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Comment by badsock | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why everyone bought the idea that we don't need unions anymore.

This is exactly the sort of thing they make better.

Because so many developers think they are unique snowflakes who are better than everyone else, and a union would just drag them down to everyone else's level. Unions are for people who work on assembly lines, right?

Special snowflakes or not, a group of majority young people won't unionize themselves if the benefit mainly goes to old people. Granted, everybody ages, but unions of today may not survive into the days when the young of today become old.

Which definitely points to a truth, obvious as it is disquieting: brutal violence lies ahead.

Seriously. Unions have been pretty violent for well over a century, as labor struggles have circulated the force of shockwaves created by obstinate dysfunction on both sides, but because of this, a collective memory of known quantities had built up.

Now, in a sudden bout of amnesia, certain mistakes are primed to repeat themselves. Others not so much, but how to guess which errors boil over first, and why, without understanding the roots of each problem?

Technology and any related social change will augment outcomes, but not always in a good way. On the one hand technology empowers mobility and learning, on the other hand, eavesdropping and misinformation.

So I expect a lot of people here are well above average and wouldn't be better off represented by a union.

Citation required.

A union won't make a company hire you. Whatever power union has, it comes after signing on the dotted line, so that particular problem would not be solved by a union.

Unlike police or muni drivers or Detroit auto works, programmers are among the most frequent job changers.

Other than Hollywood unions (where main benefit, as far as I can tell, is ensuring that you don't get taken advantage of too much at the low end thanks to minimum wages etc.) is there any example of a union for a profession where you change your employer every 2-3 years?

is there any example of a union for a profession where you change your employer every 2-3 years?

I know a few construction workers who essentially work for the union. A contractor will get a job, and they'll contact the different unions and say they need people to get it done.

The unions in construction also provide continuous training for their members, and good training to boot. I've had real estate developers in NYC tell me they won't do foundation work with non-union labor because it's so important to get it right the first time.

Though the drawback is that union workers tend only to want to work with union workers. So you can't go with the union workers to do your foundation, and use a non-union contractor to do other work.

An employer I used to work for found this out the hard way when word got out that they had hired a non-union carpenter to do some custom cabinetry on an office build out (he was an expert craftsman who was not cheap, so it wasn't done for cost savings).

Suddenly it got very hard to find workers to finish the electrical and plumbing work.

Though the drawback is that union workers tend only to want to work with union worker

That is the whole point... a worker's only leverage is to withhold labour. As an individual that is insignificant but en masse...

Theater and film are great examples of unions whose participants change jobs every few weeks or months. The unions are sometimes "hiring halls": you get the call from the union itself where to appear tomorrow morning. They also protect workers from competition: the only way new workers enter the field is when the union decides it can't fulfill its employers' needs with existing senior members.

Unlike police or muni drivers or Detroit auto works, programmers are among the most frequent job changers

Also unlike police or muni drivers, if the union makes it too expensive to continue to pay your wages and work within the constraints of the union contract, the company will either outsource your job somewhere cheaper, or it will go out of business and be replaced by a company with cheaper workers.

Detroit Auto Workers found this out when the Big Three decentralized and moved jobs out of Detroit and they were under intense competition with foreign car makers.

>A union won't make a company hire you. Whatever power union has, it comes after signing on the dotted line, so that particular problem would not be solved by a union.

Actually a union can very well push for changed attitudes and laws regarding age discrimination.

> I don't understand why everyone bought the idea that we don't need unions anymore.

Because things were good enough and a generation after Unions became a thing, people got complacent.

We have them in Europe (IT related I mean).

It is up to us to keep them being relevant to take care of our rights.

A trade union wouldn't work in this industry. A mediaeval style craftsman's guild would tho'...

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