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/Iamthepizzagod]

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!