How Unions Are Pushing Back Against the Rise of Workplace Technology

Then Macy’s will have to pay their worker’s more per hour.

I was a cashier for Walmart and faced the same issue. At $9.25 an hour I was required to end work one day at 12:30 am when Walmart closed and start at 6 am the next day when Walmart opened. The issue was that anyone who walked in the door at 12am was allowed to shop as long as they wanted and since I was the only cashier on shift I had to work sometimes leaving after 1 am instead of the 12:30 am I was supposed to. That gave me five hours in between shifts.

How long with unemployment as low at it is will Walmart be able to get cashiers willing to put with that kind of scheduling which was all done electronically?

Answer: I quit. And I doubt Walmart was very successful after I left.

Just look at the Trucking Industry to see the effect of Unions - If it wasn’t for UPS, the Membership would be down to less than 500,000. Union Trucking companies [NEMF] are closing while private drivers are picking up the work. The Teamsters will be down to nothing in the next 10 years.

Many of the latest generation of programmers seem to have no concept of the underlying processes that their software is supposed to automate or support. It seems lately that software is becoming more and more prettied up and graphic intense and less and less useful.

Well a big issue with this is that there's so many new languages that don't actually use line-by-line programming. Ruby-on-Rails is an example where the program writes a lot of your code for you, so kids these days don't actually know how to do any basic programming. Also, yes, so many people I know in the business are all about GUI and making stuff look pretty. Instead of practical and easy to use.

A what-should-be-frightening trend I've seen is that, as the software becomes an obstacle to accomplishment, people are starting to switch back to paper because they need to get their work done and the software isn't helping.

Yup, I see this at work a bunch with our new-ish inventory software. There's several tweaks I would want to make stuff much easier, but they won't add it as an option because either it costs $$, or it's not a so-called 'best practice'. Also, it's all cloud based so when there's internet issues, we pretty much just have to shut down for a time. Without a local database/software instance, we are 100% dependent on internet access to do anything. So difficulty of use, plus some employees not fully knowing the software, adds up into us often using printed lists or writing stuff down instead.

As one who is both a business analyst and a programmer, I do believe that one should be both, trying to separate the roles is a disaster waiting to happen, too much gets lost in the “hand off”.

“Heads Down” coders should go the way of the “Dodo Bird”

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