All respect to Mr Doctorow, but he’s got this wrong:
Tech workers are workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they’d built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe.
…and…
Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents’ funerals and their kids’ graduations to ship on time.
It wasn’t “vocational awe” it was money that lead tech workers to work long hours and sacrifice. Lots and lots of money, five to ten times what your non-tech same-aged peers were getting. It was so much money that if you didn’t live too high on the hog, it set you up for a very nice retirement and having “fuck you” money in your late 30s and 40s. During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.
With all the tech layoffs and enshitification, those meteoric salaries are starting to come down to Earth. They’re still high comparatively to other professions though. So I think tech unions will gain more traction now, but employers also have more tech workers (right now) so they can bully their current workers to try to avoid unions. However, tech is cyclical, as is hiring. I’ve been in tech long enough to see 3 large downturns, but when the pendulum swings, the hiring returns and (so far) those high salaries have too. If the pendulum swings too quickly and the high salaries (and now “work from home” requirement) returns, tech unions will be back to where they were struggling to establish themselves in the industry of job hoppers jumping ship from one employer in under a year or less chasing the larger compensation.
I hear this argument against unionization all the time:
During those days the only thing a tech union would do would make your life balance better, but at the cost of your salary.
It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization). I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.
It feels like fear mongering when there are no data to back it up (this is not a knock against your post, it’s a complaint against the argument against unionization).
If an org, under union influence, would do 15% to 400% salary increases year over year for their entire company/department, they’d likely go bankrupt. Yet that was possible on an individual level without a union in place. I didn’t really mention it before but employers that treated their workers poorly were many times an asset to this method. That bad behavior drove away workers, meaning the bad employers would have to increase their salary offerings much higher to attract a worker to join even with the bad behaving employer. It also meant that the IT worker, who may not have been entirely qualified, would would have a shot at getting the position (and become qualified on the job). Once that that worker is qualified (after the year or two), they can take that knowledge and experience and jump ship to a good quality employer, gaining yet another with a big raise. The worker also just collapsed 5 to 10 years of slow career growth into 1 or 2 years.
I only know one person in a union and they have limited anecdotal data that shows that the cost of being in a union is offset by salary gains.
I’m guessing those quotes are about salary gains across a the entire company/department. This was nearly mercenary-mindset IT work. As in:
- Get in with the raise
- Learn the next thing you need
- Work the thing for a bit until you know it and have the experience and expertise at that employer
- Get out
Rinse repeat.
None of that is assisted with a collectivist union mindset or union implemented rules. Please correct me if I get any of the following union benefit bullet points wrong. As I understand it, the union would do everything to undo that situation. They’d:
- work to normalize pay across workers fairly.
- emphasize a proper work/life balance
- enforce conflict resolution with strong worker advocacy
- encourage/provide training across the company/department for continued competency among everyone
- establish rigid rules for promotion
IT has been a raging river, but if you were able to navigate it, you’d get to the end very quickly. You’d certainly come out with some cuts and bruises though. If getting to the end (comfortable money in our case) is what you were looking for, then it was the fastest way to it.
I’d take those last 5 bullets. I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.
Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.
I’ve worked hard to gain salary only to find that it didn’t matter. Every review I’ve ever had was a lie. If I was given a good raise, I was told that it was my hard work. If it was a bad raise, they found one item to give me ‘satisfactory’. A bunch of us shared our salaries over drinks one evening and we all were about the same. That was a big surprise to me.
You’re proving my original point. Staying at a single employer for years, and you’ll get minuscule raises irrespective of the level of your efforts. Further, you get a sham of job security. When tough times come (as I’ve seen three cycles in IT), layoffs can come and take your job anyway. Without having built up a war chest of savings to live on, your living situation and that of your family is at risk.
Back to the point of the original article, employees talking is bad for employers. Unionization is one way to solve the collective agreement problem, but there are others. When employees (or any group for that matter) organize, they can make things happen.
You’re trying to fix employers. You’re welcome to go that route. In the original article Doctorow posited that “vocational awe” was the reason IT people put up with such conditions. Apparently that’s true for some. However, I also know it was not true of others who preferred to make the money they needed to eventually stop working for someone else.
Blame the “corporate buzzword”
“The web” “The cloud” “Blockchain” “AI”
Get non-technical management out of technology and you’ll see a 180° change
It’s happening with pretty much all professions. I’m a chemical engineer and it’s pretty much every role at my plant, the plan is just make everyone work so much they hate their lives, and then those people quit and make things worse for everyone else that’s left and it’s all fueled by an endless supply of fresh college grads who are just thrown into the deep end with the understanding that over half of them will get fed up and quit within a few years and those who stay will train the new ones coming in. It’s not just engineers, it’s operators, mechanics, maintenance coordinators, safety reps, anything you can think of. While technology technically allows fewer people to do the same work, that same work is just getting worse and worse because each employee has to do so many different types of things and have so much riding on them personally that they feel like they can’t leave or take any time off without messing up the whole operation - there is no redundancy.
Everyone I know in the chemical industry is saying the same thing. Everyone is overworked and wages for chemical engineers have been stagnant for the past 20 years in spite of inflation and each employee delivering much more productivity than they used to. I have started to envy the production line staff who at least get overtime pay and don’t have to think about this shit once they clock out. They just leave and it’s the next shift’s problem.
Full-stack and DevOps were enshittification events in my book.
I would say the only silver lining here is that the exploitation of labor puts these giants in a precarious position where all of their critical work is being done by unhappy, extrinsically motivated people who are often only still there because they’re relatively immobile (i.e., they aren’t good enough at their job to find another one easily) or they were kept on because their salary is lower and they’re less experienced. It makes these massively complicated technology ecosystems extremely brittle, which is why software has been shit across the board for the past decade or so. It’s possible there will be a pendulum swing if and when quality becomes an attainable and marketable feature again.
