There is also the FSF, numerous hacker camps and conferences aimed at women (Grace Hopper Celebration, etc).
I'm very skeptical on the need for a broad coalition of tech professionals.
Meanwhile more and more tech workers are crammed into open office sweat shops while labor laws in multiple jurisdictions are getting changes and exceptions to our detriment.
I think we're idealistic. Perhaps we think protectionist associations shouldn't need to exist. A few of us do extremely well and we think that somehow if we can play our cards right we can have it too. Unions have lost both their power and respect. We're generally less social.
Unfortunately, we don't live in the Star Trek universe. We live in a capitalist environment. We've seen from models like scrum that communication and collaboration create better outcomes, so it shouldn't surprise us that professions that collaborate generally do better for their members.
Capitalism drives pressures to find the cheapest way to develop. Outsourcing to 3rd world countries has turned out to be difficult, and now we are trying to see how much real estate expense we can avoid by cramming people together. Luckily, this appears to damage both mental health and productivity.
This isn't just about us, but also about children and future tech workers. Will we leave them lawyer's offices or sweat shops?
Here's a great open office design https://i.pinimg.com/originals/52/d4/e0/52d4e0dca05a63f42516...
The comparison to sweat shops rubs me the wrong way. When I was saving money for university, I worked 40 hour weeks in fast food. It was grueling, it paid minimum wage and I fell asleep exhausted each day. I saw people work 60 hour weeks in that job to try to live off it. But, that job still pales in comparison to a real sweat shop.
I'm an EE. I have all the qualifications needed to go into a field with a professional association guarding the entrance. I even worked summers in engineering departments. But, I chose software because it was better.
I feel like you're making comparisons to jobs you have no direct experience with.
I think an assembly line (as pictured in the post) is a much better comparison. Assembly lines are legal and popular, their goal is to lower costs for the company as much as possible. In most cases, the comfort of the employee isn't a big consideration as the goal is to lower costs. They are noisy and they aren't great work environments. I do not want to work on an assembly line.
The open floor plan office, in my opinion, is very similar to an assembly line. Employees are in close proximity to one another and lack personal space or any kind of privacy. If you need to make a call, you need to leave your desk and go into the hall, bathroom, etc. Unlike the cubes of the past (which were not well loved) there's no place to put pictures of loved ones or to safely store reference material (manuals not available online, etc.) They are noisy and, as has been pointed out, they are harmful to the employees physical and mental well being. I do not want to work in an open floorplan office.
http://vanessaauditore.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/privac...
What if your boss asks you to build a database to help the government track Muslims/illegal immigrants etc and you're uncomfortable with that?
If you supported the FSF, that might improve your chances of being able to build the database using free software.
Whereas if you unionized, that might improve your chances of being able to refuse to build the database in the first place.
And what if you're uncomfortable with much of the revenue you generate for your company going to the idle shareholders rather than your fellow workers?
Unionizing can help there too. Imagine if software companies were owned by workers themselves. That could be a reality if more of us unionized.
The EFF's focus is 'technical' only in the sense that it's restricted to topics which involve some kind of electronics. They've been campaigning against digital surveillance and mass profiling since before most politicians have been aware the issue mattered.
(The FSF isn't especially relevant here, but neither is the Sierra Club; you simply picked an issue they don't work on.)
It's true that the EFF won't save your job if you refuse to build a tracking database, but frankly I'm a bit confused what you think unions would do here. Unionization has a great track record on labor rights, but that looks more like "only spending 40 hours per week building the database". Union status isn't usually relevant to employees outright refusing assignments because of their conscience. And the EFFs focus here makes sense; as long as someone is willing to build the database (say, the sort of people who write malware for the government), opposing the plan overall is more important than opposing some specific contracting deal for it.
The move to revenue is a non sequitur which kind of looks like your real reason for focusing on unions, but I'm still not exactly sold. Software companies already distribute stock more than other companies, and have salaries as an unusually high portion of overall costs.
Meanwhile, "worker owned" and "unionized" are fundamentally different things, and I see no evidence that one leads to the other. Unionization usually happens as a response to not owning the company, and having no way to become owners. Software companies are vastly more likely to be some form of worker-owned (e.g. startup, co-op, stock-granting employer) than most business, which has historically been one reason they don't unionize.
Somehow I also don't think that union will be political neutral, so I won't be building the muslim database, but I will be building the "who has a gun license" database.
And, on top of that, fail to recognize that some problems are inherently social, and ignoring that and failing to address them as such doesn't make them solvable by other means, it makes them nonsolvable.