It would be nice.

Most of my complaints about unions are:

• Seniority is a terrible system to build a foundation from. It just is. I don’t give a fuck who got there first, seniority systems grow complacency, punish competence, and lower labour mobility. I was in a union as a teenager, the company offered lump sum payments for the older union members to literally sell out the younger ones with delayed wage increases, and they all voted for it since it was harming someone else.
• There are many unions that are just greedy pigs. You pay dues in, the union gets fat, but they spend all their time defending the wrong people.
• Unions can add a lot of extra process to things that don’t require it

However, that does not mean we shouldn’t have unions. We should maybe try to improve how we do them, so they work better for everyone.

I just want a union that looks out for unfair labour practices, forced unpaid overtime, keeps the company competitive on salary and benefits, and is willing to fight for workers who are unduly fired or sidelined.

Yea it’s almost like American politicians on the right have run a 40 year long campaign to weaken unions, turn people against them, and even attempt to outlaw them.

Nothing works if the government doesn’t, I hate to break that to people but politics is life.

Power corrupts. It’s no different in a union. Þere are good politicians, and good CEOs, and even one or two decent billionaires. But by and large, power and wealþ corrupts.

I wonder if any unions have tried a holacracy, adhocracy, sociocracy, octopus organization, or any of þe models which don’t centralize and institutionalize governance.

I’m pretty much of þe same mind as you. Unions are þe best option for workers, but are still far from perfect. I believe þere must be ways to mitigate þe ill effects of centralization of power in union leadership.

My main problem with this line of thinking is that you and your co-workers are your union.

Unions are just like the government. The more that you tell yourself it’s someone else’s problem to figure out, the less you will actually be represented by it.

Yeah whatever people work a lot, nobody wants to be responsible for their own power, etc.

But you get the union that you fight to build and the contract that you vote to accept.

Yes, exactly, and people are so dogmatic about the topic it makes space for mismanagement and corruption like any other organization. I became an engineer, so we are ‘forbidden’ to join a union and that was fine with me for a long time.

That mindset was based on my personal experiences with unions working as a teenager and throughout university, as well as from watching my blue-collar parents get fucked by their unions and companies equally, over and over and over my whole life. As I’ve become old and learned the role of OG unions in the creation of most of the rights as a worker I take for granted today (ex. weekends exist), it has been difficult to reconcile.

Having unions is not only good, but required, but they have to be held to a higher standard than they are today, and they shouldn’t be immune to criticism from workers.

100%

Anything we as humans choose to be a part of, we can choose to improve. Unions included. Nothing needs to stay the same if it isn’t working.

Seniority is a terrible system to build a foundation from.

There’s nothing inherent in union membership that forces seniority to be a requirement. It made a certain amount of sense in commodity trades, but the volatility of skill requirements in software and high tech invalidate that assumption.

Unions can add a lot of extra process to things that don’t require it

That can happen. And then there are the things that do require it. Better to have dismissal for a legitimate cause than at-will employment and an arbitrary kick out the door.

Tech workers have only resisted unions because employment has mostly been easy to find in the industry (depending on location and sector). They also have an innate libertarian bent in the culture that would resist unions. But with all the company consolidation and layoffs, it’s hard to tech workers aren’t being taken advantage of in most places.

More importantly people don’t want their labor to negatively impact themselves and the world and with AI being shoved down our throats to take away our power it’s clear that working conditions and having a say over them matter more than ever now

None of the tech workers I know have been resistant to the idea of unions and neither am I. I would say it’s the exact opposite actually, like there is always some reason I can’t join whatever union or that we can’t form a new one for tech workers. So you end up with this tiny group of devs in the CWA, and this other tiny group in the UAW, and a bunch more who work at a place that has a contract with the IBEW but they can’t join that and on and on and that’s before we even get started on the number of people who are now considered contractors and can’t join whatever union anyway.

I don’t know. Quite the opposite experience here. I’ve always only heard stupid ignorant shit about unions from my colleagues. Things only strated shifting over the last coupleof years.

Because of the personality type that’s attracted to the field, engineers lean towards libertarian or authoritarian rightwing. I’ve met a few exceptions, but they’re notable precisely because of their rarity.

I would think knowledge work is really compatible with unionization, as it has less “fungible” employees.

If one assembly line shift goes on strike at GM, they can switch in another crew, or hire scabs and get pretty close to back to normal.

If your software dev team goes out, any replacements don’t have 200 years of experience on exactly where the bodies are buried in the specific design and architecture. You will suffer ramp-up problems. A strike threat is way bigger, especially if it cuts into keep-the-lights-on stuff like SRE and operations too.

That’s actually a bit part of why unions have not traditionally been seen as necessary in tech. Employees had more leverage even without strength of numbers than many other jobs. Combined with the relatively high number of employers, the threat of an employee saying they’d just leave if they don’t get better conditions was real.

Current economic conditions change that. Fewer companies are hiring, and AI makes it easier for a new employee to learn what’s going on in your system. So the need to unionise grows.

Employees had more leverage even without strength of numbers than many other jobs.

That was always the dream, but in practice, the pricing power of a form that employs many thousands of people is vastly greater than that of all but a 99.9 percentile individual.

I fully recommend. Been part of two unions and both were great. In the us, it was fantastic.

Recently fought RTO and got me a payraise.

I’m a tech worker

That’s awesome. Is your employer big tech, or a smaller entity?

Medium? Def not big tech. I found big tech only has big sakearirs and nothing else.

I have a fucking pension.

Yep! Got invited back to big tech. I’d make double what I do now working for a state university but my insurance would become shit by comparison and I’d have no pension I’m building towards, just a 401k, whereas I’ve both pension and a 403b here.

nice! Yeah theres some huge benefits to working outside big tech. Piece of mind as well. Im making he world a better place instead of a select few. Feels good!

I hope this becomes the norm. Having tried to form a bargaining unit myself I can tell you it’s an uphill battle. Some workers are vehemently against it still and they will successfully encourage others to act against their own class interests.

I worked IT in public service, so I did have a very powerful union. Private sector coders love to lick those boots.

I’m surprised to hear the staff resisted unions.

DevOps, here. Union. I came from an union DevOps job to this one. I vastly prefer it over dotcom merc jobs since they can’t just fire everyone after a bad quarter.

The rest is about the same: good or bad managers, lazy or awesome peers, loafer or champ; same in either environment.

if they are laid off already, likely wont be useful now. tech will try to lay off even faster to prevent a union. much like how starbucks is doing it, close every location that is threatening to unionize.

1. The Game Worker Hardship fund shows how unions can help laid off workers. What We Will shows how workers can come together to support each other even without fully having union representation.
2. Workers who form a union can fight for lay off protections and severance packages even if they can’t always save the jobs they’re fighting for. This can include the right for those who were laid off to get first dibs when hiring picks back up.
3. Shops with unions will have way more process for employers to follow which slows down firings. The places without a union will be the ones where it’s easier to fire staff quickly, but obviously employers will feel more compelled to discipline workers who have a union so those who do have one will have to be ready for a flight probably (but that’s better than not fighting at all and having zero help after a layoff imo)

I mean we’re seeing at least the gaming industry, after decades of abuse, start to unionize so that’s a good sign at least.

Also anecdotal but at my place, as the older generation retires, the younger one are a lot more open about welcoming unions. Still the whole “white collar” label has a strong pull.