Why don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers?
I know that we’re not a monolith and are actually a heterogeneous mix of opinions, but there frequently talk about job dissatisfaction (career burnout, comically stingy equity grants, etc).
But when organizing comes up, it’s usually treated with disdain because so many have bought into highly individualistic hustle-culture and the narrative that unions only exist to help lazy freeloaders
Tech workers, or white collars in general, believe in the law (I'm Not A Lawyer, as well as looking as the union as a solution) and sort of peaceful solution, without much violence.
We tend to think like this, unconsciously if not outright: "I'm smarter than the next guy, so in a dog-eat-dog system I'll come out ahead. Organizing with a bunch of less-smart people would only hold me back."
Plus, at the risk of too much head-shrinking, I've never gotten the impression that tech workers liked each other very much. There's a lot of disdain in the industry, for the guy who uses that language or framework or operating system that I think sucks. You don't see that so much with, say, truckers. There may be some good-natured rivalry based on truck brands or long-haul versus short-haul, but not the real disdain you see in tech.
The simplest answer tends to be the right one, so in the face of the inexplicable, the answer is usually ignorance.
The tech track works great if one falls into line and doesn't rock the boat by questioning authority or trying to see the big picture. If one clings to original teenage fantasies like the idea that intellectual prowess and financial success eventually bring esteem and a social life. If one chooses to avoid becoming mired in dead end physical labor jobs like everyone else, even for a time, in worship of their own cleverness.
But should the unthinkable happen, say, the loss of a loved one due to a hyper focus on work, or witnessing one's work being used to take from others, or waking up one day to find oneself disillusioned with the direction tech is going, then suddenly tech loses its luster. One starts to recognize it for what it is - just another way to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Tech has come to symbolize sheltering from reality, like a state sanctioned drug. It's a way to pat oneself on the back and downplay the wisdom of those outside it. Blindly worshipping it to the exclusion of the other wonders of life is the surest way I know to separate oneself from the soul, other than money perhaps.
In good conscience, I must add that the vast majority of tech today is phantom tech, not real tech. It serves to entertain and distract rather than be a labor-saving device. So in that sense, it's understandable that people invested in solving anything except any real problem have a disdain for the plight of labor.
> Why don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers?
Because many tech workers don't see themselves as workers, with some justification, many having substantial capital investments alongside labor income, making them, in class terms, petit bourgeois or at least close enough to it to perceive their own interests in more bourgeois than proletarian terms. And even the tech workers that are clearly part of the proletarian intelligentsia tend see themselves (rightly or wrongly) on a path that leads into the bourgeoisie, with bourgeois interests.
Working class: you are sustained by your current labor.
Upper class: you can sustain yourself based on the returns from your investments more-or-less indefinitely.
Middle class, between the two: you can sustain yourself off your investments for so long that you can’t practically be threatened by unemployment.
It is a labor relations issue explicitly, you need a union if you are in the first of the three classes, because otherwise you can be threatened by unemployment to do something dangerous or dehumanizing.
In the middle class definition, practically there’s some element of the fact that our skills are in high demand, so you can become unthreatened by unemployment by having just, like, a 1 year buffer. But I do think we can overstate how in-demand our skills to satisfy our egos…
It's crazy how we've abstracted financial serfdom out of the status of being a property owner. Contrasted with renting it surely seems like independence, but whether the bank squeezes extra value out of you directly or through the proxy of a landlord, the end result is similar.
What makes solidarity between workers possible is the homogeneity of their labour. This condition is not present for tech workers. Labour market conditions are completely different from those of say, a meat processing plant or a factory assembly line.
Doesn’t the “G” in SAG stand for “Guild?” A guild is different from a union, right? It is more like a bunch of independent contractors making connections or something like that.
not only would the collective provide benefits to the individual workers, but it would serve as an (optional) form of licensure/credentialing that ensures each member has a baseline level of competence. it could make hiring so much easier if you could skip the fizzbuzz screening rounds by pulling from a pool of vetted talent.
Yeah. There are groups like ACM, IEEE has some computer sub-group if I recall correctly, and there are more niche groups like SIAM. But, they all seem to have a somewhat academic focus, at least in my (very limited) experience.
Good point. I am not familiar with Hollywood to know what their job market is like.
EDIT: another commented mentioned that NBA players are also unionized. I think there is a second element to it, which has to do with how monopolized the employer market is.
This is the exactly the right kind of question to be asking, but I think your conclusion is wrong. Why think the painters and the welder in an auto factory have more in common than 20 different kinds of programmers do?
I think this is the right line of thinking. My understanding of the grandparent's argument is 2 pieces:
1. Heterogeneity/homogeneity of labour.
2. Tight/lose labour market.
I think Argument 1 is the weaker argument. There's a lot of fungibility between software roles. However, there's a higher learning cost. Moving to a new software company requires a few months before someone is close to full productivity. This in contrast between a painter moving from a Ford supplier to a GM supplier will likely close to full productivity within a few weeks. The cost (to the employer) is lower to rehire someone.
Argument 2 is the stronger argument, but may not be forever. In a tight labour market, I see very little need for unions. If the marginal worker can (and will) leave their position for a better position (pay, benefits, culture, etc), I see little need for unions. However, if the labour market for software engineers shifts in favor of businesses, this will change rapidly.
As far as I know workers in auto factory work on assembly line with very standardized amount of work and with work itself being highly repetitive.
Also, their output is relatively easy to measure and stand arise.
This is not true for programmers, making standard pay increase for programmers less useful as a target. What would be measured? Hours in office? Commits? Lines of code?
Most of us have way, way more in common with a meat processing worker than we have in common with the people who sign our pay checks.
The wealthy class makes multiples of your salary in passive income and their marginal tax rate is lower. You work and fork over 40%. They do nothing and pay 15% or less.
You put your retirement money into a 401k. They put their retirement money into a “charitable foundation”.
You draw down from your retirement money. They take a loan against it.
What’s the difference between a billionaire and a meat packing worker? Billions of dollars.
What’s the difference between a billionaire and a faang engineer? Also billions of dollars.
I said nothing about belonging to different economic classes.
My point is simply that if you are 1 of 50,000 in a meat processing plant, you do not really have any way of competing with your fellow workers. You might try to work harder and faster, but then you end up raising the bar for all, and you now have to maintain the new pace. And once the rest catch up with your pace, the pay for all will be lowered again.
In tech, every job is slightly different, and there is a real opportunity to meaningful differentiate yourself from the rest and compete in a much more dynamic job market.
Also, who are the ones hurting currently? The juniors or the seniors? Seniors are mostly doing fine. Juniors are the ones hurting. And juniors would have an even harder time, if you transitioned to a unionized system, because entry requirements would be raised significantly to account for the fact that you cannot fire people so easily.
I’m sorry but any conversation about solidarity among workers is so obviously about class, not even going to bother reading the rest of your comment if that’s where you’re going to go.
Because software developers are some of the most privileged people on earth and need to sooth their guilt by pretending to stand with the working class.
Of course nothing rings as hollow as someone who works from home or a beautiful office, sits in a comfortable chair and works by typing on a keyboard complaining about the struggles of the working class.
You know, there's a lot more to the working class than just manual labor. Anyone that depends on a wage to live is a worker, and we all share the same struggles.
No, things like: we obtain money by working rather than by pumping assets. We pay income tax rather than capital gains tax. Our employers are always asking for more while paying less. We do not individually have enough assets to make individual lobbying efforts EV positive, but our employers and the largest shareholders sure do. Politics is an expense for us but an investment for them -- unless we join together.
Structurally we are more similar than different, even if tech workers have had it good for the last while.
A pitch like this is exactly why unions don't resonate. This comes off as zealotry, genuinely. I've never heard someone suggest tech unionization without coming off as deeply aggrieved at the world.
If you were writing a book about the typical history and personality of tech workers, "deeply aggrieved at the world" would have to be in there somewhere.
>No, the same struggles such as being dependent on the whims of increasingly unhinged oligarchs, while democracy is being dismantled and the planet burns in the name of the stock market.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that. Does not seem to apply to me though.
Sometimes I worry that all the stories about unions helping to end the most extreme exploitation and fix deadly working conditions has made them unrelatable.
If you make a cushy salary and the biggest physical risk is carpal tunnel, you might think ”I dont have it THAT bad. It’d be greedy and disrespectful of the sacrifices that were made to use unions in my situation”
What made unions unrelatable for me was them obviously pushing the interest of factory workers over the interests of engineers. Thanks for trying to get my job outsourced I guess.
My class is the middle class and for generations we have profited from the extremely productive corporations here in Germany. Never in my life have I felt being "exploited" if anything these corporations have been excessively kind.
Quite interesting pattern. Insisting that everyone is a member of your imagined group, whether they like it or not. Then, when they reiterate why they don't want to be part of your group they never signed up for, you label them a traitor. No wonder communism has such a bloody history.
The threat of violence is the only way social progress has ever been made.
Since the poster above seems to be German, he especially should know.
The only reason the conservative Bismarck established the German welfare state was to stave off revolution.
The only means through which capitalists give even an inch is through that threat. That's why worker rights are being rolled back in a lot of places right now - because workers have become soft.
I would call kicking out corrupt occupier oppressing workers and pretending to be socialist superpower as a great success.
Doing it with no bloodshed typically accompanying such events was even better.
Russia was not friend to workers, it was oppressive evil state and kicking it out (what started steps toward collapse of USSR) was one of greatest successes in the history of Poland.
It was no accident that largest strikes in the history of country taken place during PRL and capitalism is so well regarded in Poland.
As a German I know that German corporations, like Bosch and Zeiss have always been at the forefront of making sure their workers were taken care of. Realizing that worker happiness and productivity aren't opposites but only come together.
As a German I know that the only attempt at an anti-communist uprising was met with swift brutality by the troops of the pro-capitalist social democratic government.
As a German I know how a country divided between anti-capitalism and capitalism looks like after many decades. I have seen the ruins of anti-communism with my own eyes, they are hard to hide and so are the crimes of the anti-communist government.
As a German I know that besides national socialism, anti-capitalism is also an illegal ideology in Germany.
The top-end of the working class shares more with the low-end of the working class, than the top-end of the working class shares with the low-end of the upper class.
I have never been to a politician's dinner. I have never changed a law. If I were fired, which can be done at any time for no reason, I would have no source of income. Money is the weakest form of power, and a well-paid job is the weakest form of money.
the labor movement really needs to get beyond this stereotype that it is to lift all these hunched poor little downtrodden suppliants out of poverty. workers who have successfully organized are not pitiful schlubs, and their affluence is a testament to the success of their organizing, not its triviality. political interests of the labor class just are not the same as those of capital, and therefore its methods and aims should be different as well.
one thing that i've been repeating for years now is that if you want tech to organize, unions need to sell themselves differently.
unions in the past are portrayed as remove physical dangers, limiting to reasonable hours and fair wages. but tech workers already have that stuff, so they don't see an upside.
codetermination (getting workers on the board), four day work weeks, full-time remote, sabbaticals, open source support, rethinking startup equity, ... there's all sorts of things we could be pushing for that would make our jobs better that we could to push for if we worked together.
It is still labor and we are still exploited - most the revenue we generate goes to capitalist interests, not us, the laborers, which are the creators of all revenue.
It's just that we have it comparatively good and so are less inclined to seek out systemic change - a less favorable reading would be that we are bought off to split us off from the rest of the proletariat.
More likely software developers are, for the most part, middle class – deriving their income from a combination of labor and land/capital.
While software developers just starting out are apt to be working class, when you receive a comparatively high income for your labor it soon becomes hard to find things to do with it if you don't start investing in land/capital, so one in that position doesn't stay working class for long.
You make it sound like organizing you and your peers is just virtue signaling toward the plight of the working class.
It’s not virtue signaling. There are material gains that could be made by organizing. Layoff protection and the power to set company direction are two big ones that come to mind.
It’s okay to want to unionize for selfish reasons. In fact, I think it’s borderline propaganda to suggest the only reason a wealthy person would organize is because of their own class guilt.
Do you also think the working class have no business complaining about the struggles of the truly poor? And the poor can’t complain about people literally starving?
You seem to be claiming that empathy is always “hollow” but I think this is at most a statement about you. Many people can be both well off and want to make things better for others. Not everyone, for sure, not enough maybe. But attacking people for showing empathy seems weird.
The unions I have heard about or seen in action (in Poland or from news) either
(1) demanded flat payment increases for all workers based on seniority etc. Which may make sense for factory workers but I am not enthusiastic about flat rates for programmers not taking into account actual experience/availability/output etc.
Factory workers in many cases do job that can be easily rated and measured and do some specific amount of it.
While measuring output of programmers is notoriously hard.
I expect that union agreement of this kind would in fact benefit only lazy freeloaders not doing any work but having seniority.
(2) are guilds that existed to keep jobs for members and to outlaw or ban hiring outsiders.
I strictly prefer for exclusionary guilds to not exist and one of my big worries is that one would be setup, in area affecting me. One way or another, not necessarily an obvious self-naming itself as a guild.
(3) are gangs existing to steal public money - for example, see coal miners in Poland. Main union achievements was to steal billions of public money to help lazy freeloaders doing work that was not worth doing or outright harmful.
I do not support theft, also in terms of parasiting on public resources. Even if I would get some of proceeds of theft.
(4) intended to achieve more free days, flexibility etc. On my freelancing agreements I sacrificed large part of earning to get about 100+ free days a year, very significant flexibility where and how and on what I work.
So this part is achieved for me - and I am not sure how many other tech workers would actually prefer more free time over being paid more.
I am not automatically against unions for tech workers but my first reaction and assumption is not that it will be positive or useful for me.
The union at my workplace is of the opinion that engineering jobs should be outsourced so that factory work can be kept onshore.
Do you think I would join an organization like that? There is a clear conflict of interest between blue and white color workers and the more numerous blue color workers push the union to prioritize them.
Government of Russian federation and significant part of Russian society that supports reconquering territories Russia used to control.
Soccer hooligan vandals.
Corrupt local politicians.
Some vandals obsessed with damaging community-run geodata collection project.
People who thing that overregulating everything in Europe is an exciting adventure and we should have more of it.
Climate change deniers, people misunderstanding vaccines and in effect trying to resurrect diseases that were extinct locally.
People with Saruman-like approach to trees.
Coal miners parasiting on billions from public funds to fund coal mining (as selling coal does not allow to pay for it, at least with how much they are paid for it).
Because there are conflicts of interest. Factory workers create the products which create profits. I am paid with these profits, if the profits go down engineers loose their jobs.
If Factory workers longer and more efficiently my job becomes more secure. So obviously I want a union which advocates that factory workers work longer hours, it is clearly in my interest. The same goes for strikes, if factory workers strike they endanger my job and reduce the size of the engineering department, reducing my chances to get promoted.
Their unions want my job to get outsourced and my working conditions to be made worse (RTO) why should I have the tiniest shred of solidarity with them?
>Get rid of them and there'll be plenty of money for both of you.
The unions? Sure, if they were gone things would become better.
> Why don’t labor issues resonate more with tech workers?
They do! What doesn't resonate with many tech workers is working together with other people. Tech workers are largely used to working alone, and many even struggle in social situations more-so than in other industries, so when a labor issue arises they believe it is a problem they must solve on their own.
The many people working in big tech are certainly used to working together and solving problems together. I think others on this thread are closer: generally high economic status and greater perceived career autonomy than in other industries
They are used to working together to the extent that is necessary to further their own self-interest (i.e. get promoted). That competitive environment is not conducive to working together in a 'brotherhood' sense that a union requires, through.
Industries with significantly higher economic status and autonomy are all over unions (sports, entertainment, politics, medicine, etc.), so that doesn't really explain it.
I’ve been a manager in tech for the last 11 years full-time
Prior to that I was a military commander as a Major in the United States Air Force
Before joining the AF I had jobs in construction, freelance web design and car stereo installation in high school
The singular difference is the personality of tech workers is “I can do this faster and easier by myself - I have no desire to communicate with other people”
It seems to stem from a large swath very technical people coming from isolated environments when they were children.
Specifically ones in middle to upper middle class families, where the computer was their creative outlet and they were spending more time with a computer and understanding the computer than they were other people.
They were able to get excited about and learn and get deep into a topic where you really didn’t need other people — you need to documentation you needed books and you needed time to experiment.
Almost every single other job I’ve ever worked in you *need* other people in order to make progress. That is not true for writing really small functional and precise software which is the “job” of most swe.
As a function of that the majority of SWE’s (and frankly this applies to most technical experts who have a very specific niche) have neither of the interest nor the belief that the organization is valuable in of itself as the organization and they are way more excited to jump companies in order to promote themselves because that is how they are incentivized and are happy to find themselves in that position.
If you wanna actually make an organization that creates sustainable software, you need an entirely different way of thinking. you need to think organizationally you think you need to think about how to help people how to get things out of their way communication etc. etc. etc. all these things have nothing to do with“shipping code “
And for a lot of people who are good at programming they really genuinely could not care or have the capacity to understand about anything other than their narrow frame of view and they do not see their coworkers as part of their community they see them as competition.
Tech workers tend to get paid very well. That limits incentivization for unionization. Also there is a stigma that unions tend to be for the middle of the road workers with modest salaries. All the senior leaders with big salaries are not union, and everyone wants the big salary.
It’s silly. MLB players are unionized and they make more money than tech workers. The reason why management don’t need a union is because they have much more say in determining their own wages.
We make a lot of money. Money pays for healthcare, childcare, paternity/maternity leave, retirement, food, housing, transportation, in addition to recreation. Our "struggle" is invented. Oh, career burnout huh? So you're working yourself harder than you have to in order to make more money? Sounds tough. And small equity grants? Oh gosh, how dare they not give us even more money.
People who don't make a lot of money struggle to afford all those things, and are worked to death despite it. They don't just have enough and want more. They literally don't have enough to live a life free of struggle.
Unions exist because workers were literally being killed by their employers. What's a tech worker's biggest gripe? Being on-call? Not getting a bonus on top of their fat salary? The only time I've ever done a hard day's work as a tech worker was when I joined a shitty startup that was abusive with long hours. I left and joined a normal company and it was smooth sailing. The most painful part of the job is my tennis elbow, but hey, I have a corporate healthcare plan and a $1000 swivel chair. I don't see the point of a union in this environment.
The vast majority of tech workers I know come from comfortable middle class suburban backgrounds, so I'm not surprised they're anti-union and anti-labor.
I will admit that the return to office push was the first time I actively considered forming a union or at least an org that would fight for that specific benefit. Covid changed me.
Labour issues? I'm afraid that most tech workers still believe that improving the technology is enough for the society to thrive, not rethinking capitalism (or at least its current implementation).
because generally tech workers are well compensated relative to other workers, the areas where this isn't true have had some movement in labor initiatives like the The United Videogame Workers
Because tech jobs are one of the few career lines that create a realistic path to passive income => becoming an "evil of capitalism". In fact, life outcomes that fall between "failure and poverty in old age" and "generational passive income from capital", are infrequent in the tech industry, at least from the people i know.
Those who fall between the two are usually those who didn’t have a family nest egg to start with (ie, their parents were factory workers rather than accountants).
In my experience everyone thinks “we’ve got a good thing here, let’s not ruin it.”
Indeed the bar is so low that even with all the bullshit in the tech industry, we seem to have it better than most- on salary alone. Throw in “full remote” (although that’s disappearing) and it really can’t be beat, even when your boss yells obscenities at you every day.
I think I agree. Objectively we do have it better than most and tech is generally an extremely cushy job.
Even here in Europe salaries can match Doctors and Lawyers but the barrier to entry is much lower and in my experience employment is still based on merit more than anything.
Perhaps there's some element of "don't rock the boat" but maybe some guilt too. We really have lucked out.
Not sure how comfortable I'd feel taking union action over my job that requires me to leave the house once a week but pays 3x a teachers salary.
I don't care that much about "labour issues" because it seems like a logically flawed avenue to explore to begin with.
To be financially successful under any market system I can think of requires you, in a mathematical sense, to be close enough to the top within a company that you get a greater proportion of the profit than simply 1/employees.
In simple terms - I can't employ a maid unless I earn more than a maid, a maid can never be paid enough that I would want to be a maid (being the maid's employer, or at least having that optionality, is strictly superior).
Some jobs have comparative advantage, e.g. I might enjoy working on my car but know that a mechanic can do the same job in 1/10th the time. But a lot of stuff is just straight - I earn more than you, you do it for me, so I can get more things done.
No, it is not mathematically ordained that conditions must suck on the bottom of the pyramid in an absolute sense. In a relative sense, your argument isn't wrong, but in an absolute sense, the failure of our economy to bring modest levels of comfort on the bottom despite truly astonishing advances in fundamental capacity is a scathing indictment.
In the absolute sense, from my perspective as someone who was born with not much (I often have a sense that this discussion is driven by people who were always fairly well off and see "the poor" as a different species) the primary issue is excessive regulation, resulting in things like property being hilariously expensive, so that it's difficult to afford a house or start a business.
Wages and hours for low level jobs feel like a distraction, barely anyone needs more toys, the issue is that the necessary items for life are monopolised.
So from my perspective the only thing that labour regulation can achieve is to basically just compress that experience, we still won't build more housing or make it easier to do so etc.
> Literally thousands of working people embraced the ideals of anarchism, which sought to put an end to all hierarchical structures
Something that groups of people rarely seem to realize: you don't have to accept a binary. You don't have to put all hierarchical structure to an end. You don't have to do ONLY one thing or ONLY another. Life is about balance.
Doesn't matter what side of a spectrum you're on. Conservatives, capitalists, evangelicals, anarchists, socialists, leftists. Each group is often dominated by a polarizing, binary force. Some fiery personality is agitating so hard for their point of view that they will only accept total capitulation and domination of their position. But that doesn't leave room for the middle way, compromise, a diversity of states of being. And so it creates conflict, even warfare.
I've worked in both systems (capitalist hierarchy, anarchist non-hierarchy). Both are useful. Both suck. The reason they both suck, is their incapacity to accept that sometimes the "other way" is better to get a specific thing done. But they can't see outside their own limited model. They're 2-dimensional, when they need to be 3-D.
They won't allow the "other way" in, because they're afraid it will taint "their way", and in some way ruin or defeat it. But if they did finally compromise and allow an alien system to co-habitate with their own, they'd see the truth. A composite of glass and plastic is better than either of them alone. Foreign organisms living in your gut make you healthier. It's the sum of the good properties, closely aligned, that contribute to a better whole.
> Something that groups of people rarely seem to realize: you don't have to accept a binary. You don't have to put all hierarchical structure to an end. You don't have to do ONLY one thing or ONLY another.
I do not understand your framing. You don't "have to" do anything. These are people talking about what they wish to do.
> Life is about balance.
Pseudo-Buddhist bullshit.
You are lost in abstraction. These arguments are actually about material conditions, they're not just personality conflicts. Middle-class people lose contact with this fact, because they have no material worries; or rather their material conditions are simply tied to whether their employer believes they are profitable to employ. Of course middle-class people have to "compromise." Or rather they have to paint their total and continuous submission as a compromise, complain about the inflexibility of their bosses, and dream of one day having the leverage to order people around themselves.
Arguing that the best solution is in the middle is just the moderation fallacy. It's not profound, it's the law of averages. It's the kind of thing you can say regardless of subject, an invariant, that will always make people who believe in the law of averages believe you said something profound.
The US does have a rich history of labor movements and it's sad that they've been diminished - arguably because of perceived and actual corruption in living memory - while working conditions for many haven't really improved.
In the UK, also a nation with a very rich history of labour movements and philosophy (Engels family owned factories in Manchester, which he and Marx used as justification and evidence for many of the points made in Conditions of the Working Class), has also seen a recent decline in labour movements - but that's partly because working conditions have improved so massively in recent decades: employment rights, statutory holidays and minimum wage have all improved.
However, in recent years something has changed, and I think a lot of people are now looking at holidays and working conditions in other countries: France (a socialist republic), Germany and Canada all seem to have better work/life balance, strong productivity, remain in the G7 and the roof hasn't fallen in.
I do wonder whether the rise of zero-hour contracts and the gig economy, the debate in the US over tipping as a basis for not paying a higher minimum wage, the lack of holidays and so on, might lead to more interest in either new labour movements or reinvigorating the old.
What's interesting for me is the productivity data shows that many businesses that need knowledge workers to function make more money and grow faster if they allow more work/life balance, but the messaging from the leadership pushes back against it. RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks. AI should, in theory, make that even more possible, but I don't think that's how most in the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 want it to work out.
It's going to be an interesting thing to watch/be part of in years to come, but history tells us transition moments are often violent: can that violence be avoided?
> RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks
It does depend on how you measure it. Given diligent workers you could argue that working from home is better for 'on task' work, than the distractions of the office - however some of those distractions create value for companies that's hard to measure.
I've lost count of the number of times I've had the polite - how are you type conversation - via a chance encounter in the office, that has lead to an idea or new connection that moved something forward, ( have you tried X? Have you talked to Y ).
These don't happen when you are on task working from home.
For companies which are knowledge based - this sort of spontaneous creativity happens more when people are all together and less when people have to intentionally reach out.
Companies aren't just the simple sum of the individuals and a lot of the creativity happens off-task.
If you look at layouts of buildings for organisations lauded for unusually high output - I'm thinking Bell Labs, Xerox, MIT Media Lab, and others - historically there has been mixed mode: the ability to do focus work, and also the ability to step away from focus and bump into people on the way to get a coffee or lunch.
Today's working environment is 40+ hours in open plan offices with too few social spaces or meeting rooms for meaningful collaboration, so both focus work and casual collaboration have to be fought for.
Regardless, what's interesting to me at least is that even while we can see productivity rose for many decades even as people moved to the 5 day, 8-hour week (which must was counter-intuitive - there was an expectation of a drop in outputs), we're seeing potentially more gains from moving to a 4 day week.
RTO - for my type of work, and most work that needs "flow" for 2-3 hours a day, minimum - doesn't work for most people in 2025. Leaders are holding onto it in an irrational way, and that is leading to growing resentment. That, coupled with trying to pay people who have to show up (service workers, gig economy workers), with ever fewer working rights and poorer conditions, means something's going to give at some point.
If all the menial work was done by robots, and we were all going to Bell Labs-style environments for 3-4 days a week, I think we'd all prefer that and actually, society might be a lot more productive as a result. But it's never going to happen. Not in our lifetimes, any way.
Except when a company like Best Buy can fire a bunch of workers and replace them with Accenture who are paying workers $40/hour while holding them hostage with the H1B. At least 20% of workers in US construction (and even higher for residential) are illegal aliens. Then there is the offshoring of manufacturing: your local workers get too uppity? China can supply whatever you need. Don’t like the United Auto Workers? Move your factory to northern Mexico.
What’s interesting is that tariffs helped American workers back in the day — whether or not that happens again remains to be seen.
Unless the entire world gets onboard with worker rights, trade barriers remain one of the only ways to improve the working conditions of local people.
Regarding the French example: they do have the so-called 35 hour week, but compare disposable income for the same job in the U.S. versus France: Americans have much higher disposable income than the French (even after accounting for health care costs.) The US could improve conditions, but pay will drop accordingly. That might be ok or it might not, but there is no free lunch.
While trade barriers might improve working conditions, as you hint, it's going to come at a cost of disposable income.
Those barriers work by raising the minimum price of a product, making it profitable to produce it in a more expensive labor market. When you make products more expensive though, it comes out the other side as people have to pay more to get the things they want, and you get inflation.
If that is what people want, OK, fine. I don't think it's what has been sold to most Americans though - not only is the narrative that inflation going to be avoided, but income tax is going to be scrapped too. It's hard to find credible economists from any part of the political spectrum who agree.
I hope it does work, because if it doesn't, what will follow will be horrible to watch from afar, even if as a result we end up with prices for most things coming down (if Chinese companies can't sell to the US, they'll just dump to the rest of the World).
The Republicans’ trade barriers do not solve any labor problems. They contract the total market size and tax economic activity.
The French have higher disposable income because Americans are too busy wasting their income on sky high rents, sky high healthcare costs, paying for cars because it’s necessary, higher food and alcohol costs, etc. (Plus they have more of the thing money can’t buy: time). And these tariffs are going to make American’s lives even more expensive. (No one release in the world is going to oh these taxes: only Americans).
It's a bit amusing that May Day was due to the major strike in the US, but the US doesn't celebrate on that day, but in September:
> There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[18] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative,[19] formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.[2]
We have been conditioned to fear the idea of demanding a more fair distribution of wealth: My great grandfather for example was shot dead by a cop during a union strike. Nothing happened after that event, just silence, fear and a deeply traumatized family.
It is very important to remember that many of the things we enjoy today as workers only exist because of the enormous courage of workers from the 19th and early 20th century who fought really hard for a better future.
> police have never been on the side of the people
that is a remarkable generalization, that overstates things to the point of being misleading
> They are they muscle of the state.
still, there are better and worse states
if you go fully pacifist and disempower yourself and your state it will not result in peace - it will result in someone else, likely worse, taking over
Police in my country did some bad things (and far more bad things when we were a Russian puppet state) but last time I had an actual contact with police it was on railway station when they have cordoned off a group of aggressive football hooligans.
I assure you that I preferred policeman over group of drunk abusive hooligans. And some kind of "muscle of the state" is needed to keep such people in check.
(at the same time, police power should be kept on a leash)
Its only a generalization in so far as that is and always has been their direct purpose. The history of policing is, regionally, either rooted in slave catchers or as muscle to disrupt labor organizing.
> The history of policing is, regionally, either rooted in slave catchers or as muscle to disrupt labor organizing.
Not really? It may apply in some very specific area but it does NOT generalize worldwide.
And for direct purpose: even taking maximally cynical view and seeing police as muscle power existing to enforce tax payments by threat of force and to disrupt threats to state...
Then I, as a citizen (and many other people) would agree that gangs should be disrupted and that they prefer to pay taxes over every lowlife able to steal all their stuff and burn down their home.
Sadly, it takes only few people to make area terrible for others. Some do it with no benefit for themselves and there is no way to reason with them. Taking out such people (for whatever reason) by police is an useful service. That - even with quite badly managed police - is overall beneficial.
Ideally, the interests of the state and of the people coincide (otherwise you cannot have a democracy). It is very unhelpful to say that the police is by nature hostile to the people. It does not have to be that way, and we should demand that it is not. The police is the enforcement arm of the State, true, but we are the State.
Yes, the union makes me strong by trying to get my job outsourced so factory workers can be kept onshore. It makes me strong by trying to push for RTO, so that engineers can show solidarity with factory workers who have to be onsite all the time.
Making the generous assumption that there is a gap in your cultural knowledge and sharing the source of these two lines with background context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_Forever
I have clear conflicts of interest with the working class, who work in factories. If I were in a union it should advocate for factory workers working more.
The core proposition of syndicalism is that the workplace should be democratized. Democracy is far from perfect, and if often fails, but we believe in it nonetheless because everything else is worse.
You keep repeating this in various comments throughout this submission- can you share links to the materials of the union(s) you are referring to and point out the relevant sections where they are advocating for this?
I am curious to take a read for myself, as I'm sure many other readers are
It's the IGM and of course it isn't their public position, but it is clear that this is what they think and how they behave. They also are extremely influential in my company, as part of the Betriebsrat, and try to steer it in that direction.
I recently had to deal with them (as part of the Betriebsrat) and, just as human beings, they seemed to be some of the worst people I ever met.
There's a lot of regressives here actively abusing the flagging functionality for censorship - ironically the same kind of people that'll tell you how much they care about freedom of speech (the unspoken part: but only if its speech they agree with)
Social media cracking down on leftist ideology is something that needs to be studied. They are very slick about it, and will usually find some way to make it appear legit (eg: deliberately interpreting obvious sarcasm as literally as possible and then hitting you with the content policy) but at the end of the day anybody can see that reactionaries can get away with calls to violence and war crime apologia while the rest of us have to be on their absolute best behaviour.
It really goes to show you that capital has no ideology and will adopt whatever shape it needs to as the political climate changes. The United States government is now fascist, and therefore the investor class is also fascist.
The founding fathers would have been called terrorists today by the British. Past the Boston Tea Party, the Green Mountain Boys is a pretty good example. "The Green Mountain Boys stopped sheriffs from enforcing New York laws and terrorized settlers who had New York grants, burning buildings, stealing cattle, and administering occasional floggings with birch rods." - https://www.britannica.com/topic/Green-Mountain-Boys
Nope, not excused. Did they have to ask nicely to have more rights? Unions right now are the lesser violent version of conflict with the police.
Furthermore, this is laughable: Later evidence indicated that only one of the police deaths could be attributed to the bomb and that all the other police fatalities had or could have had been due to their own indiscriminate gun fire.
Again, Blair mountain. I guess they didn't ask nice enough?
...with rights for all workers that today it would be unthinkable to even question? Or worse, women's suffrage? Or rights for people of color?
There's no such thing as a (successful) social movement that doesn't employ some amount of violence - the police and the state more generally simply won't allow it.
You've seen how it works out, that's correct. It works out with five day work weeks, sick leave, ban on child labor etc etc.
All social progress resulted from the threat of violence. It is the only mechanism though which the capitalist class can be convinced to make even the smallest concession.
A the way we do that is to declare that someone is a communist (whether or not they are), then equate communism to terrorism, then treat it with McCarthyism or Napalm.
I see you don’t understand what communism means. We’re talking about socialism here. Don’t let fear of what you haven’t bothered to learn rule your life.
I know that we’re not a monolith and are actually a heterogeneous mix of opinions, but there frequently talk about job dissatisfaction (career burnout, comically stingy equity grants, etc).
But when organizing comes up, it’s usually treated with disdain because so many have bought into highly individualistic hustle-culture and the narrative that unions only exist to help lazy freeloaders
Plus, at the risk of too much head-shrinking, I've never gotten the impression that tech workers liked each other very much. There's a lot of disdain in the industry, for the guy who uses that language or framework or operating system that I think sucks. You don't see that so much with, say, truckers. There may be some good-natured rivalry based on truck brands or long-haul versus short-haul, but not the real disdain you see in tech.
The tech track works great if one falls into line and doesn't rock the boat by questioning authority or trying to see the big picture. If one clings to original teenage fantasies like the idea that intellectual prowess and financial success eventually bring esteem and a social life. If one chooses to avoid becoming mired in dead end physical labor jobs like everyone else, even for a time, in worship of their own cleverness.
But should the unthinkable happen, say, the loss of a loved one due to a hyper focus on work, or witnessing one's work being used to take from others, or waking up one day to find oneself disillusioned with the direction tech is going, then suddenly tech loses its luster. One starts to recognize it for what it is - just another way to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Tech has come to symbolize sheltering from reality, like a state sanctioned drug. It's a way to pat oneself on the back and downplay the wisdom of those outside it. Blindly worshipping it to the exclusion of the other wonders of life is the surest way I know to separate oneself from the soul, other than money perhaps.
In good conscience, I must add that the vast majority of tech today is phantom tech, not real tech. It serves to entertain and distract rather than be a labor-saving device. So in that sense, it's understandable that people invested in solving anything except any real problem have a disdain for the plight of labor.
Because many tech workers don't see themselves as workers, with some justification, many having substantial capital investments alongside labor income, making them, in class terms, petit bourgeois or at least close enough to it to perceive their own interests in more bourgeois than proletarian terms. And even the tech workers that are clearly part of the proletarian intelligentsia tend see themselves (rightly or wrongly) on a path that leads into the bourgeoisie, with bourgeois interests.
Working class: you are sustained by your current labor.
Upper class: you can sustain yourself based on the returns from your investments more-or-less indefinitely.
Middle class, between the two: you can sustain yourself off your investments for so long that you can’t practically be threatened by unemployment.
It is a labor relations issue explicitly, you need a union if you are in the first of the three classes, because otherwise you can be threatened by unemployment to do something dangerous or dehumanizing.
In the middle class definition, practically there’s some element of the fact that our skills are in high demand, so you can become unthreatened by unemployment by having just, like, a 1 year buffer. But I do think we can overstate how in-demand our skills to satisfy our egos…
Ethan Hunt play by Tom Cruise and Waitress #2 played by Jane Doe aren't very homogeneous with regards to pay and fame, but they're both part of SAG.
not only would the collective provide benefits to the individual workers, but it would serve as an (optional) form of licensure/credentialing that ensures each member has a baseline level of competence. it could make hiring so much easier if you could skip the fizzbuzz screening rounds by pulling from a pool of vetted talent.
EDIT: another commented mentioned that NBA players are also unionized. I think there is a second element to it, which has to do with how monopolized the employer market is.
1. Heterogeneity/homogeneity of labour.
2. Tight/lose labour market.
I think Argument 1 is the weaker argument. There's a lot of fungibility between software roles. However, there's a higher learning cost. Moving to a new software company requires a few months before someone is close to full productivity. This in contrast between a painter moving from a Ford supplier to a GM supplier will likely close to full productivity within a few weeks. The cost (to the employer) is lower to rehire someone.
Argument 2 is the stronger argument, but may not be forever. In a tight labour market, I see very little need for unions. If the marginal worker can (and will) leave their position for a better position (pay, benefits, culture, etc), I see little need for unions. However, if the labour market for software engineers shifts in favor of businesses, this will change rapidly.
Also, their output is relatively easy to measure and stand arise.
This is not true for programmers, making standard pay increase for programmers less useful as a target. What would be measured? Hours in office? Commits? Lines of code?
The wealthy class makes multiples of your salary in passive income and their marginal tax rate is lower. You work and fork over 40%. They do nothing and pay 15% or less.
You put your retirement money into a 401k. They put their retirement money into a “charitable foundation”.
You draw down from your retirement money. They take a loan against it.
What’s the difference between a billionaire and a meat packing worker? Billions of dollars.
What’s the difference between a billionaire and a faang engineer? Also billions of dollars.
My point is simply that if you are 1 of 50,000 in a meat processing plant, you do not really have any way of competing with your fellow workers. You might try to work harder and faster, but then you end up raising the bar for all, and you now have to maintain the new pace. And once the rest catch up with your pace, the pay for all will be lowered again.
In tech, every job is slightly different, and there is a real opportunity to meaningful differentiate yourself from the rest and compete in a much more dynamic job market.
Also, who are the ones hurting currently? The juniors or the seniors? Seniors are mostly doing fine. Juniors are the ones hurting. And juniors would have an even harder time, if you transitioned to a unionized system, because entry requirements would be raised significantly to account for the fact that you cannot fire people so easily.
Of course nothing rings as hollow as someone who works from home or a beautiful office, sits in a comfortable chair and works by typing on a keyboard complaining about the struggles of the working class.
Structurally we are more similar than different, even if tech workers have had it good for the last while.
If you find that you are not aggrieved at the world then most likely you are in a privileged bubble
Oh, I wasn't aware of that. Does not seem to apply to me though.
If you make a cushy salary and the biggest physical risk is carpal tunnel, you might think ”I dont have it THAT bad. It’d be greedy and disrespectful of the sacrifices that were made to use unions in my situation”
Just do not be surprised that people run away from ideas (even reasonable ones) when associated with such beautiful terms as "class traitor".
I don't know or care which class I am betraying.
Just because you don't feel it, doesn't mean the exploitation doesn't exist.
I do not see them as the same class as me.
I have never felt exploited, but I HAVE enormously benefited from German corporations.
Since the poster above seems to be German, he especially should know.
The only reason the conservative Bismarck established the German welfare state was to stave off revolution.
The only means through which capitalists give even an inch is through that threat. That's why worker rights are being rolled back in a lot of places right now - because workers have become soft.
This is a lie.
Poland and many areas occupied by Russia managed to end Russian control without this.
Doing it with no bloodshed typically accompanying such events was even better.
Russia was not friend to workers, it was oppressive evil state and kicking it out (what started steps toward collapse of USSR) was one of greatest successes in the history of Poland.
It was no accident that largest strikes in the history of country taken place during PRL and capitalism is so well regarded in Poland.
As a German I know that the only attempt at an anti-communist uprising was met with swift brutality by the troops of the pro-capitalist social democratic government.
As a German I know how a country divided between anti-capitalism and capitalism looks like after many decades. I have seen the ruins of anti-communism with my own eyes, they are hard to hide and so are the crimes of the anti-communist government.
As a German I know that besides national socialism, anti-capitalism is also an illegal ideology in Germany.
if treated seriously, that just makes "violence" a meaningless term
for start, there is a difference between threats of violence and actual violent acts for example
Just because you don't like being made aware of the violence committed by your preferred system doesn't make it less violent.
Here's the definition according to the Cambridge dictionary:
> actions that are intended or likely to hurt people or cause damage
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/violence
Please enlighten me as to why it doesn't apply.
I have never been to a politician's dinner. I have never changed a law. If I were fired, which can be done at any time for no reason, I would have no source of income. Money is the weakest form of power, and a well-paid job is the weakest form of money.
unions in the past are portrayed as remove physical dangers, limiting to reasonable hours and fair wages. but tech workers already have that stuff, so they don't see an upside.
codetermination (getting workers on the board), four day work weeks, full-time remote, sabbaticals, open source support, rethinking startup equity, ... there's all sorts of things we could be pushing for that would make our jobs better that we could to push for if we worked together.
I don't know about you but I don't make anything even remotely close to six figures...
It is still labor and we are still exploited - most the revenue we generate goes to capitalist interests, not us, the laborers, which are the creators of all revenue.
It's just that we have it comparatively good and so are less inclined to seek out systemic change - a less favorable reading would be that we are bought off to split us off from the rest of the proletariat.
While software developers just starting out are apt to be working class, when you receive a comparatively high income for your labor it soon becomes hard to find things to do with it if you don't start investing in land/capital, so one in that position doesn't stay working class for long.
It’s not virtue signaling. There are material gains that could be made by organizing. Layoff protection and the power to set company direction are two big ones that come to mind.
It’s okay to want to unionize for selfish reasons. In fact, I think it’s borderline propaganda to suggest the only reason a wealthy person would organize is because of their own class guilt.
You seem to be claiming that empathy is always “hollow” but I think this is at most a statement about you. Many people can be both well off and want to make things better for others. Not everyone, for sure, not enough maybe. But attacking people for showing empathy seems weird.
It sounds much better for them to be on the team of all workers rather than the other team, or to be out of the game entirely.
(1) demanded flat payment increases for all workers based on seniority etc. Which may make sense for factory workers but I am not enthusiastic about flat rates for programmers not taking into account actual experience/availability/output etc.
Factory workers in many cases do job that can be easily rated and measured and do some specific amount of it.
While measuring output of programmers is notoriously hard.
I expect that union agreement of this kind would in fact benefit only lazy freeloaders not doing any work but having seniority.
(2) are guilds that existed to keep jobs for members and to outlaw or ban hiring outsiders.
I strictly prefer for exclusionary guilds to not exist and one of my big worries is that one would be setup, in area affecting me. One way or another, not necessarily an obvious self-naming itself as a guild.
(3) are gangs existing to steal public money - for example, see coal miners in Poland. Main union achievements was to steal billions of public money to help lazy freeloaders doing work that was not worth doing or outright harmful.
I do not support theft, also in terms of parasiting on public resources. Even if I would get some of proceeds of theft.
(4) intended to achieve more free days, flexibility etc. On my freelancing agreements I sacrificed large part of earning to get about 100+ free days a year, very significant flexibility where and how and on what I work. So this part is achieved for me - and I am not sure how many other tech workers would actually prefer more free time over being paid more.
I am not automatically against unions for tech workers but my first reaction and assumption is not that it will be positive or useful for me.
Do you think I would join an organization like that? There is a clear conflict of interest between blue and white color workers and the more numerous blue color workers push the union to prioritize them.
this is a bizarre simplification, sounding like some kind of silly propaganda
I am well aware of enemies not fitting into such labeling at all (and probably there are more less obvious ones)
Soccer hooligan vandals.
Corrupt local politicians.
Some vandals obsessed with damaging community-run geodata collection project.
People who thing that overregulating everything in Europe is an exciting adventure and we should have more of it.
Climate change deniers, people misunderstanding vaccines and in effect trying to resurrect diseases that were extinct locally.
People with Saruman-like approach to trees.
Coal miners parasiting on billions from public funds to fund coal mining (as selling coal does not allow to pay for it, at least with how much they are paid for it).
If Factory workers longer and more efficiently my job becomes more secure. So obviously I want a union which advocates that factory workers work longer hours, it is clearly in my interest. The same goes for strikes, if factory workers strike they endanger my job and reduce the size of the engineering department, reducing my chances to get promoted.
>Get rid of them and there'll be plenty of money for both of you.
The unions? Sure, if they were gone things would become better.
They do! What doesn't resonate with many tech workers is working together with other people. Tech workers are largely used to working alone, and many even struggle in social situations more-so than in other industries, so when a labor issue arises they believe it is a problem they must solve on their own.
Industries with significantly higher economic status and autonomy are all over unions (sports, entertainment, politics, medicine, etc.), so that doesn't really explain it.
Prior to that I was a military commander as a Major in the United States Air Force
Before joining the AF I had jobs in construction, freelance web design and car stereo installation in high school
The singular difference is the personality of tech workers is “I can do this faster and easier by myself - I have no desire to communicate with other people”
It seems to stem from a large swath very technical people coming from isolated environments when they were children.
Specifically ones in middle to upper middle class families, where the computer was their creative outlet and they were spending more time with a computer and understanding the computer than they were other people.
They were able to get excited about and learn and get deep into a topic where you really didn’t need other people — you need to documentation you needed books and you needed time to experiment.
Almost every single other job I’ve ever worked in you *need* other people in order to make progress. That is not true for writing really small functional and precise software which is the “job” of most swe.
As a function of that the majority of SWE’s (and frankly this applies to most technical experts who have a very specific niche) have neither of the interest nor the belief that the organization is valuable in of itself as the organization and they are way more excited to jump companies in order to promote themselves because that is how they are incentivized and are happy to find themselves in that position.
If you wanna actually make an organization that creates sustainable software, you need an entirely different way of thinking. you need to think organizationally you think you need to think about how to help people how to get things out of their way communication etc. etc. etc. all these things have nothing to do with“shipping code “
And for a lot of people who are good at programming they really genuinely could not care or have the capacity to understand about anything other than their narrow frame of view and they do not see their coworkers as part of their community they see them as competition.
People who don't make a lot of money struggle to afford all those things, and are worked to death despite it. They don't just have enough and want more. They literally don't have enough to live a life free of struggle.
Unions exist because workers were literally being killed by their employers. What's a tech worker's biggest gripe? Being on-call? Not getting a bonus on top of their fat salary? The only time I've ever done a hard day's work as a tech worker was when I joined a shitty startup that was abusive with long hours. I left and joined a normal company and it was smooth sailing. The most painful part of the job is my tennis elbow, but hey, I have a corporate healthcare plan and a $1000 swivel chair. I don't see the point of a union in this environment.
When you work in a trade where you could easily be killed or injured on the job the calculus is a bit different.
Particularly this part:
> nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."
Indeed the bar is so low that even with all the bullshit in the tech industry, we seem to have it better than most- on salary alone. Throw in “full remote” (although that’s disappearing) and it really can’t be beat, even when your boss yells obscenities at you every day.
Even here in Europe salaries can match Doctors and Lawyers but the barrier to entry is much lower and in my experience employment is still based on merit more than anything.
Perhaps there's some element of "don't rock the boat" but maybe some guilt too. We really have lucked out.
Not sure how comfortable I'd feel taking union action over my job that requires me to leave the house once a week but pays 3x a teachers salary.
I don't care that much about "labour issues" because it seems like a logically flawed avenue to explore to begin with.
To be financially successful under any market system I can think of requires you, in a mathematical sense, to be close enough to the top within a company that you get a greater proportion of the profit than simply 1/employees.
In simple terms - I can't employ a maid unless I earn more than a maid, a maid can never be paid enough that I would want to be a maid (being the maid's employer, or at least having that optionality, is strictly superior).
Some jobs have comparative advantage, e.g. I might enjoy working on my car but know that a mechanic can do the same job in 1/10th the time. But a lot of stuff is just straight - I earn more than you, you do it for me, so I can get more things done.
Wages and hours for low level jobs feel like a distraction, barely anyone needs more toys, the issue is that the necessary items for life are monopolised.
So from my perspective the only thing that labour regulation can achieve is to basically just compress that experience, we still won't build more housing or make it easier to do so etc.
Something that groups of people rarely seem to realize: you don't have to accept a binary. You don't have to put all hierarchical structure to an end. You don't have to do ONLY one thing or ONLY another. Life is about balance.
Doesn't matter what side of a spectrum you're on. Conservatives, capitalists, evangelicals, anarchists, socialists, leftists. Each group is often dominated by a polarizing, binary force. Some fiery personality is agitating so hard for their point of view that they will only accept total capitulation and domination of their position. But that doesn't leave room for the middle way, compromise, a diversity of states of being. And so it creates conflict, even warfare.
I've worked in both systems (capitalist hierarchy, anarchist non-hierarchy). Both are useful. Both suck. The reason they both suck, is their incapacity to accept that sometimes the "other way" is better to get a specific thing done. But they can't see outside their own limited model. They're 2-dimensional, when they need to be 3-D.
They won't allow the "other way" in, because they're afraid it will taint "their way", and in some way ruin or defeat it. But if they did finally compromise and allow an alien system to co-habitate with their own, they'd see the truth. A composite of glass and plastic is better than either of them alone. Foreign organisms living in your gut make you healthier. It's the sum of the good properties, closely aligned, that contribute to a better whole.
I do not understand your framing. You don't "have to" do anything. These are people talking about what they wish to do.
> Life is about balance.
Pseudo-Buddhist bullshit.
You are lost in abstraction. These arguments are actually about material conditions, they're not just personality conflicts. Middle-class people lose contact with this fact, because they have no material worries; or rather their material conditions are simply tied to whether their employer believes they are profitable to employ. Of course middle-class people have to "compromise." Or rather they have to paint their total and continuous submission as a compromise, complain about the inflexibility of their bosses, and dream of one day having the leverage to order people around themselves.
Arguing that the best solution is in the middle is just the moderation fallacy. It's not profound, it's the law of averages. It's the kind of thing you can say regardless of subject, an invariant, that will always make people who believe in the law of averages believe you said something profound.
In the UK, also a nation with a very rich history of labour movements and philosophy (Engels family owned factories in Manchester, which he and Marx used as justification and evidence for many of the points made in Conditions of the Working Class), has also seen a recent decline in labour movements - but that's partly because working conditions have improved so massively in recent decades: employment rights, statutory holidays and minimum wage have all improved.
However, in recent years something has changed, and I think a lot of people are now looking at holidays and working conditions in other countries: France (a socialist republic), Germany and Canada all seem to have better work/life balance, strong productivity, remain in the G7 and the roof hasn't fallen in.
I do wonder whether the rise of zero-hour contracts and the gig economy, the debate in the US over tipping as a basis for not paying a higher minimum wage, the lack of holidays and so on, might lead to more interest in either new labour movements or reinvigorating the old.
What's interesting for me is the productivity data shows that many businesses that need knowledge workers to function make more money and grow faster if they allow more work/life balance, but the messaging from the leadership pushes back against it. RTO and 5 days working weeks seem to be less effective than nomadic/remote work and 4x10 or even 4x8 working weeks. AI should, in theory, make that even more possible, but I don't think that's how most in the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 or FTSE 100 want it to work out.
It's going to be an interesting thing to watch/be part of in years to come, but history tells us transition moments are often violent: can that violence be avoided?
It does depend on how you measure it. Given diligent workers you could argue that working from home is better for 'on task' work, than the distractions of the office - however some of those distractions create value for companies that's hard to measure.
I've lost count of the number of times I've had the polite - how are you type conversation - via a chance encounter in the office, that has lead to an idea or new connection that moved something forward, ( have you tried X? Have you talked to Y ).
These don't happen when you are on task working from home.
For companies which are knowledge based - this sort of spontaneous creativity happens more when people are all together and less when people have to intentionally reach out.
Companies aren't just the simple sum of the individuals and a lot of the creativity happens off-task.
Today's working environment is 40+ hours in open plan offices with too few social spaces or meeting rooms for meaningful collaboration, so both focus work and casual collaboration have to be fought for.
Regardless, what's interesting to me at least is that even while we can see productivity rose for many decades even as people moved to the 5 day, 8-hour week (which must was counter-intuitive - there was an expectation of a drop in outputs), we're seeing potentially more gains from moving to a 4 day week.
RTO - for my type of work, and most work that needs "flow" for 2-3 hours a day, minimum - doesn't work for most people in 2025. Leaders are holding onto it in an irrational way, and that is leading to growing resentment. That, coupled with trying to pay people who have to show up (service workers, gig economy workers), with ever fewer working rights and poorer conditions, means something's going to give at some point.
If all the menial work was done by robots, and we were all going to Bell Labs-style environments for 3-4 days a week, I think we'd all prefer that and actually, society might be a lot more productive as a result. But it's never going to happen. Not in our lifetimes, any way.
What’s interesting is that tariffs helped American workers back in the day — whether or not that happens again remains to be seen.
Unless the entire world gets onboard with worker rights, trade barriers remain one of the only ways to improve the working conditions of local people.
Regarding the French example: they do have the so-called 35 hour week, but compare disposable income for the same job in the U.S. versus France: Americans have much higher disposable income than the French (even after accounting for health care costs.) The US could improve conditions, but pay will drop accordingly. That might be ok or it might not, but there is no free lunch.
Those barriers work by raising the minimum price of a product, making it profitable to produce it in a more expensive labor market. When you make products more expensive though, it comes out the other side as people have to pay more to get the things they want, and you get inflation.
If that is what people want, OK, fine. I don't think it's what has been sold to most Americans though - not only is the narrative that inflation going to be avoided, but income tax is going to be scrapped too. It's hard to find credible economists from any part of the political spectrum who agree.
I hope it does work, because if it doesn't, what will follow will be horrible to watch from afar, even if as a result we end up with prices for most things coming down (if Chinese companies can't sell to the US, they'll just dump to the rest of the World).
The French have higher disposable income because Americans are too busy wasting their income on sky high rents, sky high healthcare costs, paying for cars because it’s necessary, higher food and alcohol costs, etc. (Plus they have more of the thing money can’t buy: time). And these tariffs are going to make American’s lives even more expensive. (No one release in the world is going to oh these taxes: only Americans).
> There was disagreement among labor unions at this time about when a holiday celebrating workers should be, with some advocating for continued emphasis of the September march-and-picnic date while others sought the designation of the more politically charged date of May 1. Conservative Democratic President Grover Cleveland was one of those concerned that a labor holiday on May 1 would tend to become a commemoration of the Haymarket affair and would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements that backed the May 1 commemoration around the globe.[18] In 1887, he publicly supported the September Labor Day holiday as a less inflammatory alternative,[19] formally adopting the date as a United States federal holiday through a law that he signed in 1894.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day#Labor_Day_versus_May...
Labo(u)r Day of US/CA/JP/AU/NZ:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Observance_of_Internation...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Day
It is very important to remember that many of the things we enjoy today as workers only exist because of the enormous courage of workers from the 19th and early 20th century who fought really hard for a better future.
that is a remarkable generalization, that overstates things to the point of being misleading
> They are they muscle of the state.
still, there are better and worse states
if you go fully pacifist and disempower yourself and your state it will not result in peace - it will result in someone else, likely worse, taking over
Police in my country did some bad things (and far more bad things when we were a Russian puppet state) but last time I had an actual contact with police it was on railway station when they have cordoned off a group of aggressive football hooligans.
I assure you that I preferred policeman over group of drunk abusive hooligans. And some kind of "muscle of the state" is needed to keep such people in check.
(at the same time, police power should be kept on a leash)
Not really? It may apply in some very specific area but it does NOT generalize worldwide.
And for direct purpose: even taking maximally cynical view and seeing police as muscle power existing to enforce tax payments by threat of force and to disrupt threats to state...
Then I, as a citizen (and many other people) would agree that gangs should be disrupted and that they prefer to pay taxes over every lowlife able to steal all their stuff and burn down their home.
Sadly, it takes only few people to make area terrible for others. Some do it with no benefit for themselves and there is no way to reason with them. Taking out such people (for whatever reason) by police is an useful service. That - even with quite badly managed police - is overall beneficial.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The union wants my job outsourced so that factory workers can keep theirs.
Please tell me why I should have solidarity with them.
I am curious to take a read for myself, as I'm sure many other readers are
I recently had to deal with them (as part of the Betriebsrat) and, just as human beings, they seemed to be some of the worst people I ever met.
hard to say without knowing what was there
It really goes to show you that capital has no ideology and will adopt whatever shape it needs to as the political climate changes. The United States government is now fascist, and therefore the investor class is also fascist.
Furthermore, this is laughable: Later evidence indicated that only one of the police deaths could be attributed to the bomb and that all the other police fatalities had or could have had been due to their own indiscriminate gun fire.
Again, Blair mountain. I guess they didn't ask nice enough?
There's no such thing as a (successful) social movement that doesn't employ some amount of violence - the police and the state more generally simply won't allow it.
All social progress resulted from the threat of violence. It is the only mechanism though which the capitalist class can be convinced to make even the smallest concession.
It's even more laughable the idea of people protesting for working conditions to be deemed as "communists"
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html