Discussion on:

IT pros take a cautious approach to unions

The two targeted businesses cited in the article have more tranditional shipping - warehousing - retailing types of businesses. Even though they and other more traditional companies like Best Buy and Circuit City deal with high-tech types of equipment, these are not your traditional IT - IS types of business. They are ripe for unionization because many workers in similar positions are already unionized in one way or another.
But in the IT - IS segment, in the software and hardware development segment, we are really working with engineers who are highly creative and often motivated by an inner drive to create and innovate. These people (geeks, nerds, whatever) are often fiercely independent and the best are often prima donna in nature. We (I count myself in this group) are the backbone of the IT - IS - development community and by our very nature, unions tend to be stifling. Unions, no matter what the promises, will not find a home here, mostly because we work our own hours, willingto give up "having a life" just to succeed in our own way, and even, if the company permits, having a cot in our cubicle so that we don't have to leave what is really important to us -- our work.

In 37 years in the IT business I would have to respond that I have known many creative and innovative people. However, they did have a life and families besides their ?job?. I would even categorize some of them as geeks or nerds. However, the prima donnas of the world may work all night to come up with the technologies of the future. But it?s the poor geeks and nerds that are left with making it work and asking, "why". The rest of us are left to either integrate and utilize, or are end-users of that technology.

I agree strongly with Dave Fuchs statement about how " . . .Unions could help IT workers but at a high price." My point exactly. What is the goal of Unions? To make sure that all people are payed a comparable wage so that no one person is either paid too little or too much from a the average wage as defined by industry. But here lies a problem. Which industry? The work force of IT spans all of our known industries in some fashion. So what one industry dictates as fair wage for IT will not be how another industry views the value placed on IT talent in it's own industry.

What is the reality of a union in the current market ? Wages and benefits are high, too high for the comfort level of most managers. A union in this type of market would serve mainly as a management tool to "classify" workers and pay the "agreement"rates etc...... get the picture.

Promises of entitlement, power and security have always been the big attraction of unions; however, all one has to do to see the end result of unionization is to count the number of industries/businesses over the last few decades that have located in other countries because of unrealistic environmental demands or because unions have made it too expensive to do business in the United States any more. Too often unions are the last refuge of the mediocre, and the end result are empty factories and store shelves full of products that simply aren't made in America any more...You can't touch the devil without the devil touching you.

Most IT people I've known are at least somewhat libertarian in their views. The traditional lockstep of the labor movement is unappealing to us. We see ourselves as individual adult human beings, not as children to be dictated to by any organization. Yet for this same reason, unionization is beginning to take on an air of inevitability. Workload is one reason. When I first saw the "24-7-365" mantra, I thought it was an error, and should be "24-7-52". Then I realized that many IT managers reallydo think that, with regard to work, a year DOES contain 365 weeks. IT workers are beginning to be looked on as fungible goods. Use them without respite until they break, then throw them away. Simple corporate greed is the other driving force. The HRshortage cited to justify offshore migration and H1B visa growth is not due to a lack of qualified IT people, but to a desire to have qualified IT people at McDonald's wage scales. Hence, no retraining efforts. Hence hiring foreign professionals at coolie wages. Unless there is a turning, unions could come to be seen as a last, desperate recourse of the U.S. IT professional. I fear that this will spell disaster both for the U.S. corporate economy and for the IT professions.

Agree! Unfortunately it?s the bottom line that ?Corporate America? and the ?Free Market? system depend and most influences decisions, good and bad for America workers.

You hit the nail on the head. Your told you want to make more money that what you can get working at Mcdonalds?? learn a trade, Wel here we are ! We have been learning a highly Technical trade and they want to pay us slave wages. Thats not fair and what we need is a law that says if you have a highly learned skill you deserve more than slave wages.
You know corporatio0ns try to get out of paying you what your worth , when you read the ads they want you to have ten years experience and they want you to have a degree in everything but the kitchen sink!! and if you don't , thats thier reason for not paying you what your worth.
We have to freese our wages!! Nobody in the IT field should ever work for slave wages, If you do , your either retarded or a foriegner!!
Corporations using non english speaking people make inferier products with poor documentation, that gets lost in the translation! hehehe it will bite them in the butt!

Unions make up a small percentage of the overall workforce and are on the decline for a reason. Don't sell your soul to a union; go somewhere else if you don't like your job conditions. Companies that abuse their IT staff will lose them.

Unions produce lethargy and laziness at every level. You could always identify a "union job" by the amount of people standing around doing nothing. I would hate to be lumped together with those individuals. Unions are an outdated concept who now fignt for the sole purpose of being heard and right to be lazy.

Not to mention the organized crime factor that comes in to play with unions.

Unions are just bad all the way around. They help lazy, uneducated, and unmotivated people advance to salary scales they would never meet based on their merit or worth.

ie..garbage man 40,000-50,000

How does someone who rides on the back of truck and sling crap all day, make more money than, lets say teachers? UNION thats why.

Lets noteven get started on the teamsters, the construction unions, automobile unions or the Transportation unions. If they don't get what they want, what happens? Job action. Who pays for it? We do in higher fares, prices, and taxes.

I say no way...NEVER to an IT union....

When I was growing up, I saw the good, the bad, and the evil of unions. My dad, uncles, and aunts worked in the auto and aerospace industries all their working lives. For all the evil and bad things, true and false, unions were then good for the working Joe and Jane giving them stability at work and home. What I have seen and had happen to me over the past 15-20 years as and IT Professional, if I had been a Union Member my life would be much different, but better than what it is today.

IT Pro's have the best employment opportunities of any employee group.
Unions would not add any benefits to their situation at present.

Didn't like the T-Shirts. I have had my pay checks garnished by two different Unions. The IBEW and the CWA.

I held tech postions while in bondage to both of these dictatorships. Technical ability, quality of work and work ethic count for nothing under union oppression. The only thing unions care about is how long you've been a memeber. Which equates to how much money you have contributed to the coffers.

As a employee with little *senority* my career was impeded rather then advanced by union memdership.

I was actually a member of IBEW, (I was young and naive). So I guess that my check wasn't realy garnished by IBEW. But, when I changed from Electronics Technician to DBA, The union oppressor chaged to CWA. I worked for AT&T. Having been blocked and knocked back in my career as an Electronic Technician by the IBEW, I'd be da**ed if I was going support their sister organisation in the IT field, CWA. So I did NOT join the CWA. They still extorted money from my pay check. But it was under protest.

I was laid off from AT&T 9 years ago after Working for them for 10 years. It was the best thing for my career. Since then I have grown and achieved great hieghts in my carreer as a Unix Systems administrator. Something that I could not have done under union oppression.

If I sound bitter, it is just the taste that has been left in my mouth after having to endure a work environment created by unions where one with oustanding technical ability and work ethic, is passed over in pormotion in favor of those who have been there the longest. Regardless of ablilty. >:-&

KH

IT Pro's have the best employment opportunities of any employee group.
Unions would not add any benefits to their situation at present.

Union principles like managemnt philosophy must change to be able to relate to the new work styles of the 21st century. Most workers inthe IT world are not 8:00 to 4:00 laborers. The work itself is not geared to production line processes.

But the need for representation of the IT worker in the business world is still needed. Management must not be allowed to make arbitrary decisions that effect workers without some degree of recourse by the worker.

Case in point involves those individuals who are adversely effected by a decision by upper level management to spin off a segment of its business to exist as a seperate entity. Recently this happened in a popular hight tech company. Easrly last year employees working on a specific product were told that they were going to be spun of into a seperate entity. Half of the employees were allowed to volunteer for layoff or look for other jobs in the company. The remaining half were told that they did not have that option and that their only recourse was to resign if they did not want to stay with that entity. Later in the year when the company was unable to spin the project off the remaining employees were layed off.

This is one example where I feel an IT union could have been effective in preventing such a discriminatory practice from taking place.

Other discriminatory practives have to do with the way senior employees are treated in a company. Perks and high salaries are offered to younger college graduateswhile older employees who have remained loyal to a company are weeded out discrimnately.

IT Unions will not look like the old AFL-CIO unions of the past but will serve a vital role in represnting the IT professional in the future.

Unions do have their time and place and I support someones right to organize. But in this industry, it would only promote mediocrity. Whenever you have a pay scale based on time served, not talent, drive, experience or quality, you will have problems. This industry was built on these qualities and must not lose them to move forward.

Please don't believe that the union is going to create one big pay grade for IT people. They are merely going to protect your rights (and your back). Each company will have it's paygrade levels. When an IT person is hired, they will be hired in an appropriate pay grade. If their performance warrants, they will be boosted to the next pay grade.

With the high percentage of conservatives in white collar positions like IT, it figures that the union spin would be mostly negative.

As a former trade union member, I think there are pros and cons. For the pro side, I think a union can get yourwages in line with national averages. They also can protect you from unreasonable working conditions like 80 hour work weeks. In my current position, it was a union threat that finally forced overtime pay for some lower magement positions. An effective union can also find employment in your area in case of an unexpected layoff as well as supplemental income in these situations. They allow you to bargain with voice of many rather than to fight it out for yourself - a plus if management is unreasonable.

On the con side there is corruption and lack of representation for the cost of membership.
Unions also sometimes protect the jobs of people that are a detriment to the company. They can limit your exposure to different types of work by limiting a company's ability to move you around.

The best situation is to work for a company that treats you well so that you don't need a union. For those who do not have this option, union membership is an alternative.

Unions promote mediocrity, something we all despise as IT professionals.

They limit personal growth and stifel productivity.

An IT union? I see quotas, restrictions, and paper MSCE's abound. It wont matter how good you are but what certifications you have and if you are a minority with a disability. It will run the the IT field ofshore faster than you can say NAFTA.

An example of a situation where an IT union might have helped is the current suit against AOL. It deals with basic issues ---like what is an employee, what is compensation, what is a temp, what is a staff, etc. The link below explains the case.

Microsoft has already been there and done that. They lost to the tune of $97M.


http://www.forbes.com/asap/2001/0219/060.html

Maybe not many network admins are interested in collective bargaining. Maybe they want to be the lone wolf cowboy trusting the good will of the pencil pushers and bean counters. Que Sera.

What about the rest of the IT industry --the data entry folks, help desk staff and cabling technicians?

Tom D.

A network admin who forfeits 400+ hours of comp time each year.

I was recently forced to become represented by a union, though I'm grateful that I work in a right to work state, so I won't be wasting my income to fatting so union bosses pockets. One of the perks in being in IT is that most of us enjoy a certainlevel of employment freedom, as everyone needs our talents. Aside for running to the highest paycheck we get to work where we are challenged and under the conditions that we feel are in our best interests. We have flexibility. Pay and promotions are typically commensurate with merit. Unions seek to standardize everyone, and reward longevity over contributions to the bottom line. Unionization will stiffle creativity. What about the IT professional willing to work for the startup, because of the challenge and potential windfall, what union would allow their members to work for those wages and conditions. I'm sure that there are some instances where IT workers would gain, some benefits from unionization, especially with consolidations/mergers occurring. But if I were an IT manager caught in a merger, I would want to be retain employees because of their skills, experiences and abilities, not because of their union ranking. In closing, I do not believe that we would have experienced the innovation these past years had IT employees been unionized.

Coming from a town where Steel and Unions were king, those who worked for the industry during the boom made a lot of money. When times got tough and the union greedy, unemployment in the town went to 30%. There are enough IT jobs to get better benefits or pay and improve your growth potential or situation that unions are just not required. Don't really see an issue in the future either. Keep them away, let me manage my own career!

What a sure way to kill a profession! All the IT bottom feeders vote in a union, and then, if you're unlucky enough not to live in a right-to-work state, you either join or hit the road. All the quality people leave, and pretty soon, the union has done for IT what it did for autos and steel---export jobs abroad.

I've observed the effect of unions in a number of job fields over the years and have come to this basic conclusion about them. They are a tremendous waste of time and resources for all parties concerned. They encourage sloth in workers, reward incompetence, ineffeciency, and job incompatibility, and discourage initiative and ambition with rules and regulations that make it virtually impossible for employers to give merit promotions, or fire those who can't keep up the the requirements of the job. I would not join a union, and would fight to keep unions out of the IT sector.

I think that unions are a bad idea, and believe it would stifle the industry as well as hurt IT Professionals. Number one, a flat payscale regardless of knowledge, experience, etc., doesn't sound very good. Number two, unions charge dues, and veryrarely do they give back what they take, from the employees or from the employer.

I don't know if I'm for or against unionization. I think that I'd need more information as to what issues would be on the table.

One thing that I have noticed though is the huge difference between wages that I've received in the SF Bay Area and those that I've received while working in FL and MI. Both of those states pay substantially less than they do in the Bay Area. FL pays almost 50% less in some cases. The reason, the so-called lower cost of living.

I think that at the least, thereshould be a minimum industry wide standard for IT positions. You'd better believe that the new start ups, and those tech companies that are already established in those areas are NOT charging less for there products and services than companies in the Bay Area but they'll use the cost of living excuse to pay IT employees less.

Again, I don't know if I'd want to join a union or not but maybe that's the only way to get things, at least minimum pay, adjusted so that there isn't such a huge difference in the rates of pay.

Keith DeJarnet

The City of Seattle's Systems Analysts have been in a union for many years, but the senior level IT staff were not until this past November. We just organized and successfully won voluntary recognition in most of the city's departments.

The workplace, even when you work for the government as we do, is not democractic. We don't elect our bosses or vote on the department's priorities. We get told what to do and can get fired if we don't do it.

Unionization gives you a chance to have more control over your working life. We here at the city were too much at the whim of our managers who were paying people doing the same work wildly different wages, not fair in the distribution of training and job assignments, and have been hiring a large group of revolving-door contractors to do the best assignments. (We also think these contractors ought to unionize--they are underpaid and are always under the threat of being fired for the least little thing. One got fired for complaining to a secretary that his chair was bothering his back...)

As more and more dot.coms go belly up, there may not be such a shortage of IT workers. We'll need the protection and security of union contracts to stop all forms of discrimination and to setup job training programs that allow newbies a place to start when they have no experience.

With management having so much control over an employee's livelihood, there will always be a place for unions in IT, whether the pundits admit it or not.

I do not beleive the unions are good for the
IT industry. Unions are for factory, truck,
telephone operators. It would stiffle the
creative drive of the Technology Field.

I'll be honest up front, I don't like unions and probably never will. I have seen/heard to many horror stories from those that are unionized now and weren't before. Those who have spoke to have spoken under confidence, for fear they would get into trouble for critizing the way the union operates. Unions would prvide stability in wage/salary, but would cause a price increase in the software products sold. When you went to work for a company, you were never orginally promised a life time job, unions seek to obtain this as job stability. I also don't care for the policies of most unions where money I would pay as union dues, would goto [political] sources that I don't believe in or agree with. When companies can't produce a good product at a fair cost to comsumers, it will wither on the vine. Part of that cost is paying IT specialists/professionals a fair salary/wage and provide reasonable working conditions. Once started, a union is hard to stop, especially if they go on strike. Could you imagine the impact to various aspects of society, if IT's shut down the entire "WEB" of the US in a symapthy strike? I paint a grim picture, but I don't want to find out the hard way, when a vast majority of our economy depends on the "WEB." Keep the unions out of the IT industry/field.

I know, by past experience, that a Union is not all it cracks up to be. A Union would hold me back, limit my pay, and would not relocate me in time of layoff. What do I need a Union for? If you dont like where you work, dont work there.
Matt A.

I don't believe there is a place or a need for unions in the IT field. There would be NO benefit to IT professionals and ther would be lots of negatives. We would be paying for the priviledge of limiting our income and possibilities. Sounds like a losing situation to me.

There is a wide range of skill sets out in the marketplace as well as a wide range of needs. The defining of the jobs, the skill sets to fill said jobs, and pay scales involved could help companies more than the workers. Right now its still a magicblack box out there with very high pay scales overall. I can't believe what people are looking for right out of school and/or with little or no experience. Turning IT into a cookie cutting exercise is never going to work especially for talented ITpeople.

After having spent 20 years in Govt Service (military), I've seen similar results that Kurt Moser is referring to. Too many people are 'protected' when they should've been let go due to substandard performance, while being overpaid at the same time. This also causes really good IT people being held back, not allowing them to advance as they should. Also, there are too many political decisions that enter in to promotions. Don't get me wrong, I've worked with many good people. But, as I'm coming up on retirement, and entering the private 'Civilian' workforce, I've been looking forward to working and advancing based on merits, not politics or some Union rep not working in my dept. having a say on who gets a certain job or pay raise. I've never liked Unions for this reason, not to mention the overpricing of American made products.

I've always been of the opinion that joining a union is the same as supporting socialism. No way union. By the way I average 50-60 hours a week at my job and I don't get paid any extra. Some would say that should be enough for me to join a union, toget my hours down to 40 hrs per week. If the hours get to be too much I can always quit. The way I look at it, I was looking for a job when I got this one.

So you're working 50-60 hours a week and you don't get paid any extra? You must be doing it for love and experience then, own your own company, or management must really appreciate you.

Employers need more workers like you. This is the sort of unquestioning dedication I would have expected from a worker in the former USSR or China. Oh, but they were communists, weren't they?

Teamsters corruption, violent work stoppages, ties to organized crime, higher prices resulting from artificially inflated wages, these are just some of the things that come to mind in addition to the Marxist approach of giving everyone the same - regardless of ability. Workers of the world unite - indeed...

First thing a Union does is make a person lazy. And anytime you are dealing with people you are putting yourself in a bad situation. It only takes a little money from a big company to corrupt the union stewards and there you are. Unions are a definite no.

Unions could help you as a manager, know you are hiring a programmer with minimum skill level and give you a pool to draw from. If the Union is active in setting knowledge standards for pay increases, managers get what they pay for. Not just someonewho can talk a good game and not be able to deliver.
This is just my opinion.

I would not think unions would do the IT industry any good as they need a lot of man power to beat the employers over the head with, to get anywhere and most of the IT People are On there own not in a large group.

I work in the IT field, and a normal week for me (as well as many other people, I'm sure) is upwards of 65 hours. I stop getting paid after 40 hours, and the pay that I recieve is by no means fair compensation for the work I do (Network Admin, Backup DBA, VB Developer, SQL Programmer, Tech Support, Project Management, ad nauseum...) My last "raise" was 8%, which wouldn't be too bad if I was making more than a pittance. A union might not be too bad...