Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work

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.

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.

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...

As a small rebuttal of sorts, consider

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

You are making less money than what you would have been making if that illegal arrangement had not been made.

So, software has always been rated for extreme growth. Investors absolutely love software for that reason. They don't like bridges, or planes.

But none of this is set in stone. Software engineers are losing leverage by the day. It's possible our salaries, stability, mobility, and equity will all decline. That does happen to careers sometimes. We're just assuming things will continue as they are, but they're already not, so I don't think that's a safe assumption.

Unions are, ultimately, about balancing leverage. You have to understand that, as an individual worker, you have little to no leverage. As a software engineer you have, arguably, the most leverage of any individual workers, and even then it's incredibly lopsided. You are purely at the behest of the company and the market, for the most part. Your control is an illusion, carefully implanted in your brain through decades of propaganda. Unions do not suddenly give you perfect leverage, but they certainly give you more.

With the layoffs we've seen, how many engineers wanted that? And, what could they have done? Well... a lot of people are now realizing, nothing. They had no control. They are passengers.

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?

> I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.

AI is going to kill the goose

Instead, you got a nice paycheck, and made sure to make the world actively worse for everyone. Good job.

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)"

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.

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.

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

1: https://www.benjnewman.com/uploads/1/2/2/1/122135844/kane_ne...

2: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv3s8mwx

3: https://www.projectcensored.org/unions-won-more-than-70-perc...

4: https://www.mediamatters.org/labor-unions-and-workers-rights...

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.

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.

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

It is indeed way too late. But I guess late is better than never. It is foolish to try and push through this in an employers market, though.

>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.

coexist with this:

> What's going on now is normal and companies are aggressively working to claw back the compensation gains of the last 1-2 decades.

in your head?

Where did the gains the companies are clawing back come from if negotiation is impossible? Do you think there were SWE unions before 2010 which made these gains and disappeared without a trace?

As for your question - it's pretty simple, companies bust unions because unions negatively affect their business. It does not follow that unions are good for their members and if your comp comes from the business equity it means it's bad for you.

(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.

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.