I’m skeptical because I don’t necessarily trust the people who would be at the top of a union to align with my preferences better than status quo. Some of the orthodox opinions in the community are not mine. But it would go something like this:

Despite tech workers’ financial power, management gets away with many widely unpopular working conditions. Think of the ubiquity of open offices, or of offices in general. Or sprints, or story points, or JIRA. Or the prioritization of new feature work over reliability and refactoring. Or the infamous crunch time near a deadline. Or the unfairness and perverse incentives in a promotion process. Coworkers making more than you because they joined at a lower stock price or had better counteroffers. Theoretically, workers could get more control over these conditions.

There are also many things programmers are asked to build, which at least the loudest among us find reprehensible. This includes anything to do with advertising, personal data, aggressive sales practices, dark patterns, etc. Programmers could reduce the prevalence of these things by collectively refusing to work on them. Even informal rumblings made some headway on this kind of thing at Google.

Finally there is a more general leftist solidarity angle where programmers could “make the world a better place” by using their own indispensability to leverage their employers into better pay and conditions for others. Kitchen staff, cleaning crew, even gig workers contracted through the platforms they work on. Tech workers have a better chance of getting this sort of thing done by contract than by legislation.