Unions are directly contrary to the freedom and flexibility of switching jobs. They tie your pay to how many years you've worked at a company, not how skilled you are.
I'd rather have my wage fixed by a corporation than a union. At least corporations value skill.
I disagree with you. Unions are a way to balance the corporate power. I understand unions can become corrupt but there are ways to battle corruption on both sides. If the unions decide to be corrupt? Well, tank the business. I understand this isn't ideal but it opens up discussions. Demands for higher productivity is a management desire. Demands for better work-life is a worker desire. There is room for both sides to win. Letting management have free reign is more evil than the counter.
Those unique skills did not protect them from being abused by Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Intel or any others.
Either you believe many companies abuse their employees with no real consequences or you don't. If you believe the former then avoiding the solution because it is contrary to your ideology is never going to fix anything.
Because empirically it would not be. There is a great deal of mis-information about them from right leaning media that might create the contrary impression:
That they limit wages, but the screen actor's guild certainly doesn't cap actor's wages.
That they limit outside work, but for example, state employed court reporters do all their transcripts outside working hours and make quite a bit not being paid hourly for that.
Indeed they have protected pilot wages for decades beyond what would have been possible otherwise.
There is no case where an effective professional organization of some sort doesn't make things better for it members. To suppose that you as an individual will ever have any hope of negotiating on an equal basis with a multibillion dollar company because of "market forces" hand waving is utterly unreasonable and the poster child of limiting yourself due to ideology. Your one and only protection right now are few pieces of rapidly diminishing legislation.
For better or worse you live in a society where if you don't have a lobbyist you are invisible and where what is considered bribery in every other country (ie money in politics) is considered free speech. A lobbyist alone would work wonders let alone the other advantages of an organization.
Confirmation bias mean that exceptional or confirmatory anecdotes are much more likely to be remembered[1]
I continue to be amazed that there armies of people who consider sentences that begin with "I know someone who..." to somehow be definitive evidence of anything whatsoever.
I continue to be amazed by people who criticise anecdotal evidence as an ad hominem or straw man attack without providing any kind of evidence of anything you have said.
We are talking about benefits for people, we are not talking about abstract mathematics - you don't want to accept the situation of those people because that would be inconvenient for you, considering what you have said.
Constructive discussion is now over; you failed to convince me.
You don't need a blue collar union patterned after UAW, but there have been multiple successful lawsuits about illegal wage suppression across many areas of high tech. They are probably the tip of an iceberg. These lawsuits suggest a much deeper pattern of high level collusion between these incestuous companies to systematically depress wages.
There are professional organizations for every major profession. Technically, the ACM would probably be the closest thing to a union that programmers actually need, but it's limited to the big iron scientific computing... So, yeah. I don't know if there is something for all of the webdev 2.0 gluelib writers out there.
Except for actually discovering those secret agreements, what policies do you see an union instituting that would ameliorate that problem? I see how unions can help set minimum wages and conditions for their members, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions is part of what got us a step up from the world described in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. It took 30 years, but did you expect it to get fixed quickly and easily? Politics is a lifetime grudge match. The Capitalists you sell your labor to, ideally, want you to work for free with perfect efficiency 24/7/365. That's why they are replacing workers with robots.
Anyway, a professional organization will give you more far flung networking opportunities as well as intelligence on what's going on at other firms, which will increase your value as a worker, and presumably, your pay.
Bullshit. I can believe that programmers have unique skills, and also believe that companies don't give a shit about that, and largely try to treat them like replaceable parts.
Even having unique skills is not enough. People can still take advantage of you if you aren't career- or business-savvy enough.
This is a complex environment, not simply a question of being special snowflake 10X programmer or whatever. "Oh, you're skilled, Jimmy. You get the job done. But see, Jimmy; you are not a team player. We've been having a lot of work to do lately, and you are not putting in the extra effort by staying late enough, Jimmy. You see, Pete, now that's a guy that goes the extra mile! And there are plenty of others. Frankly, you should try and put in just a little more effort (because you're easily replaceable, Jimmy)".
What good does it do to be a "10X Ninja" if you feel like a small fish in a big pond with no bargaining chips?
I don't really see what the benefit for Jimmy to stay in that situation is. If Jimmy is skilled, and the company thinks or acts like Jimmy is replaceable, then Jimmy is in a bad job. Jimmy should leave before Jimmy is mentally harmed.
I believe this to the extent that I think creating a union to protect people in that type of situation is a net negative, where the union acts to help keep people in that type of job, where the union acts like those people are replaceable parts, which ends up being to the benefit mainly of that type of employer: as those workers indeed become replaceable parts.
We should encourage those skilled workers to leave instead, by offering them something better.
> I don't really see what the benefit for Jimmy to stay in that situation is. If Jimmy is skilled, and the company thinks or acts like Jimmy is replaceable, then Jimmy is in a bad job. Jimmy should leave before Jimmy is mentally harmed.
You are assuming a perfectly rational actor. And with perfect information - we tend to suck up and endure a lot of shit if we just think it is "normal".
Isn't that a bit like saying "if you want to change politics, go for it, it is your political parties". There is so much entrenched interests in most of these structures that it is really hard changing them. You could start a new one, but it is quite a lot of work.
Yes, changing any preexisting system requires effort. It requires more than showing up one day and saying, "Here are my ideas, they are better than what you do, everyone do what I say now."
That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that it requires skills and efforts that us technical types often aren't very good at--listening to people, understanding their motivations, and looking for common ground and compromises. Then acting on that persuasively, to get people to go along with your ideas.
It's tough. Impossible? Absolutely not. It can be done.
But the point is that, right now, there's no such obstacle to overcome; saying that "it's not impossible" is exactly not an argument in favor of introducing unions.
Well, yes, and the workers in the tech industry continue to suffer from a lack of the benefits unions bring, including better pay and protection against being fired capriciously.
Remember the Adria Richards thing, how some guy lost his job? Having a union-back disciplinary process in place would have put a stop to that, you know.
I do remember the Adria Richards thing, but as far as I know, it's not exactly a widespread issue in the industry.
Regarding pay, it's not clear to me that it would solve the capping/fixing issue. Even with the no-poaching agreement, developer salaries are usually pretty high in those companies (especially for employees worthy of being poached). Would union rates really be higher than what they're already getting? I doubt it.
I'm not sure how what you believe has much bearing on this situation.
And I see no theoretical reason why union rules would necessarily do what you say--that is, why they would necessarily remove your ability to get better pay based on that thing you said is not generalizable or quantifiable anyway.
After all, we have one good real-world example that does what you're going for, the Screen Actors Guild. I assure you that A-list actors command a great deal more pay than your run-of-the-mill SAG member.
Why wouldn't something like that apply to the tech industry, as well?
"They tie your pay to how many years you've worked at a company, not how skilled you are"
There's nothing inherent about unions that makes this true. It's that it worked for many of the low-skill job unions. Nothing says this has to be true for a tech union.
"At least corporations value skill."
No they don't. They value paying the least possible amount for the most possible work.
I'd rather have my wage fixed by a corporation than a union. At least corporations value skill.