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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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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