I think tech workers are currently in a weaker position but still a fairly strong position to unionize. There are plenty of people still employed enough to be able to support those laid off, and tech workers as a whole earn enough that many should hav a significant savings for emergencies like strikes. I think we should be organizing to have similar protections like a guild, where we guarantee minimum quality of treatment for us workers but no maximum on perks and wages, not even pegged to tenure.

Strikes are probably the least effective tactic for a tech union. Software isn't a coal mine or a railway. Plenty of products have glided along for a while with very few people maintaining them. Sometimes even zero.

I imagine if we do see tech collective action it'll probably be done quietly in the form of silently exploding technical debt, with documentation that misleads more than it informs and products that collapse under the weight of their own unmaintainability.

This has me wondering, how might a union be formed so as to avoid common misbehaviors of unions? I’m aware of many examples of unions behaving pathologically, but well-run unions hardly make headlines. Are there any noteworthy examples of the latter?

Off the top of my head, paths to explore would include:

- no full-time/paid positions as union officials

- term limits on union officials

- limited budget

Perhaps I’m naive, but the last item seems especially appealing. I don’t quite see why unions need big budgets, as it seems to me their activities should more or less revolve around the kind of collective discussions that can take place on Zoom or a forum. As such, expenses would be more or less limited to operational expenses for these tools.

I’d actually consider joining a union that was sufficiently restricted in scope, and narrow in its focus.

The trickier question is how to avoid the failure mode of unions defending known-bad employees. Having worked a few union jobs in the past, there were more than a handful of colleagues I sincerely wished would get fired, but for whom the union afforded undue protection.

> The best time to unionize is when you're in a strong bargaining position to set a sustainable baseline in your first contract and build the infrastructure to make a strike credible. Unions are strongest when they have a huge fund to support their members through a strike.

I might be wrong, but I don't think the average employee salary would be nearly as high as they are, given unionisation costs quite a lot of money, that drives up the cost per-employee massively. You might say now is the best moment ever to do this, but I don't see why that would be true.

This was thought to be the solution in the 90's en early 00's, offshore everything (basically wfh but wf-lower-income-country). Turns out it works sometimes but is hardly a panacea.

Digital work leaves lots of traces. Unions, at least where I live, will kick you out for strike breaking.

I had an idea regarding this. What if a new CC license was developed for open source projects where that code could only be used by union-participant companies/individuals?

that's such a good point. hell they could just have them create a new app.

While I don’t agree with your hot take, it would be amazing if all the C-suite hand wringing about RTO being the best thing ever resulted in strong unions as a result.