However, the union has pushed for better regulations. When I started my career 5 years ago for instance, I had to sign a non-compete. Almost every offer had one, as an individual I couldn't do much. The union however helped pass legislation so those general non-competes are illegal, and can only be used for very specific purposes. When I got offers, they would also look over the contracts, tell me what I should be expected to be paid etc, giving me more knowledge and backing as a rookie (vs big cos). The yearly salary statistics is detailed and useful for me every year.

The union also collectively bargains for other stuff. For instance my mortgage rate is far lower through their offer than anything else I've found. The member fee (~400 yearly?) pays it self many times over just from this.

So I think this works great. Everyone on here always paints unions as these monoliths, but they don't have to be. I am still valued as a singular, but for the big stuff we're numerous.

Just because I'm being paid outrageously high, doesn't mean I shouldn't also be getting paid more.

As for software engineers (apart from SQL ones who would of read your UNION JOIN as a whole different sentence), most grown up in a work environment that has seen the need for Unions moot as tech companies shifted in perks/remunerations that exceeded what many a Union could of dreamed of achieving. That alone seen the driver for Unions moot in many eye's, combined with a lack of tech focused Unions and the shift from lifer work mentality to few years being classed a long time at a company. Times changed and moved faster than many Unions.

However, many tech companies grown to the stage that they ain't all software engineers and the size/scale of them has seen them grow to the stage that some level of check like a Union wouldn't go amiss and opinions about unions as a whole been slowly improving in the past few years after decades of disdain. Thing is, what type of Union and is the need for a larger more tech orientated Union or lots of smaller ones? That's the crux.

Though when I started in tech, the worry about competition bugging the water cooler was the edge-case worry, today it's the company itself that has become that worry and less of an edge-case as well. So clearly the use of Unions does have some safety in voice for employee's.

It really struct me one day at work, as myself and all of my coworkers watched in horror as "leadership" made decisions after decision that we all felt not only made our lives worse, but were fundamentally bad decisions for the health of the company, how powerful the ideological tools are that keep us from questioning who has a say in the future of a company.

One of the key reasons there weren't more peasant revolutions was a combination of violence to suppress this, and, more importantly, ideological tools to keep peasants in line. That we still read our kids stories about how great princesses and kings are is evidence of how strong this feudal propaganda is.

Especially at software companies, the hardworking engineers are why the company can exist at all. How many times have engineers deeply cared about things such as quality of the code base, giving back to open source communities, or even things like ethical treatment of coworkers and users?

But we have been trained to treat CEOs and "leadership" like divinely ordained kings. Sure the VCs and Founders have laid out the capital to run the company, but capital alone does not make the company.

Have you never worked at a company where software engineers are forced by management to make very bad technical choices? Have you never been in a room where everyone working on the project sees clearly it will be a disaster but has absolutely zero say in the decisions around it? Have you never seen your company do questionably illegal or unethical things, where everyone working on the project wishes that they could stop things, but no individual wants to handle the risk of being a whistle-blower and having their career destroyed?

Imagine a startup or large tech company where collectively the engineers had a voice on par with the c-suite. Where they could say "I know that we have quarterly goals to meet, but we refused to ship new product until we have our infra in a least a semi-stable state. This will allow us to ship faster in the future and it's important for the company"

or

"We strongly believe that while this current feature does generate slightly more revenue, it is intentionally deceptive to users and ultimately harmful to them and our product, so we would like to see it changed or removed"

or

"X,Y and Z Open source products have saved us tremendous amount of capital, to continue to keep these ecosystems we depend on healthy, we demand that N hours a month be actively devoted to giving back to these projects"

or

"I know you are unhappy with employee 123, primarily because they have openly questioned the decisions of management. However they have no records of outright insubordination and are considered a valuable member of the technical team, so we will fight your request to fire them."

Labor having a voice is about far more than just salaries and benefits like it is for factory workers. And if you think the solution is just that engineering management needs to better represent their teams, then you likely haven't worked in management.