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Comment by 0zemp2c | Hacker News Reader

Good luck...the "scabs" crossing your picket line all WFH and you'll never even know who they are.

WFH means work-from-anywhere, which dooms the leverage of a union

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 would be interesting, but it would probably only pressure small to midsize businesses without resources to just develop everything in-house anyway, and even then, only if it starts to comprise the majority of open source software

They would develop a tool based on ChatGPT/Copilot to automatically transform FOSS software into an obfuscated form such that they could invoke plausible deniability in court cases.

A competitor would just recreate it without union requirements.

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.

kick who out of what? foreign workers wouldn't be in, or care about, your union

If a foreign worker could do what most of us do, they would already have your job, because they are infinitely cheaper.

30 years after first trying to replace all of us, they have still been unable to do so because it just doesn't work that well, even with a hybrid WHF company.

The union would kick out members who are strike breaking. It isn't possible to break the strike if you're not part of it. It wouldn't be effective to hold a strike in the first place if it was only a small minority of employees.

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.

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

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