>Uber's male chauvinistic culture and the problems associated with that can be a typical examples of "why tech needs to unionize"

Why wouldn't the same employees that are setting Uber's culture set the union culture? The union is a collective bargaining unit that acts on behalf of the workers, not the most moral and upstanding workers, or the most progressive workers, or the workers that represent you personally.

> Why wouldn't the same employees that are setting Uber's culture set the union culture?

Company culture comes from the top.

In a union or a cooperative, the members actually have an opportunity to decide who gets to be at the top.

Ultimately, company culture is a product of what the owners and their appointees allow and incentivize. In Uber's case, its culture is directly tied to Kalanick's management.

I agree in that unions give employees leverage in management and decision making, and that a union might have provided incentives for Uber to behave differently towards its employees. But a union isn't going to change who owns the company, unless they negotiate a buyout.

There are some airlines that will not take accept delivery of a Charleston-assembled Boeing 787. The fact that you can speak up with less repercussions in unionized Everett when too many corners are cut obviously has influence on product quality and company culture, even though the union doesn't get a seat at the board.

In a co-op, yes. In a union, no. You only elect your union leaders, not the company's leaders. The board decides who is in charge of the company, and the board is controlled by shareholders.

Powerful unions sometimes have a board seat, but one seat does not let you unilaterally impose who runs the company.

From the public version of the story, a vast majority of the issues seemed to stem from management, not necessarily the workforce. A union would help all workers have a voice (and a union lawyer can be used to identify and validate early on that there is a problem to be solved).

There's always the danger that a faction takes over an organization. (Bipartisan consensus is especially bad, don't run for the hills when you encounter it, instead raise the alarm and protest vociferously.)

Luckily there is institutional experience how to prevent a descent into oligarchic bureaucracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Democracy

Respectfully, plenty of misandrists and anti-White racists do show up to those meetings and join panels to push their discriminatory agenda.

Why do you think we talk about the lack of women in STEM, but not the lack of men in HR, education, social work, psychology, etc?

Because bigots set the agenda.

Having sports programs for one sex has been ruled illegal under Title IX — but how many universities have special tutoring just for women?

That is, programs to help women in majors where they trail but offering no similar programs for men in majors where they trail.

Again, the reason we don’t talk about that illegal discrimination is because bigots set the agenda.

Not in my experience (2 unions). Do you have any examples of unions where this has occurred? (Recently, not some event from the 1950's or 1960's -- racists and sexists were much more powerful in all forums back then.)

Your example is universities, and I've never heard of any university faculty being unionized. In fact, that's another great example of a system where policymakers have immense prestige and very high paying jobs. Tenure allows senior faculty to set crazy agendas of all sorts, good and bad. That's the main criticism of the tenure system! Having worked a few years in academia and a few years under a trade union, I can tell you the two could not be more different, in structure or operation. I'm not sure how a criticism of academia is relevant in a discussion of unions.

You ask "How many universities have special tutoring just for women?". I don't know. How many? I searched the 3 colleges I've attended in my life, and none of them do (or at least it's not easy to find online -- compared to all the "free tutoring for all" that I found). Are you suggesting that many do?

If you want to talk about illegal discrimination, give me facts, not vague innuendo and rhetorical leading questions. And let's not get distracted by unrelated systems.

I’ve worked in Australian Universities and both the support staff and teaching/research staff where unionised. And sure there are professional with tenure but there are also quite a large number of adjunct professors who are basically being exploited.

There are plenty of men in HR, education, and social work.

Men simply don't go into those fields as much as women do because they pay less than comparable positions in other fields.

Case in point: the number of men in nursing has been increasing every year without having any gender-based outreach efforts, because nurses make good money, get longer weekends, and you don't need 10 years of degrees to become a nurse.

Similarly, the % of men employed as educators increases with salary. Or in other words, very few male teachers at the K-3 levels, more at the middle-school level, and the largest % of male teachers at the high-school level.

Sadly, that sort of thing gets boosted on HN & calling it out for what it is like you did gets your comment turned grey & flagged.

It’s illegal discrimination to provide programs only for the majority sex — see rulings on only having sports programs for men. (Women have been the majority of college students since the 1980s.)

There’s nothing wrong with women in STEM programs, but not having matching men-in-social-sciences programs is a Title IX violation... precisely in the way only having sports for men would be.

You can have programs for no one; you can have programs for everyone; you cant have programs only for one sex.

That’s literally the point of civil rights laws.

That's an oversimplification of Title IX. Nowhere does it state that a university must offer the same sports programs or even the same number of sports programs for each gender. It only states that women who desire to play sports be accommodated, which is to say, a school can't only have sports programs for men.

From the US Department of Education website:

A college or university is not required to offer particular sports or the same sports for each sex. Also, an institution is not required to offer an equal number of sports for each sex. However, an institution must accommodate to the same degree the athletic interests and abilities of each sex in the selection of sports [1]

[1] https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/interath.htm...

If you make sexism/racism the focus of your union, it will be very short lived.

I doubt the word "unionizing" was ever something management wanted to hear

Unions have a terrible reputation when it comes to helping people in the minority. They have elections and tyranny of the majority is the natural outcome. Unions and Labor parties have a nasty history of racism. About 15 years ago I was present when a UAW rep called a gay salaried coworker the f-word at 150 decibels and the company could do nothing. He is now the plant union chairman.

I am sure this union will start off nice, but eventually the Bros will run it.

Basically every institution in the U.S. has racism in its history.

But the reason the civil rights movement has been so aligned with the labor movement historically is because racial and economic progress are linked. That's one reason why there's more pay equity in union jobs.

Worth noting that Dr. King was assassinated, he was in the city because he was striking with sanitation workers.

https://www.theroot.com/dr-king-understood-the-power-of-unio...

I am clearly biased based on my experience, and agree with MLK that you can’t make progress if you don’t have a voice. Maybe if the union is setup with parliamentary style representation it would avoid some of the nasty problems I have seen first hand.

I honestly don't know about unions in the anglophone world, but here in continental Europe they did a rather splendid job. I think it might be a mix of propaganda by corporate media and lack of transparency that led to the downfall of unions in NA and Britain, but it really doesn't need to stay that way. Build up the system again, and this time better.

I also don't see why there shouldn't be an international union of IT workers. We are an extremely flexible workforce, generally sharing similar concerns, and usually with a strong urge to cooperate on a number of issues. We could even band together to crowdfund certain open source projects we really want but never get around to.

Yeah, I think you make a fair point. Unions need to be representative of all parts of the workforce. The first things unions do when they start organizing is try to create a committee that includes all departments, people across race, etc.

But I just don't think you dismiss, say, the concept of banks because of problems that banks have had. Or sports. Or the entertainment industry. Or anything else.