IT workers and unions
I'm an online editor with CIO.com, and I write and edit labor- and career-related stories for the site. I recently wrote a blog entry about the need for IT workers to unionize, and it's elicited a pretty strong response from readers (17 comments). What amazes me about the response is the number of IT workers who are so anti-union. I suppose this shouldn't surprise me, but I would just think in this day in age--with IT workers' job security threatened by the economic problems facing the U.S., the rise of outsourcing and off-shoring, the lobbying to raise the caps on H-1B visas, etc.--that IT workers would be more recpetive to the concept of organizing. I would think that at this time they'd be desperate enough to look to anything that might help them stand up to corporate America. But many of them still believe that training, education and re-skilling is the key to them remaining competitive in such a tight market. Many also believe labor unions do more harm than good, that they only help to accelerate outsourcing. And in spite of all the detrimental things capitalism and the open market is doing to their jobs and to the IT profession, they still seem to blindly believe in market forces. I don't get it. Can you explain why IT professionals (software developers, network engineers, architects, business analysts, help desk professionals, DBAs, system admins, etc.) are so anti-union?
Unions represent bureaucracy to IT workers
Why are many IT workers opposed to unions? It's very hard to answer such a broad question. It's a mix of a lot of things. Much of it is simple ignorance of unions and what they are about. One good place to go for an answer is Slashdot. Unions come up as a topic of discussion there every so often:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/09/183249&mode=nested
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/09/04/1359257.shtml
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/07/26/1336225
My sense is that in an age that embraces transparency and the flattening of social hierarchies, unions, at least in their current shape and form, don't fit in. IT workers, particurlarly those with a libertarian bent, are loathe to embrace an institution that they think would come between them and their first love of working with technology.
But workers in general are unwilling to stick their necks out to bring positive change, not just IT workers. It's one thing to be pro-union, it's quite another to risk your livelihood and actively campaign for a union where you work. And workers have every right to be afraid. Labor laws are stacked against them and it's relatively easy for a company to fight a union campaign and sack all the workers who supported the drive.
It's not impossible to bring a union to IT workers, but the planets would have to be aligned perfectly in order for it to happen.
you're right they are anti-union
Yeah I've noticed that too as an IT worker. For one thing unions are associated in
many people's minds with manufacturing. Manufacturing left the country so unions
declined. That's what a lot of people think anyway. IT people view themselves as "knowledge workers". It's pathetic
because there is a habit of thinking themselves above trades or manufacturing
when they don't make as much money nor have as much job security. Somehow there
is a lot of arrogance and Narcissism in the field, not to mention sexism and bias
against minorities. (On the whole this is not a fun group to be around if you're not
a young 'hotshot' guy.) So they think they are above such things as
labor unions. I'll bet if you hit some computer science schools or
technical schools teaching IT even today in this economy, you will still be able to find a lot of that
narcissism being reinforced even tho it doesn't make a lick of sense. You can't
very well think you're one of the few people in the universe smart enough to do IT when
there are no IT jobs in the paper, the qualifications for jobs get more and more
ridiculous and it's an extremely short lived career due to age discrimination.
Hang out with a bunch of IT people and you'll typically find that most of them have
highly inflated beliefs in their own abilities. They always think they are not replaceable,
when people exactly like them are getting replaced right and left. It makes them think they don't need
a union or any kind of assistance ever since the world will realize what geniuses
they really are and (any minute now) they'll be on the path to career greatness. A lot of
times the gifted child thing kinda wears out as time goes on. You may see some
folks in their 40's or so starting to figure out they're not going to do really well and in fact
they may be in for trouble. Those people may be interested in unions. The younger
ones are probably pretty disinterested.
Problem two, a lot of times IT views itself as an arm of management and finds
itself doing management stuff. These are the people who are going to
write the programs to find out who is getting union email at work and things
like that that management wants done. I have found most IT people to be very
conservative about employee "rights'. They tend to associate themselves with
management and not with the workers.
If you compare IT people with another group of high arrogance, say doctors,
it's interesting that doctors are fully capable of figuring out when they are on
the run and turning to unions. Whereas IT people aren't. Doctors always had
a lot of associations and maybe that's what is supplying them with the information
and how they're comparing notes and detecting when they need to change
strategy whereas IT people appear devoid of a clue. Many healthcare worker areas are
much more intelligent about actively working to protect their turf and promote qualifications
to protect their jobs. Somehow the IT world missed out on receiving that cultural tradition.