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If the government doesn't protect your wages, you are left at the mercy and greed of capital. I can guarantee you that means you will be thrown under the bus the first opportunity they see fit, as soon as it makes a financial sense.
Look at the avalanche of layoffs that started with Twitter. Now the market is flooded with engineers, which makes our individual bargaining position worse. Employers notice this, and decide to stagnate your wages, saying: "well, there are many unemployed people that will be glad to be hired, just be happy you still have a job".
All of this is happening in the background of them racking in record profits and awarding their c-suite tremendous bonuses. And you are supposed to be grateful for the scraps. Does that seem fair? The government is too slow and pressured by lobbyists to act, and you are on your own.
By the way, the current cost of living crisis and the insane levels of inflation were both caused by the corporations' greed and the government's inability (or incentives to turn a blind eye) to curb them.
The mega corps used every excuse under the sun to increase their prices AND to fire people: bad macroeconomic situations, the wars in Ukraine/Palestine, high price of energy, and in that way they drove inflation up and unemployment up (thereby reducing the cost of labor). But when it comes to your salary, they don't care, as if you yourself are not impacted by inflation or layoffs.
Luckily, with unions, together, we are strong, and can at least partially retaliate to corporate greed. If anything, it's the unions that can bring the economy back, by allowing a reasonable salary for their middle class members. Thereby they are keeping funds within the country and not allowing the funds to be diverted towards the 1%'s offshore accounts. This is why, contrary to what you claimed, you can unionize to a fairer, better economy, and this is EXACTLY how it works.
Great for Fastmail employees!
Most things you said do not seem to relate to a small company with ~400 people according to linkedin.
What is stopping Fastmail to employ the playbook of the megacorps and do a couple of rounds of layoffs? Or to simply stagnate the wages of their employees, citing "bad economic headwinds"? Or to fire some high earners and replace them with cheaper ones from the huge pool of the qualified jobless? That's right, nothing stops Fastmail, unless its employees are protected either by law, regulation, or belonging to a union.
In Australia labor protections, while not as woefully inadequate as in the US, are still not enough to give workers a good guarantee of safety and bargaining power. Hence, they formed a union. It's as simple as that.
The US economy is, for instance, quite strong overall. GDP per capita is high, substantially higher than other large nations like Japan, Germany, or France. The problem the average US worker faces is not that the economy overall is bad, but rather many issues of varying severity related to inequality and job security, like how they could be fired for almost any reason, legally speaking.
The Nordic model begs to differ.
Can you expand on that? Because as an outside observer it seems that the Nordic model is primarily propped up by public-owned natural resource extraction enabling near-endless funding for universally available services and industry-wide (rather than company-wide) guarantees enforced by the unions, but nothing about the unions or their economic model drives their way to a better economy, rather they have the advantage of an external economic input unaffected by unions propping it all up.
Nordic, not Norwegian. Sweden, for instance, isn’t particularly dependent on mining and isn’t an energy economy.
It's fascinating how the lower class has been indoctrinated against them.
In theory I support all the goals people say a union has, but in practice most unions are a way to protect slackers and incompetents while bilking money from your paycheck to do little to advance your interests as an individual. One of my primary interests as a high-performer is working with other high-performers, meanwhile when I was at a union shop I'd get chastised by coworkers for doing /too much/ and being /too good/, because it made the rest look bad and increased expectations. There was a heavy heavy amount of bureaucracy caused by the union insisting on working to rule most of the time, which lead to everything being much worse every day in the workplace and generally being miserable as someone that just wants to get shit done.
I have been burnt out in my life a few times, but never by the workload, always by the work environment. Working in a union environment was a recipe for burn out, because I can't take a lackadaisical approach to my work, that's not my personality or who I am as a person. Anything worth being done is worth being done right and well.
My direct experience is that unions are run by, attract, and retain people who like to lolly-gag around with their thumbs up their asses and get paid for it, and basically have zero ambition or desire to improve the world around them for themselves or for others.
I simply can't believe why even the high paid workers like the software engineers that we are are okay with a single grandpa on the top to take millions or billions of profit while we slave our days and nights creating value for them. They are nothing without us, their workers.
We deserve a much better share of the profits, and since our individual bargaining positions are weakened now, the only way we fight back is by doing it together.
Tell me how Tesla, then Spotify, then AWS, then Microsoft, then Facebook flooding the market with devs that THEY hired is not a coordinated (you could say "unionized") collective action from the corporations?
That created an ideal climate for the corps to stagnate wages, cut costs, bump their stock price, and for you to be competing with other fellow engineers for the few positions that they so gracefully bestow upon you.
How about WE also do some collective action and fight back?
Unions achieve nothing but enriching their executives and stifling innovation and ballooning costs.
4x average US salary not enough for you as a starting wage?
Snowflakes.