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Comment by adql | Hacker News Reader

CEOs and lawyers don't appear to really need any union

But CEOs and Lawyers both have at least informal in-groups that do such gatekeeping. Law school is full of aggressive hazing, and a requirement to burn yourself out to please someone else, and CEO and director boards are the epitome of nepotism. Of course they don't need unions, they are the exact power dynamic unions are an attempt to balance against.

Neither do software engineers, doesn’t stop people from endlessly trying to pitch the idea on HN.

I once used the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement (union contract) as a model for a hypothetical software engineering union at Apple. Pro athletes are a great example of white collar organized labor.

If Apple devs had the same revenue sharing agreement the NBA players do and received a similar share of Apple’s revenue, the median pay would be around $600k. That’s just the median, think about that.

Just because engineers are well-compensated compared to the rest of the economy doesn’t mean that we can’t benefit from organized labor.

I like the structure of that thought experiment, but if anything I’m surprised that the median Apple engineer (pay around $200k?) has within a small integer multiple of the leverage of NBA stars.

I’d expect the latter to be much harder to replace than that.

When you consider the average length of an NBA career (less than 5 years), their pay looks even worse.

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