Software developers are already highly paid with lots of perks. Do they need unions?
One of the most important reasons for unions is to fight back against abusive employment practices that are unrelated to employee compensation. While software development doesn't have anywhere close to the problems mining or factory jobs, we it might be a good idea to address the culture of working long hours with chronic sleep problems. A union could also fight unfair hiring practices like age discrimination or the scandal from a couple years about hiring collusion to between several Silicon Valley companies.
I think a union for web developers would be a fantastic idea. Like you said, not necessarily for negotiating pay, but that could be part of it. It would be nice if a developer could rise from being paid close to minimum wage to an average software engineer's salary without having to switch jobs 6 times.
As an industry we need to address the problem of endemic project failure. Companies who aren't in the software industry generally don't understand how to produce software. Usually it falls on individual developers to teach the rest of the organization how to do things like write stories, build a deployment pipeline, etc. How to trust programmers to do things at their own pace and not resort to cracking the whip all the time. Anyone who's done this knows it's an uphill battle. Usually programmers just choose to leave a dysfunctional org rather than stick around and get punished for trying to do their job. Then you have dying projects full of code no one understands or wants to understand.
It would be great if we could come together to take control of our industry and really turn it into a profession. If it's what people want, we could try to engineer a profession where it's reasonable for a developer to expect to hold the same job (or at least work on the same codebase - even as a contractor) for at least 5 years without a major upheaval. Or one where you can expect to use at least some of what you learn in university / boot camp on the job. Or one where workers are expected to have different output levels and they don't fear being let go for not being a natural fast learner like John. Things we don't have that other professions take for granted. All these things aren't going to happen in the current dev culture, but would in fact be beneficial developments not just for employees but for employers as well.
If we don't do this type of thing ourselves, companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook will remake the industry in their image as they have done and are doing. This will result in a great worker pool ready for them to draw from, and a broken industry for everyone else.
Not that I agree with it, but that's an argument.
On the contrary, if you're actively making something (burgers, computers) then you're usually not paid enough to actually consume those things on a regular schedule. I think that's a symptom of an emergent caste system.
My example is meant to show that principle is absurd, not that OP actually believes in that consequence. I admit the point could have been delivered friendlier.
As for charitability, we are all prone to agree to what fits with what we already believe without critical thought. This time OP slipped up, many times it's been me.
We do need a Latin phrase for the principle of charity!
I don't see the substantial and valid point in your rebuttal. Care to elucidate in the spirit of the original point?
To take an example at the other end, should someone working in the paper clip industry be happy as long as they can afford to buy one paper clip?
I can understand an emotional reaction to people working on goods just outside the reach of their spending power. But if you think about it, those two numbers have nothing to do with each other.
Given our culture of consumer debt, this doesn't speak to whether people can afford to vacation, just whether they intend to do so or not. And, it doesn't really break down flying vs other modes of travel to vacation destinations. Nonetheless, I think this suggests that "many" people, in fact, cannot "afford" to fly for leisure.
[0]: http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/Americans-Plans-for-Sum...
If they are getting paid less than a 787 that just means they aren't producing entire 787s, they are producing parts of a 787.
When Henry Ford attempted to build the first commodity private motorcar for the middle class worker whilst also paying his assembly line workers enough to afford one of their own from their wages alone it was by design a very delicate balance. The idea was to enable someone, even without significant resources or higher education, who had the aptitude and is a hard worker to become an employee and in a measurable way start to join the middle class their own self. The assembly line was engineered to be profitable enough to accomplish this to begin with. What this meant was being able to gradually afford a house, a car, a spouse, and kids on one worker's income of course. Could be accelerated with overtime. Upward mobility financially by productive labor alone without having to receive a promotion in the workplace, or having to rely on family or other resources to become established.
Ford's factory as a system was created to be a value- and money-making-machine with everyone involved moving ahead together.
This element of mass-production of a new commodity for a large target class while simulaneously enabling new workers to enter the target class from their labor alone is one of the things that allows it to scale so well, and when this element is compromised the scaling may be unsteady and/or unsustainable.
This element is also not very present on the Boeing assembly line. Mass-produced commercial aircraft are still commodities but no middle class person is expected to purchase one using their labor alone. Balance is required but at a different pivot point. With Ford starting at a 0X target the degree of balance should be more obvious and easier to maintain. Boeing is a good example of the opposite extreme, those aircraft are so expensive who knows what multiple would be required just to get something like that off the ground. The higher the labor multiple like this you would think the more difficult the balance would be to maintain, but of course any multiple is huge compared to zero. And there's no more benchmark for anybody since the US dollar is so compromised now, a worker may have to do lots of overtime just to afford a car that's reliable enough to get to work in the first place, which can keep a home itself out of reach for their forseeable future.
Anyway, there have always been craftsworkers who build unique things for royalty, others who mass-produce commodities intended for the middle class, and anything in between. Either way the most successful can sell all that they can make.
New cars and aircraft are not designed for those whose resources are so low that they are below middle class. Such low-resource individuals can only maintain economically by doing without the full-price commodities of the middle class, substituting with second-hand and surplus commodities when possible. For them, higher expenditure levels can be unsound but are often entertained in order to give the appearance of full middle-class status. For instance the purchase of a brand new car or brand new home instead of second-hand may provide some degree of comfort but can seriously hamper any true progress up into the full middle class, especially for someone who is making a credit purchase.
You're not truly in the middle class unless you can actually afford to pay cash for the true middle class commodities. Extravagances on credit maybe but not necessities or common commodities.
Seems to me that when assembly lines are truly bettering the wealth of their workers, everything goes well until you can no longer sell all that you can make.
Uh-oh.
Employers are always going to have the upper hand, but during cutbacks even the truly generous payers can seldom recover anything significant by limiting employee compensation without being quite destructive to the structure that the founder had built. Employee cutbacks beyond a certain level, or in the case of employers who are on the edge by paying "market" or "competitive" rates, will end up generally halting employee's upward mobility in a tangible way. Even under the most severe conditions, shareholders with strengh and conviction are supposed to be there to absorb almost all of the financial fluctuations. Capitalists who fail to intentionally restore prosperity to their employees as soon as possible seem to be a great source of opportunity for a union to become competitive in offering more to the employees in bulk than the actual employer is doing on their own at the time.
Balancing the employee's entire financial opportunity versus a relatively small percentage of the bottom line is not easy even when it's intentionally generous.
Employee prosperity is always at the discretion of the involved capitalist, and the labor market is suposed to be set by comparison to how productive those workers would be if in business individually or teaming in a way that allows them to absorb almost all of the gains or losses from operations themselves.
Looks like without undue extraneous influence, capitalism involving other people's money would not be as rewarding compared to plain entrepreneurialism where the worker has the resources to fund the venture independently of other people's money.
How absurd is that?
If you really believe in what you are saying, then go ahead and build your own company and grab the business for yourself.
I know you don't agree with it, so I'm not ascribing this to you, but of the set of people who believe that, then why are so many startups failing left and right and laying off workers because their products don't hit critical mass? Millions of dollars paid out to the workers who churned out a failed product. Their downside is being out of a job. The entrepreneur's downside can be and often is much larger.
Whereas in Germany, unions seem to have a clever dialogue with employers. Probably most people have been educated to economics, in a pro-capitalist way?
[1] Ironically they're not so wrong: Because of our mandatory contributions, our compound tax rate is 63%.
Those of us commenting here today may not be around to see it happen, but I believe it will happen eventually.
For now things are good. We got lucky and we found ourselves in a relatively new profession that not a lot of people are trained in and we're making good money (and some of us don't even have college degrees)
Also, the trades historically haven't been particularly well-paid, but that's not the case anymore.
Moreover, a substantial number work in such high stress situations that they have to get out after a bit and suffer serious burn-out as a result.
A union, professional association or better labor standards might be able to address all this.
I'm a software developer making nearly $100k (That's probably $200k in Silicon Valley dollars) and I'm a union member.
Now, my union isn't a blue collar union in the traditional sense. My union is just an employer organization to e.g. push mandatory contract contents like flexible pension age, insurance issues etc. It's a white collar union. They don't negotiate salaries for their members. If I ever end up in a situation where I need legal help, e.g. I'm quarantined when leaving an employer and think it's unfair - I can ask my union for legal help. They also provide an unemployment insurance to bolster the public insurance for their members (if the public provides 50% of income, the union one adds to that so get maybe 80 or 90% of your income).
Blue collar unions on the other hand represent people who are replacable. The union is their only way of achieving bargaining power against employers. Blue collar unions typically negotiate wages and raises for all members at the company. Blue collar unions may have to go on strike etc, whereas white collar unions rarely do. That means my union fee might be 1/4 of what a blue collar union costs per month, since the white collar unions don't need a stash of money to live through a strike.
So these are fundamentally different organisations. My union is more like a legal aid + insurance deal that costs me a few bucks per month.
Now: you could argue that with my relative power over my employer, shouldn't I be able to just negotiate this myself? I should be able to retire when I want? I should be able to just hire a lawyer when I need one? And buy unemployment insurance at market rate? Well yes, I suppose. But the insurance is actually pretty good valuye for union members (we are considered less likely to be unemployed so the premium is much lower) and I'm happy to buy all that stuff as a package deal. I like the idea of someone representing my group and not just me.
In a few hotspots yes. But the vast majority of programmers are just office workers like any other. But unlike HR and so on, they face the threat of offshoring...
It's like saying all musicians are highly paid and have loads of perks because look at Jay-Z.
So in the end I decided to become freelancer. I can ask much higher rates and now I feel I get a fair compensation for my work (perhaps 2x or 3x my previous wage). And apparantly my clients believe so as well.
That's fine. I'm an entrepreneur as well and I make my own rules.
But there are a lot of people who just want to cash a check and do the work put in front of them. I employ a lot of them. And they're great. They have no aspirations to strike out, to deal with healthcare as a freelancer (have you tried being a father of two with kids or a spouse with chronic medical issues?), to deal with financial windfalls and insecurities, and so forth.
Did you? Are you ignoring all the work that went into landing the contract? If your work was really the major effort the smart thing to do would be to strike out on your own.
I'm pretty sure that wasn't edited in in response to your comment, since it's quoted in another comment much older than yours is.