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BBLISA: Re: Overqualified?!?!



Restrictive work rules are not inherent in collective bargaining and
unionization.  Look at university faculty unions for example: noone tells
a psychology professor that she can't start researching history, or
writing papers on philosophy, or performing statistics in front of an
entire class.  They don't even tell her she can't open up her computer,
swap the hard drive out, load on RedHat 7.3 and configure her sendmail to
be an open relay.  What the union does do is set salary minimums, set
maximum teaching loads, require health benefits, require regular raises,
set lengths of contracts, prevent the president from firing you in the
middle of the semester because they don't like your haircut, etc. etc.

There are indeed older industries, predominantly those involving a lot of
skilled physical labor, where union work rules do sometimes get in the
way, but they usually developed for good historical reasons and often
benefitted management as well--you really want someone from the locomotive
engineers union driving your train, you don't want the low level
supervisor in the train yard, unable to find an engineer who wasn't due
overtime, telling the conductor who's never been in the cab before to make
the next run.

And you don't want even the qualified engineer, regardless of overtime
pay, working 20 hour shifts, falling asleep at the switch, and plowing
into the train in front of him.  The analogy to IT is pretty obvious: if
you have, say, a SysAdmin group of two, and they're continuously working
12-hour days, it might be a really good thing to be able to go to
management, with a contract already in hand that says they normally work
eight hour days and a whole union backing them up, to tell management they
need to hire a third SysAdmin, whether management wants to or not.

Union work rules are, of course, sometimes used as a form of job security:
given the current state of employment in IT, I don't necssarily see that,
or any other form of contractual job security, as a bad thing.  The
bogeyman of restrictive work rules gets thrown around a lot when the
subject of unions comes up, yet, interestingly, those media personnel who
often disseminate those attitudes: newspaper reporters, television
producers, reportes and editors, etc. are themselves almost universally
protected by union contracts.

For those IT workers who like to work independently there are other good
union models.  Take, for example, the screenwriters union: many members
work exclusively freelance, while the union sets relatively high minimum
pay (which experienced writers can negotiate much, much higher), requires
employers to pay into health, pension, and vacation funds, works for the
writers to make sure they do indeed get paid (and can require considerably
more pay if egregious changes are constantly introduced by the employers),
and so on.  But the union doesn't prevent the writers from working at 3am,
taking on as much work as they can get, etc--it sets minimum standards and
protections that can always be exceeded, but can't be undercut by someone
offering to do it for less than the minimum.

In Europe most professional workers, including much of management, is
unionized, and frankly I think they enjoy a pretty good lifestyle, well
paid, protected from capricious management and sudden drastic changes in
the economy and short-term employment events.  In the US the union model
somehow is normally assumed to be the early industrial trade unions that
grew up in another era, but there are many other models that are much more
appropriate to IT workers.

Arthur


On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> I think that unions in IT is a bad thing for many reasons. First, I
> mentioned work rules. Work rules exist in many environments for safety. But
> they also exist to define the demarcation zone. So, the job of system
> administrator must be defined in the contract. A person who is not a system
> admin (union employee or not) may not violate that boundary. Many system
> admins do programming of some sorts, such as scripts. Now assume that the
> entire IT department is unionized. Programmers do programming, system
> admins to admin. An admin needs to fix a shell script, he/she then calls a
> programmer to do it. Then, in the example in my department where the
> software engineers in our group provide our own system admin work. We
> install software, we may install hardware, etc. The admins generally
> provide us assistance, but mostly work on the systems in the labs. But,
> other than the production systems in the lab, we software people make major
> changes. On my project for the past two years, we had a private network,
> isolated from the company net. The admins were generally not involved with
> those systems. If we were a union shop, we would have considerable
> difficulty.









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