work and the changing mood of the tech scene.
I don't think Occam's razor says any such thing. I see, all the time, first hand accounts of unions acting in ways that cause harm to nearly everyone except those in the union, and only actually benefit a select few. Examples like
- not being allowed to plug in your monitor at conference center or vacuum your area; instead needing to pay a union member a minimum of 30 minutes of time for 2 minutes of work.
- union members verbally and even physically abusing people that are just minding their own business, trying not to get involved; you're either with them or against them.
Unions have done great good for the American worker, and continue to do so in many cases. But they also do great harm and, when leadership is looking out for itself over it's members, can provide very little practical benefit.
It's a rough topic because it's VERY polarizing. It seems like the vast majority of people fall into 1 of 2 camps; they either love everything about unions and can't see the negatives, or vice versa. It's very hard to improve on the situation when that's the case.
I’m sorry that you’ve had some bad experiences, but a few personal anecdotes are not persuasive about such large scale concerns. Obviously seeing someone physically abused by a union member is bad, but “unions are bad” does not logically follow from that experience.
The American union is pretty bad it seems to represent the lobby arm and is totally out of touch with employee needs. It’s not a local org of your peers it feels like just another rent seeking corporate entity.
Personal experience. All our local unions got sold out by union headquarters when it came time for contract negotiations. They did things like surprise votes over holiday weekend and negotiating contracts without involvement from local reps
How many unions are we talking about here? One, a dozen, a hundred? Is it enough to draw a reasonable pattern from, or are we in “I had a bad experience with a union therefore all unions are bad” territory?
Teachers union got sabotaged, machinist union got sabotaged, engineers union same deal. Different kinds of tricks but it seems pretty consistent story. Big Union hq negotiates a contract that’s not great for local members but skirts by at 51% vote under suspicion conditions.
I’m not anti union. I mean union do provide slightly better pay conditions for members but they seem to be super corrupt as well. They are like a mafia, they provide services for members and Mafia members do slightly better but it no co-op.
Unions in the US (with some small exceptions) have to negotiate better working conditions which benefit all workers, regardless of whether they are a part of the union or not [1]. If there was no mandatory fee, then unions would likely suffer from the free rider problem and be suboptimally funded.
Of course, this doesn't mean that all unions' fees are justifiable for the value they produce, nor does it mean that all unions which impose mandatory fees improve working conditions for all workers. But I think it's hyperbole to call mandatory fees "rent-seeking" when there might be a perfectly rational explanation in some instances.
Mandatory fees are rent-seeking either way, it's just possible that imposing the rent is justified.
Off-hand, I'm not convinced. I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it. I usually think about this in terms of public policy (free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...) but I think it applies here too.
I would not be surprised if a union that had to justify its dues to workers would be more effective for workers than one with mandatory dues because there would be more direct pressure for the union to be transparent and effective. I am not entirely confident in this though, in large part because I don't understand the politics around unions in practice! Mandatory dues do seem like a viable point of leverage against union-busting attempts from management, which could be a more important effect.
You are not using rent in the conventional, economic sense. Rent is specifically a payment made to an manufacturer of goods or services that is higher than what is necessary for that manufacturer to bring those goods into existence; (i.e. higher than the profit margin that would have incentivized that manufacturer to produce the good in the first place).
For a trivial example, if a union makes no profit and its actions provide more utility to its employees than their mandatory payments, then it is not receiving any economic rent.
> I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it.
I'm not sure if you fully understand what free rider problems are. The whole point of preventing free riders is that by imposing a tax or mandatory payment, you increase net utility. If imposing a tax truly imposed significant net harm, then the problem wouldn't be a free rider problem by definition!
Free rider problems are really coordination problems. Essentially, there are situations where if everyone cooperated, then everyone would be happier. But there is no incentive for any one person to cooperate because they can choose to defect, yet still receive the benefits of cooperation.
> free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...
First of all, these are not solutions to free rider problems. Second of all, it is not clear that they impose significant net harm. For example, you might claim that welfare reduces the incentive to work and or educate themselves. This is the typical conservative market-fundamentalist argument.
But practically speaking, humans need to take care of basic needs before they can start working or learn. The positive effect of nutrition, taking care of basic needs, etc. might overwhelm the negative effects from reduced incentive to work. So you need a lot of sophisticated analysis on real data before you can claim that these policies actually impose net harm.
I've been listening to the Oral History of the Kickstarter Union and I don't believe the charge of rent seeking or the implication of close ties to organized crime is accurate.
Rent seeking usually refers to creating new income streams for yourself without providing any benefit by acting as a middle person, and unions do provide benefits to workers, in the form of collective negotiation for individual benefits, but also a seat at the table when it comes to how the business is run.
I also get the sense that the organized crime connections of unions are overblown. Like that settlement was I believe a way to end the consent decree that's been in existence since 1989.
And the arrest of the Lucchese crime family in 2017 didn't seem to include any members of liuna local 66. I believe the mob tax is actually a reference to crimes that happened back in the late 90s involving the Scalamandres brothers. If they were doing anything with the union it was exploiting it, and blaming the victim doesn't seem fair.
You know who else is tied to organized crime? Major financial institutions.[1]
Corruption happens everywhere, including every major corporation and every government. Singling out unions for the same problems is a smearing tactic, not a moral stance.
This is an underrated point actually. I've thought about this for a while and there's a case to be made both for and against some of the adversarial and arguably antisocial aspects of American ethos.
You can end up with insane rules that ultimately benefit no one. An old boss of mine told me about a time he was working for a big auto manufacturer. They were rolling an update to a major system. It looked like everything went well, so people started to go home.
Pretty soon though, the team started to see issues with the update, up to and including a major LoB system going down. They immediately rolled back the update but found they had a problem- they needed some servers restarted to pick up the update, and the sole person who by union rules could restart the server had left for the day and wasn't picking up the phone.
Now there were people who technically had permissions to restart the server, but they couldn't cross the union rules. They spent over an hour (with the major LoB, business critical system down) trying to get in touch with the people who were allowed to restart the server until they finally convinced the physically datacenter ops people (who were still on duty) go physically unplug and replug the servers in question.
He couldn't disclose the total cost of the outage, but I was lead to believe it was in the millions of dollars.
A functioning owner/management/worker relationship might fight over how the earnings of a company might be split, and even how or what to invest in, but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole. An adversarial relationship prevents the sort of cooperation and good-faith assumptions that allow the different parties to collaborate and work to everyone's benefit.
That being said, that non-adversarial relationship is a two way street, and ownership+management need to be participating in good-faith as well.
It’s not really clear to me why all the blame for the adversarial nature of American unions is placed on the unions themselves. Shouldn’t some of the blame be also blamed on American businesses too? It does after all take two to tango.
If businesses simply acquiesce to employee demands unions would not be necessary. However and instead, the moment organized employees submit their demands, they are met with resistance so both sides have to engage mono a mono until the entirely unnecessary conflict is resolved.
I mean, bosses literally hired armed thugs to shoot labor organizers. There’s a damn good reason why labor activists don’t trust the bosses; they shouldn’t.
By this logic, the average person shouldn't trust union bosses, as there are incidents where union bosses commit violence to achieve their ends (the mob/racketeering history).
If you can prove that violence among labor organizers was more prevalent than violence by bosses towards workers, I’d like to see it. I personally am quite dubious.
This sounds more like someone who just wants to blame a series of poor management decisions on those damn unions.
It's management's responsibility to make sure they have the right people on hand when they roll out an update to a major system. It's also their responsibility to come out of union negotiations with the right contracts, which would have at the very least included some sort of force majeure clause to account for technical disasters.
It is impossible to account for every edge case without infinite resources. Being flexible is very important when resolving things that you didn't consider.
> but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole.
Unless workers own equity this is not at all as much of a truism as it sounds. Could be rephrased as “but they should all be working to enrich their bosses”.
Alternatively, it could be rephrased as "if the company pays its workers an amount they [the workers] are happy with, then working to keep the company successful is in the the workers best interest, because they are likely to continue to be payed well". Alternatively, "If a company is paying you well and help cause it to fail, you are sabotaging yourself".
Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks (you can't restart the server, but you can unplug it or you can plug in a lamp but you can't change a light bulb)? That's not a management failure. Sounds like they had people who were trained and had the technical ability. It was bureaucracy that caused the problem.
> Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks (you can't restart the server, but you can unplug it or you can plug in a lamp but you can't change a light bulb)? That's not a management failure.
On the contrary, that's a two-sided negotiation and if management have failed to protect their interests then that's on them. I've heard plenty of stories like this where it turned out the real reason was that management's own rule was that anyone who touched that server without that certification became personally liable for damages, and management had been warned about their lack of certified people but refused to send more people on the xyz server training course, and or something on those lines.
First, as others have mentioned, the union did not unilaterally choose how the job specs at this plant were written.
But to answer your broader question, the reason unions sometimes point for seemingly narrow job specs is to prevent management picking and choosing titles in a way to keep pay and membership down.
Let's say that in this situation, you have 5 Server Janitors and 1 Sysadmin, with corresponding pay rates of course. Maybe the janitors have the skills to turn on the server, but the spec says only the sysadmin can. Whose fault is it that there's just one sysadmin? And if the job spec says anyone can turn the server on, why give anyone the sysadmin title?
Exactly the scenario I had in mind with my comment. A lot of places are now "two tier" where the newer employees have no path to the higher rate. You have one guy hanging who can press the button for $43/hr, and anyone who replaces him will top out at $32/hr.
Not to mention the history of labor battles (actual fisticuffs) and police departments in many parts of the country... talk about adversarial!
Because otherwise your boss could tell you to sweep the floors while your software was compiling.
The negotiation of specified work duties resulted in an agreement between the company and the union representing the employee. If that doesn't matter, then why negotiate at all? Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?
If you want flexibility, you negotiate flexibility. You don't negotiate the reduction of work duties against wages, and then demand that employees do whatever they have the technical ability to do. If I have the technical ability to do accounting, but I'm employed as a bus driver, can my employer demand that I balance the books?
Employers don't own employees. There's a contract that promises specific wages for specific work.
> Because otherwise your boss could tell you to sweep the floors while your software was compiling.
And if the floor was really dirty and he had a good reason (showing off the office to a visitor and nobody else was available), I'd be like "sure thing, lets get the place nice for the visitor; I'm not busy". Or, if he was just a neat freak and constantly asking people to do work they weren't hired to do like that, I'd say no.
> Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?
Generally, you're hired with a job description. Anything outside that description is up for discussion. I mean, I'm a software developer, but if I had to have a union contract that said I wasn't _allowed_ to empty my own garbage when it annoyed me that it was full... I'd go elsewhere.
I don't expect the owner of the company to prioritize my interests over those of the company or his own. But I do expect him to consider my happiness and well being when making decisions that effect me (or, more generally, groups). And, along the same lines, I prioritize my well being over that of the company, but the well being of the company matters to me, and I'm willing to be flexible to help it succeed.
> Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks
It's just an exclusivity clause. The employees and management willingly entered into a contractual agreement containing a provision that management ostensibly understood and then completely failed to account for.
If I sign an employment contract that explicitly says "I will be your exclusive provider of X service, I am not available on weekends", the employer shouldn't be surprised when I refuse to come in on Saturday and Sunday or sue them for breach when they hire a second service provider.
Alternately: sounds like the point about adversarial relations stands; a more collaborative culture prioritizing the success of the business (the collective interest) might have yielded a less expensive reboot.
If American businesses wanted a collaborative culture then they would share the rewards. As it stands for most work in the US you make the same amount of money whether or not you make the company succeed. The businesses could easily rectify this by including stock as part of compensation so that incentives have aligned.
Tech has realized this and as an industry hands out a good amount of shares of the business to employees. I can’t really empathize with businesses who cry for the need for labor to care about the success of the business but refuse to hand out anything but the minimum of rewards
Say I enter into a contract with a hosting provider who only offers support between 6am and 10pm.
There's an issue with one of my servers at 3am and I'm pretty sure it just needs a physical reboot.
No chance they'll let me into their data centre to fix it myself. Even though in this specific scenario I might be able to solve the problem with no cost to them.
I can also think of a lot of reasons why I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to restart my servers.
Sure this sucks, but maybe I accepted the terms of the agreement because I figured there was a low chance of having the issue and I wanted to save a few bucks.
Sounds like the business wasn't willing to pay vital staff to be on call, so why should the worker have their life outside work be impacted without suitable compensation?
Having 24hr operations without adequate technical support is 100% the fault of management.
This is why on call exists. What if their worker had been drinking, or awake for 36 hours, but decided to head into the office to help out the team? There is plenty of caselaw on this very circumstance when people are killed or get arrested.
Because going into a negotiation with a belief that both parties are expected to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith tends to give you better outcomes.
Whenever I buy nearly anything negotiated (car, house, boat, large software license, other business deal), I simultaneously expect both parties to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith, yet all of those single-trial negotiations are entirely adversarial. It seems perfectly reasonable and fairly efficient to me.
I assume car sellers - especially for used cars - are negotiating in bad faith. It definitely seems to make the process less efficient. Standard advice is to get a car inspected by your own mechanic before purchasing. Dealers disclosing the results of an inspection and being trustworthy would be a more efficient process - it would avoid redundant inspections by multiple prospective buyers, and it would avoid people wasting their time on cars in condition that they didn't want to deal with, and it would avoid people who don't know how to play the game getting ripped off.
Think prisoners dilemma. A car /house/boat purchase is basically a one-off interaction - you’re not likely to be dealing with the same salesperson in 5-15 years when you buy your next car - so the strategy both parties should use is different from the strategy when it’s going to be frequent repeated interactions as in a workplace.
In the case of the car, it's definitely not a one-off purchase. People will go back to the dealer to get the vehicle serviced, and from what I understand this can (mainly for new cars) have a greater total lifetime value than the cost of the vehicle itself.
Even if this weren't the case, if you're ripped off by a used car salesman you will tell every single person you know that they're a snake.
Even if you don't do that, there are arbitration courts you can take them to to both waste their time and force a refund (VCAT where I am, I'm sure there's something similar overseas).
I really don't think it's in a used car salesman's best interests to lie and swindle.
You're mixing situations. I was imagining a NEW car sale, not used cars. In that case the product itself isn't in control of the salesperson, so there's no room for swindles there - but you have an adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc. That said, you're hardly going to blame the dealership if you get talked or dark-patterned into an upgrade you don't need or even regret. "Caveat emptor" and all that. We're so used to adversarial situations like that we blame ourselves more often than not.
A collaborative approach is a lot more like when you ask you're knowledgeable friend "what kind of bike should I buy?" and they ask you about your needs, goals, and budget then guide you towards specific options. They're helping you make a purchase, without pressuring you into something that's not useful to you.
>adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc.
I get what you mean now. As someone who "does sales" a fair amount in my work (owner of a second-hand video games business) the adversarial stuff is actually really frustrating.
I always try to give the customers the same advice I'd give a friend or family, even "downselling" them from a $100 purchase to a $25 repair if that would be more suitable, yet still so many people are adversarial and distrustful.
From my experience, this distrust hurts (non-expert) consumers even more than it hurts the businesses. Ideally, you'd have an honest salesman pointing out the pros and cons of all the different products so that the consumer can make an informed choice. Maybe that product that costs $50 will last for 20 years of continuous use, whereas the $30 version will break after 18 months.
Instead, because salesmen can't be trusted, they rely on their own instincts and buy products whose prices are completely uncorrelated with quality.
The difference is that you buy or don't buy the car if negotiations fail.
At work you have or done have a job or even revenue if the only thing employer and employees are doing is trying to throw wrenches into the machinery to get the upper hand.
If you're buying a large software license today — and I bet this holds true for at least some houses, cars, other "high-pressure sales situations" too — the vendor definitely won't think of the negotiation as adversarial.
In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.
I wouldn't use the term adversarial for this. Ideally in a house transaction, the main thing is that both parties want the deal to happen - the seller wants the money and the buyer wants the house. They very much have the same goal of getting the deal executed.
Now obviously all other things being equal, I'd rather pay less money (or charge more money)
But in most cases, neither the seller nor the buyer operating in good faith will really try to squeeze the other because losing a multi-hundred-thousand (or even million+) deal by being too anal about $1000 is in neither one's interest.
If a seller got very "adversarial" most buyers would say "fuck you, I'll keep looking."
I’ve heard union leaders say getting workers to “hate the boss” is an important part of organizing. Entering in to negotiations where the goal is to punish the boss as opposed to getting the best deal for the workers is toxic.
Union leaders tend to be rewarded for doing the best thing for the union, which is not always the best thing for the workers. The principal-agent problem is hard to beat.
The quickest way to beat it is to not allow closed shops. Give employees the freedom to join a union of their choosing, independent of their current employer, and you'll fix a lot of (doubtfully all) of America's problems with unions.
To clarify a technicality, closed shops are illegal (hiring o ly those already in the union), and union shops (where you must join upon hiring) are legal.
It isn't businesses that want it, but unions demand it as a power move- power against the workers. By being forced into a particular union, workers lose their recourse against unions that behave badly.
For one thing, it undermines their ability to screw over new hires at the benefit of those with seniority, and allows them more wiggle room in wasting the money they collect in dues on things like retreats to remote islands.
There are a few instances of places throwing off bad unions, but it is a long process, unions will fight back in courts, and you have to be prepared for retribution from your coworkers who disagree.
Having union membership in any way tied to your employer is nothing but a way to abuse you, the worker.
In adversarial systems, the successes of the other party can be seen as a relative loss, even if everyone benefits.
At a friends workplace, the union recently fought management and prevented a prevent work from home policy from being implemented. This was something that both the workers wanted and management wanted, but the union saw it as leverage to push for other demands.
If you're a worker sympathetic to the organizing effort, it's probably not. Depends on your presumed union leaders.
If you're in management, being 'the adversary' probably means being on the back foot in terms of negotiating and probably compliance with local labor laws.
An unenviable place to be (said with a wee bit of sarcasm).
I am not an expert on German unions, but I think one key factor is that German unions tend to have company-level decision-making and representation. In the USA, it is common for unions to be industry-wide, with little or no significant company-level decision-making authority.
These monolithic unions strike at one company or another according to what will most benefit the rest of the union. This means that the union is 'attacking' one company, and helping their competitors, subsidizing the costs to members at that company with money earned by members from the competitors. This is something like blackmail, and is bound to cause animosity with management.
Yes, I've read about that, but it seems like those unions give each branch/local/company significant independent decision-making authority, which is uncommon in top-down US unions.
The biggest reason is that in Germany, unions actually take part in decisions. It means that in addition to representing workers they take the company interests into account, after all, employees can't be paid if the company doesn't make money. In other countries they can only protest and so, they work by opposing management instead of trying to find a solution that suits everyone.
One big failing of American worker unions (not all but increasing in numbers) was when they agreed to two-tier systems for pay and benefits. Such unions basically compromised new hires benefits and pay to continue high pay and benefits for tenured union workers.
Yeah because it is required for them to be on the boards of the big companies too.
The US should play around with board composition from both the legislation side, as well as a consequence for all fines and settlements and court orders.
I don't know about that. We had a German employee who sexually harassed multiple people and it was the work council that basically made it impossible to fire him.
A little tidbit is that unions in the Netherlands usually bargain for all employees, while that isn’t the case in the US in my understanding? You still get a few little union bonuses (like employers paying union fees) and bargaining by unions pre-disposed to their (usually older) membership. But all in all unions bargain for everyone, not just their members.
> Because nearly everyone in Germany is in some sort of union.
This is not true. DGB (comprising most unions and all major ones) reported less than 6M members last year [1] out of ~45M working population total or ~34M of dependently employed people [2].
A lot of people might end up benefiting from a union due to them often negotiating contracts for whole occupational groups, but they are not members.
A lot of Americans tend to believe that American culture and human nature are the same thing. That humans are irredeemably selfish, and that cooperation can only occur as an emergent property of pure selfishness and greed. Those of us who live in more cooperative cultures know this to be false.
It is the same in France, but they are still powerless because they are not present on the company's board unlike Germany.
In France it is only the government owned companies who can strike, strikes in private companies are rare. It only happens when they are all fired, but it is too late..
> It is the same in France, but they are still powerless because they are not present on the company's board unlike Germany
Not exactly powerless, some decisions and some changes need to be accepted by the worker's councils. But they cannot make decisions and force the company to go in a certain direction.
Grand parent might refer to the fact that German companies with > 2000 employees have to have a supervisory board where 50%-1 vote a held by representatives of employees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitbestimmungsgesetz
Interesting side note, in mining and steel companies by law the vote is split 50% between employee and owner representatives and there’s a neutral member as tie breaker. This is often justified by safety arguments but actually stems from the WW1 and WW2 experience of these industries were pushing for war (good for business) and a neutral member was thought to temper these tendencies.
Funny that you say that, in fact I was waiting for someone to say it, because pay is considerably higher in companies with a works council than without. Tech companies are famous for lacking works councils.
You can go to your works council and request to see the salary and bonus structure for your peers that work the same job as you. Exactly the thing that is being shut down in the OP.
So instead of making a point about how a works council lowers tech workers' pay, you made a point for creating them.
No, he makes a point for leaving Germany for higher pay. As a talented individual, one needs not rely on unions to fight for some mediocre salary everyone gets, one can negotiate it on their own and get a salary worth the skills.
Talents leaving the country is an actual problem (for Germany, not the software engineers), no wonder there’s a term for the shortage: The famous Fachkräftemangel.
The Fachkräftemangel is largely driven by pay, not by actual shortages. Nearly all software companies have open positions for a software engineer with masters degree and 10 years of experience with sap, haskell and c++, 36k anually before taxes. All those open positions go into official statistics where they appear to the public as some kind of shortage. The labour market is okay and migration statistics show that it's apparently not worth leaving germany for the better off except for migrating to austria and switzerland.
The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system.
Also, speaking as a Canadian, we've got plenty of "brain drain" here, and it's not because we've got socialist labour laws - because for the most part we don't.
> The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system.
The US system can be summarised as "Fuck you, I got mine".
That said if we are honest we have to discover the positives of an individualist system vs a more collective system.
One of which is that exceptional people do on average do better than they would in a more collective system.
It's whether those people doing better is sufficient to offset all the people doing worse that is the debate and I think on balance no, it's not.
That said I'm also not one of those exceptional people either (not many of us here actually are) so that will colour my view, I'm a decent to good developer who writes stuff that works, provides value and gets paid so to me strong worker protections whether enforced by government or union make sense otherwise the power is all on the other side of the table.
Well if you think that some combination of being exceptional, or being hardworking + a bit lucky, or some such gets you further in the US than other places, then you can bet that the exceptional and hardworking people are going to end up coming to the US.
Also, there is nothing special about software developers in Germany. They don't fare any worse than other technical staff. The biggest predictor for pay is the size of the company.
Having worked in the US for almost a decade, having seen a lot of different software companies because of my role, and now, long back in Germany, working for a new software company that I own a sizable part of (co-founded between "veterans" of the software industry), and looking at my country with new eyes after coming back from the US (and it took me quite a few years to come to the conclusions):
It seems obvious to me (now) that overall the US is quite a bit richer than Germany (questions about wealth distribution, inefficient health care, and education notwithstanding).
Software in particular is not exactly a strong suit of my country. We don't have the scale, we don't have the investments, we don't have the expertise (comparing the levels between US and Germany), we don't have the same kind of market outlooks to justify similar wages.
That last bit is just my own conclusion based on my own thoughts and observations, I did not study the subject. Even just walking around in what are supposed to be the best parts of my big city, after having seen much of the US where I traveled a lot and looked at many places and neighborhoods because I really liked exploring them, I am damn sure US "wealthy" is on another level to German wealth. I'm not looking at the top 1%, but top third or quarter. Below that it's harder to say, and when including questions of safety net or health the comparison is different - but we were talking about well-paid software engineers.
In my opinion, we (Germans) are not nearly in as good a position as we think or are told about ourselves. I think software engineers (and engineers in generell) simply can't be paid that much more here. It's not that all the money goes to somebody else, it's not there to begin with.
For example, the EU and the US as a market are not comparable. It is much easier to sell to all of the US than to even sell to just a few countries within the EU. It may be not too hard legally and logistically, but culturally the EU countries really are completely different countries. Germany is not exactly known as an exporter of software either, apart from SAP.
Yes it was sarcasm considering American engineers in the top third of pay absolutely dwarf even the highest paid german engineers unless they are working for an American FAANG.
and yet my company’s betriebsratswahl was plagued with fear, managers having meetings saying why unions are bad, and so on. and it failed by 1/3 of 1 vote.
That's after the employees vote though, and only if the unions win the vote. The employers do not have to provider resources before the vote has been done.
Heck Apple should want employees discussing this stuff in an internal channel rather than all over the internet. Employees getting together and talking about pay, job titles, tenure, team structures, project names, executives and probably more on a random Discord server with no way to verify user identity sounds like a security nightmare.
I disagree. It is almost as if at work talk on work provided media like slack, should be work related. What is next? People complain about mutiny related chat rooms being banned by the Navy?
Not being allowed to mutiny in the navy is related to the whole violence thing. It’s also the case that people in the navy can’t just quit when they want to. I don’t think you want those kind of rules applying to most workplaces. Talking about pay equity is a good thing to be encouraged.
Ok, then perhaps Apple should ban the channel about fun dogs.
Looking at my company slack, we have a ton of channels with a "soc-" prefix, which we use to designate a channel that's there for social purposes rather than work. I think my employer would have a mutiny on their hands if tomorrow they decided to shut that down.
Plotting mutiny is a crime. Angling for pay equity is legal. The equivalent here would be if Apple broke up a #insider-trading Slack channel where people exchanged Apple’s MNPI.
How much people are paid clearly matches the scope of “... Apple business and must advance the work, deliverables, or mission of Apple departments and teams,”. Paying people fairly advances the Apple teams.
But it's not always work related. My fiance's work has a slack channel called dev-urandom where people can share, among other things, cute puppy pictures. Before covid, my work had a smash bros channel to summon people to play and post new character releases.
That's a strange analogy. The military can compel you, by force, to walk into a hail of bullets. It is not a "job". Though everyone's salary is public knowledge :)
This is a kind of tangent, but I'll put it out there..
What would happen is Twitter the company employees tried to unionize and used the twitter service to organize. Could twitter ban them or suppress them? Would twitter have to let them do their thing regardless?
It would probably be an unfair labour practice for Twitter to do so, as it's pretty clear that twitter employees can use twitter at will and such a policy would be purely suppressing their organizing.
Of course twitter is a terrible medium for organizing anyway, so maybe Twitter would want them to use it! I hope if twitter employees do try to unionize they don't try and do it in tweets.
I guess I’m curious whether Twitter would be compelled to allow tweets that “violate” its tos.
Let’s say it’s a rally: “Let’s organize and prevent Twitter from requiring proof of immunization status.”
It’s about unionization and demanding that Twitter not demand proof of immunization (if they were to require it), but it could be any number of things that are contrary to their liking including unionization.
I really think employer hosted employee activism is just ... always a problem.
It's a minefield, and one with slack where the employer has all that data, what was said, and who... that's just a mess for EVERYONE.
>But that rule has not been evenly enforced. Currently, Apple employees have popular Slack channels to discuss #fun-dogs (more than 5,000 members), #gaming (more than 3,000 members), and #dad-jokes (more than 2,000 members).
I would find those more acceptable if I were an employer, even an employee.
Edit: I had a bad typo in this post where I said "employee hosted" and intended it to say "employer" now fixed, thus some of the responses.
For folks who don't know, one thing right out of the union-buster handbook is that you first remove the ability of workers to organize themselves at work -- and then when they have to resort to visiting their co-workers at their homes to organize them, you make those home visits an argument against the union.
I think there has to be a line somewhere between protecting employees right to talk about work (that has pretty strong protections, even public comments online can be protected between employees have been protected) and ... having the employer host a slack channel.
What happens if that channel gets really nasty and some employees are bullying others (for any reason) or just anything bad comes of it?
The employer is by default privy to the whole channel too.
I just think recorded info like this hosted by the employer is inherently a bad idea and everyone would be better served if the employees ran some channel of their own hosted elsewhere.
> What happens if that channel gets really nasty and some employees are bullying others (for any reason) or just anything bad comes of it?
"We don't condone the existence of this channel, however due to labor laws, we can't and won't take action against it. If the discussion of this channel moves away from primarily being labor and organization related we will archive the channel, give all of you access to the archive, and shut it down. This is to prevent the harassment and not to block organization efforts.
If you feel uncomfortable in this chat, please let us know and we can silently remove you from it.
We also encourage employees that want to organize to use alternative methods that aren't hosted by Apple."
The other side on Hacker News will say 'be open and honest', but fail to indemnify the person at hand against potential losses. Talk is cheap, unless you're the one who has to pay for the consequences.
So, if a company can't afford to enable "nast[iness]", they "should tank"? I am trying to take everyone's argument at face value, but yours doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Wouldn't bullying be a reason for discipline regardless of what medium is occurred in? That doesn't seem relevant to Slack channels about any particular topic.
You suggest having a line, but as a top-level comment alludes to, there historically has been one and it's right where the author of this article drew it.
Companies have the right in most circumstances to say "no hanging up non-work pamphlets on the bulletin board." But once you allow non-work pamphlets, you can't discriminate against against these types of issues. That, sadly in my view, changed under the Trump NLRB specifically when it came to email (which one could argue slack is similar to). Though it's likely to change again under Democrats.
By the way, in terms of "bullying" it's worth noting that the law protecting the ability of people to talk about workplace conditions using company resources like a bulletin board or slack channel doesn't have to allow for abuse behavior by coworkers. If you're seeking a line, that can be it, and it's based in current law, too.
This final comment isn't aimed at you, but I wish the "anti-cancel culture" activists took this seriously as a free speech issue. This kind of thing is much more common and a bigger deal than a select group of folks who have to rely on substack for their audiences to follow their thoughts.
It's not even much more common: it's the same thing. "Canceling" is people losing their jobs over suspicion, rumors, accusations and unpopular opinions on no material grounds. With labor rights, that can't happen. You have to have a specific, pre-negotiated reason.
Somehow the people who moan endlessly about someone getting fired for liking a tweet are the same people who will fight to the death to preserve the ability for employers to fire you for liking a tweet.
> I just think recorded info like this hosted by the employer is inherently a bad idea and everyone would be better served if the employees ran some channel of their own hosted elsewhere.
I wonder if the employees would be allowed to set up their slack channel elsewhere, or if Apple would prefer having control.
> What happens if that channel gets really nasty and some employees are bullying others (for any reason) or just anything bad comes of it?
What if the Earth ended yesterday? It doesn't matter, because it didn't happen. Also, that would be a disciplinary matter for those employees, not the chatroom.
> I just think recorded info like this hosted by the employer is inherently a bad idea and everyone would be better served if the employees ran some channel of their own hosted elsewhere.
Have you ever tried to get your friends to join you on some new social or messaging platform? And failed miserably? Yeah. Now try getting random coworkers to do it.
The entire purpose of banning this room was to raise the barrier against organizing. And it did so effectively.
So you're suggesting Apple will allow an email to go out to everyone that alerts employees of the EMPLOYEE-hosted slack space? Because if not, we're back to having to tell them via home visits. Any other method (for example, spreading the word in the break room) would get the worker organizers in trouble if they got caught.
> you can ask "hey can i have your phone #" and then text them. you can ask them "can i have your email" and then email them.
Can you do this on company property? If not, you seem to be proposing some sort of psychic divining of the payroll and addresses of workers, or some psychic communication of phone numbers and emails.
Can you stand outside of the gates and flag down cars as they leave?
How can you be all for unionization but be against any possible way to establish a union?
If the coworker rats you out for violating their policy, since you're now suggesting they just violate the policy because it's hard to enforce, then you are fired.
This is more difficult than you think at Apple, since the company provides many engineers with phones for company use that most people just use personally.
I've always worked for small startup or regional tech companies (software companies, TaaS companies, datacenters, ISPs)
I landed my first gig at a large bay area software company and it's been great. Maybe I'm still green - but i've never experienced a company that treat it's employees so well in compensation and benefits. Never. including a somewhat large european software company i worked for. I'm sure once you dig in somewhere, there's stuff from a labor perspective to complain about but i just don't see it.
But no matter the company, including this one, I've always rejected company phones and pushed to use my own. Wanna give me a stipend? Ok.
Want me to install Microsoft InTune to give you admin control over the MS app on my phone (office/teams/outlook)? Ok. That's fine
Wants a policy of me locking my phone upon installation of some apps? Ok.
But you don't get to control my whole phone. Period. And I don't get the people who allow this line to be crossed.
Besides, one day 5 or 10 years from now i might want to look for another job - should i be using company property to do this? Should i when i inevitably look up stuff in my private life that might violate company policy? Be it political stuff or adult entertainment?
Have you ever tried to get your friends to join you on some new social or messaging platform? And failed miserably? Yeah. Now try getting random coworkers to do it. And then try doing it without being allowed to tell them about it at work, over email, over slack, or over any of the other ways you contact your coworkers.
> one thing right out of the union-buster handbook is that you first remove the ability of workers to organize themselves at work
Simplest way around that is handing out pamphlets near the company entrance/exit containing information about the union. And of course you point to non-employer-hosted resources such as a member-only forum.
If you mean the parking lot, keep in mind that's a contested area that employers have fought very hard to prevent workers from using to organize.
If you mean just outside of the parking lot, you STILL have issues. Amazon for instance, in their recent organizing battle, literally was accused of getting the county to change the traffic light timing:
Pamphlets? In 2021? Really? I think if the only way labor organizers can reasonably notify members and potential members of goings-on is via pamphlets, there's something wrong here.
What are you going to do, ask HR for a list of everybody's personal email addresses? Pamphlets seem like a pretty reasonable workaround to me. Though, in my experience, pamphlets are more of an icebreaker than the actual medium of communication. If you're just standing around trying to talk to people, nobody wants that. If you're holding a binder, or have some pamphlets to hand people, they're a lot more willing to talk. As long as the pamphlet has a URL or email address, probably a QR code, it has a purpose for those who are interested.
Good thing it's 2021 where opt-in communication at a better level of home visits is a click away (literally, they could have just made a new Slack workspace and used non-work devices to visit it)
But what you're suggesting is that they'd have to do a house visit in order to tell coworkers about this slack workspace -- that anything using company resources, including company grounds, should be a violation of the rights of the company.
In what universe is there no option besides a house visit to share a link?!
In what universe did my comment say "that anything using company resources, including company grounds, should be a violation of the rights of the company."?!
In what universe is there nothing between "start a public slack channel on the company slack" and "show up to someone's house with a URL"?!
I'm sorry but it's like HN has just suddenly become this place where people are literally unable to just reply to the comment they read and not some made up fantasy version that relies on whatever agenda they've applied to you. It's a little much when you're going this far in turning off your brain to be able to do it... please realize using critical thinking is not a moral fault. It's the bare minimum you can do reading a comment.
I think the challenge is most of our major tech corporations love to publicly tout their progressive bonafides at every possible opportunity.
Right until it hurts their pocket book that is. Then suddenly all of the politics they've been pushing go out the window and they want to have an apolitical workforce.
If corporations want to be non-political, they should stay non-political.
I've personally become quite cynical about their motives. I think these woke tech companies are happy to talk about equity and climate because it doesn't cost them anything -- it's basically free marketing -- but if their workers organized or their taxes were raised, they'd suddenly show their true colors.
Regarding this specific issue, I do not see what paying people for what they negotiate has to do with progressivism.
Equity in pay potential is progressive (i.e. not discriminating against race, etc), but I do not see why everyone should have the same pay. I pay people (and businesses) differently based on what I think my second best option would cost. Is that not what everyone does?
> Equity in pay potential is progressive (i.e. not discriminating against race, etc), but I do not see why everyone should have the same pay. I pay people (and businesses) differently based on what I think my second best option would cost. Is that not what everyone does?
People aren't generally advocating for "the same" pay (precise lockstep), but broadly transparency and auditability. To use Google as an example, roles have bands. Two people in the same role aren't paid the precise same amount, but you'll generally know that they'll be +-, say, 20%. And someone at L+1 will earn more than someone at L.
In other words, there is a fairly straightforward way to calculate $$$ given performance review data. So there's rules and things work within the rules. This allows individuals to see that their performance is getting compensated the same as someone else's performance, via the same rules. If and when there are exceptions, the employer should be able to justify those exceptions. Why is John, at L, getting paid more than James at L+1? Because James was just promoted, and John has been a top performer at L for the last 5 years.
> It is anyone once their interests / income matters.
I think the GP's point was that they are dishonest about it. They claim that they, unlike others, aren't selfish, other things matter more than money etc when in reality they don't, and all the talk is only virtue signalling.
Just out of curiosity: what are your thoughts on Unions, the epitome of "employer hosted employee activism"?
Of course management is going to be least tolerant of things that represent financial risk to them, and there's nothing more financially risky than employees realizing where all the excess profits go...
Realistically, discussions about unions and organization are always going to need to happen at least partially using "employer hosted" spaces.
Whether that means communication that happen in meeting rooms, in break rooms, in cafeterias, or over e-mail, Slack rooms, or other employer-hosted message boards.
It's important to have union communication spaces outside the workplace too -- whether at union headquarters, Slack rooms, etc. -- but nobody's even going to find out about those without discussion and recruiting happening on-site.
If employees are allowed to approach each other about organizing in a cafeteria or break room or by the water cooler (which is critically important), then Slack is no different -- the "social" Slack channels are just the digital equivalent.
I don't think it's at all reasonable to say that a Slack channel is an "equivalent" to spreading information by ad-hoc meetings in the cafeteria/break room/near the water cooler.
I can reach all people in a Slack channel by spending a few seconds typing something. Reaching any large number of people through chance encounters in an office on break time requires perhaps hours of work spread out over days or weeks. And you'll never reach employees who work in another location if you can only physically talk to the ones who work in your office.
I think there is a difference in the slack channel being hosted on Apple's Slack compared to an employee telling another about their independent Slack instance & channel over an existing Slack channel and/or DM.
I think you should look some of this stuff up. Your expectations aren't really in line with the law.
As someone else has posted, once you let a little non-job related material in ("cute doggo pics!!!") you're almost always allowing labor discussions in as well. A strong pro-labor NLRB would (and possibly will) be all over this action.
Right, this is why lawyers are renowned as the fun police. The correct action from the perspective of the interests of the shareholders would be to ban the dog chat and the dad jokes.
Only if management and the shareholders are ignorant and short-sighted. Discouraging union activity with a stick is not a long term win. Maybe with a carrot, or maybe embrace it.
employer hosted you mean... i'll delete after you correct, cheers
but the apple anti-trust enforcement action I'd like to see enforced would be them keeping dad-jokes all to themselves, denying competitors the same comic relief
>>Slack channels for activities and hobbies not recognized as Apple Employee clubs or Diversity Network Associations (DNAs) aren’t permitted and shouldn’t be created.
Clearly the solution is to have an "LGBTQ+ and pay equality" channel.
Apple actually already nixed an employee run pay survey because it collected diversity data.
Their argument was that while collection and discussion of pay is protected, collection of (opt in) gender and race etc. Data is not.
Flashback: From 2005 to 2009 Apple was running an illegal wage fixing scheme and using threats of demolishing competitors with patent infringement lawsuits when they stated they didn't want to participate because the scheme was illegal.
Apple eventually had to pay out in a settlement a tiny fraction of what they stole from employees, so there is little incentive to engage in other blatantly illegal acts against their employees-- much less in activities which are arguably just inside the line of legally permitted.
I have a few thoughts about this-
1) I dont think it is 'professional' behavior to discuss everyones business on a slack channel
2) I dont necessarily agree with equal pay for each job title. I think it should definitely be in a ballpark based on job function. I've worked long enough that I've seen equally titled employees with VASTLY different work outputs. That isnt to say that the less productive employee was even a bad employee, they just werent the 10x employee the other one was. I dont see a problem with the 10x employee making more money.
3) Is complaining on Slack or posting your salary the best way to accomplish the goal of equal pay? I don't personally think it is, but I am willing to hear counter arguments.
4) If I were unhappy about my current pay, I would approach it much differently. I would first go to my direct manager and tell that person I felt I deserved more comp. I would put together a list of reasons/accomplishments/justifications for this reason. I always keep a journal of what Im working on and try to send a list of "working on, completed, to do" so that I have my goals set properly. I send that on a regular basis to my manager(But I contract so its a bit different than an employee in this regard).
5) If you still feel like you are under compensated or underappreciated, go look for a job. Get an offer. Have leverage. You will either get a raise or a new job. Win Win Its frowned upon to do this often but I think its better behavior than starting a slack channel and asking people to post their salary.
Everything you mentioned in 1-5 is inherently harder to do as an employee because there is a vast information asymmetry in the workplace. ICs work on a "need to know" basis while managers and HR know everything.
How can you say for sure that you deserve more when you don't know how much others in your role are making? Why would your manager not simply say no and shut down the discussion? If they do offer you a 5% bump, maybe you actually deserve 15%? It's like playing poker with someone who sees all the cards. Sure they can't beat you if you have a royal flush, but on average they will always come out ahead. There's a reason there are laws mandating that your employer cannot stop you from talking about your salary.
These discussions all serve to give you as an employee more data to use in negotiations, and for that they are incredibly effective.
If people are discussing their salaries for equality, then I think it’s fair for all other employees to comment on wether they are actually good and effective at their job. Let everyone vote on if they really deserve that salary—or a larger one, or a smaller one.
The company makes the comp decisions via management, not the rank and file employees. They already have information about everyone's compensation.
Sharing compensation information with your coworkers only puts you on a more even footing when negotiating with management. After all you are probably at least somewhat aware of your relative productivity. If you and the company disagree, you find another job where hopefully you are more in sync and everyone is happier.
I don't see why you can just find a new job and tell them to sod off. Sure its not always the right answer to leave and try to effect change from within. But if Apple is SOO stacked against the employees I am not sure why anyone wants to be there.
What if you didn't know you were being underpaid (say, by half)? Unless you knew that your salary was low compared to your peers, you would have no way to do #4 or #5 because you were blissfully unaware.
What if you didn't know that all of the folks of your gender got paid 16% less than the folks on the team of the opposite gender? How would you know this and/or do something about it?
It's not about being happy with your salary, it's about being treated fairly. How can you expect to be treated fairly without the data?
> 3) Is complaining on Slack or posting your salary the best way to accomplish the goal of equal pay? I don't personally think it is, but I am willing to hear counter arguments.
A slack channel is probably an efficient way to organize other employees for collective bargaining. There are already salary sharing sites like team blind and levels.fyi
To me this is an issue of scale. A small startup can hand pick talented people and pay them the same. Its pretty easy to manage employees and validate performance as you approach ~100 employees.
Now scale that up to 50k employees. The talent pool isnt large enough to have only A players. Secondly in a large org you may not want some of the A players available because they have a crappy attitude. So what do you do? Hire B and C players and hope you can mentor them to a B+ A-. Im still not sure they deserve top tier pay, at least at first. If they demonstrate improvement then compensate them. Personally I think where companies go wrong with comp is that they stop rewarding top performers- especially in the IT/DevOps side. Ive worked at various companies where the sales and or traders that form the business often get large rewards just because they are on the income side of the house. IT and Development can at best increase efficiency and reduce costs but they are always just that, a cost. So short sighted managers eventually hit a wall and say no more comp increases. Eventually that person leaves when they find a better job, and they spend 50-100k recruiting a replacement that they have to pay what the existing employee wanted in the first place.
No direct incentive today. If they find value through the site (maybe for a negotiation), then they're free to contribute back and we've seen that be a pretty significant motive. Pretty altruistic, but people realize it helped them and it can help others in the future.
These aren’t factory line workers — these are highly compensated “employment at will” knowledge workers at one of the most prestigious employers in the world. With Apple on your resume, you can likely apply for a job at many firms who will compensate you much more than Apple. A typical skilled knowledge worker who feels underpaid would look for opportunities elsewhere and either leave or leverage an offer for a raise —- unless of course they were not really skilled and/or they had other motivations.
Also, these demands for pay equity from knowledge workers (and their leaks to tech media activists) will almost certainly incentivize and drive employers to increase hierarchies and divisions in their organizational structures. Can you legitimately complain about pay equity when your job is unlike anyone else’s job in the org chart?
You shouldn't need to be unhappy with your salary to expect to be treated fairly relative to your peers.
Arguing that jobs are different is moot. Even two very different jobs for the same title with the same tenure are in the same rough ballpark. It's not a justification that it should be impossible to get the data.
With many of us working from home, now all of our "normal day to day" communication channels are basically "hosted" by the company. When you were in the office, you could easily walk over and have a private conversation with someone. Now it's done over communication lines that the company pays for. I wonder if that will have a long-term effect on our ability to talk critically about our workplace with coworkers.
Jacob Preston was sitting down with his manager during his first week at Apple when he was told, with little fanfare, that he needed to link his personal Apple ID and work account.
You are not required to use your personal Apple ID at work. It just means you’ll carry separate devices, and most don’t want that inconvenience (including me). It also makes it harder to debug real world scenarios if you only test on non-real world data.
Facebook doesn't allow 2 accounts for the same person for account security reasons. This is also why they tried to get so aggressive with checking ID cards to create facebook accounts. So either you delete everything from your personal account before linking, or link it as is.
Is there a reason the employees didn't use a different IM client to do this? Pay equity is a serious issue that directly impacts the corp's ability to negotiate against their own employees. Why give Apple banhammer privileges by discussing it on corporate channels?
Generally, using an internal IM client provides a stronger guarantee that all people in the group are employees. This reduces the risk of leaking out sensitive info, or the chances of a journalist/competitor snooping in, or phishing attacks etc.
As such, employers should strongly prefer that such communication happens via internal channels. It is the smart thing to do, unless you believe that employees would just stop discussing these things if you banned them from internal IM. But of course, this is Apple.
Even in the context of companies that often have slack channels where people discuss all sorts of topics ... it's one I would expect many people would want away from the prying eyes of the folks who chose to pay them X.
I wonder if there is some expectation / hope / motivation the the employer would see the topic and somehow respond? A sort of slack channel as a psudo-protest / online activism?
At my previous job at a national lab, we could access these charts that would show pay bands for each title, and had a dot for each employee in your department. Since you know your own salary, you could pretty easily see if you were being underpaid--although of course you'd need to take into account how long you had been in the position vs. your colleagues.
Why don’t they just create a slack channel and pinned on that channel it says “hey here is a discord channel to go to…” Maybe the point of creating the channel actually is to get it banned so they can point to that for anti unionizing complaints?
Apple banned the channel, I'd be surprised if they actually wanted the sort of info you're suggesting they might be after. At the very least, it suggests Apple doesn't think there's much benefit in having that info.
They could start by posting surveys in women's bathrooms. If Apple is like other tech company's, the C suite folks will all be cis men and never go in the women's bathrooms.
Once the women gather data they'd have to figure out how to do part 2, gathering men's data, in some equally sneaky fashion.
Not all equities are the same in Apple’s eyes. - not George Orwell
I hope people aren’t surprised. Apple has a very consumer friendly image but that is because the incentives are aligned. Behind the scenes, the knives come out: Apple labor fixing scandal, Apple caving to the FBI on end to end encryption, Apple playing favorites in the App Store, etc… These aren’t one-offs, they are the culture.
We have a similar large pets-focused channel at my company and it's more like reddit.com/r/aww than a conversation with coworkers. I keep it muted, and check in from time to time if I need a happy-pictures fix.
google tried to prevent teams from using slack "for security reasons" but then deepmind got an exception, and enough people had to join slack groups for external work collaborations, but I don't think the leadership ever explicitly sanctioned slack as an officially supported internal mechanism.
The vast majority of team communication at Google goes through Chat. The only Slack usage I know of is acquisitions (who are encouraged to move off it) and interaction with customers/partners.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. That channel could have been a goldmine for HR to assess morale and to get candid basic feedback about compensation. But sure.
Do you want employees to start talking work related stuff on encrypted messaging apps on their personal (or burner) phones? This is how you get them to start doing just that..
Can't for a year and a half of acting as though establishing Slack channels will serve as some proxy for whether a company is dedicated to pay equity. Will totally distract everyone from the underlying question.
Injunction on Apple filed today in my racketeering action CVCV043016 District Court for Dallas County Iowa on behalf of major shareholder Iowa Public Employee Retiree System. The last thing shareholders need is erosion of equity via a massive NLRA lawsuit.
Sure, but some are more risky... The company I worked for, set the retention policy of the #general channel to 1 week two days after a discussion of racial/sex biases during hiring...
There shouldn't be any chat at all. This crap just creates unnecessary opportunities for liability. The only purpose for these chat services is to create attack surfaces for plaintiff lawyers. In banking the government saddles the banks with logged chats and recorded phone lines that get forwarded to regulators. Yet now in tech the industry has saddled itself with risk without even being forced to, bombarding employees with pointless notifications to boot through these insipid, time-wasting chat services.
It is very bad for employees because employees are the sacrificial goats for shareholders. The catch all escape for liability is 'an employee did it' followed by 'a manager did it' followed by 'an executive did it.' These chats to some extent make it easier to sacrifice peons to the government and/or civil plaintiffs but it also makes it harder to fend off such conflicts in the first place by just making it harder for the other side to find any dirt.
Well that's really strange I felt sure since their last vapid, empty gesture on social media that these mega corporations were going to be on our side for the socialist revolution. I was willing to overlook their tax avoidance and labor exploitation, but this!?
What they should do is, anyone who's unfairly being paid too much should have that amount deducted from their pay and diverted to community programs, or actually paying off some taxes.
They appear to have written 200 articles for the site. That's some proper diligence to establishing a deep cover as a journalist. Their beat is labor issues and workplace organization. You generally don't get a lot of company puff pieces in that particular area.
Does that change the facts? Apple banned a channel discussing pay equity, giving the reason that Slack 'must advance the work, deliverables, or mission of Apple departments and teams', which is clearly being selectively enforced.
well, certainly I don't believe the "facts" that schiffer writes because it's clear she has a very strong bias. If you keep asking the same people for pull quotes, and present only one side of the story, with no acceptance of nuance, it means you're a poor journalist.
>“It sure is very convenient for Apple that these Terms of Use that they wrote are extremely useful for crushing free and open communication among employees,” one source says.
>Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge.
Can someone please convince me: why should I want to talk about my pay with any of my colleagues? If I know how much you earn, if we are in separate teams, if you earn less than me I will not take you seriously; if you earn more than me I will give you all my attention since I want to be you and learn from you. If we are in the same team: if you earn more than me I will be jealous; if you earn less than me I will feel guilty.
What the hell is pay equity good for me ? How can I feel better in any of those outcomes?
Not that I agree with the move, but is that really surprising?
Creating a false sense of camaraderie and family creates a culture where people are interested in working and are positive toward the company. It increases productivity, makes people work more hours, and probably increases tenure.
Talking about pay equity leads to dissatisfaction and likely loss of profits as people look for more money, or for different jobs. It's not in the company's best interests.
Remember, HR is not there primarily for your benefit as an employee. I would say the same about company chat.
I could see this gaining steam. Why would the activism stop with equal pay between men and women. Why not equal pay for everything. Who is going to stand up and say I think the Non-binary Black Cook in the cafeteria should be paid 60% less than the privileged white male programmer? Could AAPL afford to pay every employee 500k?
You've posted ideological flamewar comments more than once recently. That's against the rules here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We ban accounts that break the rules, so please stop doing that.
As someone with autism, I find professional business environments entirely navigable, and have been able to thrive in them. Almost all interactions — even those involving professional workplace politics — conform to a reasonable set of established rules.
The people involved with these Slack channels and associated "organizing" efforts are consistently bringing their (eminently messy) "whole self" to work, and the result is a corrosively unprofessional mess — one that they want to introduce to the rest of the company.
I do not trust for a second that salary transparency, with these individuals, would lead to more fair, equitable outcomes for us all. I do not trust that they would evaluate the information maturely, with an understanding of the complex variables at play.
I do not trust that they wouldn't use further politicking and social dominance games (including leaking to The Verge) to advance their own personal or political interests, at a cost to others.
Ultimately, I shouldn't have to navigate their complex, subjective, toxic social hierarchies — which have nothing to do with advancing business objectives — just to get through my business day and be successful in my job.
Verge has been publishing leaks to support this group for months now, and it's disingenuous to suggest, given the body of evidence, that voluntary pay transparency is the extent of their organizing or goals.
What do you care? Honestly, so what if Apple employees unionize? They get what...better pay? They have greater equity in the trillion dollars of value that they've created?
Even if pay transparency was a small step towards organization, you say that as if it is a bad thing. The only people who benefit from suppressing organization are the executives and biggest shareholders at Apple.
> I do not trust for a second that salary transparency, with these individuals, would lead to more fair, equitable outcomes for us all. I do not trust that they would evaluate the information maturely, with an understanding of the complex variables at play.
> I do not trust that they wouldn't use further politicking and social dominance games (including leaking to The Verge) to advance their own personal or political interests, at a cost to others.
I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, talking about pay is often counterproductive, as you never see the blood sweat and tears that went into someone's pay, you only see the end result and it seems "unfair". On the other hand, at Google, there's a gigantic spreadsheet where people share their comp, and it helped dispel some narratives like "women in the same positions are paid less" to some extent. It's not the same when the company itself shares the stats - you always know there are a million ways to lie with statistics. So there are positives and negatives to this.
Were it up to me, I'd ban all such discussion. By all reasonable measures, FANG employees are paid more than enough. Focus on work, not on someone else's wallet. But it's not up to me, for better or worse.
Nope, make pay transparent. At least people can have a fair discussion with their managers why they don't get paid the median amount at their level.
So sick of companies promoting transparency in all engineering processes, but when it comes to pay it becomes this opaque thing that's also taboo to talk about.
I’d like to see how employees split on this. People always frame it as if it’s the company fighting the employee want for transparency - but as an employee I do not want transparency (although that highly depends on the level of transparency we’re talking about which is also rarely discussed).
If this a vocal minority of employees that what transparency or a larger group?
I feel when people can see what they’re getting paid relative to close colleagues (especially if you include data from multiple countries and/or cities) a lot of people won’t be happy. In theory we all know the engineers working for the office in the more expensive cities get paid more but seeing that on paper will cause a lot of animosity. I also know for example my company pays employees in similar cost of living cities differently because the local market is less competitive in one. Again, wouldn’t be good to see on paper.
Also, I think this idea that knowing what colleagues are paid improves your negotiating position is wrong. It’s much more important to figure out what competitors will pay you.
Transparency data can be useful for preventing discrimination but that should be left up to the state to monitor.
How do you make _effort_ transparent though? If pay is conditioned on effort and productivity (which it arguably should be), how do you surface that explanation, rather than just the extremely inflammatory "this person makes $700K a year" number. For all you know this person might have made the company 10x the amount, whereas someone who "only" made $600K a year had effectively negative productivity. Without this context comp numbers are effectively useless.
I'm mature enough to understand some people work harder / have greater output, etc. That's for my manager to explain. If I'm getting feedback that I'm doing well at my level but still being underpaid or not hitting the 90th percentile, than there's a disconnect between the feedback I'm receiving and the compensation.
There's another problem in the industry that new hires get way higher salaries than tenured engineers. This allows me to understand what salaries are being paid to new engineers. It's hard for me to believe a new engineer coming into the org is more productive than me. This further allows me to make a case against my manager to adjust my pay.
As a (former) high level manager: your manager knows _exactly_ who her best people are, and she prays to dear god every day that they don't leave, because then she'd be SOL. This tends to lead to unequal distribution of rewards (and as some people in 2021 would say "inequitable" since the meme is now that everyone should be poor), but without this all business would collapse.
Note that I'm not talking about "old boys network" situation here. That should be dealt with at the cultural level. I'm talking about some folks being just legit amazing and making more money than I do because of it.
> I'm mature enough
If that's the case, you're _way_ more mature than most people. Most people couldn't care less how valuable someone else is or what they do, if they make $1K/mo more.
To some extent, the "levels" constrain the compensation ranges in most organizations. Those ranges get much wider the higher you are on the org chart, and sometimes disappear entirely for VPs and up. But this isn't about how much VPs get paid. This is about how much Joe from 2 cubes down the hallway gets paid, and why that's "entirely too much" and "unfair".
The best raises I ever got were due to changing jobs, not by pleading with my manager.
> If managers provide detailed feedback about what went right and what went wrong
I'll let you in on a management secret: most of the time managers can't articulate this even to themselves unless they are talking about the few people in their organization that truly, quantifiably kick ass. They're human, they live by perceptions. The only limiting factor that grounds those perceptions is whether you're solving the hard problems your manager's manager wants to see solved. You could say this is biased (and it is), but bias is not uniformly bad, woke corporate edicts notwithstanding.
Before I get lynched over the previews sentence, let me explain exactly what I mean by it. For the record, I don't mean any kind of bias based on unchangeable traits. Simply put that has no place in a professional environment. However, _any_ manager worth their pay will be biased in favor of an employee who makes the impossible possible. Most of immediate peers would even view this as "fair". But even slightly remote peers (perhaps another, nearby team), would not have much, if any, visibility into why this "bias" exists. Worse, even immediate peers who are angling for greater rewards (often without merit - their mom just told them they always get a trophy when they were a kid) will perceive the situation as deeply "unfair".
TL;DR: hot takes are not helpful, it's a difficult landscape to navigate. My opinion on this is not particularly strong because I don't see it making much of a difference. Kickass people will still get disproportionate rewards, and whiners will get pissed off and leave. It's the potential strife that I find objectionable.
My job is hard enough. I don't need to worry about my manager's job.
If I can be asked why X was implemented like this,or why a particular decision was made when implementing a feature. A manager should sure as hell be ready to answer why Bob from ProductZ team is getting paid more than me.
I have no sympathy for managers and their human biases. Everyone does their job with human biases.
> Kickass people will still get disproportionate rewards
And, they should! You're very focused on the 1% of the kick-ass people. This isn't about them, this is about the other 99%.
> You're very focused on the 1% of the kick-ass people
Quite frankly, most of the rest don't matter one way or the other. And it's usually more like 10%, not 1%. Perhaps your job is so hard because you're expending effort on things that don't matter to your manager's manager (and therefore to your manager as well). There's a second derivative to this. If you want a decent longer term trajectory, make sure to pick the manager who ensures that his/her teams work on things that matter to _his_ manager's manager. You could easily bust your ass for a decade for zero reward if you don't keep this in mind. Or you could go work in a small company where none of this applies at all.
> My job is hard enough. I don't need to worry about my manager's job.
Once you second guess your manager's decisions (pay, raises and promotions) I think it's fair game to at least understand what those decisions really entail...
I agree with you on the issue with new hires getting paid more. It's market forces at work, but... yeah that shit sucks.
Regarding your first point I think you're a bit optimistic as to how well people take such a conversations. For example, doing well _at level_ (in my experience) means meeting expectations. There's no way someone meeting expectations should get 90th percentile comp for their level. So are you mature enough to accept that you're not good enough to warrant p90 comp?
I actually disagree. You are expected to do your job well. If expectations are high (as they should be) then meeting them is great (ie: meets = you get your target bonus.)
Exceeding expectations is above and beyond "doing well."
Talking about pay is pretty much always a win for workers. If people have an emotional reaction, maybe they need to do it more or maybe they have some unique need to opt out. Otherwise, it’s the lowest effort way for workers to improve their outcomes.
However the specifics (e.g. what if there is a policy about what topics are OK, but some OK topics are non-work, or what if there is a general work-only policy that is selectively enforced against organizing) have gone back and forth depending on the administration.
Apple's behaviour is probably a result of a 2019 ruling [1] which opend the door to this kind of thing. Given that the administration has swung back to being fairly labor friendly, it'll be interesting if this gets to the NRLB to see if they find a way to make this illegal.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/labor-board...