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.
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.