Question for the HN crowd: do you think tech-workers will begin to unionize? It seems to me that (in general) they've got such a nice position in the economy there's probably a bit of an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality. Is that correct?
But there is a solution (from the prospective of employers) for this "problem": every time you hear someone talk about "teaching everyone to code" or "the STEM shortage" (which absolutely does not exist -- there is a shortage of qualified programmers willing to work for $12/hr, a shortage of hard science PhDs willing to do menial lab work for 10$/hr) this is coded language for "let's make millions more programmers so that they become so commonplace they become a commodity and may be treated as such". As it turns out, programming is not that hard, anyone could do it if they learned. And they are learning.
Programmers would be smart to unionize before this strategy succeeds, not after, it will be much easier while they still have power. But this requires social and political intelligence, and for programmers (who lean Libertarian up until the moment they get laid off or abused by their boss) to put their egos aside and disabuse themselves of the notion that they succeeded only because they are so much more brilliant than everyone else.
The people who don't want a union aren't resisting it because they want to live in some libertarian wet dream, they are resisting it because they see their profession as something that can't be reduced to common labor and they don't see a labor union as able to provide any benefits, as indeed they don't when you are dealing with a profession. The push to get people to unionize is not about workers rights its about putting technology professionals in the place business owners want them in. No one likes the idea that software is eating the world and there is a limited group of people , who are not the traditional power brokers, who are very well positioned to capitalize on that. They would much rather that software development become a commodity so they can continue their model of capital vs labor.
I've joked before that, in order for a tech union drive to work, it would have to be recast as some sort of medieval-guild-style exploitation of secret knowledge power-play/conspiracy to get the libertarians on board.
But that's a fallacy. Most of the classic professions are organized. They're usually organized around professional associations and not "labor unions", and their collective bargaining concerns things other than their wages. But those are distinctions without differences.
Yes, tech workers aren't going to create the Tech Teamsters. That's an easy question to put to rest. But that doesn't dispose of the issue. Tech workers should organize, now, when their market power is at its zenith. There's a good discussion to have about what the resulting organizations look like.
But there's less of a tenable argument about whether they should try at all. Clearly, it seems to me, they should.
I agree with you that academic gatekeeping is a bad fit for tech workers (coincidentally, I have just one semester of college).
I think we need to be careful not to let ourselves, as a community of people sharing an occupation in this market, get derailed by the connotations of the word "union".
You mentioned AMA in another comment; will our tech union require eight years of university and one year of residency at IniTech to "practice programming"? Will it require a minimum hourly wage? At what rate? My first programming job at 17 wasn't super well paid, but better than working at the gas station. Will there be an ethics committee that might get high-jacked by activists and "disbar" programmers working for sites with objectionable content? Or the NSA or ICE? And if it can't do any of those things, what teeth will it actually have?
Most organisations meaningfully described as unions has a non-trivial element of excluding people from the trade in one way or another. I will never be a part of any organisation that will prevent any person from (trying to) make a living as a programmer in whatever way.
Don't assume that a disorganized workforce will keep that from happening. Look at pretty much all cybersecurity regulation from the last 10 years to see what could happen if labor rolls over and lets it: professional certification, run by commercial firms that specialize in selling themselves as efficient authorities.
The problem is that, once an industry unionizes, you don't really have a choice.
The process of decertification is basically a catch-22: unions are actually allowed to terminate membership of employees who advocate decertification, which makes it impossible to organize enough support for decertification from current members without risking losing your membership.
And that's all assuming that you actually hold the majority view. It's quite possible that the majority of your coworkers want to (for example) ban Asian workers from obtaining work visas. If that's the case, you can't really do anything to stop your union from supporting it either.
That example isn't hypothetical, by the way. Banning immigration from Asia was one of the first major victories of the American Federation of Labor.
That's entirely false, and intellectually dishonest.
Technically, by the letter of the law? Okay. But in practice? No, it's completely true. Your only "choice" is to find a non-unionized job (if one even exists in your field). Decertifying a union is borderline impossible in practice. And if you're in the minority opinion among your coworkers, you're completely out-of-luck, because there's nothing you can do, legally or practically.
> and intellectually dishonest.
You keep saying this phrase a lot, but there's nothing "intellectually dishonest" about explaining the practical problems associated with OP's statement ("I will never be a part of any organisation..."). You can't just use that phrase to dismiss fact-based critiques that you don't like. If you disagree, actually engage with the argument.
If a tech association just wants to get vesting schedules fixed, great, I ha e no problem with that.
But the moment someone even SUGGESTS putting up barriers to entry is the moment I oppose that organization with all of my might.
It is just too risky to allow an organization to get entrenched and ruin the tech industry for newbies.
It's farcical to expect a majority of union members to put ideology above self-interest and vote to depress their own wages by permitting new entrants to follow in their footsteps (except in proportion to existing members leaving the field, maybe).
People who are inside an advantageous position (employed in a desirable field, living in a desirable city) very reliably kick the ladder down once they've climbed.
Society at large is nearly always better off when these people are disenfranchised and disempowered. You don't even need a tyrant to do this either; simply expand the voter pool to include would-be entrants as well as current members.
Why? It was what was there and what was accessible. There wasn't a particular plan or direction, just the excitement of getting the computer to do what I wanted it to do.
Alternatively, find a niche that needs fixing with a CRUD web app, then build and sell it.
A couple of years of doing that, always making sure you're educating yourself (educating doesn't have to equal scrambling to keep up to date with every fad or sitting in a classroom, it means making sure that you're adding skills and increasing your proficiency in ways that adds value to your work. Read a few CS textbooks, it's good to know the jargon, and understanding the theory behind what I knew to work was very helpful for me), a lot of good firms will take a good hard look at you. Just always keep in mind that you're "invisible" to recruiters, so you'll probably have to hustle a bit/network a lot.
Anyway, that was roughly my path, combined with moving to London somewhere between paragraphs one and three (employers here care much less about my missing degree than they do in Denmark). YMMV.
> Alternatively, find a niche that needs fixing with a CRUD web app, then build and sell it.
Would you care to expand on that a bit please? Thanks!
I can recommend reading the early stuff on kalzumeus.com, about the bingo card creator. Same guy is also a prolific contributor here, as patio11.
[0] Experience working/consulting for various labs
Do you consider them a common laborer, like a delivery driver, or a profession that doesn't require a deep understanding of the subject matter?
No. The captains with a 10+ years seniority flying international routes might make that. The average is closer to $59/hour[1]. The average is lower than people think because many budget airliners pay only $20k for 1st year pilots. The waves of downsizing also cut salaries. That's for USA pilots. I don't know about UK.
Many programmers with barely a few years experience can get salaries beyond $59/hour without union representation which is partly why unionization is not an urgent need in the profession.
[1] http://work.chron.com/average-commercial-airline-pilots-sala...
As in other fields, the pilots' union creates a two-tiered system where the haves (major airline pilots) enjoy great wages and conditions off the backs of the have-nots (regional airline pilots) who are miserable.
While unions are meant to extract value from capitalists and management, they often seem to end up extracting it from prospective and early-career workers who haven't yet made it to union membership.
I think one thing that keeps tech engineers from unionizing is the "professional" label. Unions are iron workers, not professionals like me. I have two responses: (1) look at other professionals. Lawyers, doctors and accountants have unions, they just aren't call that. Think about it. (2) If you think your "professional" status is sticky without doing anything, take a look at programmer work conditions at overseas outsourcers. That is the future of the job if you don't do anything.
Those are not in the same category as the IEEE.
They are still labor unions with government-recognized powers, and they carefully look after their members' interests.
[1] Stricken, struck, striked?
As an alternative, anyone can start a company that puts into practice some of the employee friendly ideas you have, and use that to compete for workers, and try to move the market towards that ideal. I did that, and I really enjoyed the experience. I think my co-workers did too.
As far as where I'm coming from, I used to be more libertarian-ish. I guess I've come to a view that as population density and interconnectedness increases, maintaining societal stability requires ideologically impure and economically suboptimal compromises. Call it pragmatic socio-nihilism.
There's a massive difference between a professional association and an NLRB-governed union.
The NLRA protects any concerted effort among employees to improve workplace conditions. You don't have to be an "NLRB-governed union" to organize.
I understand that the NLRA contains provisions which protect employee activity in a non-unionized workplace, but this entire thread beings with the question "do you think tech-workers will begin to unionize?", not "do you think tech-workers will begin to make an organized effort to improve workplace conditions".
In that context, saying "Most professionals also belong to labor unions... called professional associations" implies a conflation of the two. And that's an important distinction, because most professional associations' activities don't even fall under the purview of the NLRA at all.
I'm aware - but again, that wasn't the original question of this thread.
That's not the important question. The important question is, will tech workers organize, and, when they do, what will that organization look like? That's a question we can speculate productively about.
Any union that derives its authority from the NLRA and is overseen by the NLRB will eventually end up looking like the AFL-CIO, SEIU, etc. We have decades of experimentation done by other unions with other organizational structures - all of which have failed - testifying to that.
Most professional organizations do not derive their authority or power from the NLRA at all. The activities that they take, as organizations, are outside the scope of the NLRA. Put another way: if the NLRA vanished overnight, they would still operate in the same way, as evidenced by the fact that many of the largest and most successful professional organizations predate the NLRA by decades. The same is not true of most labor unions which derive their power from the NLRA - even the few surviving ones that predated the NLRA restructured in its wake.
The fact that the NLRA protects some employee activity in non-unionized workforces is true, but it isn't particularly relevant to answering the question "do you think tech-workers will begin to unionize?", because the professional organizations that you introduced to the discussion do not require the NLRA to function as they do today.
That's not what I said.
What I said: It's misleading to suggest that professional associations require the NLRA to operate.
I've done my best to explain why the NLRA and "labor unions" (as asked in the original question) are completely orthogonal to professional associations (which you mentioned in your reply). I've explained why the rights that the NLRA grants are relevant to labor unions, but are different from the ones that professional associations require and use in their operations. I've explained why bringing up professional associations in a thread specifically about labor unions is a red herring. I've mentioned some of the history, and I've proposed a thought experiment to try and illustrate this difference better.
If after all of that, you really, genuinely think the best summary of what I've said is "it would be better for tech workers if they could be fired for organizing," then I don't know what to say. That's an unbelievably uncharitable way to twist the things I've said in good faith.
So when you cite the NLRA as a bad thing, you are literally making the argument I just suggested you were.
I never once cited the NLRA as "a bad thing".
Without the NLRA, employees can simply be fired for attempting to organize.
Sorry, I should have been clearer earlier.
Sort of, but not really. The NLRA does prevent the right to organize, which is mostly (though not exclusively) used in the context of labor unions. The NLRA was passed with the expectation that organization would generally take the form of labor unions. The ability to organize outside of a unionized workplace was specified largely to solve the "chicken and egg" problem of forming a union in the first place.
That said, the NLRA isn't the only thing (or even the primary thing) that prevents employees from being fired for joining a professional association. Which is what I've been saying all along: professional associations are notably different from labor unions which draw their power largely from the NLRA and are overseen by the NLRB.
You'll have to provide some backing examples for this. And also an explanation for why you believe the Screen Actors Guild, for one, has failed.
SAG-AFTRA largely does operate this way, but aside from that, it also has received a number of special exemptions enshrined in law (both at the state and the federal level).
What will it look like? I think the first big issue that most could get behind would be nationally organizing against non-compete agreements.
First, SAG-AFTRA is a part of AFL-CIO.
Second, over the years, SAG received a number of special exemptions in law that no other union today has received (and after 2012, that's very unlikely to change). So SAG-AFTRA is not really a realistic model for any hypothetically newly-unionized industry.
Why aren't they?
Professional labor is a subset of labor, and unions representing (exclusively or alongside other) labor exist. (Of course, tech workers don't have much professional organization outside of the labor union kind, either.)
> I think the great battle to be fought by tech workers is to stop having them treated as common laborers that perform some kind of rote process.
“rote process” or not has nothing to do with the reasons for or against having a union; it has a lot to do with what you'd want a union to negotiate for in terms of working conditions.
> Some times we call software development engineering
Only because management discovered that labels are good way to distract from substantive issues, because developers eat up the empty status markers.
Pushing for better conditions/pay for you as part of improving them for everyone where you work.
There is no reason why a union has to do anything in particular at all if you don't want it to.
I'm not trying to tell you to join a union or not, just saying that a union as a legal structure does not require any of the tactics or goals as 20th century manufacturing or public sector unions.
Yes there it. If a union takes over the workforce of your company, now you have to follow the union rules.
If unions were just opt in, them yes you'd be right. But unions are NOT opt in for many states. One you are a union shop, you are screwed if you disagree with the union.
A workplace is not democratically run, so if you disagree with it, you are also screwed, only this time you have no recourse.
Voting and democracy doesn't help anything. I am just 1 vote. I'd rather have things negotiated between me, and only me and the other party.
Yes. Which they, as the union, would decide on.
What if instead, I want to negotiate my own work contract?
If a union comes in, I have no option. I do not want other people voting on my contract.
This is why I will always fight the establishment of a union in the tech industry. I do not want to be governed by the union rules, so I am not going to allow this stuff to be established in the first place.
Same as if you don't want to follow any other rules laid down by your job.
"What if instead, I want to negotiate my own work contract?"
Nobody's saying you can't do that.
"If a union comes in, I have no option. I do not want other people voting on my contract."
You don't have any evidence of that.
"This is why I will always fight the establishment of a union in the tech industry. I do not want to be governed by the union rules, so I am not going to allow this stuff to be established in the first place."
So because you think you're a snowflake, you don't want things to improve for other people.
Instead of doing that, I will just prevent the rules form being implemented in the first place.
The real world situation that we live in is that if I do not want to follow these rules, there is a perfectly easy way for them to be stopped. And the way for them to be stopped is to prevent the union from forming before they get any power over ms.
As most people in tech oppose unions, I do not just have to "deal with it". I can stop unions from having any power over my life at all by preventing their existence in the first place.
"So because you think you're a snowflake, you don't want things to improve for other people"
No, I'd be perfectly happy with people engaging in voluntary association if they didn't always inevitably end up trying to force me to join their special club.
As long as these people won't drop the whole "force everyone to join us" clause, I will continue to oppose them.
Fortunately, the pro union people are in the vast minority in tech, though, so there is not much to worry about yet.
People get hung up on this because most developers feel like their profession is well-compensated. And, they are. But so are doctors and lawyers, who also belong to professional associations.
There's much more to bargain for than just wages.
There are plenty of things a professional organization could excel at that don't require full-blown unionization.
Because of this, seniority-based benefits and insulating bad apples from termination are traits that almost always show up in every union through convergent evolution.
But to a pretty good first approximation every technology firm in the industry is a "power structure" --- a rigid and overt one, at that --- run by financiers and owners. So it's hard to see what rank-and-file professionals would have to lose from exercising their own market power, at least in your analysis.
Thus Eric Garner wasn't a constituent of NYC, he was a constituent of his representatives, who may or may not have done a good job advocating for the safety of those interviewed or detained by the police. I don't see how constituency doesn't help here, because now we can hold reps responsible for advocating for better protection, whereas if no representative power structures existed in the US, what happened to Garner would happen all the time and we would still belong to Great Britain
New York politics (both city and state) are structured in a way that is unbelievably stable (to the status quo) and therefore all-but-impossible to use as a vehicle to effect meaningful change, even to a degree that's possible in other cities and states.
In the case of Eric Garner, yes, it's true that (for example) the judge that ruled against releasing the records surrounding his death (effectively killing any chance at a lawsuit to force change) was up for re-election last year. However, because he has the support of the party machine in his district, the party chose not to run any other candidates against him[0][1]. Party affiliation laws make it all-but-impossible for more than one party to compete in any given district[2], and actually impossible for a third party to compete[3]. As a result, there was no reasonable way he could be unseated, even if literally every other person in the county (had refused to support him.
Changing any of these laws to allow more influence from constituents requires the unanimous approval of the three ranking members of the government, who are also the leaders of the party, which means that they'd essentially have to actively give up their own power. Unsurprisingly, that hasn't happened.
If you want to demonstrate that a democracy causes those in power to listen to their constituents, there is hardly a worse example than New York.
[0] In New York, this is actually a prerogative of the party, believe it or not.
[1] Technically, they ran eight candidates against him, but there were nine positions available, so all were guaranteed victory.
[2] Think of it like Comcast and Time Warner - they "compete" with each other by divvying up territory that they each have a monopoly over. That's how New York state operates - the Republican and Democratic parties each "own" territory and have a gentleman's agreement not to compete too seriously in the others' turf.
[3] The only way third parties can gain influence in New York is to cross-endorse a candidate from one of the major party lines. For example, the Working Families Party usually cross-endorses the Democratic candidate.
No. New York already publicly funds elections. The problem is that the parties have constructed a system that allows them to bypass voters' wishes entirely[0], and that system is beyond voters' control[1][2].
On top of this, New York voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering is actually way worse than pretty much any other state that you usually hear about in the news. The difference is that it has bipartisan support in New York - since both parties benefit from it equally (at the state level), there isn't any political benefit (to those in power) to drawing attention to it and fixing it.
This system also affects the state courts, so no state court case will ever overturn it. So, short of a federal court case like what happened in North Carolina, there's no way to fix it. And I doubt that it's ever going to happen, because neither left-wing nor right-wing groups actually want to fix it.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-politic...
[1] https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/908486948972580864
[2] https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/910229632590467072
The left in the US doesn't want focus on boring things like election law because it is currently addicted to feeding its project of hearsay-ridden alarmist identity politics, the kind that would inspire someone to for example endorse the violence at Speaker's Corner despite the existing video of the incident. Election law will not appeal to young leftists for reasons obvious to those who have been through the throes of Tumblr and now Twitter politics, where the incentives to control others through social status and guilt creates a fractal prison of power structures, and have managed to grow out of it.
Individual thinkers in the Anglosphere who would rather see progressive activist resources directed toward concrete issues like corruption or housing, and actually talk plainly about the reality of the current directionless Internet dark age on the Left that siphons away these resources into nothingness, like Angela Nagle, Jesse Singal, Freddie DeBoer, and L.H. Fang suffer accusations of holding every sort of oppressive mindset from more popular leftist figures.
Unions have all converged on operating the same way because the NLRA is very rigid, and over the decades, they've found a stable way of operating. Other operating structures have been tried over the last century, and all have failed except the current one.
If anybody believes that a tech union under the NLRA would break this trend, especially while presumably still being affiliated with other traditional unions, then the burden would be on them to explain why the forces that drive other unions would somehow not apply to tech.
SAG-AFTRA has been specially exempted from key provisions in labor law.
Also, why on earth do you think we'd have to? If no one wants them, why would we have them?
So why would a group that believes that put organizations in place that force businesses to treat and pay employees equally? Why would that group start to accept that years of service is a proxy for useful experience and ability? Fear of lawsuits mean that it's already too difficult to get rid of disruptive elements in an engineering team...are we really willing to make that process harder? Will the actual 10x programmers--the ones that have the data and recommendations on their CV to prove it--be willing to cede their individual negotiating power?
Incidentally, this is exactly what labor unions have spent their time doing for much of their history as incorporated organizations. Labor unions fought (successfully) to exclude immigrants from certain regions from immigrating, and even fought to retroactively strip them of citizenship, so that members could seize their property after they were deported. Labor unions fought to relocate Japanese-Americans during World War II, to create jobs for members, and then fought to prevent them from returning home.
The current quota system for visas and immigration that tech people frequently complain about? That was the result of legislation that the AFL lobbied for decades ago.
People don't like to talk about this, because it's an ugly chapter of labor history, but especially in this day and age, it's important to remember.
Every time the topic of immigration and visas come up, the comments are flooded with racist comments and talk about how we need to make it harder for companies to hire people on H1Bs from Asia. The more overtly racist comments get flagged and removed, but the rest still stay.
If anything, it's intellectually dishonest of you to suggest that these same people wouldn't actually fight to do that, given that's literally what they say they want to do.
The difference is that professionals bargain individually, because the jobs we do are specialized. Common laborers need unions for collective bargaining; because their work isn't specialized.
So think of it more like: A tech company would only hire a licensed software engineer. The licensing process is mostly the tedium part of determining competency, so that the job interview is about mutual interest and personality fit. It then opens up more room for individual negotiation, because there is less of a competency risk when hiring.
Unions and collective bargaining is for when there is very little competency risk when hiring.
They absolutely do prevent lots of people from being hired the theater and film industry in the first place, which is a widespread complaint against them. Obviously the lucky few who do gain membership (which is intentionally difficult) make more money as a result of the constricted supply.
You're gonna have to provide evidence of that. And don't just quote a dollar amount, because that needs to be taken in context. That context being the amount of money the company makes, the value that the employee brings, the cost of living in the area, and other factors.
"A similar job elsewhere pays 50%-75% what I make here."
So what? It costs less in those areas. But that, to me, sounds like a bunch of people who haven't asked for what they're worth.
"If you try to unionize to force wages higher, all this does is causes the exodus of companies from Silicon Valley even faster."
Given the cost of living there, doubtful. And there are far more things to organize around besides wages.
I'd say your intuition is basically correct. If we use average programmer's salary of $84k[1], that places the income in the top 30%. If we extend the statistics further to include Silicon Valley salaries of $200k+, that places them in the top 5%.
I can't think of any unionization in labor history that originated with members in the top 5% of salaries. That includes unions in manufacturing, arts (film/tv), sports, transportation, etc.
Yes, NFL & MLB players make a lot today but their unions happened before the advent of TV and playing pro sports was not a highly paid endeavor. (Early MLB players had to have 2nd jobs and share hotel rooms on the road.) As a thought experiment... one might argue that if the NFL were to restart today after the invention of TV, there would not be a players union. Instead the roster of 53 football players would be 53 independent contractors. Indeed, modern players in "sports" teams like eSports are mostly independent contractors. The technology of tv magnifies individuality (Tom Brady's face also sells cars & watches for endorsement deals). Today's marketability of the individual instead of the team would make it harder to convince 50%+ of players to elect union representation. (NASCAR drivers and UFC MMA fighters had/have grumblings about union representation that have gone nowhere so far. Also, they first have to switch to from independent contractors to employees -- which is another set of hurdles.)
Some airline pilots (with seniority) are 5% salary but in the 1930s they weren't when the union formed.
So, when would 50%+[2] programmers willing want to pay union dues -- say 1.5% (SAG) or 1.4% (UAW) of their salary?!? When the economic conditions of programmers match the poor conditions of the previous successful unionization efforts. We're obviously nowhere near that situation with software devs (even ones without college degrees) earning good salaries.
Some other commenters recommend that now is the best time to unionize because the current times are good for programmers. My question to that is... has that ever happened in history?
Basically, the main driver for unionization is economic conditions instead of ideological stance. If one believes more in the the ideology rather than economics, then yes it seems realistic to think that top-5% salary earners will vote themselves into a union. Since I emphasize economic conditions, I predict they won't -- at least not within the next 10 years. If a breakthrough AI happens to make programmers a commodity equal to burger flippers, the economics stresses on the profession changes which makes unionization more realistic.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=average+programmer+salary
Well, not a union as such, but if you look at other professional degrees, almost all of them have powerful trade groups that represent the workers -- doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc.
I think it speaks more to political ineptitude and the newness of the field that programming doesn't even have the same support structures in place that engineers do.
I suppose everyone has to learn the hard way (again) during the next downturn.
The speed at which this field moved is almost entirely due to the lack of encumbrances. That includes having to pay a state licensing group to say you are professionally certified in Java, risking losing your job if you fail to renew on time, having the state lock out anybody from the profession who does not meet these requirements, having unions require these certifications and pressure companies to only hire based on them.
It's a long, inefficient and useless money grab who's costs far outweigh the benefits.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion. Perhaps some people want the worker protections other industrialized countries have? And if those people are the majority, they can get it.
EDIT:
> The speed at which this field moved is almost entirely due to the lack of encumbrances.
Maybe this field needs some encumbrances and its time its no longer the wild wild west. Credentials aren't bad, peer-review isn't bad. Maybe I want my software built like my bridges? To standards and reliable.
I agree. But more developers should know those standards. Don't call yourself an engineer if you're not willing to follow how legitimate engineers operate.
It's not. Union members earn more than their non-union counterparts in nearly all instances. Source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf
But I'd go further and say what constitutes "high" is subjective.
If you look at it in terms of median household/income distribution then yes, you could certainly make the case it's high.
But, when you consider the amount of value a developer creates compared to their salary, their pay may seem quite low. Facebook, for example, returns $188,000 profit per employee (https://www.recode.net/2017/8/4/16090758/facebook-google-pro...).
How much innovation happens in unionized fields?
How much work did Uber have to do to essentially go full on rogue to get around the system built up by taxi unions?
How much union work ends up getting either automated or outsourced to countries without union workers?
Do lost jobs count against that average pay stat?
Look at the hoops that Tesla has had to jump through just to sell cars to you directly? Those local car dealers...that's a sales union.
I mean, the National Labor Relations Board gets called in when Boeing wants to open a plant in the south east. We're not even talking off-shoring or cutting jobs.
Unions, like anything, have cyclical benefits. There are times when they make sense. There are others when they don't.
There's no "professional degree" to become a programmer and I'd like to keep it that way.
The AMA tries to restrict the number of doctors in the US and creates crises instead of letting people study to become doctors. Because they're incompetent at the goal of keeping the public healthy, and exceptionally competent at keeping doctor salaries high, you get something indistinguishable from regulatory capture.
No, thank you.
I'm sorry if that was unclear, it was early.