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Comment by wfo | Hacker News Reader

Say it with me friends and colleagues,

Union.

This is the future for all of us, when programming becomes commoditized just as teaching has. When our salaries are pushed to the bottom. We are not owners, we are not capitalists, we are not bosses, we are people with a skill you can learn on the internet and a corresponding talent for it.

Either a) this will happen to us as programmers, b) we have credentialing and gatekeepers to keep supply low c) we have a union to collectively bargain, or d) radical changes in the government save us from this fate.

In the U.S. (d) seems impossible. Programmers as a group seem to be virulently opposed to (b). So choose, unions or barbarism.

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The word "barbarism" is quite an exaggeration.

Teaching salaries are low relative to education level because lots of people are socially pushed toward teaching (obvious example: many people's mentors are teachers). Programming doesn't have this dynamic.

I'm not opposed to unionization - I joined the new grad student union when I was getting my PhD. But I think you should focus on programmers' specific problems, like long hours and low vacation time, not on problems from other jobs which have low relevance.

We aren't there yet, things are still much better for us than teachers, yes. But I'm proposing we do something about it now, while we are in demand and have power instead of waiting until it gets that bad.

Programming and teaching are similar; they are prestige positions (for now) that mark you as one of the professional class, people who do them are by and large hugely passionate and would be unhappy if forced to do something else (many programmers I know started before school because they loved it, do it in their spare time, etc). Passion in capitalism gets taken advantage of and exploited, since dispassionate economic assessment is how a 'rational' actor works in economic models; passion is a weakness from the perspective of wealth accumulation and economic success. The thing that links the fields in my view is passion.

Yup. If you want money, you need leverage. Unions provide that.

As a variation on (b), the supply of programmers can be kept artificially lower via "over-complication and obfuscation", to make basic operations more difficult than it needs to be. It sometimes feels like bureaucracies choose this strategy to keep themselves "necessary" and overpriced.

No sometimes about it! The maim purpose of bureaucracies is to provide those with nothing to contribute an opportunity to parasite themselves on the labour of the genuinely productive.

e) You will no longer be able to call yourself a "full stack" developer that can work in any field. Employers will only look for developers that are good at programming, and a expert in a niche field. For example, bioinformatics.

Your example makes me laugh, having worked with bioinformaticians. A lot of their stuff is just counting stuff from moderately large data sets and making some graphs out of it.

Unions are great at establishing entrenched interests.

If you need to qualify to join a union, or to do a specific job in a union, the qualifications will be owned by the companies which are politically powerful.

Imagine being unable to qualify as a C++ programmer unless and until you've qualified on Microsoft Windows and Visual C++.

Imagine being unable to qualify as a Perl programmer at all, because Perl isn't one of the technologies owned by a major corporation.

And, of course, doing freelance work, or contributing to Open Source, makes you a scab, stealing work from Poor, Honest Union Workers.

>Unions are great at establishing entrenched interests.

s/Unions/Companies/g

Unions can be for unskilled labor. They can exist without qualifications and gatekeeping. That's why I presented that as a distinct option, separate from them. All they need to do is bargain with employers to make working conditions better. That's it. Unpaid overtime "just this once because we're all part of the team, guys" every month? We strike and make a deal that says you have to pay us OT. 80 hour weeks on salary for 40? ops strikes and your system goes down and nobody fixes it until you make a deal and cut hours. Employer tries to put a clause in your contract that says they own your side projects? They have to go through the union first, and programmers vote hell no.

The rest of the stuff you've cooked up inside your head are sure things I can imagine but they have nothing to do with unions; they are imaginary FUD.

Unions still must restrict the supply of labor, or else they're not unions, which would destroy Open Source, or at least Open Source which isn't appendant to a company which pays programmers to work on projects.

Otherwise, by using GNU Emacs, you're depriving a union worker of their wages, and, since GNU Emacs gets updated even when there's a General Strike on, contributors are scabs, and union supporters have, historically, killed scabs.

> Unions still must restrict the supply of labor, or else they're not unions

This is true insofar as setting a floor on any of wages or working conditions is, strictly speaking, a supply restriction.

> which would destroy Open Source

No, it wouldn't.

> Otherwise, by using GNU Emacs, you're depriving a union worker of their wages

I'm a member of a union that represents programmers. None of our contracts restrict the use of open source (or even paid off-the-shelf) products by the employer.

Contracting out custom programming work isn't even prohibited, though it is redtricted.

The massive and well-funded propaganda effort to destroy unions at all costs has been extremely successful, as we can see from your post.

I have never heard of, read, talked to, or even imagined that any living person would consider contributing to open source to be "depriving a union worker of their wages" or "scabbing". Have you ever even heard of an actual existing union before? Have you ever known someone who has participated in (well, let's be generous: imagined) a strike? Has any union ever banned its members from donating their free time to charity? Are you listening to yourself?

You can't imagine anyone could have a conclusion different from yours.

The union propaganda campaign must be working.

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