What is the legality of unions across the US?
Legal but some States have weird laws in place like being able to not be part of the Union if you don’t want to
Unions are legal in all occupations. There may be restrictions on some form of collective action (i.e. the government can force strikers back to work) but organizing is never illegal.
Unions are legal in all occupations.
One caveat: the legal protections of the right to unionize apply to non-supervisors. If you have people who report to you, your power to unionize is pretty limited.
There are also some specialized jobs that aren’t allowed to unionize by either federal or state law: actual soldiers in the Army, certain political jobs, etc.
But for the most part, if you are employed, you’re probably allowed to unionize (and protected against retaliation even in an unsuccessful union drive).
If you want to read about this on a website that isn’t full of ads and doesn’t just present as an ad for their own news app, here is the source material by Blind.com.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to the raw survey data and I generally don’t trust surveys that aren’t accompanied by raw data.
I went looking for the data because 1901 respondents across 32 of the largest companies globally doesn’t seem like it would be statistically representative of any one company. If you assume the same sample size per company, which it probably isn’t but again that’s unverifiable because I couldn’t find the raw data, you’re looking at, what, 60 employees for a company the size of Google?
Look, I’m a recovering tech worker who left the industry because of the toxic work culture, having spent a quarter of my life at one of the good ones. Even there I saw the value of unions. No matter the industry, workers deserve the right to collective bargaining and fair treatment. But I don’t think surveys with unverifiable data help move that conversation forward.
Now, if I’m mistaken and someone finds a source link to the data that we can all verify, I’ll happily take another look and reconsider my opinion on it’s validity.
I think blind itself drives some interesting bias. The public posts are pretty incel. You need a critical mass of folks at your company to have a company private board so it attracts folks from bigger companies. It doesn’t seem to represent average folks well. Unless I have no idea what average is.
I’m not sure what to do with that instinct. The overall results say a thing I wanted to hear. It all feels weird.
Look, I’m a recovering tech worker who left the industry because of the toxic work culture, having spent a quarter of my life at one of the good ones.
What are you up to these days? Which unicorn was that?
I spend most of my days working on healing myself with time in nature, and I’m developing a personal photography project connected to my natural surroundings. I also spend time working on my garden when weather permits and am learning to paint and draw when the weather is gloomy. All in all that keeps my days pretty packed and active, not even thinking about tech most days whereas before it was all consuming.
The majority of my career in tech was at Mozilla, followed by a relatively brief stint at Element. I’m lucky that I was able to spend my entire career working for companies whose missions and products I still champion. But even as good and well intentioned as they are, they cannot escape so-called “Silicon Valley” as they’re very much a part of it.
Would a union be able to repeal this lame IT overtime pay expectation? This dumb rule was the $27.63 over ten years ago too. I once worked at a place and a co-worker was told by his staffing agency that they didn’t have to pay overtime.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-computer#:~:text=However%2C Section 13(a)(,duties%20and%20who%20are%20paid
A collective agreement can’t include less than the law but can provide more than the law, so they could add paid overtime in the collective agreement and the employer would have to follow that even though the law doesn’t make it mandatory.
A collective agreement is a work contract, the only difference is that the employees negotiate it as a group instead of one by one.
Now how do we do it? Especially with remote work, not sure how to organize.
Form out of band relationships with coworkers you trust to get a base going then send an email to everyone from your department from an anonymous email address to solicit feedback and organize a vote.
Especially with remote work, not sure how to organize.
Remote work didn’t stop you working, did it? Why would it stop unions from working? There’s on the ground work for sure, but it’s mostly desk stuff, especially in IT.
Damn, wtf are intuit and GM doing to their engineers?
Funny, seeing them at the top gave me a favorable impression of them, but seems to have caused the opposite for you. My impression was probably due to, like someone else said, feeling like maybe they’re not being drilled with as much anti-union propaganda.
But I’m from a place where you have to go out of your way not to be part of a union.
Gotta ask some of my coworkers if they were one of the participants in the survey.
Not bad, I thought our heads were still further up our asses.
