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Comment by jkp56 | Hacker News Reader

The way you said it - "join a union" - made me think that unions may be a good idea in software if anyone can join and leave any time. This would be like insurance that funds a big nonprofit with very motivated (and well paid) lawyers. 250 usd / month shouldn't bankrupt a software dev and 100k such devs (a large corp) would bring 250 M/year. There's definitely a room for a few unions in the US with 200-500 m/year budgets. The first thing to do would be banning non competes at the federal level.

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Although the idea is promising, 250 a month is too high. At 100k, your bring home is roughly 70(varies greatly by state). And then you'd pay almost 5% of that to a union to help insure your job. My mom's Union fees were well below 1% of her bring home.

Should be deductible at least. Unfortunately, I did Google it, and they are not, though they were before the recent tax law (though they were counted employer expenses which meant almost no 'normal employee' would be able to do so).

That being said, we're a smart group. We should easily be able to find some loophole just like all the big corps do. Couldn't we form a LLC, all become members, and use the fees as an investment loss each year? When it pays out a severance, pay taxes on the income as you would with employer provided disability insurance.

But yeah, even a $100 / month would be enough, I think, to start it off.

Let's get 1000 members * $100 * 12 and that's $1.2M a year. To start, hire two very good lawyers at $250K / year and a few other auxiliary staff, create a union-only forum that's easily searchable, and start populating it with anecdotes.

I think a union is a different structure than LLC and plays by different rules. Regardless, the first step should be talking to a proper attorney who can explain what requirements need to be met to make this organisation a union.

Rule of thumb I head somewhere is that union dues should be around half hour of wage per week, assuming full time employment. Not sure what it would be for part timers.

Half an hour out of forty hours is 1.25%.

For GP's 70K per annum wage that is 73 dollars a month.

In the UK I'm free to join and leave a union any time I want. My monthly cost is £20. That's about US$25.

If you're on a lower income, you pay less.

Which union if you don't me asking?

How do you find the service/them generally?

https://www.prospect.org.uk/

I've been with them for about 15 years and very happy with their service, training, etc.

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