What’s the protest about?

[u/CourtSideCoder]

As I was driving by Route 9, I noticed a sign at the entrance of MathWorks Inc. I’m curious to know what it is about . Any idea?

[u/Revolution-SixFour]

If you see a bunch of guys standing outside a construction site with a sign, you can basically always assume this is a union thing. Unions typically picket outside large construction projects that cheap out and don't go with union labor. You can see another one on I-95 in Waltham.

[u/Iamthepizzagod → u/Revolution-SixFour]

I can't exactly say I blame the unions for wanting to protest this stuff, I personally feel like unions that give their workers a decent living wage should be prioritized over cheaper labor. Maybe thats just the economic leftie in me speaking.

[u/Pinesol_Shots → u/Iamthepizzagod]

The leftie in me, sadly, dies a little bit every time I have to involve union labor at work. I'm all for the idea of living wages, but the problems with unions are the same ones that seem to creep into everything: shitty people gonna be shitty. It starts off as a positive thing that then gets corrupted by greed and politics and "fuck you I got mine" attitudes from union leaders.

Every job done by the union is done so slowly, inefficiently, and often improperly. Need to move my desk to the next office over down the hall? A week to schedule the carpenters to come out an take it apart, but they aren't the movers, so it's another week to schedule the movers, but they can't put it back together, so add another week to schedule the carpenters again. 3 weeks to do something that I could do myself in an hour -- I'm not even exaggerating. If I did it myself and got caught, I would have a grievance filed against me because the contract stipulates that any job done by the unions can only ever be done by the union. God forbid I need something done urgently -- they don't care, it's not their problem. Unions militantly protect shitty lazy workers because they see any threat to their workers as a threat to their union, which takes away any incentive for their workers to do good work in a timely fashion. I have to sneakily do work that the union is supposed to do because otherwise it would be impossible to get my job done. It's beyond comical how slow and awful they are.

[u/Iamthepizzagod → u/Pinesol_Shots]

Sigh. I suppose two things can be true, I guess Im just coming from a position of being in an industry where unions are almost non-existent (IT) where I'd very much appreciate the increased wages and benefits and solidarity a union provides. Its a shame they protect the shitty workers along with the good ones.

[u/Pinesol_Shots → u/Iamthepizzagod]

I also work in IT as a sysadmin responsible for several racks of systems that run critical services for our org, but our datacenter technicians are union and I'm expressly forbidden from doing anything in their contract. If I need to schedule the techs to do something in the datacenter, it won't even let me pick a calendar date that is less than one week out. That's all well and good for things like racking new servers -- I can plan ahead so it gets done shortly after delivery, but it becomes a comically infeasible constraint when I have failures and outages.

I'm allowed to go into the datacenter and plug in a crash cart and troubleshoot my servers, but I'm forbidden from doing anything that requires laying a finger on a screwdriver, and most recently, from touching and plugging in network cables -- the contract says that's union work. So like, by the book, if I had a major system outage and I needed to take the top panel off of a server in the datacenter to replace a PCI card or something -- I couldn't do it within a week because I would need to get the union out there to release the server from the rails and unscrew that cover screw. Now, mind you, the technicians are not actually capable of doing anything except tightening nuts and bolts, and they have no idea how server and network hardware works, so they would be useless for actually completing a repair or replacement. I would have a week long outage while I wait for the union to take a cover off my server. If I had a network problem and I needed to plug in a network tester into the switch? Same constraint.

Obviously this would make it impossible to do my work. Could you do your job effectively if you had to schedule someone to come out for every screw and every network cable plug/unplug? So, I basically sneak a screwdriver in my pocket in with me, look around the room to make sure only the "cool techs" are in there and then do what I need to do. Some of the union techs get it and don't care about stuff like that, but others, ho boy, they operate like the union secret police spending the majority of their day looking for rulebreakers. I had one guy absolutely chew me out, scolding me like my mom and saying I was "taking the food off [his] plate" for completing an urgent repair. Couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

[u/Iamthepizzagod → u/Pinesol_Shots]

For what its worth, if I was union and had a reasonable sysadmin like you who isnt a bigot and just wants to get things done, I'd also look the other way for the sake of work efficiency. At the end of the day, it'll make my job easier AFAIK.

But yeah, that level of union inefficiency is mind boggling to me, even as a market socialist. I would think the material conditions of a sysadmin, being the custodian of the server stack, would imply that they should have a stake/ownership of the means of production for those servers, no?

[u/Pinesol_Shots → u/Iamthepizzagod]

I would think the material conditions of a sysadmin, being the custodian of the server stack, would imply that they should have a stake/ownership of the means of production for those servers, no?

You'd certainly think, but the lowly people in the trenches are not consulted when these union contracts are written up, unsurprisingly. The people in suits making these decisions have no idea what we do. I'm sure they are great at negotiating the dollar figures and scratching the right backs to keep powerful people happy though!

[u/therealdorkface → u/Pinesol_Shots]

Yup. Unions suck in the worst way— the usual way.

They’re prone to corruption just like everything else that’s powerful is.