Well, no, I can bargain individually better than a group could try to on my behalf.
Large corporations have been proven to fix wages for tech workers[1]. There's literally no way that you could have any possible way of bargaining your way around that as a single person.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...
Actually you do, by walking across the street and getting a big fat raise to join a different company. That is one of many reasons engineers by and large don't feel a need to have someone else bargain for them - they negotiate with their feet.
You couldn't walk across the street, because the company across the street agreed not to hire employees from the other company across the street.
The free market isn't always free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
And that’s just the ones they had enough evidence against.
I don't know if the general software developer really needs a union. Some niches certainly do. Game developers are the obvious example of a group of workers who are treated worse than people with comparable skills who do comparable work in other industries. But the idea that we don't need a union because we are already paid well, we are skilled, or we can negotiate for ourselves is naive. Anytime an industry is as wildly profitable as the tech industry is, workers can benefit from a union.
Plus LeBron would be a near billionaire even without cashing a single game check. He makes way more money from being an ambassador of the game than from the game itself. Therefore he has a vested financial interest in the health of the league overall and the hundreds of other players in the NBA.
Back to software development, the question is are you the LeBron James of software development? Are you one of the handful of the best developers on the planet? If you are, I can totally understand why you might be against a union. If you aren't, you could probably benefit from a union.
Deriding legitimate concerns is not how you convince people, and makes it look like you have an agenda.
Wanting better pay and benefits for workers is an agenda, and if making that clear isn't enough (even after accounting for a cons of collective bargaining, union costs, etc), ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Difference between them and myself is, we work completely different jobs, in completely different markets, with completely different incentives.
Why is that an acceptable strategy for your side but not the other side? Could it be that you might both have valid viewpoints?
1) When workers want systemic reform of an organization.
2) When workers are more-or-less interchangeable.
Software engineers aren't interchangeable at all compared to a factory worker, which is why they have such great individual bargaining power and why (historically) they don't really feel a huge need for a union to represent them. Today, software workers have a bit more interest in unionizing because they want to change their organization's high-level goals (e.g. environmental responsibility, not making tools for warfare, hiring diversity, etc).
But both scenarios apply to Amazon warehouse workers, and union representation would almost certainly be a massive benefit for them.
You aren't negotiating against the corporation. You're negotiating against the people who determine your compensation. (This is a seemingly-minor, oft-overlooked and enormously-important distinction.)
Many on this forum have leverage over those people. (Some over the corporation.) For those people, unionization could be a net negative. Recognizing that doesn't mean the idea isn't worth pursuing.