<story><title>What the IBM Layoffs Look Like</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parfe</author><text>&amp;gt;Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor&lt;p&gt;Never going to happen.  The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they&amp;#x27;re above the simple garbage man or postal worker.  After all they create such &lt;i&gt;value&lt;/i&gt;.  Admitting a union would help acknowledges they&amp;#x27;re not special.</text></item><item><author>thenewwazoo</author><text>IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren&amp;#x27;t enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don&amp;#x27;t think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oldmanjay</author><text>When you feel like you can sum up a few million opinions as the result of a stupidity that you personally do not suffer, the odds that you are correct in your assessment approach zero.</text></comment>
<story><title>What the IBM Layoffs Look Like</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/is-this-months-ibm-layoff-for-rebalancing-or-is-it-really-for-offshoring#.VuHU1fevtY4.hackernews</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parfe</author><text>&amp;gt;Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor&lt;p&gt;Never going to happen.  The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they&amp;#x27;re above the simple garbage man or postal worker.  After all they create such &lt;i&gt;value&lt;/i&gt;.  Admitting a union would help acknowledges they&amp;#x27;re not special.</text></item><item><author>thenewwazoo</author><text>IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren&amp;#x27;t enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don&amp;#x27;t think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thenewwazoo</author><text>I disagree - I think that the right-wing opinion machine has been successfully busting unions and scapegoating labor for so long that the tech industry doesn&amp;#x27;t see the value-add of the union itself. I view it a bit like the anti-vax movement. Nobody today is dying of polio, so the necessity and urgency are lost. (And Americans are spectacularly bad at learning from history because exceptionalism)</text></comment>