Tech attracts the radical independent types.
No. I think it's a combination of:
1) HN being associated with a startup incubator, and thus attracting a large contingent of people who see themselves as the boss doing this, not the workers affected;
2) tech attracts a certain kind of gullible person who's easily seduced by tidy little systems like the pop-capitalism of libertarian tracts; and
3) tech workers (until recently) had more economic bargaining power than a typical worker, so could delude themselves into thinking they do better by going it alone.
From people I've spoken to personally, I've seen it as primarily #3 - "Why do we need collective bargaining when we have negotiating power from being in high demand with lower supply?" - despite IMHO that is when you should be using that power for such, as that power will never last forever.
Don't need politics/a "type of person" to be only looking at the short term, and thinking the current status quo will last forever. It seems pretty much a constant in every demographic.
The reason I'm opposed to it isn't because it wouldn't be good for tech people. I'm opposed to it because in general I think it would be more bad for everyone else than it would be good for tech people. I expect they would see fewer products, higher prices on the products that they have, and lower quality products. Additionally, I expect the union to advocate for the interests of the tech workers, which would generally be for tech workers to make more money, and not in the interests of broader society.
You can see a great example of this with the AMA, which did a great job advocating for the government to reduce the number of new doctors. It's probably great for existing doctors, but the rest of us should not be happy that we're paying more for our healthcare because of it.
A difference is that there's not necessarily an inherent size limit on companies while there is an inherent size limit on individuals because you can only be one person. One person can only be so economically valuable.
However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up. And that's exactly what we should do. And we definitely should prevent more mergers as well. What I would do differently w.r.t. antitrust is say that instead of only looking at harm to consumers (those who a company sells to), we should also look at harm to workers (aka those who a company buys from).
One flaw in your logic you seem to thing "an employee" and "a company" are peers. They're not. A company is an equivalent level of "banding together" as a union. A company and an employee union are peers, an employee and a company are not.
> However, that's why we have the whole system of antitrust to say when a company gets too big, as soon as we can show that it's having some kind of negative effect on consumers, we split it up.
And you're mixed up here too:
1. The employee-company relationship is entirely different than the customer-company one. Talking about consumer prices in the employee-company context is nonsense.
2. You're neglecting that all companies have certain interests in common as employers. So even if you break them all up, you're not going to solve the problems a union solves.
Use of "would" implies you believe they don't.
This is incredibly condescending. This is exactly the type of elitism speak that tells people how to vote because they know whats better for them.
Condescending towards who? Overpaid code monkeys? Maybe they should start a professional victimhood organization
> that tells people how to vote because they know whats better for them.
A large portion of this country doesn’t even have the self stewardship to not eat themselves to obesity. Such people should have no place in any political process ideally.
Are you one of those people who clutches their pearls and tells on your co-worker to management for discussing how much money they make?
Those are definitely a kind of 'people'.
In short don’t find it condescending to say a bias exists, independently of the agreement with the political line of thinking.
In fact when I was younger I was condescending the other way: surely if you are not into libertarianism your systemic thinking must be limited.
That is exactly what I meant.
Also tech people are often intelligent (in a way) and identify as such, but then let that get to their head and get really overconfident about whatever clicks with them.
bad take.