Plenty of people from my college and department genuinely think they are smarter than everyone else.
This blinds them to the kind of street smarts required to understand even basic ideas of how to not get exploited, the utility of unions, power dynamics between employers and employees.
It somewhat makes sense, many devs grew up smart and were told they were smart from a young age. You need to be to do the job. It becomes part of their identity and is a glaring blind spot for many.
I’ve worked with way too many devs that were so afraid of being wrong or had to prove they were right and were taken advantage of because of it.
But apparently that makes me stupid, I don't see why that is dumb. Being manipulated to want to work is a good thing if you want the money.
See how you needed to use a teaching example to not make it sound bad?
If you could choose between starting a union or becoming a manager, then becoming a manager will almost always be a better payoff for your own time.
Not everyone is seeking to optimize local maxima while making the world worse.
I admit this was a blindspot for me, and it was mostly a representation problem. simply put, all the examples I had were blue collar jobs, paying a cut of their lesser (but union inflated) salary to a union organization they had issues with.
I saw high profile futility. Union tried to negotiate something expensive, the company collapsed and laid off the entire town. People marching in a circle for 3 months in one city, against a multinational corporation that shouldn't really need to care. The people forming unions making demands that didn't seem ambitious enough.
I felt I was optimizing my salary, based on the current reality. But I've come to a different view, mostly that others in the working class are pitted against each other. Like, other workers are dismissive to highly compensated employees because of the numbers involved. But this is only beneficial to the executives, board and owners. I'm dismayed at how this sounds like a marxist handbook, instead of looking at how other developed nations do it. I've been inspired by codetermination in Germany, where the unions has like half of the board seats by law. Its like that perspective is completely missing in the US, in favor of false dilemmas trying to avoid marxist leanings.
I think more education on this topic is beneficial. People react to what they see.
Guess who's to thank for that German policy...it begins with an 'M' and ends with 'ists.'
Even though that is not possible in the US, I think there is room for inspiration from a working system which can reach consensus. If there was more knowledge of that, plenty of people and representatives in the US would say "huh, that's actually a good idea". Worker board representation so to have influence on decisions that affect workers, not just the trendiest companies giving some shares out willy nilly.
The policy has been good for workers in Germany, and might be the best example of how universal material demands for (actual) worker power are extremely popular in practice. Not even the most conservative German politician would dare challenge the policy in public.
It is, nonetheless, unsustainable. Without the threat of the Soviet Union, pro-worker legislation is losing its necessity in legitimating the Western ruling class. Once its founding generation is gone in a few decades, the policy will dissolve along with them, short of a newfound radical workers movement throughout the EU.