As a California tech worker (where the article is focused), I have zero interest in joining a union and firmly believe that much of what has been possible as a tech employee (high paying, interesting career) is in part because we don't have unions, and instead employees own equity and get valuable skills.
Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
> Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
I agree, but that's actually one of the strongest arguments for why tech workers should unionize now. Wages are high because employees have leverage due to 10-15 years of demand for skilled workers being higher than supply. If you wait until that leverage is gone to form a union then you've lost a lot of the leverage to negotiate for better conditions as a union.
For the record, I've been in a union in another industry much earlier in my career, and I'm pretty on the fence about a tech workers union, but I think your argument is pretty short sighted.
Part of what made the "no union" deal work out for early tech employees was that supply was scarce and demand was exploding. Good pay and equity weren't really a function of not having a union, they were a function of being early in a market with more jobs than workers. We should keep that separated, before crediting the lack of a union for the result.
That's leverage you didn't build and don't control and it's already eroding as the market catches up. Which is why collective bargaining needs to exists, a way to hold onto ground when individual leverage isn't guaranteed.
BTW, it's not like unions had it easy. Even as they were legally recognized (organized labor was treated as a antitrust problem), the judiciary has in the US been dismantling the little foothold it has after it. The US needed 2 new laws to actually get something. And even then, it doesn't enjoy the same flexibilities that other forms of collective arraignment has, such as capital, in the way of "right-to-work" laws, at-will employment and strikes aren't protected as they should. Hell, legal existence and being on equal footing with the other side of the table have never been the same thing.
These topics are just so difficult to debate. They are filled with feelings and one person's perspective or anecdote, and it is difficult to drill down into what is true or what is not true.
You wrote "Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind".
How do you know?
And, for the sake of argument, let us say it is the best deal in the history of humankind, does that make it fair that the big tech companies did the following...
For these topics I don't think there is anything wrong with using your own experience. Yes it's one person's perspective and anecdote (mine), but that's what informs my opinion. I've worked at a couple of unionized places before, for me they're terrible. You can say those are bad unions, or unions in Europe etc are better. This may be true, but my own experience tells me to avoid them.
This is a good point about quality of life. I focused on money in my original comment, but I've heard a lot of people complain that unions have kept them working with their worst coworkers. That alone is a dealbreaker for me.
Look at other unions. It's a "union" of workers so they need to have some guidelines.
Teaching for instance you know exactly how much money you'll be making over the next 20 years. Add a masters (which may or may not contribute to you being a better teacher) get a bump.
Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric? What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric? It works in some places that are commoditized. A toll collector does the job, and maybe there is some merit to rewarding someone for loyalty. But programming is not that kind of job.
The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit. Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
>Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric?
Given my experience as someone who is looking for full time work over 3 years later because executives decided that data centers are better to pursue than quality products: yes, and yes.
>What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric?
People who need to worry about rent next month.
>The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit.
And we know from decades of knowledge this is never true. Two equally talented engineers can be paid differently based on where they live. They can end up with much different compensation based on one company lucking out with a deal and another missing a crucial deal and collapsing. Which isn't an engineering factor. We know negotiating gets you paid more, which is a skill orthogonal to engineering.
This illusion of meriocracy will be the collapse of the whole industry.
>Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
Because you think the job is building things. the 20 years employee understands the systems and how to keep things together. Life isn't all about moving fast and breaking things. Especially in fields like teaching the future generatrions.
Well, if a European dev asked me how I could possibly know if they'd make more in a less regulated environment, I would point to American salaries.
Agree it's hard to know things and that antitrust arrangement was bad. If we're talking policy, we are implicitly accepting counterfactual reasoning (because otherwise why would we change policy).
Yep. We can go around and around. Like, does health care count for some of the discrepancy? Or the more generous time off that Europeans typically have?
I do recall some reports that concentrated on just workers that had unions in the United States versus workers in a similar field that did not have unions, and it concluded that unionized workers get paid more.
But, it was not the tech sector, so someone, maybe you, will argue it does not count.
Just very, very difficult to get to the bottom of what is the best way.
I am in the we should unionize camp. My stance is based on, the tech companies have way more leverage than you or I. They do not work in your interest. A union is imperfect but it is better than nothing to get "some" leverage back.
These kinds of chains make it really clear that, despite the association and similar worker pool, the Games Industry is in fact not the Tech Industry. I see comments like "Tech is the best career deal in humankind" and I feel like I entered bizarro world as I see my entire network feed being laid off, shuffled around, and ground to literal break downs in real time. This was already a factor before the last few years, but it's only accelerated.
Thankfully: the Games Industry is in fact not the Tech Industry. Thus, game developers are a lot more receptive to unionizing than general tech. But it's still a bit absurd; I've always had the advice of "move out of games to a more stable tech job if you burn out". Well... those stable tech jobs sure became unstable quickly.
Unionization succeeds first and foremost when workers have significant leverage. That leverage is irrespective of how much workers get paid but is based on how critical those workers are to a given type of work or given industry. What you are describing shows the immense amount of leverage tech workers have had for the last two decades or so and now with AI that leverage will only lessen. Unionization is fundamentally about maintaining control over your own labor (of which salary is a part but not the only concern). Unionizing 3-5 years ago would have been best but next best is now.
Not really. It is all about leverage. When you've got what they want, and they can't get it anywhere else, they pay the price.
Whatever leverage tech workers have, they would have even more if they unionized. Salaries are high? Maybe they could be even higher. These trillion dollar corporations can afford it.
> employees own equity
Why would this be mutually exclusive with unionization?
Except they can’t and these AI labs know that very well, which is why their marketing push is always so overpoweringly annoying: they have to convince you because they know they are wrong and their product will not deliver what they are promising.
I've been laid off. It was fine because software is literally the most marketable skill in the world.
Edit: But also, this was a pre-profit VC-backed company. If those companies can't lay people off, it's not like you make good money with more job security. Either the company just has less runway (so I still lose my job, just later and with everyone else) or they adapt by hiring fewer people at lower salaries.
I was canned early last year. Looking for a new job was mostly fine. It wasn't insanely easy like 4 years ago and I had to network a bit, but there very much is still demand for qualified people.
Would suck to be in this market as an entry-level engineer, though.
My network has all experienced at least one layoff in the last 2 years. Every single person I talked with except maybe 1 or 2 people. And they don't feel good about their studio.
Most tech workers I have met with parent commenters opinion have been laid off at various times in their career.
I think it's important to note that unions aren't very good tools to avoid layoffs. If there is a company specific hardship, the union can't simply force the company to maintain headcount all the way into bankruptcy. On the other hand if there is a secular change across the industry, the unions can't prevent that change either. Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.
Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.
A friend of mine at Amazon got laid off during their big stupid AI push last year and yeah, being paid like $150k a year sounds nice until you realize that only covers basic living expenses in, say, Manhattan. Now was Amazon right to fire so many people for basically no reason? No, but software on its own is no longer marketable. One person can generate a hundred times more code than before the advent of LLMs, so you only need one person to do the job of a hundred. Now, it takes some skill, that takes years to develop, to use LLMs effectively in the workplace, so Amazon was incredibly short sighted to believe it was just some magical box that fixed everything automatically. But that doesn’t mean companies won’t be making similar moves, in the aggregate, in 10 years, when leaner competitors come to rip a chunk out of their profits. Do you see the capex of major tech companies now? They are _scared_, they have every right to be. You have to be just as nearsighted as those Amazon bosses to believe that things will continue as they always have, that this is just a short dip in a long term regression to the mean.
But despite those margins, it's also an industry with a LOT of unprofitable businesses, unlike any other industry in history. From many people's perspective, if they already earn well, why rock the boat in a high effort high risk way so that the union can negotiate an 8% raise instead of a 4% raise. I don't need the money. And the bad to worst case outcomes could give me serious irreversible buyers remorse.
That's the issue. 2/3 of my layoffs were not "financial hardships". One was just a medium sized studio who ran out of projects and didn't want me to continue. The other was a large global company who was about to make big purchases (and eventually, change leadership).
Maybe with job #1 I could have saved it, but I was underpaid and already looking out the door, so it wasn't surprising to me. Job #2 was 100% the kind of place a union would have saved my job from. (and if you care, Job #3 was just classic "startup funding pulled". They shut down a year later. It is what it is, but I guess you don't see the red flags when you get a nice pay boost and a shiny company on your resume).
>Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.
yes, almost like they spent the last 50 years working with the federal government to break down union powers. Surely isn't a plethora of literature on that.
>Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.
You forget stability. Making big money one year and none another year just averages out to "okay".
It's still not clear to me whether union protection is going to be worth the decrease in job creation. There's a reason Europe has way less IT positions with worse salaries.
Salary isn't even be all end all. In fact, higher salary might be worse, because in total you have to pay out of pocket for things your europeans counterparts. Therefore they should have more discretionary income compared to a US worker (I don't think I have to source this).
Every time someone says Europeans have it better, note that we are not seeing net migration of high-pay tech workers from the U.S. to Europe that we should if that were true. SWEs are not stupid. (If nothing else, there would be a barrage of submissions on Hacker News saying "Here's one neat trick for tech workers to increase their effective income!".) So, yes, you do "have to source this".
>note that we are not seeing net migration of high-pay tech workers from the U.S. to Europe that we should if that were true.
How many EU's are migrating to the US?
Most people's solutions in first world countries is not to go through the arduous process of finding work in another country and leaving behind their entire culture and network behind in hopes of a better life. That is not the same decision you make as if you're jumping to another state/province (which in itself is already a big life change).
Actually it is, because you can make money in the US and then retire in Europe or wherever else you want and live like a king, as many people I know have done.
No, the benefits Europeans get do not translate to any equivalence to the money an Average American makes. The per capita income is like 100k a year now.
Unions don't help with that as can be seen with Volkswagen or much of Detroit.
Or, from an IP-driven industry perspective, the offshoring of Hollywood following the SAG and WGA strikes in the early 2020s.
And if IATSE couldn't stop VFX from being offshored back in the 2000s and 2010s, then tech unions wouldn't be able to either.
Edit: can't reply
> Without film industry unions, might the offshoring have been undertaken even earlier?
Not really. VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s despite only starting as an industry in the 1990s.
> Yeah but this is a limited perspective. If the union was truly international (like they _used_ to be) VFX workers could push for high wages wherever they worked.
VFX workers in most countries are not unionized either, and much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
Yeah but this is a limited perspective. If the union was truly international (like they _used_ to be) VFX workers could push for high wages wherever they worked.
VFX workers did try to unionize along with software engineers. Major tech companies colluded illegally and were caught doing this. This was way before the AI boom
>Unions don't help with that as can be seen with Volkswagen or much of Detroit.
Yes, let's point to examples of intentional union decay as proof that unions do not work.
>VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s
And there's still VFXs jobs domestically. For the same reasons offshoring tech in the 2010's didn't work out
> much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
Most countries are not "at-will" like the US. those houses cannot just layoff people on whim.
That said, yes. VFX is very much a contractor-driven field. But there's a different between knowing the end of a contract, and waking up one day to realize your key fob doesn't work and you're locked out of your account. You get to plan around the instability.
Volkswagen is perhaps the greatest counter-example. The union in Germany converted every layoff initiative in whole or in part (more often in whole) into partial retirements, backfill stops, reduced working hours, compensation freezes.
Wait a second, are you arguing that it’s better to just straight up fire people? In that case, the company is absorbing the lion’s share of the profits (or whatever profit is left) so you are effectively arguing in favor of shielding an entity over the livelihoods of the people who work within it.
To butcher a famous poem, it's better to have hired and lost than never to have hired at all. Restrictions on letting go of enployees mean that companies are afraid to hire. They double check and triple check, they reject everyone they feel even the tiniest bit suspicious of, they try to protect themselves with ultra long probation periods, etc.
I don't know about the US, but I spent 4.5 months trying to get a new job here in the EU as a senior dev. Everyone tells me that was quick.
>there is a real risk that what arises is labor immobility and blocking new entrants.
We're already doing that without uniuons. Older folk can't afford to retire and new grads cannot get a leg in to start their careers. we're talking something like a quarter of new grads who cannot get any job in their field out of college.
sure, you haven't needed the protections that unions provides so far (and tech companies have wisely provided tech workers with enough benefits so that they don't feel the need to unionize. that's going to change.
> I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
This golden egg has a funny smell. You are exclusively focusing on high paying as interesting is found in many careers. Lots of people don't trade rights for cash. Many prefer a comfortable lifestyle that protects their families and life style, whilst allowing them to just do a fair day's work in exchange for pay. It is far better if people don't feel they need to put in endless hours or always have to please someone to avoid getting fired.
The lack of union is exactly the reason why every software developer shut the fuck up and took money in exchange for building spyware, tracking software, ran psychological experiments on unknowing people and generally contributed to the destruction of society. "Engineers" would have the balls to stand up to it, and unions would be the backbone that helps it happen.
Instead, you got a nice paycheck, and made sure to make the world actively worse for everyone. Good job.
This is essentially a story about front-line traditional desktop support/sysadmins at a public university.
It's not going to be the same story at much higher paid shops where workers often have equity, good benefits, and the market has provided access to other jobs if you lose yours (in my experience, there are still shortages of qualified and competent engineers).
I would like a different method to deal with the pitfalls, but the politics, drama, overhead, and costs of unionization just don't interest me. I'm not interested in being at one job for life.
IIRC union seniority is tied to the current employer. Move to another employer and all your seniority and the perks that go with it are gone so union members avoid it. No mobility for you.
I have not seen that to be the case. Usually the opposite. You have x years of seniority/experience and then you hit a minimum base pay for your new employer.
Indeed. But that's by design from decades of efforts to reduce union powers. A proper system would simply patch the obvious loopholes to get the intended result. But sometimes neglect is a better tool than opposition.
So why should I bind myself to it, if it's reached this point? The master's tools won't dismantle the master's house. Subjecting myself to a collective bargaining agreement meaningfully limits my individual power, but no longer meaningfully limits my employer's power.
> Subjecting myself to a collective bargaining agreement meaningfully limits my individual power, but no longer meaningfully limits my employer's power.
You're really just saying "I don't need collective bargaining, I got mine". Collective bargaining only works if everyone does it. You do it because everyone needs to do it for it t o work.
You don't get insurance because your house or car is fine today, or even because you're a bad driver/homeowner. You get it because you can't predict the future, and the overall cost is cheaper than floating the bill by yourself should the worst happen. If you used the same mentality for your car insurance, insurance as a model also wouldn't work.
That seems to be a big sticking point people don't get (probably because the propoganda works). Unions always fail due to collective effort of companies and the government to weaken them, not because of any nitpicks over drama or bad leaders or whatnot. Every workplace already has those but many keep ticking.
I don't think it's helpful to chastise people for acting in their self-interest. I am willing to individually give up a little to collectively gain a lot. That makes sense to me. But, as we have agreed upthread, this isn't the value proposition anymore. Collective bargaining has been institutionalized and nerfed by those that it was supposed to regulate. Today, it's asking me to individually give up a little in order to collectively gain a little, while adding additional complexity and a second parallel bureaucracy to my workplace. I'll vote in favor of fixing the law, and once the law is fixed, I'll be more interested in letting a union represent me.
>the politics, drama, overhead, and costs of unionization just don't interest me.
Any collection of people has politics, drama, and overhead. That's the nature of collaboration with humans. So this really doesn't' say much to me besides "I got mine and don't see a need to rely on others (yet)"
Being in a union isn't about being at one job for life. I'm a member of IATSE (the huge mega-union behind thousands of technical job titles/positions in the entertainment industry, such as film editors, sound mixers, etc; really it's many mini-unions acting as one.) There is really no connection to belonging to a union and being stuck in one job title, in fact the incentives are set up in the opposite direction - the greater the group of people the union represents, the more mobility (and many other benefits) its members get.
You should revist your stance on unions and start by reading up on how they work and what benefits they confer. Assuming you are not in the 1%, a union almost certianly would benefit you. It is a way of equalizing the playing field when the interests of BIG capital conflict with the quality of life and meaningful human experience of individuals.
> You should revist your stance on unions and start by reading up on how they work and what benefits they confer. Assuming you are not in the 1%, a union almost certianly would benefit you. It is a way of equalizing the playing field when the interests of BIG capital conflict with the quality of life and meaningful human experience of individuals.
I already have that agency. If I wanted money, I'd have long ago worked for a FAANG. I didn't because I wanted something else. I enjoy working at startups and small to medium sized firms for the challenge and flexibility in all matter of things I get to work on. I have shifted my career from being a sysadmin/netadmin, to devops, to development and it just involved getting involved at places I've worked at. There was no need for licensing, meeting requirements, etc.
If I felt I didn't have any of that agency, I'd likely feel differently about it. But I just don't see what any union (small or large) is going to do for me unless I was in a jurisdiction where they provided extra services like healthcare or other universal benefits.
IATSE membership helps with job mobility because they enjoy a carve-out allowing sectorial bargaining. It would be illegal in US for a union to try to organize the software industry along the same lines.
Wow, illegal you say? Damn, I suppose an organization that is capable of shutting down an entire sector of the economy will have to obey the strict letter of the law...unfortunate.
Financial equity, benefits and opportunities at other companies in my experience are not the determining factors for tech workers. Lack of or loss of self-determination and self-governance are.
The tech workers who are unionized that I know didn't join for financial gain because there is none (except for a few who are bad at bargaining). They joined to exert control over their workplaces and help build companies they can be proud of.
The same way every other union works... I don't get your question? The unions that do work, are not the ones you see on tv. When something explodes, specially a union, it gets massive coverage. When a union works, any achivement gets burried while the negative press is the only one given coverage(1, 2, 3, 4).
So, I will challenge the reader: unions win about 7 out of 10 elections to get certified/created. Does your mental image of labor news look like 70% wins? If not, ask why
I agree in general, but this article claims that the unionized tech workers now have pay increases, cheaper health benefits, and layoff protections. There is also a discussion about the process. This article at least is not just "unions good" (waves hands).
I'm involved in a new workers cooperative, and I've been thinking about how organizational structures relate to the workplace. Cooperatives are fantastic, where they exist. In the tech world, two prominent examples are Igalia and Bocoup. (I worked on SpiderMonkey at Igalia, and collaborated with Bocoup on test262 tests.) Both are highly specialized consultancies, and both are internally democratic. To get some idea of what it's like to work at a coop, I recommend the 2023 FOSSY talk "Inside Igalia: Scaling a Co-Op Beyond 100 Members": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du7fC8VCbXg
Workers coops have structural limitations, though: with some exceptions, they're new entrants to the market and have limited access to capital. Unions interact with existing businesses, which I think is why they're so much more controversial than coops, and they can bring some of the benefits of workplace democracy to a much larger group of people than coops presently can.
the problem with unions is that they tend to enjoy legal protections not afforded to anyone else. as such they will distort the marketplace. as is often the case with such carve-outs those who can get in early tend to benefit at the expense of everyone else.
it was a mistake to entrench unions because now you will never get rid of them, but it's not surprising as the alternative would have been aggressive anti-trust action and the corporate powers would much rather deal with unions (whose incentives they can model just as well as their own).
note that the incentives of the unions are the incentives of the union organizers which much like in democracy are not aligned with the collective they purport to represent.
> the problem with unions is that they tend to enjoy legal protections not afforded to anyone else
Capital has higher protections than unions, what are you on about? You have the corporate veil whereas the liability stops at the organization rather than the individuals and that is very seldomly pierced (J&J is a neat case here, even while courts are being wise to that move now).
Also, if carve-outs distort markets, that argument disqualifies the corporate form first. Because corpos have limited liability, corporate personhood, patent monopolies, etc. they also have political power on top, which is always fun.
BTW, and I alluded to this in another comment, antitrust was used against labor, not capital. Labor had to work for decades to be excluded. Before that, union members got personally sued into the ground under antitrust, almost losing their homes and savings accounts. Maybe we should bring that back too, but with actual people that needs to be antitrusted.
> Capital has higher protections than unions, what are you on about? You have the corporate veil whereas the liability stops at the organization rather than the individuals
the corporate veil does not protect capital, it explicitly makes capital be the vulnerable part.
or are you decrying the fact that a human capitalist isn't made vulnerable? there are good reasons for that as in a standard corporate setting individuals may not have the requisite influence to dictate a course of action, if they are held responsible by what the emergent corporate entity embarks on then there will be no capitalism.
if the unions become corporate entities and their members give up all labor protections (become contractors) then it will be more even but they obviously don't want that. a highly organized minority is always the elite for a reason.
> Also, if carve-outs distort markets, that argument disqualifies the corporate form first.
anyone can make a corporation. a union can become one and compete on an even playing field. a market cannot be distorted when the playing field is even. a union is a distortion by design as it has no other purpose than to distort, to give entities elevated privileges. for that matter an LLC is sufficient for most purposes, and individuals can become LLCs.
>they tend to enjoy legal protections not afforded to anyone else.
The ideal scenario is stronger labor laws, but even the most progressive circles I'm in don't seem to have much energy in trying to end at-will employment (the mechanism driving rampant layoffs for any reason the emplpoyer wants). So Unions are the next best thing.
And yes, this is the same logic as "people who bargain get paid more". People who collectively bargain end up with more perks. It's an inevitability.
>as such they will distort the marketplace. as is often the case with such carve-outs those who can get in early tend to benefit at the expense of everyone else.
Like all tech workers who started their career around 2010-2021? Yes, timing is everything. But you can't control when you are born. You can control if you choose to navigate a union.
Was part of the frontline effort to get our colleagues into UPTE. As we move towards AI automation, we need to make sure that workers have a seat at the table when we impact our students, patients, and our research across the state.
That is a public-sector union. That's different. Political power matters in that space.
A useful private sector union to watch is The Animation Guild, IATSE local 639.[1]
They represent traditional animators in Hollywood - Disney, Dreamworks, Marvel, etc. But they've never been able to organize a game company, despite years of trying. They have good contract terms - the contract is a floor on wages, not a ceiling, and overtime is handled well.
Here's what purports to be a complete list of "tech unions" in the US.[2] Only six have a contract with the employer. That's pathetic. The six:
- "Apple Shuttle Drivers Union". Not even Apple employees, but drivers for Compass Transportation. Teamsters.
- "Gimlet Union". Gimlet Media employees. Writers Guild of America. 83 people.
- "Glitch Union". Glitch platform defunct as of 2025. Communications Workers of America.
- "Ringer Union". Affiliated with Spotify. Writers Guild of America. 65 people.
- "Security Guards at Silicon Valley" Service Employees International Union. 3000 people.
- "United HCL Workers of Pittsburgh". Google contractor. 20th largest H1-B visa sponsor in US.
"HCL America INC has filed 60,667 H1B applications and 1,294 PERM green card petitions. Avg salary: $102,175." Steelworkers Union. 60 people.
Only the last represents "tech workers", and that company is mostly non US citizens.
Anyone know of other unions which, right now, contractually represent tech workers in the US?
Just not finding any real tech worker unionization.
There was an opportunity to organize and exploit market power back in 2017-2018, when there was a frenzy of recruiting and growth in the industry. The field was also much more ideologically coherent, in the wake of the first Trump election, than it is today. But nothing came of it. It's less clear that any similar opportunity exists today, or why it would come together now when it didn't under more favorable circumstances then.
How would that even work? The federal/state government would legally ban people from writing code (like they can legally ban people from practicing law or medicine) unless they have a certificate from the programmer industry guild? I think the low barrier to entry is something that makes the field so interesting and dynamic. Being interesting and dynamic are great things in tech whereas you might not want a real dynamic and outside-the-box doctor or estate attorney.
> is a professional organization like lawyers, doctors, and architects have
those don't serve to protect workers rights, but rather serve to artificially limit the number of people who can work in that industry; if anything they are anti-workers-rights
My experience has been that most tech employees are "exempt" employees, but other than being denied overtime pay, they're mainly treated by employers as non-exempt. Exempt was meant for organizations full of professionals who are generally autonomous, which rarely is the case in tech, especially software development where the micromanagement can be extremely high. Tech workers aren't treated like doctors and lawyers. Employment law shouldn't pretend that they are.
For all of the high compensation tech workers can make in specific regions, at specific firms, how is it that they lack the leverage to demand something as basic as remote work, or as simple as not working in open offices? Consider the ubiquitous distaste for the open layout, how it creates distractions, damages flow state, that "no one" actually likes to work in a bullpen. Yet for all the grousing that software engineers do about them, they're still the prevailing industry trend. For like two decades now. In the status quo, where's the worker power to stand against that?
Unions sound great in theory, but they aren't working all that well in practice for high-paying fields that require specialized knowledge. It negates the main advantage of that: being able to move between jobs without losing the salary, because employers are paying _you_ for your skills.
Unions also are terrible because they often artificially strangle the supply. For example, you can't become a licensed electrician without completing an apprenticeship, and unions control the number of apprenticeships. With all the corruption associated with that.
Here's a question I have for all the predictable "I don't need a union" SWEs out there: if unions were so bad, why do companies literally spend millions and break the law to make sure they don't happen?
To borrow a George RR Martin'ism, there are a lot of children of summer of this space that have only experienced the 2010s, which were an unprecedented boom in tech hiring. Even now in permanent layoff culture they've been anchored to the 2010s as being "normal" and this is "abnormal". You are incorrect. What's going on now is normal and companies are aggressively working to claw back the compensation gains of the last 1-2 decades. A few key AI people are making insane money but I assure you that this is temporary too.
You do not have negotiating power with a trillion dollar company. If you withhold they labor, it's no big deal. If they withhold your paycheck, you and your family are at risk of homelessness, bankruptcy and death. These are not equal positions.
The very idea that unions will reduce your compensation is itself propaganda created by decades of McKinsey "research", billionaire-backed think tanks and money in politics as well as a healthy dose of the Red Scare. Many of the benefits you take for granted like weekends, PTO and sick pay only exist because people died for those benefits. Also, look at any industry and union employees get paid more than non-union employees. The Big Three automakers pay more than Tesla does, for example.
Permanent layoff culture exists to disrupt your life, reduce your compensation and make you do more unpaid work. Unions would prevent that.
Lastly, I have to note, it's pretty interesting that this submission got killed on HN manually. 2 hours, 60 votes and that would be on the front page. I went through the top 500+ submissions and couldn't find it. It's still on new but nowhere on the main feed. Interesting. That in itself is evidence that VCs don't want unions.
I definitely see a lot of "but tech (and I) am special, they need us" going on here. Clearly those employees have not had a significant layoff, or are running startups themselves (which isn't surprising at all given the site). And they haven't looked down at the current market for new grads, nor at the general state of the job market in general. I still regularly see other postings elsewhere on someone saying to the tune of "I just got laid off after 5+ years at [Company]. What is happening to the job market?".
(Un)fortunately, being a laid off game dev making ends meet freelancing has given me a lot of time to learn economics.
>Permanent layoff culture exists to disrupt your life, reduce your compensation and make you do more unpaid work. Unions would prevent that.
And extended exposure to this culture is probably why my sector is much more receptive to unions. We've been in such an environment even in the "good times". It does suck not knowing if you'll have a job next week. At least contract work always has an end date and you simply bet on not having it continue.
>I have to note, it's pretty interesting that this submission got killed on HN manually. 2 hours, 60 votes and that would be on the front page. I went through the top 500+ submissions and couldn't find i
That behavior as of late is why I tend to just do a blank query on search and skim through the highest voted pages in 24 hours or a week. Helps me find blind spots like this that didn't make the front page.
Unionization of the industry is long long overdue, if for no other reason than professional ethics.
A small town lawyer can fuck up paperwork badly enough that they lose their ability to practice law. A software engineer can fry the brains of hundreds of thousands of people and it's all ok so long as they managed to get a few of them to click ads.
It should have the same requirements for personal liability like other professions do.
Unions typically fight pretty hard to keep their members from facing professional liability (see police unions), so your comment is a bit at odds with itself.
I'm fairly confident that a software engineer's union would not be lobbying to make it's members liable for things they did while legally performing their job duties at places like Meta or Google.
Cannot Now Save. Unions get power when labor is at its strongest, not when labor is at its weakest. When tech labor was at its strongest, it became super-libertarian, started discussing sous vide and $300 shirts, became YIMBYs, and told the flyover states to learn to code while creating the gig economy. FAANG colluded to fix salaries in the valley for years, and they just sighed and paid their $3000 rent to live with 3 roommates.
I'd add shouldn't be saved. There were far too many programmers before AI, and everything was getting worse. They were mostly vastly overpaid, except for the extremely productive ones who contributed to society the most, who were vastly underpaid or worked on a volunteer basis. Their salaries were a function of ZIRP and quantitative easing, and their acquisition (and now their layoffs) were to juice the stock prices that were the engine of the entire thing.
Learn to dig ditches. If we used less immigrant slaves, ditch diggers might be able to start a union.
The reason AI is failing is because it's replacing programmers that were totally superfluous and bringing in zero marginal revenue. Laying off your programmers and not replacing them with AI is going to be the new black.
edit: I got a lifetime subscription to Jacobin when it started (because I thought we needed a glossy lefty magazine) but I really hate it and keep accepting issues out of pure spite because I know it costs them money. I don't know what makes them think they can talk about economic issues yet avoid any math or actual discussion of economics. The suburban child of immigrants upper-middle class Liberal Arts majors on the left are its albatross. Please stop saying Gramsci.
For some tech workers maybe but the issue is that for much of vc backed tech work, Marxist analysis a la Jacobin et Al do not work. Marxists delineate the working class from the owning class but in my experience in these vc backed startups and large public companies that come out of them, the working class quickly becomes part of the owning class.
The union would only serve to make sure that transition never took place.
No thanks, I'll take my seven figure options please.
You might want to read some more Marxist analysis. TLDR: Eventually the real owning class decides they no longer need to pretend that the professional class is one of them.
Dan Russell is president and chief negotiator of the University Professional and Technical Employees–Communications Workers of America Local 9119.
Max Belasco is a University of California, Los Angeles School of Law business systems analyst 3 and chapter cochair of University Professional and Technical Employees Los Angeles chapter.
Aaron Petcoff is a socialist activist who lives in Brooklyn.
I'm pretty sure that everyone is aware that an article from jacobin has these biases. Perhaps it is notable because you're so frequently exposed only to billionare and corporate biases.
Nothing wrong with stating the sources up front. They are clearly pro-labour and pro-union. It helps to know where the authors stand. Would you rather the authors were buried under seven layers of shell companies?
Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
reply