At some point engineers & scientists of various disciplines need to form country-wide unions. Imagine for a moment that CS & software engineers, electrical engineers, MechE's, ChemE, CivE's, etc. formed unions and then maybe collaborated to occasionally act an unified super-union.
Those unions would wield incredible power over national economic policy and the dealings in a lot of company board rooms.
I am completely with you morally, but with the amounts we make, I have a very hard time seeing it ever get any traction.
If the workers ever unite in a real way, we could possibly make something happen in that context, but I have a hard time seeing that too. I can more easily see robot slaves getting here first.
As someone who lives in LA, and is very close with people who work in the industry, the unions should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from
The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families.
There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year.
The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.
Imagine if software engineers could hop from project to project at different companies working on just things they were interested in?
Part of the guilds’ power is that they have rules and agreements with the other unions that disallow using non-union labor if other union labor is involved. Or if certain rules are broken. Bargaining is much more powerful when the actual product cannot be shipped if the unions strike or don’t work on your project. Software does not really have this restriction.
And as someone who also has many friends across various roles in the Industry (and once tried to break in), there is one not-oft talked about downside: it is rather difficult to get into the guilds, with a lot of unpaid internships and nepotism involved. And even with the great union contracts, hours are long, the work sometimes dirty, and the culture on set often times incredibly toxic.
So yes. The guild model probably the one that is more applicable to SWEs. But also don’t copy the model Hollywood has built too closely.
The USA has enterprise bargaining. Sectoral bargaining was proposed. But the corporations (plantation class) nerfed it.
The comparative power of Labor, USA vs EU, speaks the merits of sectoral over enterprise bargaining.
"Sectoral collective bargaining is an aim of trade unions or labor unions to reach a collective agreement that covers all workers in a sector of the economy. It contrasts to enterprise bargaining where agreements cover individual firms. Generally countries with sectoral collective bargaining have higher rates of union organisation and better coverage of collective agreements than countries with enterprise bargaining."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and the banks owns their cars and homes, so it’s much harder to unionize now than it was in the 1800s.
Working-class French know how to strike.
Lawyers have it good. They’re the smart ones. They made it illegal to own a law firm unless you’re a lawyer. Because “shareholders vs clients would be a conflict of interest”. No more so than other industries!
Bridge designer or aerospace engineers vs shareholders seems an even greater conflict of interest than lawyers. Engineers should create the same arrangements for their own work. Instead of trying to be a “staff” engineer at a big tech company you’d try to be a partner at a tech firm…
It might be that outside of Marx's text that were already dubious in the 1800s people know that "surplus value" is a BS one-dimensional concept that totally disregards time-value, risk appetite and a preferrence for stable income vs moon-shots.
What makes you think unionizing and striking was ever easy?
https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/homeste...
https://www.iup.edu/library/departments/archives/coal/unions...
BTW, Layoff is the natural consequence of over hire, but did you feel angry when companies are over hiring? Probably not. It means employees are just as blind as employers.
I am more than happy to continue negotiating on my own as I always have. I don't trust anyone to do that on my behalf.
A union could say something like "if you want any union workers, you can't have more than X% of open jobs be to non-union workers (or non-US workers)". This is pretty standard fare, and I doubt most (US) companies would forgo US software engineers entirely.
Look at yelp, their official hiring policy is almost "anywhere but the bay". (its technically more nuanced, and closer to "distributed across major global metros", but basically the implication is lower cost workers outside of SF.
If that pay attracts someone from the Bay Area, what’s the problem at all? If it doesn’t, what’s the problem vs the current policy?
If you’re an American software engineer, inside or outside the Bay Area, that’s a worrying trend.
A license creates scarcity, and deputizes a few people as “licensed” which grants them some special privileges. But not quality of life privileges, work privileges. My mother is a licensed engineer in another discipline. She has to “stamp” or approve anything before it can be built. A lot of her job is resisting management requests for her to stamp everyone else’s work (cheaper unlicensed engineers). She says the extra job security is more than ruined with extra stress and fighting. If she says someone else’s work is inadequate… it’s a problem for everyone including her to fix. So… we could require that licensed software engineers approve all code reviews that go to production…? But not do anything to mandate quality of life improvements. You couldn’t even prevent outsourcing because you can have one licensed American whose sole job is approving the overseas code reviews. They may not even be team specific. Sounds terrible to me.
The benefit of a union is negotiation. A Union could say “no unpaid oncall”, and “you have to hire x% union workers”. With a license…? How would you enact those protections? How would you slow layoffs, or ensure jobs don’t get outsourced? One thing people always forget: unions don’t have to dictate pay.
There are examples of unions today. Google had a union. It wasn’t very popular because no one thought they needed it, but it was there. Most government jobs in the US have a union. Hollywood actors have a union, and those actors get paid very well. The union uses the actors as bargaining power - if you want the famous actor, you need the union cameraman and sound guy. It prevents a lot of the behind-the-scenes work from being outsourced.
It works for film due to some historical circumstances but don’t known if it will work for software
Movies are done and gone, software can live and need updates forever.
If google wanted to outsource, they could hire people globally, with very little cost or efficiency loss. All else being equal, a dev in Baton Rouge (or Bogota, or Buenas Aires, or Bangalore) is as productive as one in San Jose. And it doesn't cost anything extra to bring one on.