But what if another programmer is willing to make me a million for only 25%?
That's how markets work. You get paid what what the market will bear, not what you "should" make.
That's how markets work. You get paid what what the market will bear, not what you "should" make.
My comment was more about the companies though which may form cartels to drive down employee wages. Companies forming cartels is illegal, while unions are legal in many places.
In the US, union workers make between 10% to 30% more than their non-union peers[1].
You're comparing pay across two different economies and only looking at unionization as a variable. It's like wondering why engineer rates in Omaha, Nebraska aren't on par with those in New York, and concluding that it has something to do with differing fire codes.
Correct, but these protections exist (and existed at the time) independent from a union.
> In the US, union workers make between 10% to 30% more than their non-union peers
There's very few high-skill jobs which are commonly unionized. In a market where supply is greater than demand, then yes unions have absolutely shown to improve worker outcomes[1]. I'm not aware of any evidence for markets where demand outstrips supply (like that for skilled software engineers). It's not immediately clear that union protections would be beneficial.
>You're comparing pay across two different economies and only looking at unionization as a variable.
No, I'm simply pointing out that your flippant response to esoterica doesn't actually address the question. If unions are better for workers, why is it that a non-union area !!with a cartel depressing wages!! was still substantially better for workers than a unioned area with no such issue?
Saying "oh the market is different" ignores the question of why the market is different.
[1]: Indeed, that's kind of exactly what happened with this cartel. Facebook wanted to hire skilled engineers, and was willing to pay more, so broke the cartel. That kind of thing won't happen when workers are generally equivalent, but SWEs aren't.
Sure there are. Doctors and actors, to name just a couple. In both cases the "union" actively works to create barriers to entry.
The AMA colludes with medical schools to set artificially-low student body quotas. If you've ever wondered why teaching "XYZ for pre-meds" is such a miserable experience, this is why. You have to earn straight A's to get into med school because there are so many more qualified candidates than openings (but it's not clear to me how, say, art history or algebra-based physics makes you a better doctor).
SAG (the screen actors guild) requires actors to have already performed in a SAG production a a condition of membership. And they also strictly limit the number of non-SAG performers on SAG productions. That chicken-and-egg problem was very intentional
If you've ever taken a macro economics course, you know what effect these actions have on prices.
> I'm not aware of any evidence for markets where demand outstrips supply (like that for skilled software engineers). It's not immediately clear that union protections would be beneficial.
See above. Unions can create a market where demand outstrips supply.
> If unions are better for workers, why is it that a non-union area !!with a cartel depressing wages!! was still substantially better for workers than a unioned area with no such issue? Saying "oh the market is different" ignores the question of why the market is different.
So tell me why professional associations exist, then. Why do doctors form a union to increase wages, if as you say, they would be better off without it?
Neither the SAG nor the AMA are unions in the traditional sense. In many ways, the AMA actively works against worker quality of life (consider that the horrible conditions for med students/residents and the high suicide rate among MDs) to artificially reduce supply.
>Why do doctors form a union to increase wages, if as you say, they would be better off without it?
The AMA is mainly a lobbying organization, not a union. Since a significant percentage of doctors are in private practices or small practices, they don't have representation with the government. So sure, the AMA does collectively bargain with the US Government. But by that same token, since 53% of MDs are self employed, the AMA can't do "normal" union things like set wages, because there's no one to bargain with except the doctors themselves.
And interestingly, the AMA actually admitted that its intentional supply-reduction is hurting the medical industry as a whole. To answer your question, "because they thought it would be better". But in hindsight, they probably weren't.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
I suspect your posting in bad faith here and in the usa SAG minimum rates doesn't effect the higher rates that successful actors get.
Another way to see it, collective bargaining goes both ways, ie both workers and employers will come to a joint agreement. So if we created a FAANG engineers union and created a joint pay-scale for them, then that would basically be equivalent to the non poaching agreement often derided in discussions like this.
Not all union models have sector bargaining and it certainly doesn't work for professional unions - and I am not saying that European unions really get the needs of m&P members and need to change.
Issue 1: It's very difficult to tell if your contribution got 50% improvement in performance because there were 10 other devs pushing in features and bug fixes. This is the attribution problem
Issue 2: This happens over time. It's very unlikely that your 50% improvement happens every year or month. Because, think for your self, this is compounding with large rates. It grows quickly. 1.5x improvement in 6 cycles (months or years) is 10x. This essentially is the time problem
Issue 3: even if you deliver the results you did, in a large company there's a large bureaucracy and no one person has the ability to increase your salary by that much. This is the control problem.
It’s avtually fairly non-trivial to be able to say with even a modicum of certainty how much value a given developer brings to their company.
I currently write software used by millions of people. Partly because I’m a backend engineer, I have no real idea how much more the company is making due to my direct efforts. Since they keep paying me, I’m assuming it’s a decent multiple of my carrying cost, but I have no way to measure it.
In every other aspect of computers, the industry has finally embraced usability as a desirable goal, and not just for end-users.
On my first computer, you had to read a 100-page user manual and learn exactly what commands to type. In my first programming language, you had to manually allocate (and worse, deallocate) memory. With my first database, we used to have to go type VACUUM regularly. None of these is true today.
Yet even though some of the highest paid people in the world are members of unions and have agents to do their negotiating, programmers seem to have latched onto this idea that if you're not making top dollar or have your ideal working conditions, you should "just negotiate better".
Why stop there? Tell programmers they should "just program better", too.
> You can also unionize
Have you ever organized? I don't think you realize how difficult this is, especially without strong support from an existing union. There's a reason unions heap rewards on people who do it.
Existing unions also have great labor lawyers. A common response to even thinking about unionization is getting fired. (That was in the news recently because it happened 4 weeks ago here in Seattle.) Labor laws aren't what they once were, and there's usually no consequence to the company for firing organizers.
Flipside: I can still write software for my first computer without looking anything up, over 30 years after reading those 100 pages. I still know the memory layout, opcodes, assembly etc by heart and it is still the best way today to program that particular computer (which still works in my man cave) today. Yes, today it is all simpler, but the 100 page example I find a plus, not a negative. Maybe you were referring to something but my 100+ page manual was usage and at the same time programming (using was programming beyond the basics) as that was the only way to use the system.
In other words, markets work that way because that's how the bosses and capitalists want it to work, and have so far been successful at thwarting attempts to use the government to change things.