So far it seems to me that software engineers already have a pretty good position on the market. Would it be improved through unionisation?
Software engineers in the "regular" industry indeed are better off without unions. There's no obvious problem that unions would solve, and there are costs (unions in general add inefficiency).
In gamedev, though, salaries are low and work/life balance is traditionally very poor. I can see why some Epic workers decided to consider unionizing.
How do we know that?
And it's not about offshoring a-la 1995 or 2005. It's about building the whole company outside of the US, only having minimal presence here for fundraising / legal / whatever. There is already a number of startups executing this strategy; unions will immediately make it a no-brainer for all new companies.
Most of the high-skilled tech hubs I'm aware of outside the US are in countries with stronger worker protections than the US, and often more unionization too. (This does vary, absolutely - worker rights are greater in Berlin or Paris than they are in Zurich or London.)
Now, for low-paid low-skilled workers, the situation might be different, but those aren't determinative of where a tech company is based long-term, and the union would be best if it spans all skill levels.
Unions aren't just a US thing, by the way. Hello from Quebec where unions are far more common than anywhere in the US. Even undergraduate university students are typically unionized here, complete with strikes and cross-university federations with elected leadership. Much of Europe is also far more unionized than the US, though certainly not the part of it you referenced by Eastern Europe (maybe aside from Finland).
- No more stack ranking or other absurd professional advancement schemes
- Refusing unethical business practices (to take an example in the spotlight again, reusing 2FA phone numbers for any other purpose)
- Refusing unethical business relationships (China, ICE)
- Higher liquidation preferences for more employees
- Working hours (end of "unlimited" vacation; on-call restrictions; prior to COVID, WFH)
- Racial and sexual harassment across vertical hierarchies (unions alone won't solve these problems in tech - they can even make horizontal harassment worse if union leadership is not committed to this goal - but could have ousted e.g. Gundotra or Drummond much sooner)
Also what about people who have different preferences? You might get lucky and the brave new world of software unions will push for exactly those conditions. Unluckily for me, I have very different preferences.
Why does that only apply when people are trying to dismiss the value of unions or discourage their colleagues from forming a union with their coworkers? Surely if you didn't want to work in a union shop, but a majority of your coworkers did, it'd be on you to just find a new employer.
Though one caveat: that simple analysis only applies for as long as employers are legally allowed to refuse to hire union members.
Then anti-union me can go to some anti-union company. We write in our employment contract that I won't join a union, and that the company will never hire any union members, and we live happily ever after.
You can try to think through the consequences of giving unions various legal privileges. Eg if for example, a company can't legally discriminate against union members in hiring nor fire an established employee who joins a union despite having promised not to, things might be different. Especially if you add in common extra privileges like banning employers from firing striking unions members or if picketing is legalised etc.
Why or why not?
Well, FAANG themselves certainly worries they will, they keep firing the organizers.
Very real problems in the tech industry, all of which a union could help with, and none of which require the clearly mismatched "you can't touch that socket - call the union electrician" contract provisions from industries like trade shows that the anti-union people like to overfocus on.
In terms of salaries, the only effective tool unions have to increase them is their ability to exclude people from employment. You can see this having a great effect with the ALPA, AMA and Bar Associations, who have all succeed in making becoming a pilot, doctor or lawyer incredibly expensive, difficult and time intensive. Regardless of the true underlying motives, their success in keeping people out of the professions is why they’re all so highly paid. This is also why union organisers believe they should have the right to prevent non-union members from seeking employment in a company they are striking against (and call such people scabs).
The more ordinary trade unions are typically much less successful in having any significant impact on salaries, because their only meaningful tool for constraining supply is the temporary impact of striking.
Unions also usually serve as a levelling mechanism, where CBAs aim to reduce the difference in remuneration between the more productive and the less productive members of staff. So whether that’s effective for any particular person would depend on how productive they are, potentially having a negative impact, positive impact, or little impact at all.
The single area where unions can easily have the most positive impact is in enforcing compliance with employment laws. It’s much harder for employers to skirt employment law when employees have union representation (unless the union in question is one of the many “yellow unions”, who primarily protect the interests of employers over employees). The flip side of that is that it is of course much harder to fire poorly performing employees (try firing a corrupt cop for instance).
This is not true. Capitalists and managers often take large profits and salaries that could go to workers instead.
Striking can have an influence on supply, but it’s influence is very limited by the fact that striking can at best represent a temporary disruption to business. How much an employer could potentially afford is not relevant as long as there is somebody willing to do the job for less.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/retail/2020/07/16/us-jus...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/bankruptc...
https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2017/11/22/bankrupt...
It’s irrelevant anyway, because that’s not how wages are set. Please explain why you think a company would choose to pay a union member more than a non-union member would be willing to do the job for.