Are you a member of a trade union? Why? Why not? If you are, and don't mind mentioning it, which one?
Do you know of any programmers who were helped by being in a union, or would have been helped by being in a union? Do you know of any programmers who were hindered or would have been hindered by being in a union?
No. First of all, like JohnFX, I'm not aware of unions for programmers in the US (they may exist, but I've not heard of them, and I have no colleagues or friends who are or were ever in one). And on a more personal note, I work for a small business (a literary magazine, actually), and I'm treated well and have no use for one.
On a more general note, I don't think they're particularly necessary for programmers. Unions exist primarily to protect the rights of workers when the employee-employer relationship is tipped unfairly in the direction of the employer. This may occur if work is inherently unsafe; when jobs are not mobile and/or the employer has a monopoly on work in an area (e.g., police, firefighters, and teachers); or when there is not a clear-cut way to distinguish between good and bad workers (think someone on an assembly line). None of those apply to developers: developers needn't lobby for safer working conditions, development jobs are fairly fluid (maybe not as much in this economy as in recent years, though), and there's a clear difference between a good programmer and a bad one. I think unions have failed to spring up because they aren't really necessary in our line of work.
No. Primarily because I'm not aware of any union that applies to my job and secondarily because I'm not a big fan of unions in general.
Unions force two things:
Both things are bad for me as a developer. Programming, like other 'white collar' professions, is as much about the person as it is about the discipline. You can send two people to identical schools, learning identical things, and performing the same task, but you will have two different outcomes. Unions treat every 'worker' as interchangeable; and bargain as if they are all interchangable.
They are not. Without a union, I have the opportunity to negotiate my own wage and my own benefits. If I want to work for lower pay but get more vacation, I have that option.
Secondly, Unions traditionally want what anyone else in power wants: More. They want more money for their workers, more vacation, more benefits. This is a problem when they ask for too much and send the business into a tailspin (see: US Auto Industry; the current union debates in Wisconsin).
Unions are not good for business, and without business we would not have jobs.
If you're programming in a 19th century soot-filled factory for sixteen hours a day, then yes, you should probably unionise.
Otherwise, talk to your manager directly about workplace problems. You'll be surprised how much more reasonable management can be in the 21st century. You probably won't ever actually need the blunt and disruptive negotiation tools that unions impose.
I'm not a member of any union because I don't see the need for it in my particular situation. I have good working conditions and I'm making more than I'm spending by a comfortable margin, and that's good enough for me. Paying dues to a union for representation that I have no need of would not be a rational decision.
If conditions were different, though, I would be amenable to joining one, because I'm aware of the good that they do in situations where they are necessary.
However, I believe that such membership needs to be voluntary. If you believe that the benefits of union membership make the cost worthwhile, then you join, otherwise you don't, and you don't get the same benefits that the union members get. The concept of a "union shop," where all workers are required to join the union and pay dues as a condition of employment, is simply a protection racket by a different name, and needs to be recognized as such and made illegal.
Unions are a necessary evil. We may not like them at times, but they are our only check against unchecked corporate greed.
Anyone who believes that professionals do not join unions is misinformed. The two best compensated practitioner-oriented professions in America are both unionized. The American Medial Association (AMA) and the American Bar Association (ABA) are little more than unions by another name. They serve as gatekeepers for their respect professions and provide a voice for practitioners in politics, which are the most important activities in which most labor unions are engaged.
Furthermore, you can bet you rear-end that hi-tech employers are unionized. Their union is called the Information Technology Association of American (ITAA). The ITAA uses its substantial political clout to suppress wage demands through workforce dilution. Even the libertarian economist Milton Friedman noted that the H-1B program is yet another form of corporate welfare. That labor subsidy would not be in place if it were not for a union composed entirely of hi-tech employers.
In closing, I am not a member of labor union, but I would be willing to join a union structured like the AMA or ABA. I also support the professional licensure of software practitioners. The barriers to entry are far too low in this field. This situation leads to poorly-quality software and a revolving door career model where most of the practitioners in the field have less ten years of experience.
If you work in government you might not have a choice. Programmers here aren't 'professional' employees because there is no accredition body for programmers.
Interestingly there also isn't for physicists, you can be working on a satelite with a physics PhD but you are in the same union as the janitor. While your boss who just managed to scrape through an environmental engineering (?) degree is a professional.
And before you start thinking of an AMA/ABA type organisation - they have been proposed regularly, normally by large software companies. If you have to be a professional to produce software then there is no open source, no Linux or Apache. But you could still have all those wonderful Access and VB apps as long as the programmer had been on the accredited MS-Access training course.
Actually that's not quite true - software is rather more portable than legal or medical services - everyone else in the world would have Linux and Apache but the US would be forced to buy MSFT server or Oracle and only employ MSFT certified devs.
Are you a member of a trade union? Why? Why not? If you are, and don't mind mentioning it, which one?
<p>Do you know of any programmers who were helped by being in a union, or would have been helped by being in a union? Do you know of any programmers who were hindered or would have been hindered by being in a union?</p>
LOL, there is no need for one. Programmers can pick up their bag and leave whenever they want and get another employee. There are lots of businesses in different sectors that need programmers.
The reason why say teachers need union is because where the hell else they're going to find another employer? There is really only 1, the government. Yes there are charter and private and what not. But really man, that is rare. So yeah... ^_^ (<-- teachers union sympathizer). The problem with public sector too is they tend to suck you in with pension so if you leave the pension is going to cash out so you can't move your pension around like 401k unless it's another gov job (once again 1 boss). So most of those teachers are stuck unless they want to forfeit and cash their pension.
