Even software engineers are labor man. If it isn't livable for regular people, what the fuck is the point?
My dad was involved in trying to unionize engineers at GE, a long time ago. There was a vote, but it didn't quite make it. It wasn't until like a quarter century after he died that I realized he might not have retired early by choice.
I have zero details on it, all I know is that it was pre-Jack Welch, and probably the majority of the engineers felt that they were too good for a union.
I am a member of a union that has a long and convoluted history, but I think the origin was basically about how office workers didn't want to belong to the same union as everyone else.
People said this was folly, that it was splitting the power of the employees to our detriment.
When I was in union you negotiated as a group. You bring up the bottom and pull down the top. Seniority determines most of your compensation, not performance.
When can you negotiate as an individual?
Is the scenario you have in mind when there is an actual bidding war, when you go into a negotiation of salary with an actual offer from another firm, and neither one is offended enough to eliminate you from consideration?
How often does that happen to you and how often do you think it happens in general?
No bidding war required. And nobody is offended. And it happens pretty often for white collar work in high demand industries.
Just wondering, do you not negotiate? If so, you might be losing out on many multiples of your current compensation.
[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
[1] https://github.com/vlvagerviwager/salary-negotiation-tech
You don't actually need another job on hand to negotiate terms. It's also up to you what you want to haggle over, money or holiday, on call duties, etc.
I think the key is agency. If you have it, you can negotiate. If you're always in a terrible negotiating position like certain blue collar workers, it makes sense to be in a union.
Mind you, I'm not sure if would be bad for white collar workers to unionize. Doctors for instance are white collar and have unions.
You can always try. If you have always made market rate, then have you ever really negotiated anything? To benefit from negotiation skills, you would have to be making way below market and then somehow convince someone to pay you what others are making. And do it without flat out lying.
Edit: In my experience, older folks are easier to sell on the idea because they’ve seen how the sausage is made and have had enough time to have possibility convert to reality. Younger folks are still…more optimistic than the data suggests is realistic.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
At Amazon and Uber? The problem is that they aren't not millionaires; they're mkaing 250k-650k/yr. At those companies, even in extremely high CoL, you can pay the landlord his due and be a millionaire in 5-10 years.
At least in the US, they aren’t temporarily embarrassed, they actually are millionaires in many cases. Software engineering today may have one the highest expected ROIs of any occupation in history.
Now if they walked off the job for a year, then things might change because it could cost their bottom line meaningfully. Maybe. But. And this is a big but. The companies are sitting on tens of billions of dollars in the bank and have private police forces on campus. I’m pretty sure they’ll pay extra for any strike breakers to come in if it came to that to avoid setting the bad precedent (from their perspective) that labor is an equal party to meaningful negotiations. The police force will try to ensure the safety of the strike breakers. The company will also go on a PR offensive to magnify any small misstep to overwhelm the bigger story.