this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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How does a contract union even work? Isn't the whole point of contractors that it's a less binding temporary position that can be terminated if needed?
Most contracts are through contract companies, who then employs (ala W2) the workers.
I could see all tech workers that work for these companies forming a union—that could make a real, honest change in the tech workforce overall.
Surprised this wasn’t talked about in the article or anywhere else in the comments. I feel like it doesn’t make sense for contractors to unionize during a contract job as that would change the terms of the contract.
Many contractors for Alphabet companies do functionally the same work as employees yet get paid a fraction with a fraction of the benefits. Several friends of mine who are contractors and employees have affirmed that the work contractors do is for the most part very similar and both agree that this is a fucked up situation for the contractors.
Think of it like gig economy drivers who are frequently exploited for 'contract based work' when the reality is that this is a full time job for many drivers in everything but pay.
Contracting isn't always that cut and dry. Different industries and sectors of employment can use it for indefinite employment, and as such, many people can end up relying and hoping for longest possible work. I.e., USA Federal Contracting. Creating a union to protect workers and fight for financial fairness isn't something that Contractors should be excluded from -- it is still work after all. And in the case above-mentioned the actual workers do not negotiate with the contract issuer, but the middleman, a contract company -- human capital.
That's interesting, my company takes a different approach, if we don't go contract to hire in a year, we choose a new person to fill the role.
I wasn't mentioning it as a preclusion, more as a how the heck would they expect a tech union to work. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) is an example of a union for contractors, but that's more nice role as the positions are very difficult to fill for and the roles often can't be reasonably replaced. Tech workers though, that pool is HUGE. If you had a tech union it would need to contain a significant portion of 8% (26,000,000) of the US population. It would seem they would lack the bargaining power as they're easily replicable. Perhaps if you were unionizing inside a single company that provided contractors you could destroy their workforce by all walking at once, but google doesn't need to fire these people, they can just terminate the contract with the company that provides them.
If the contractors were employees, there would be a massive lawsuit incoming (may be anyway) as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) protects the rights of employees to organize and join unions, but it generally does not cover independent contractors.
California seems to have some at-will variances for unions but it's still listed as employees. Should be interesting to see this play out.
Sounds like it's time to start organizing the people that can actually do the work, as little as 10% of those people unionizing will improve the situation of EVERYONE that does tech work.
The median salary for a software engineer in the US is something like $70,000 a year last I checked on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A gigantic portion of those 26 million people "in tech" work boring help desk jobs or run the IT for small companies or whatever. It defies logic that FAANG etc would pay people with a few years' experience a half a million dollars in total comp if they were so easily replaceable.
Plus, remember that there always are people willing to do it for less. Unless customers pitch in.
Unless UNIONS pitch in
Every major contract I've worked on has has a union presence.
It works because a company far too transparently pretends that "contractors" aren't employees. I also helps to prove to be BS when the "company being contracted to" sets the rules of employment and decides who is a suitable "contractor" and who is not.
In my little experience, I assume, now that they’ve formed a union they can collectively bid on contracts as a shop and ask for a prevailing wage to complete it.
I would be surprised if Accenture wasn’t pretty upset by this as well. Not a great selling point for potential clients: go with our contractors and they just might join your employees union!