"Athletes unionize" is one of the better arguments I've heard for why devs should.
I'm curious to learn more about the origins of the players' union.
I'm curious to learn more about the origins of the players' union.
And especially, note that unions are wage fixing cartels!
Besides that though there are a few other things that don't come up in white collar environments. One is career tenure. I think NFL is the shortest average career length for North American sports at something like 2-3 years. In MLB non-elite players who are 30+ are now becoming less likely to get picked up by teams after hitting free agency, meaning the median career for a successful career is something more like 6-7. Athletes in such a situation don't have any leverage to sit out a whole year, which can represent 14%-50% of their lifetime earnings in the primary thing they spent their youth training on. Athletes also have to worry about physical injury that don't exist in white collar environments, which has led, for example, to changing touchback rules in football and adding a 26th man to the roster in baseball this season.
You're burying the lede there: the careers, particularly in sports like football, are short because sports actively break people. Athletes can tear their ACLs and alter their ability to walk or run for years, or end up with traumatic brain injuries that permanently alter their personality. After 5 years they're used up and cast aside -- and who in the public remembers a 2nd string Linebacker?
Given the immense amount of training, suffering, and injury... I'd come to the same conclusion re: bargaining.
Most European countries have a professional football players union, and their contracts are owned by the club, and not within a monopoly like with American sports. The same goes for referees, coaches, managers, etc.
Again, the amount of money these people are paid can be very high, and while many players don't use the union for things like negotiating pay, they rely on the union for other types of representation.
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
That professional sports are monopolies and monopsonies isn't particularly relevant to this point.
The fact that tech workers can find a job elsewhere is even more motiviation to unionize because you have even more bargaining power and there are smaller risks.
What are you talking about. That’s entirely relevant. What’s not relevant is that the workers are rich. Market dynamics are the entirety of what determines your compensation and working conditions. Being able to leave for a competitor is pretty all the leverage you’re ever going to have.
I suppose you could argue that's happening out of employer generosity? And that they're more generous when there's a union?
Does that hold for unprofitable VC-subsidized companies? They might go bankrupt if VCs are turned off by a unionized workforce in the next round.
However, there is significant evidence in blue-collar and white-collar industries, and in artistic and athletic fields, that unions increased members' earnings.
That sports leagues are actually very relevant. See for example from https://theundefeated.com/features/all-22-why-decertificatio... :
>Counterintuitively, the owners benefit from the existence of a union as well. The existence of unions allows leagues to operate under rules that are in violation of federal antitrust law, which is why decertifying has been the most impactful threat to leagues.
That same article goes on to explain how unions actually in some ways have acted against the interest of athletes in some way, since the collective bargaining agreements that they entered in to have locked in conditions for years that would not make sense in a more free floating market.
Even the best NFL athletes used to have day jobs. The 2014 minimum base salary for MLS players was just $48,500 (which increased to $7x,xxx in 2019 as a result of the union renegotiating pay scales). On average (median or mode), a professional soccer player will make less than an entry-level programmer in the valley, despite a significantly smaller potential workforce.
Some of the increase in pay is due to the union, and they should be applauded for that, but part of the increase in pay in all these leagues also is due in part to the increase in revenues from media deals
Here's what the NFLPA has on their website: https://www.nflpa.com/about/history
One of the reasons I like it as an example is it shows how much more a union can do than simply negotiate raises, and that they don't even have to do that part at all! You can collectively bargain over anything, and also a union can theoretically serve as a type of association that has other benefits. There's room for a ton of innovation and creativity here.
You don't see people argue that their union means mediocre football players can't get fired. The values of the workers can absolutely be shared by the union (the players are the union) -- and if you want to negotiate for even higher pay rather than making it harder to fire folks, you can do that.
When he started, MLB players hated hearing him out because they thought he was a communist. Talk about a situation where people cut off their nose to spite their faces!