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Comment by 0xcafefood | Hacker News Reader

Labor unions seem like the wrong model for organizing "knowledge workers." A professional association like the American Medical Association might be a better way to structure things.

One difference is how they gain leverage. Labor unions seem to rely on the fact that they are the ones _right there_ who can work in a factory, clean a facility, etc. But capital sort of did an end run around some of that by literally packing factories up and shipping them overseas. That seems pretty easy to do to knowledge workers as well. At least to some degree and at some level.

This is far outside anything I've read extensively about, and it'd be interesting to read more.

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> Labor unions seem like the wrong model for organizing people in a lot of "knowledge workers." A professional association like the American Medical Association might be a better way to structure things.

Please explain—knowledge workers are still workers and the same benefits that labor unions provide to other workers apply just as much here.

Secondly, why would I ever care about a professional organization if I can't use it to collectively bargain? It doesn't seem to work this way for doctors; why would it work this way for us?

Knowledge workers do not need to be there in the office like the labor unions. This can be used both ways. The WFH crowd uses it say they can work from home. The GP is suggesting companies thinking that if we don't need in-office workers, why not just offshore it altogether?

> why not just offshore it altogether?

Policy equivalent to tariffs to make it unfavorable to offshore vs hiring onshore talent. I.R.C. §174 implements this concept with an amortization delta between US and non-US based development and R&D cost accounting, for example.

"We can make you come into the office because we say so or we'll just offshore." might be challenging in the current zeitgeist.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174

How does 174 work with a outside contractor company?

> Knowledge workers do not need to be there in the office like the labor unions.

Nothing about a labor union implies this, either, just that labor is necessary to produce revenue. This is still true for service-based companies, even if it takes longer for underinvesting in labor to hurt.

> The GP is suggesting companies thinking that if we don't need in-office workers, why not just offshore it altogether?

This is true regardless of if you're in a union or not. I'm not going just to toss the baby out with the bathwater. There isn't a situation where I don't want a union outside of maybe self-employment.

> capital sort of did an end run around some of that by literally packing factories up and shipping them overseas.

Knowledge workers did this to themselves by moving everything to the cloud and remote work. My boss was literally told by one of our private equity overlords that if a job can be done from home, then it can be done from India. They proved good on their word by doing it to my job within two years. And that was before the current era of mass layoffs. I was here warning people to this effect and making myself rather unpopular back during the boom times.

I'd like to see a stop to abusive practices like unpaid overtime, but I doubt that any form of organization is going to end RTO.

Medical workers are shielded from outsourcing because the vast majority of people who need medical care aren't going to travel overseas to get it.

The threat of jobs being exported just means that members of the union or association have to embrace innovation like unions do in Germany rather than focus on job retention.

FWIW medical workers often belong to unions

I would do either in a heartbeat to maintain my remote status.

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