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Comment by badwolf | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps if there are multiple frustrated workers, they could get together and pool costs of their own reps... Then if more workers are frustrated they could also join.

American Frustrated Workers™ are so close to discovering unions...

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This is very much a "'No Way To Prevent This' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" kinda situation.

This is one of a long laundry list of problems to which the average American has been trained to abhor the most obvious solution.

The article does mention unions twice but only obliquely. Definitely feels like a elephant in the room situation - and kind of odd for the Guardian of all places not to highlight.

Been saying this for years

> As I’ve mentioned before, software engineers will embrace unions once they accidentally reinvent the concept from first principles under a different name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18992421

That plus inject a health dose of the tech buzzword du jour. Last year would have been crypto unions or metaverse unions.

Leveraged Labor Modules

Unions don't go far enough because workers would still remain beholden to the whims of owners and unequal profit sharing. Worker-owned co-ops are how to structurally transform conditions and fairness to respect the interests of employees.

The nuclear engineering consultancy I worked at in the 90's was one such example.

I wonder how unions will react to a world where a lot of essential software is developed by hobbyists.

I would think that FOSS projects, as self-governing autonomous entities, are closer to worker-owned co-ops (which unions aren’t, but are in theory working towards) than they are to faceless corporations governed by diktat with the vast majority of employees holding a pittance of diluted shares.

That's true but it completely fails to answer my question.

What would a hypothetical developers' union do if it called a strike and people kept working on their OSS projects?

Negotiate with the organizations behind the FOSS projects if necessary. It's hard to say given the lack of historical precedence, have there been any situations when business operations were stymied by FOSS issues? Besides something like the left-pad fiasco?

OK, sure, negotiate. But there's a lack of two things: Carrot and stick.

Unless the person working on the OSS project is a member of the union, the union isn't doing things for them. He pays no dues, they don't poll him or count his vote. So it's like when companies demand OSS contributors are part of their "supply chain" and therefore must fix bugs on the company's timetable: You can't unilaterally foist an obligation on someone and expect to be taken seriously.

So if a hypothetical union I'm not part of demands I stop working on my hobby, they can neither hurt me nor stop helping me if I don't comply, so I'm not going to.

And given the ability of a single hobbyist, or a small group, to do outsized things in software, that seems like a pretty big hole in the concept of a union having a monopoly on labor in a given field.

In aggregate, American workers are wimps and low information consumers. They don't realize how bad they have it, what the problem is, or how to solve it practically even if they did. Instead, they have been indoctrinated with a red scare and damnatio memoriae about their own history of socialism and organized labor anything that doesn't worship at the alter of corporate profits.

It’s not limited to the USA though. We have the same issue in France, and I guess most European countries.

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