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Comment by Blackstrat | Hacker News Reader

Unionizing tech workers will not save tech jobs. It'll only create an additional costs to the employees. We saw similar trends in the 80s when the PC started to displace the mainframe developers/users. The pool of available mainframe jobs shrank somewhat, while the demand for PC developers exploded. Every major technology change creates these displacements. The answer isn't to look for unions to save your job. It's to figure out how to pivot and still be employable. All unionization will do is cost you mosey and stifle innovation. I grew up in a union household as did my wife. Unions aren't the answer to any question in the modern world.

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Do you have any data to back up your claims? Because from what I understand, unions were the backbone of the recovering US labor market following the Great Depression, which punctuated a period of extreme speculation and inequality (the Gilded Age) similar to what we're seeing today.

The data I've seen largely show that union membership is highly correlated with better pay, benefits, and working conditions. It seems clear to me that individuals are at an extreme disadvantage in wage/salary negotiations due to the enormous information asymmetry present when the counterparty is a corporation, and collective bargaining seems the most straightforward way to reduce that asymmetry.

As far as I'm aware, the reduced effectiveness of unions in the US is a direct consequence of union-busting legislation at both the state and federal level (e.g. so-called "right to work" laws, Reagan's actions against unionized/striking flight controllers). If that's the basis for your conclusion, I would agree in the sense that we need a strong political push to undo anti-labor legislation to ensure unions can be as effective as possible.

I'm not advocating for not having unions, but the idea some people have and corporations push is based on a hypothesis that companies will try their best to minimize costs.

Unions do have these real benefits for the workers who are a part of them, and these benefits come at the cost of the corporations who have to pay more and implement better practices.

This increases the cost of human labor, so when doing a purely greedy analysis of costs vs revenue, the costs go up for processes which requires human labor, which drives down the profit, disincentivizing investment or even the continuation of processes that require unionized labor. Overall, there winds up being less demand for human labor and more demand for automation.

I'm not here to speak on the truth of this, I think of it from this perspective: Information asymmetry (not understanding the opposing argument) benefits the party who has the information, so understanding their argument is necessary if you want to counter it.

I’m not buying it. This sounds like bog standard anti-union FUD. There are plenty of reasons to organize a labor resistance that’s not just job preservation. One example that very few are willing to discuss or let alone negotiate is a reduction of the work week. If AI is making all of us so much more efficient, let the worker benefit by reducing from 5 days to 4 days. AI productivity gains only favor the managerial class. It’s lop-sided. We can do better.

Another issue is that AI is human replacement strategy and isn’t necessarily the same as the mainframe dev displacement. A new career filled the void because the work still needed to get done by people. New opportunities emerged out of the ashes. The vision from tech oligarchs isn’t that - it’s elimination. It’s centralized power.

I grew up in a household with a parent in a union. We had a pretty darn good quality of life. My dad wasn’t overworked had great benefits, a pension and was able to provide.

Finally, the solution to this problem does not explicitly have to be union. This is a community of builders and thinkers and problem solvers. Maybe you could tell us what you think could affect some change then instead?

Unions aren't just about protecting jobs. They play a critical role in job conditions as well. The most obvious example is the unpaid overtime we all are forced to provide (on call, weekend work to meet crazy exec deadlines etc) simply because we are classified as 'exempt' employees.

Also, classic factory unions are not the only kind possible. The SAG is a good example of a union representing (often) highly paid workers and primarily negotiates working conditions and a (low) floor on pay.

The fundamental reality is that except for a vanishingly small number, tech workers have zero leverage against employers individually.

The tech folks mistook a longish boom as evidence of their genius and skill. As long as demand outpaced supply of tech workers, the going was good. Once the tides turned, we're finding out the reality of where we stand with respect to the oligarchs.

This isn't new however. We've always been subject to these cycles. Expecting a union to mitigate cycles is a fantasy. All it can do is protect the mediocre that are displaced by the AI. We saw the same reaction when companies began to employ more contractors and offshore more work. The mistake is to believe that we are somehow experiencing something new. We're not. If you've ever worked in an environment where the management supported "top-ranking", it's similar, except it occurred once or twice a year. No one is guaranteed a job. What I see here are concerns from people whose primary job seems to be coding, likely most on the web based applications. These were always commodity jobs as Amazon told me a decade ago. The value that tech people bring are understanding the business, the problem, and proposing solutions. As of now, AI cannot do that effectively. Instead of hoping for unions to mitigate the displacement or shorten the work week, a better strategy is to figure out how to be irreplaceable. If you're slinging code for 40+ hours a week, you have ALWAYS been disposable.

People who think unions don't benefit workers are the flat earthers of the 21st century.

And those that believe unions benefit workers, particularly in the tech space, are the same people that think life would be better under a collectivist form of government and that the minimum wage needs to be raised continuously. Unions had their place in early 20th century. Those conditions are in the past. If your "conditions" in a tech job needs improvement, get a new job. Anyone that went into tech expecting it to be like a 7-3 manufacturing job, went into the wrong business. I spent years working 60+ hours a week and loved it. If you don't, change careers.

Working 60+ hours a week for years is nothing to brag about. It just means your projects were mismanaged, done poorly and you were absolutely taken advantage of. You also mentioned in another comment that you are disposable if you are "slinging code" 40+ hours a week.

No, we weren’t being taken advantage of. We were working a project that changed an industry dramatically. The projects weren’t mismanaged. They were very aggressive to be sure, but that’s sometimes what it takes to be first and change things. We did it voluntarily and were well compensated for the times. As for disposable code slingers? That’s been true for the last 30+ years.

So which industry was changed dramatically by your team working 60+ hours a week for years? If you we’re compensated for overtime you can thank unions for that, if you worked voluntarily overtime you were by definition taken advantage of.

> As for disposable code slingers? That’s been true for the last 30+ years.

The last 30 years saw massive growth in SWE salaries. That doesn’t happen if SWEs are disposable.

We aren't talking true software engineers. We're talking about people that think their job is to write code and nothing else. Yes, SWE salaries have gone up a good deal in recent years. However, we heard the same outcries about unions in the late 80s-90s when outsourcing and offshoring began to flourish. As for compensation for voluntary overtime? It had nothing to do with unions and everything to do with visionary management and aggressive, committed team members. The average person in the industry today doesn't have the same drive. I saw that repeatedly the last few years I managed. Their expectations were based on what they had read about FAANG jobs, which didn't reflect the typical commercial situation. So while salaries did rise, they weren't competitive with the Big Tech firms. That's just reality. But those applying to the jobs thought differently. It was common to get college graduates from middle and lower tier schools or junior developers with 1-2 years experience expecting to make $150K+ and get 4 weeks of vacation. That's just not realistic at most companies. And if you were able to reach a mutual agreement, they seldom stayed more than a year or two before trying to leverage up another notch.

Brother, you voluntarily worked overtime without compensation because you "loved it" and thought you were already highly compensated. All this means is that your company took advantage of free labor and you missed out on being paid for your work. Whatever your compensation levels are, giving free labor to your employer is a foolish game. 60+ hours a week for years, come on...those projects are absolutely mismanaged if the work can’t be done without that much overtime.

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