avidamoeba

When you learn that publicly traded companies are mostly obliged to squeeze as much work from you while paying as little, then all the all the puzzle pieces fall into place and all of what you said starts to make perfect sense.

Make an alt-alt over VPN and tells us more. 😁

I guess not much if I were an Intuit employee and significantly if I were at Apple. 😄

"that's not good, but we'll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about"

Classic. Once I landed in a team who's been woken up every night, often multiple times a night for several years. The people left were so worn down, burnt out and depressed that it was obvious just by looking at them. The company has cut the team to the bone and the only people left were folks that didn't have the flashy resumes to easily escape. They had drawn up plans to fix the system years ago. BTW, none of that was disclosed to me until I had signed up and showed up for work and asked who are those miserable looking people over there. "That's your team" the man replied.

Those compensation requirements would basically make it financially impossible to have someone on-call or they’d just have to hire people for those hours and say they are normal working hours

These are not the only options. Here are some others:

1. Ensuring the on-call load is shared more evenly so that everyone is woken up under the painful limit
2. Fixing the broken shit that keeps waking people up, which they keep ignoring because "it's low priority"
3. Hiring people for a night shift, appropriately compensated for their diminished health and other life impacts. The union can ensure such positions aren't paid the same as normal work hours while not being prohibitively expensive. Night shifts are a standard thing in some occupations

Something's telling me most orgs where 2 is an option would go with that. Related to that - increases in labor compensation is what forces companies to spend money on capital investment that increases productivity - read new equipment, automation, fixing broken shit, etc. If there are cheap enough slaves to wake up during the night, doing this investment is "low priority" (more expensive) and isn't done.

That's not the case the parent was asking about though. They were asking whether they can do more than what's in their job description. Not whether someone else is obliged to do more.

I don't doubt your experience and it's totally fine by me. That's how they want to run their workplace, that's the way they run it. It doesn't mean you're gonna make yours like that. It's unlikely that a software org would be run like that. At the end of the day unions are democratic institutions where their members decide how to do these things. Because of that, your current org would likely be run the way you and your colleagues want to run it. Not in some bizarre way that Las Vegas convention workers do. :D

You're unlikely to be told that you aren't allowed to do this or that, unless it's a safety violation of some sort. The idea that you can describe jobs to the letter and everyone is aware of what's written there and only does that is absurd. What's in the job descriptions protects you against abuse if someone makes you do things aren't paid for trained for, capable of, etc. It's a backstop. It doesn't prevent you from doing other things. In fact doing extra is a basis for promotion, just like it works in non-union shops. That's what how I've seen things working in a unionised university I have access to.

In any case, if a union card comes to my desk, I'd get the power first and worry about these details later. At least someone would ask me how I want these things to work, instead of telling me with the only alternative being to leave the company or be fired.

A union lets you have leverage when negotiating for anything with the corpo. Individually you have a little if you're top talent, and none otherwise. Very few people are irreplaceable, some are somewhat painful to replace, the rest are less so. We've been mistaking the tight labor market in this industry for our own self worth but hopefully the last couple of years have helped most of us snap out of it.

Speaking of pay, the structures I've seen at a union university for example have pay scales based on the job and defined pay increases in every job. You know what you're gonna get paid for a position you're applying, and you know what you're gonna get paid years ahead in that job. With that said, a union can negotiate any sort of pay scheme. Perhaps most importantly a union can negotiate to get a much larger portion of the profits for the engineers. You think some folks in tech are paid very well, but if you look at the value they generate, they might not be paid nearly enough. If you think a union might take your 500K salary to 300K while raising some other people's salaries you should consider that a union can take it to 800K or more. Assuming this is happening at one of the wildly profitable companies where this money exists.

And of course a union gives you the leverage to negotiate any other conditions like the ones that you mentioned. On-call, PTO, remote, etc.

They're doing that in any case when they can get away with it. Not forming a union isn't going stop them.

Productivity isn't affected much by individuals beyond some marginal differences. An accountant from 1920 can never be as productive as an accountant today no matter how hard they try. When productivity is discussed by economists, it means investment in equipment and training that makes people produce more for the same hours. When productivity is discussed by business leaders in relation to unions, you're being lied to or they're incompetent.

This is likely the case with GM given that their manufacturing is unionised. Engineers just got a demo what that can do for them last year. They aren't getting the raise assembly workers got.

Not bad, I thought our heads were still further up our asses.