[Read "Want to Stop Your Job From Being Outsourced? Join a Union."]

Every time I mentioned to my (mostly) libertarian I.T. geek acquaintances that, gee, maybe we should organize and fight back on the unpaid overtime hours issue, I got laughed at. Every time I said unionization would allow us all to negotiate consistent pay, I was told to leave the room. Times were uncommonly good. It was every geek for himself, and if I thought we should look out for each other, maybe put pressure on The Man to do things sanely, I was obviously some kind of liberal loser who didn't want to take responsibility for my own career.

After 20 years in the I.T. business, I'm leaving. I worked my ass off from the early '80s on, putting LANs into resistant corporate glass houses, deploying firmwide integrated systems (which, thanks to overworked programmers, never worked right), and put up with the bullshit amateur hour of the Internet. For all those years of 60-hour weeks and on-call weekends, I got exactly nothing, except an aversion to beeping sounds and the fun of watching my boss get bonuses for my work.

Screw everyone in the arrogant, self-centered, socially backward baby-fest that is the I.T. business. Take "personal responsibility" for your careers now, dirtbags. Oh, that's right, you don't have jobs anymore. Poor babies. At least now you have time to work on those bug lists, right? And you can brush up on those interpersonal skills so you don't treat everyone like they're pond-scum.

Too late now, suckers. Your jobs have been Walmarted, baybee. Good riddance.

-- Rob Oakley

Thank you, Joel Keller! I'm not an I.T. worker, but my fiancé is. Yes, he gets paid a lot of money. But since he started this job, over a year ago, his hours have gotten longer and longer, management has demanded more and given less, and those little extras that companies give their workers to let them know they're appreciated (muffins for breakfast, the occasional beer hour) have disappeared.

My fiancé regularly works 60-70 hours a week, and sometimes as much as 90 hours. He goes in to work every weekend, often on both Saturday and Sunday. In order for us to take the occasional weekend trip, say to go visit family, he has to beg his supervisor for a weekend off. There is an unwritten rule that holidays are not actually days off. The company recently instituted mandatory attendance at meetings on Saturday mornings.

In addition, the company treats them like children. No matter how hard they've been working, and how much they've gotten done, the question is always, "Why haven't you done more?" The assumption seems to be that if the company doesn't constantly watch them and keep the pressure on at all times, the employees will slack off at any opportunity. Come in 15 minutes late one morning (because you were at work until 2 a.m. the night before) and you get a talking-to about what it means to be responsible, and how the company doesn't pay you to slack off. The company is miserly with sick time and personal days, and never seems to cut the employees any slack. A few months ago, I had to have emergency abdominal surgery, and was in the hospital for five days. The company grudgingly allowed him to take the day of the surgery off, but refused to let him take any more time off, and made him make up the day he missed during the next week, while I was home alone.

What does he get in return for working so hard, in such a hostile atmosphere? Not overtime pay. Not extra pay for all those extra hours he works. Not comp days. Not extra vacation or personal days. Not the ability to occasionally come in late or leave early. It seems that in return for paying his salary, they got complete control of his life. With all that money he makes, all he has the time and energy to do is come home, watch TV and fall asleep.

I work a lot too. I get paid less than half what he makes, and I have more degrees than he does. But my company is understanding when I need to take a few hours off for personal business. My company is generous with comp time when I work overtime. My boss pats me on the back when I've been working hard, and although he can't afford to pay me more, he makes his gratitude known in other ways -- a lunch out, or a box of chocolates, or simply a nice e-mail.

I.T. workers need to unionize, if only to force companies to treat them as human beings, instead of slave labor. They burn their employees out at an outrageous pace, and then dump them and hire new people, because right now there are a lot of out-of-work I.T. people desperate for jobs. This has got to stop. Being paid a generous salary does not mean that you should give up on having a life, and work yourself into an early grave or a nervous breakdown.

-- Name withheld by request

I'm writing in response to Joel Keller's piece regarding labor and the technology industry. I applaud Keller's research -- the technology industry, among others, suffer from non-unionization. Further, the lack of overtime pay is equally disturbing. As a former organizer for ACORN and the Fund For Public Interest Research, I encountered numerous difficulties, especially when I and others brought up unionization. Groups like these claim to fight for low-income workers and just causes, but refuse to pay their workers overtime, reimburse their workers for travel and office expenses, and above all, require their workers to work ungodly amounts of hours for extremely low pay, all in the "fight" for those who are underrepresented. It's time to bring this problem to light -- it's been going on too long, and literally hundreds of workers are forced to suffer each year.

-- Name withheld by request

Once again the liberal brain can't grasp the level of meanness and hatred of the average Joe Six-pack American. It's the inability to deal with and marginalize this psychological group that will eventually lead the U.S. to a fascist state.

Anybody that's been in I.T. for any length of time knows that I.T. people are the most introverted, mean people around. Perhaps more than accountants even! We are "engineers," after all, just with less formal education skills. The American mythology of "survival of the fittest" is worshipped among these kinds of people. A union doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell with a group of people that would rather die than accept "help" from anyone and, more important, is loath to give help to anyone (especially "those" people [moving the eyes up to the left]). And anything related to "group power" is the antithesis of everything mean people believe in.

So, it's time to stop fantasizing about "unions" in a country full of mean haters. I don't know what the solution is, but fantasies won't do it -- that's for sure!

-- John

Unionizing information technology workers? A day late and a dollar short, guys. The time to unionize was when we were strong.

I durn near got drowned when I suggested this in a hot tub at a sysadmin conference in 1991, of course. Everyone in I.T. knew that unions were Bad -- synonymous with the old abuses of the AFL/CIO. But now the horse is gone, and folk are looking at the barn door in dismay ...

-- Stephan Zielinski

I want to commend Salon and Mr. Keller for illustrating a possible solution to the growing trend of outsourcing white-collar labor. Mr. Keller outlines some potential drawbacks to unionization, which I believe may be mitigated. I don't believe there are any rules for how union contracts need to be structured. So it might be possible for a well-organized and creative union to structure an agreement that maintained protections for salary and outsourcing while also allowing for a more dynamic partnership with management around performance pay and bonuses. I have been somewhat disheartened by much of the union actions lately, and it seems that this sort of solution is entirely possible and actually in the best interests of the membership. Perhaps I.T. is the place where this could begin.

-- Michael Tuck

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