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Comment by humblebeekeeper | Hacker News Reader

Workers should exercise their power more, imo. We need more folks willing to put tools down, collectively, over stuff like:

* RTO mandates that reduce productivity AND job satisfaction

* High CEO pay outstripping worker pay

* Loss of work autonomy and space (working without an assigned desk)

* Layoffs out of the blue for successful teams

* Weakening benefits

* AI being wedged into whatever task you are working on

I don't care if it's a union, I don't care if it's a guild, I don't care if it's just a group of folks deciding to take action together, whatever. It's time we (especially us in tech) to stop acting like "got mine" and start acting like "get ours".

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The hard part is these workers are doing the job to survive life. Without the job, the unsure future is terrifying.

I’m all for taking action. I just don’t know what action best suits my needs, other than finding a new job or starting my own business and hoping I don’t become one of the greedy ones too.

> The hard part is these workers are doing the job to survive life.

Tech companies used to hire all the brilliant engineers because they were worried about startups eating their lunch.

Without antitrust enforcement, they've grown large enough that they can essentially bleed money in any of their non-core markets for decades without it impacting them. So this clearly isn't the case anymore.

We need to:

(1) get the DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. to slap the FAANG / Mag 7 hard. Bust them up into many companies. It would probably even result in greater market value being created as these companies are inefficiently sitting on gold mountains that they do not monetize and also making insane malinvestments that simply waste millennia of human engineering in stupid ways that have absolutely no potential of succeeding. But more than anything, this oxygenates the field for competition and provides greater upside to the financial / labor / innovation capital that are actually doing the work.

(2) start lots of startups that erode the key money makers of these companies. They're quite vulnerable right now. And they've laid off a lot of highly skilled labor.

Google should be four or five companies, at minimum. And it's time that the governments of the world demand it.

> I’m all for taking action. I just don’t know what action best suits my needs, other than finding a new job or starting my own business and hoping I don’t become one of the greedy ones too.

Tech workers shouldn't punch down against unions. We should be pro-union in general.

For some reason, too many tech workers think they are some kind of top 1% of tech workers, captains of their industry, and master negotiators: Each of them are a unicorn worker that unions couldn't possibly help.

US style unions generally require the above average workers to give up some form of compensation to benefit the below average workers.

While you could argue "too many tech workers think they are some kind of top 50% of tech workers" and be correct, that is very different than claiming unions help everyone but the top 1%.

What sources do you have for that?

Unionized employees make more than their non-unionized counterparts [0]. Even if the top earners to bottom earners gap shrank in relative terms, in absolute terms both would likely be higher.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/weekly-earnings-of-nonunio...

The gap is much smaller for private sector workers, and it's somewhat self-selecting by the fields where a union exists at all.

If I'm one of many types of service worker, sure I very well might join a union because I'm pretty replaceable and my income has little to do with my individual performance. I'll do better by forcing my employer to collectively bargain on terms that are relatively favorable to me by law.

That doesn't mean that all tech workers should support unions entering their field.

I think you may have misread this: For some reason, too many tech workers think they are some kind of top 1% of tech workers

They’re saying too many erroneously believe they are part of the top 1% of their field. They’re thinking they’re better than they actually are. And so, mistakenly, it follows that unions are of no use to these top performers.

I did not misread it. My point is that you can fall well below the top 1% and still fail to benefit from a union.

I’ve been in several unions in the US. Generally they’re positive experiences and not something I’d denigrate. After having read your other comments in this thread, it would seem you and I would at best disagree. You give me the impression you’re a total mercenary with no other obligations other than enriching yourself. I am and know plenty of people who actually want to build community, build the commons, etc. Not saying that isn’t you, just saying from this thread I don’t have that impression.

You’re right of course, that super high performers don’t always benefit from a union. But the rest of us do when those folks have a sense of obligation to others.

I work to make money. My obligation there is to ethically make as much money as possible for my company, myself, and my employees.

I build community/commons/etc. in my personal time (which also includes some overlap since I do have some social relationships with work colleagues).

The amount of money I make at my job allows me dedicate more resources to those efforts, rather than intentionally docking my own pay to benefit some random person who happens to be performing a similar job to me much less effectively and would stand to benefit from being in a union.

It is true that unions often have a leveling effect on wages across workers. But you are missing a big part of it. They also take a larger share of the pot from the owners. So while a particularly strong engineer might be giving up some earnings to less skilled engineers, the pot is larger to start with.

And because the stronger engineers are giving up some earnings to the less skilled engineers, the larger pot doesn't matter to them.

Unions basically buy job security for a fixed duration of time for their members by offering concessions related to compensation. Competent workers in a non-declining field (i.e. pretty much all of tech) already have job security via their skills, and don't need to explicitly guarantee it by giving up some compensation to offset that risk for the employer.

It makes even less sense for software development since it can be moved overseas so easily in most cases.

What if the pot is very large.

I am paid very well. But my employer makes so much in profit that any loss to other engineers would be vastly outweighed by the amount won from the bosses.

Unions are not just about job security. They can fight for compensation and benefits. And job security is not some meaningless thing, even for competent workers. Getting laid off still sucks even if you can find another job. If you are here on a work visa that's going to be stressful as all hell even if you are a massively in-demand engineer. We can also see what happens when there are coordinated layoffs by the bosses. It is definitely not the case that all competent engineers are having fast turnarounds to get another job right now.

The leveling effect is because poor negotiators, people without powerful networks, and people in disadvantaged positions have people negotiating on their behalf from a position of strength, not because people who are paid less on average (women and racial minorities) are mostly shit workers.

I agree with you, but I'm trying to accept the framing from the comment above to get them to see the benefits of unions even if they cannot be disabused of the idea that existing pay is meritocratic.

Unions help level racial and gender pay gaps. The framing that this is because high skilled workers are compensating low skilled workers, that the current situation is meritocratic and white men are naturally superior, is implicitly white supremacist and misogynist. We didn't push back on this, because we tried to find common ground with the other side who never had anyone or any social obstacle challenge this framing of natural hierarchies. However, the consequence now is that fascism is mainstream and part of the government, which thinks DEI is about hiring low quality people.

Why? Assuming you're talking about a standard US union and not something like a guild, it would ultimately suppress wages for the top talent to provide job security to the other end of the bell curve.

Why do you think this, other than "unions = communism"?

I have no problem with unions as a concept and if people want to join them that's fine with me.

However, unions in practice enforce mediocrity while also becoming an institution that exists to support itself (aka its leaders) rather than its members once it reaches a large enough size (which is not unique to unions at all).

Unions makes no sense for a top performer in a field where an individual can outperform other workers performing similar tasks by orders of magnitude. Software development is one of those fields.

What part of that do you take issue with?

A top performer is not immune to exploitation by capital.

Sure, no one is. However, a top performer is much less likely to be exploited and much more likely to have their pay reduced by collective bargaining.

tying healthcare to employment and making two-earner households the norm has been a disaster for labor power

now your employer holds you hostage via health care & if one spouse loses a job the other is not able to quickly replace part of that income

i mean, the income replacement thing was a lot worse when there was only one breadwinner. at least with a two income household you have something.

No, now two (rather than one) incomes is required for a middle class lifestyle for most couples so there is no labor safety blanket available to temporarily allow the other couple to look for work.

It's even worse when under a work visa. You can't even defend yourself when figuring out the legal course takes longer than you can stay in the country.

I imagine we could get a lot of issues resolved if public school teachers went on a nationwide strike for only a few days. Not even a complete week.

The same could be said about back of house restaurant staff or caregivers like CNAs or daycare staff.

The two most vulnerable groups of people in our society are young children and the elderly. And the people who take care of those two groups are treated terribly and paid non-living wages.

Having them go on strike for a few days would at the very least bring a great deal of attention to the matter.

Yup, sounds very straightforward to me. At least ten days of mandatory strike should be mandated by law as it can resolve so many issues.

Not at all against the idea, thinking about it from the other perspective: people would just use leave, or WFH, or take LWOP for the teacher aspect to take care of their kids. Or form a commune where one parent takes care of ~10 kids and everyone else goes to work.

Elderly care, yes that would probably be more effective. However, I can see a scenario where people would pass away from a lack of care even if for a few days. This opens up a whole new can of worms.

Never tell them when the strike is going to end, it ends when your demands are met not a moment before and they should never hear otherwise.

There are multiple types of strikes.

Some are as you describe, but that's generally considered the last resort: those strikes are the pitched battles of labor wars.

It's much more common to have strikes with smaller scope and a defined endpoint, which are more or less warning shots. They show a) that the union is serious, b) that it has the support of its members to strike, and c) just how devastating it can be when they do so.

If teachers unions across the country were to coordinate a three-day strike, it would send an incredibly strong message to school boards and state departments of education—both directly, and indirectly through the collective screams of parents. (Unfortunately, at this point, any efforts to help teachers and improve public education are going to be seriously hamstrung by the Trump administration's destruction of the federal Department of Education.)

Worth noting is that in the United States, we passed laws to make it difficult to do multi-union collective action. Secondary strikes are generally illegal (workers of company B can't strike because A's employees are striking A to try and induce A to come to the negotiating table).

I'm sure the folks with legal power would try to use that law to tamp down on any full-on nationwide action.

Where is all this money going to come from? Labor is already the largest expense for most companies, and executive compensation is only a very small proportion of it. If the companies are have all their profits taken away (in the form of increased worker pay), their capital will vanish as well (either invested elsewhere or spent by the former investors on assets & services), and they won't be able to operate.

I think there's a bit of room between where we are today and "all companies have zero capital".

I think life has gotten too expensive. People have zero leverage. Part of that is self-imposed in terms of unnecessary expenditure but the basics like food and housing are now so expensive people can't strike. They can't quit and try to find something new. You need an exceedingly strong union to get anything these days and even then most of the recent strikes in my country have achieved very little.

people had to fight and die for basic rights, like not getting hands chopped off by machinery -- and then laid off. or not sending 10 year olds into coal mines.

are you, or the "workers" you describe willing to not just put tools down, but riot, burn factories, facilities, fight the pinkertons, etc? cuz if not, you ain't gonna get it.

meanwhile those jobs will get sent to offshore teams

Well, the time to take action was about 25 years ago when we were in demand. That horse has long since bolted.

So you want to work from home with top pay, top benefits, control over your assignments, control over Ai competition, and control over CEO salary. And you're couching this as the reasonable ask of oppressed labor and want to organize over it. Do I have that right? Last, I assume that the labor pool should be as large as possible.

The CEO pay issue is agitprop nonsense. It's purely political without proved mooring to worker interests. It's predicated on the same fallacy that more taxes will mean more appreciably more social benefits for the poor. Instead, the money gets routed everywhere else. The only metric that matters for workers is their own pay. You have no idea if higher CEO pay isn't linked to comparably higher worker pay, not less. No worker in their right mind would spite-lower CEO pay just to have their own be static or decline.

Agitprop: Agitprop, derived from the Russian "Agitatsiya i Propaganda," refers to the practice of using cultural and artistic forms to promote a political ideology. It's characterized by its overt and often forceful messaging, aiming to influence public opinion and behavior.

TIL

Said post you learned it from was also a shining example of agitprop.

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