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Comment by sonzohan | Hacker News Reader

IT Teacher (professor) part of a union here. Unions in the U.S. are incredibly weak. U.S. unions can barely represent, much less collectively bargain. That's why software engineers keep failing to unionize. My union wants to pay tenured CS/IT folks less than non-tenured English Professors. English profs here had the biggest raise in decades, going from 62k to 80k. They want to pay IT/CS profs 69k. Where I am (Seattle) that's considered Low Income...

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Software engineers fail to unionize because most of them know it’s a bad deal. Tenure in and of itself has 0 to do with your value as a software engineer.

But yes your point is right on in that the unions are useless. In large part because they are a corrupt themselves and their grift is taking a vig on employment.

I think you're doing downvoted because you put words into the parent comments now that weren't there. They didn't say unions are useless. They said American unions are weak. The implications are very different.

"They didn't say unions are useless"

If something is weak (like the unions), will it ever be useful?

It's faulty logic.

"Unions of type T are weak, therefore all Unions are without purpose" is not logical.

A poor implementation of a system is not a case against the system, particularly when other countries have proper implementations of the system.

(BTW I'm discussing things with the opinions given by others. I certainly don't think unions, even in the US, are particularly weak or useless. The president had to take action to prevent a particularly useful and impactful railworkers' strike last year. Teachers in Virginia got good pay raises after a strike several years ago. Writers and actors are fighting for their long-term survival against large studios.)

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