Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work
jacobin.com
jacobin.com
Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind. I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
Or, from an IP-driven industry perspective, the offshoring of Hollywood following the SAG and WGA strikes in the early 2020s.
And if IATSE couldn't stop VFX from being offshored back in the 2000s and 2010s, then tech unions wouldn't be able to either.
Edit: can't reply
> Without film industry unions, might the offshoring have been undertaken even earlier?
Not really. VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s despite only starting as an industry in the 1990s.
> Yeah but this is a limited perspective. If the union was truly international (like they _used_ to be) VFX workers could push for high wages wherever they worked.
VFX workers in most countries are not unionized either, and much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
And the experience of the VFX industry is probably the best example of what would happen to a heavily unionized software driven industry.
Edit: can't reply
> are you arguing that it’s better to just straight up fire people
Nope, but there is a real risk that what arises is labor immobility and blocking new entrants.
I don't know about the US, but I spent 4.5 months trying to get a new job here in the EU as a senior dev. Everyone tells me that was quick.
We're already doing that without uniuons. Older folk can't afford to retire and new grads cannot get a leg in to start their careers. we're talking something like a quarter of new grads who cannot get any job in their field out of college.
Yes, let's point to examples of intentional union decay as proof that unions do not work.
>VFX was already largely offshored by the early 2010s
And there's still VFXs jobs domestically. For the same reasons offshoring tech in the 2010's didn't work out
> much of the industry has already shifted to ASEAN, China, and India where there is no real unionization to begin with.
Most countries are not "at-will" like the US. those houses cannot just layoff people on whim.
That said, yes. VFX is very much a contractor-driven field. But there's a different between knowing the end of a contract, and waking up one day to realize your key fob doesn't work and you're locked out of your account. You get to plan around the instability.
Edit: But also, this was a pre-profit VC-backed company. If those companies can't lay people off, it's not like you make good money with more job security. Either the company just has less runway (so I still lose my job, just later and with everyone else) or they adapt by hiring fewer people at lower salaries.
Would suck to be in this market as an entry-level engineer, though.
YMMV.
I see you haven't been in the current job market.
How many EU's are migrating to the US?
Most people's solutions in first world countries is not to go through the arduous process of finding work in another country and leaving behind their entire culture and network behind in hopes of a better life. That is not the same decision you make as if you're jumping to another state/province (which in itself is already a big life change).
What Job creation? The last 3 years have only shedded IT roles (what the tech industry falls under) in the jobs report.
I think it's important to note that unions aren't very good tools to avoid layoffs. If there is a company specific hardship, the union can't simply force the company to maintain headcount all the way into bankruptcy. On the other hand if there is a secular change across the industry, the unions can't prevent that change either. Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.
Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.
But what if they could be even better? This is an industry with 75-80% gross margins, quite unlike any other industry in history.
I promise you, management doesn't think that way.
That's the issue. 2/3 of my layoffs were not "financial hardships". One was just a medium sized studio who ran out of projects and didn't want me to continue. The other was a large global company who was about to make big purchases (and eventually, change leadership).
Maybe with job #1 I could have saved it, but I was underpaid and already looking out the door, so it wasn't surprising to me. Job #2 was 100% the kind of place a union would have saved my job from. (and if you care, Job #3 was just classic "startup funding pulled". They shut down a year later. It is what it is, but I guess you don't see the red flags when you get a nice pay boost and a shiny company on your resume).
>Easy example is how Big 3 automakers were 100% unionized in the 1970s and have since shed about 500,0000 American jobs despite producing more automobiles than ever.
yes, almost like they spent the last 50 years working with the federal government to break down union powers. Surely isn't a plethora of literature on that.
>Unions tend to be good at bargaining for better pay and benefits, but the current status quo is that most tech workers already have decent pay and benefits anyway.
You forget stability. Making big money one year and none another year just averages out to "okay".
It's because they outsourced most roles starting in the 90s. They don't need as many people due to efficiency gains, but not "hollow out entire cities" levels of efficiency. Human labor is still necessary, and human labor in other parts of the world will be cheaper than many automation gains for times to come.
That doesn't tell me we got efficiency gains, they just shifted models on how and what to make. And where they make it. If we had true efficiency gains there'd be more cars sold, perhaps at cheaper prices.
The big 3 produced 15.66 million passenger cars in 2025.
Seriously, I wonder if tech workers really even understand how lucky they are being able to sit at a desk instead of, say, toiling away in the mines.
You wrote "Modern tech workers arguably have the best career deal in the history of humankind".
How do you know?
And, for the sake of argument, let us say it is the best deal in the history of humankind, does that make it fair that the big tech companies did the following...
As a small rebuttal of sorts, consider
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
You are making less money than what you would have been making if that illegal arrangement had not been made.
Well, if a European dev asked me how I could possibly know if they'd make more in a less regulated environment, I would point to American salaries.
Agree it's hard to know things and that antitrust arrangement was bad. If we're talking policy, we are implicitly accepting counterfactual reasoning (because otherwise why would we change policy).
I do recall some reports that concentrated on just workers that had unions in the United States versus workers in a similar field that did not have unions, and it concluded that unionized workers get paid more.
But, it was not the tech sector, so someone, maybe you, will argue it does not count.
Just very, very difficult to get to the bottom of what is the best way.
I am in the we should unionize camp. My stance is based on, the tech companies have way more leverage than you or I. They do not work in your interest. A union is imperfect but it is better than nothing to get "some" leverage back.
Teaching for instance you know exactly how much money you'll be making over the next 20 years. Add a masters (which may or may not contribute to you being a better teacher) get a bump.
Do you believe there is a direct correlation with how long someone was working there and how productive they are? Would you like to live in this rubric? What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric? It works in some places that are commoditized. A toll collector does the job, and maybe there is some merit to rewarding someone for loyalty. But programming is not that kind of job.
The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit. Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
This is actually spot on. In my last gig I was working with the kind of people French job security produces. Never again.
Given my experience as someone who is looking for full time work over 3 years later because executives decided that data centers are better to pursue than quality products: yes, and yes.
>What kind of people do you think are interested in this kind of rigid rubric?
People who need to worry about rent next month.
>The best people want to work in a place where they're valued (and paid) on merit.
And we know from decades of knowledge this is never true. Two equally talented engineers can be paid differently based on where they live. They can end up with much different compensation based on one company lucking out with a deal and another missing a crucial deal and collapsing. Which isn't an engineering factor. We know negotiating gets you paid more, which is a skill orthogonal to engineering.
This illusion of meriocracy will be the collapse of the whole industry.
>Why shouldn't a better engineer with less formal experience be promoted above someone who has been filling a desk for the last 20 years?
Because you think the job is building things. the 20 years employee understands the systems and how to keep things together. Life isn't all about moving fast and breaking things. Especially in fields like teaching the future generatrions.
It is well recognized that meritocracy is an illusion. A much better determinant of success is the birth lottery. If you're born into a rich family versus a blue-collar one, you have unequal starting points, access to education, better-than-average medical care, and more reliable, higher-quality food. Once you win the birth lottery, you have access to a network full of connections that will hire you based on who you know or who your parents are, rather than your ability (e.g., a Nepo baby). When you are a nepo baby, you are insulated from many of the inequalities built into our financial and education systems.
You'll frequently hear from successful people that they got where they are because they have sufficient morals or good standing in the world, and that if you didn't make it, you're clearly not a good person. This rationalization is mostly bullshit because there are many in the 1% class who are lousy human beings and, by their own justification, should be on the street.
When you buy into meritocracy, you are contributing to keeping the billionaires in place and supporting their destructive behavior, tearing at society.
see: https://www.linkedin.com/videos/the-institute-of-art-and-ide...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2025.2...
https://therowlandfoundation.org/the-myth-of-meritocracy-ref...
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/01/the-myth-of-m...
Thankfully: the Games Industry is in fact not the Tech Industry. Thus, game developers are a lot more receptive to unionizing than general tech. But it's still a bit absurd; I've always had the advice of "move out of games to a more stable tech job if you burn out". Well... those stable tech jobs sure became unstable quickly.
Instead, you got a nice paycheck, and made sure to make the world actively worse for everyone. Good job.
I agree, but that's actually one of the strongest arguments for why tech workers should unionize now. Wages are high because employees have leverage due to 10-15 years of demand for skilled workers being higher than supply. If you wait until that leverage is gone to form a union then you've lost a lot of the leverage to negotiate for better conditions as a union.
For the record, I've been in a union in another industry much earlier in my career, and I'm pretty on the fence about a tech workers union, but I think your argument is pretty short sighted.
That's leverage you didn't build and don't control and it's already eroding as the market catches up. Which is why collective bargaining needs to exists, a way to hold onto ground when individual leverage isn't guaranteed.
BTW, it's not like unions had it easy. Even as they were legally recognized (organized labor was treated as a antitrust problem), the judiciary has in the US been dismantling the little foothold it has after it. The US needed 2 new laws to actually get something. And even then, it doesn't enjoy the same flexibilities that other forms of collective arraignment has, such as capital, in the way of "right-to-work" laws, at-will employment and strikes aren't protected as they should. Hell, legal existence and being on equal footing with the other side of the table have never been the same thing.
Not really. It is all about leverage. When you've got what they want, and they can't get it anywhere else, they pay the price.
Whatever leverage tech workers have, they would have even more if they unionized. Salaries are high? Maybe they could be even higher. These trillion dollar corporations can afford it.
> employees own equity
Why would this be mutually exclusive with unionization?
> I see no upside in killing the goose with the golden egg.
AI is going to kill the goose
So, software has always been rated for extreme growth. Investors absolutely love software for that reason. They don't like bridges, or planes.
But none of this is set in stone. Software engineers are losing leverage by the day. It's possible our salaries, stability, mobility, and equity will all decline. That does happen to careers sometimes. We're just assuming things will continue as they are, but they're already not, so I don't think that's a safe assumption.
Unions are, ultimately, about balancing leverage. You have to understand that, as an individual worker, you have little to no leverage. As a software engineer you have, arguably, the most leverage of any individual workers, and even then it's incredibly lopsided. You are purely at the behest of the company and the market, for the most part. Your control is an illusion, carefully implanted in your brain through decades of propaganda. Unions do not suddenly give you perfect leverage, but they certainly give you more.
With the layoffs we've seen, how many engineers wanted that? And, what could they have done? Well... a lot of people are now realizing, nothing. They had no control. They are passengers.
It's not going to be the same story at much higher paid shops where workers often have equity, good benefits, and the market has provided access to other jobs if you lose yours (in my experience, there are still shortages of qualified and competent engineers).
I would like a different method to deal with the pitfalls, but the politics, drama, overhead, and costs of unionization just don't interest me. I'm not interested in being at one job for life.
The tech workers who are unionized that I know didn't join for financial gain because there is none (except for a few who are bad at bargaining). They joined to exert control over their workplaces and help build companies they can be proud of.
Was this really necessary?
Apparently, if you can't make it on your own, you have to lean on unions as a crutch that lets you coast
What are you talking about? I never insinuated anything like that.
You should revist your stance on unions and start by reading up on how they work and what benefits they confer. Assuming you are not in the 1%, a union almost certianly would benefit you. It is a way of equalizing the playing field when the interests of BIG capital conflict with the quality of life and meaningful human experience of individuals.
I already have that agency. If I wanted money, I'd have long ago worked for a FAANG. I didn't because I wanted something else. I enjoy working at startups and small to medium sized firms for the challenge and flexibility in all matter of things I get to work on. I have shifted my career from being a sysadmin/netadmin, to devops, to development and it just involved getting involved at places I've worked at. There was no need for licensing, meeting requirements, etc.
If I felt I didn't have any of that agency, I'd likely feel differently about it. But I just don't see what any union (small or large) is going to do for me unless I was in a jurisdiction where they provided extra services like healthcare or other universal benefits.
You're really just saying "I don't need collective bargaining, I got mine". Collective bargaining only works if everyone does it. You do it because everyone needs to do it for it t o work.
You don't get insurance because your house or car is fine today, or even because you're a bad driver/homeowner. You get it because you can't predict the future, and the overall cost is cheaper than floating the bill by yourself should the worst happen. If you used the same mentality for your car insurance, insurance as a model also wouldn't work.
That seems to be a big sticking point people don't get (probably because the propoganda works). Unions always fail due to collective effort of companies and the government to weaken them, not because of any nitpicks over drama or bad leaders or whatnot. Every workplace already has those but many keep ticking.
It wasn't my intention, but there's ultimately no other way to describe someone who chooses not to participate in a community effort as "selfish". And that's not some judgement call per se; everyone needs to be a bit selfish to work hard, push forward, and advance their lives. The degree and cost of the selfishness is where it starts to cross from individual actions to a character trait. But I digress.
>Today, it's asking me to individually give up a little in order to collectively gain a little, while adding additional complexity and a second parallel bureaucracy to my workplace.
But you keep falling into the same circular logic. We can agree that powers have been reduced. But we get those powers back by having people give up a little. The more people who give up a little, the more we all gain. Saying that that's not worth it weakens the entire cause.
>I'll vote in favor of fixing the law, and once the law is fixed, I'll be more interested in letting a union represent me.
I hope you do. But who do you think gets those laws proposed and put on the ballot? The stronger the coalition (which is simply a more general form of "union of people to pursue a common goal), the stronger chance we actually get a bill to vote on. And these companies are really good at killing stuff off while it's still in the boring proposal phase.
Don't shoot the messenger. I'm interested in participating in effective collective action, but don't have time for taking action just for action's sake.
If you feel you lack time now, I hope the day doesn't come (like me) where you get plenty of time.
Any collection of people has politics, drama, and overhead. That's the nature of collaboration with humans. So this really doesn't' say much to me besides "I got mine and don't see a need to rely on others (yet)"
Don't compare it to other unions or say it could be like X. Just write a few hundred words on what it would actually be like.
So, I will challenge the reader: unions win about 7 out of 10 elections to get certified/created. Does your mental image of labor news look like 70% wins? If not, ask why
1: https://www.benjnewman.com/uploads/1/2/2/1/122135844/kane_ne...
2: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv3s8mwx
3: https://www.projectcensored.org/unions-won-more-than-70-perc...
4: https://www.mediamatters.org/labor-unions-and-workers-rights...
Workers coops have structural limitations, though: with some exceptions, they're new entrants to the market and have limited access to capital. Unions interact with existing businesses, which I think is why they're so much more controversial than coops, and they can bring some of the benefits of workplace democracy to a much larger group of people than coops presently can.
it was a mistake to entrench unions because now you will never get rid of them, but it's not surprising as the alternative would have been aggressive anti-trust action and the corporate powers would much rather deal with unions (whose incentives they can model just as well as their own).
note that the incentives of the unions are the incentives of the union organizers which much like in democracy are not aligned with the collective they purport to represent.
Capital has higher protections than unions, what are you on about? You have the corporate veil whereas the liability stops at the organization rather than the individuals and that is very seldomly pierced (J&J is a neat case here, even while courts are being wise to that move now).
Also, if carve-outs distort markets, that argument disqualifies the corporate form first. Because corpos have limited liability, corporate personhood, patent monopolies, etc. they also have political power on top, which is always fun.
BTW, and I alluded to this in another comment, antitrust was used against labor, not capital. Labor had to work for decades to be excluded. Before that, union members got personally sued into the ground under antitrust, almost losing their homes and savings accounts. Maybe we should bring that back too, but with actual people that needs to be antitrusted.
> Capital has higher protections than unions, what are you on about? You have the corporate veil whereas the liability stops at the organization rather than the individuals
or are you decrying the fact that a human capitalist isn't made vulnerable? there are good reasons for that as in a standard corporate setting individuals may not have the requisite influence to dictate a course of action, if they are held responsible by what the emergent corporate entity embarks on then there will be no capitalism.
if the unions become corporate entities and their members give up all labor protections (become contractors) then it will be more even but they obviously don't want that. a highly organized minority is always the elite for a reason.
And "otherwise there would be no capitalism" is basically my argument. We give capital special legal protections because unlimited personal liability would make organizing capital much harder. So the objection can't simply be that labor gets special legal protections too, you'd have to explain why those protections are unjustified for labor but justified for capital.
The ideal scenario is stronger labor laws, but even the most progressive circles I'm in don't seem to have much energy in trying to end at-will employment (the mechanism driving rampant layoffs for any reason the emplpoyer wants). So Unions are the next best thing.
And yes, this is the same logic as "people who bargain get paid more". People who collectively bargain end up with more perks. It's an inevitability.
>as such they will distort the marketplace. as is often the case with such carve-outs those who can get in early tend to benefit at the expense of everyone else.
Like all tech workers who started their career around 2010-2021? Yes, timing is everything. But you can't control when you are born. You can control if you choose to navigate a union.
Unions also are terrible because they often artificially strangle the supply. For example, you can't become a licensed electrician without completing an apprenticeship, and unions control the number of apprenticeships. With all the corruption associated with that.
A useful private sector union to watch is The Animation Guild, IATSE local 639.[1] They represent traditional animators in Hollywood - Disney, Dreamworks, Marvel, etc. But they've never been able to organize a game company, despite years of trying. They have good contract terms - the contract is a floor on wages, not a ceiling, and overtime is handled well.
Here's what purports to be a complete list of "tech unions" in the US.[2] Only six have a contract with the employer. That's pathetic. The six:
- "Apple Shuttle Drivers Union". Not even Apple employees, but drivers for Compass Transportation. Teamsters.
- "Gimlet Union". Gimlet Media employees. Writers Guild of America. 83 people.
- "Glitch Union". Glitch platform defunct as of 2025. Communications Workers of America.
- "Ringer Union". Affiliated with Spotify. Writers Guild of America. 65 people.
- "Security Guards at Silicon Valley" Service Employees International Union. 3000 people.
- "United HCL Workers of Pittsburgh". Google contractor. 20th largest H1-B visa sponsor in US. "HCL America INC has filed 60,667 H1B applications and 1,294 PERM green card petitions. Avg salary: $102,175." Steelworkers Union. 60 people.
Only the last represents "tech workers", and that company is mostly non US citizens.
Anyone know of other unions which, right now, contractually represent tech workers in the US? Just not finding any real tech worker unionization.
Bad unions cannot. All unions are not the same.
Doctors have a super powerful lobby and union (not sullied with the plebian name "union") and lo! Are super wealthy.
They have mandatory laws restricting competition and licensing requirements, etc.
If tech workers had a lobby like the AMA and doctors, they too would be super rich.
Golf, anyone?
What tech workers need, if they need anything, is a professional organization like lawyers, doctors, and architects have.
those don't serve to protect workers rights, but rather serve to artificially limit the number of people who can work in that industry; if anything they are anti-workers-rights
To borrow a George RR Martin'ism, there are a lot of children of summer of this space that have only experienced the 2010s, which were an unprecedented boom in tech hiring. Even now in permanent layoff culture they've been anchored to the 2010s as being "normal" and this is "abnormal". You are incorrect. What's going on now is normal and companies are aggressively working to claw back the compensation gains of the last 1-2 decades. A few key AI people are making insane money but I assure you that this is temporary too.
You do not have negotiating power with a trillion dollar company. If you withhold they labor, it's no big deal. If they withhold your paycheck, you and your family are at risk of homelessness, bankruptcy and death. These are not equal positions.
The very idea that unions will reduce your compensation is itself propaganda created by decades of McKinsey "research", billionaire-backed think tanks and money in politics as well as a healthy dose of the Red Scare. Many of the benefits you take for granted like weekends, PTO and sick pay only exist because people died for those benefits. Also, look at any industry and union employees get paid more than non-union employees. The Big Three automakers pay more than Tesla does, for example.
Permanent layoff culture exists to disrupt your life, reduce your compensation and make you do more unpaid work. Unions would prevent that.
Lastly, I have to note, it's pretty interesting that this submission got killed on HN manually. 2 hours, 60 votes and that would be on the front page. I went through the top 500+ submissions and couldn't find it. It's still on new but nowhere on the main feed. Interesting. That in itself is evidence that VCs don't want unions.
(Un)fortunately, being a laid off game dev making ends meet freelancing has given me a lot of time to learn economics.
>Permanent layoff culture exists to disrupt your life, reduce your compensation and make you do more unpaid work. Unions would prevent that.
And extended exposure to this culture is probably why my sector is much more receptive to unions. We've been in such an environment even in the "good times". It does suck not knowing if you'll have a job next week. At least contract work always has an end date and you simply bet on not having it continue.
>I have to note, it's pretty interesting that this submission got killed on HN manually. 2 hours, 60 votes and that would be on the front page. I went through the top 500+ submissions and couldn't find i
That behavior as of late is why I tend to just do a blank query on search and skim through the highest voted pages in 24 hours or a week. Helps me find blind spots like this that didn't make the front page.
>You do not have negotiating power with a trillion dollar company. If you withhold they labor, it's no big deal. If they withhold your paycheck, you and your family are at risk of homelessness, bankruptcy and death. These are not equal positions.
coexist with this:
> What's going on now is normal and companies are aggressively working to claw back the compensation gains of the last 1-2 decades.
in your head?
Where did the gains the companies are clawing back come from if negotiation is impossible? Do you think there were SWE unions before 2010 which made these gains and disappeared without a trace?
As for your question - it's pretty simple, companies bust unions because unions negatively affect their business. It does not follow that unions are good for their members and if your comp comes from the business equity it means it's bad for you.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. It's possible to unions to make everyone worse off, not just the employer. I'm not saying that's always the case, but this is not a good argument.
It is indeed way too late. But I guess late is better than never. It is foolish to try and push through this in an employers market, though.
A small town lawyer can fuck up paperwork badly enough that they lose their ability to practice law. A software engineer can fry the brains of hundreds of thousands of people and it's all ok so long as they managed to get a few of them to click ads.
It should have the same requirements for personal liability like other professions do.
I'm fairly confident that a software engineer's union would not be lobbying to make it's members liable for things they did while legally performing their job duties at places like Meta or Google.
Imagine that - socialists complaining that workers get paid livable wages.
Cannot Now Save. Unions get power when labor is at its strongest, not when labor is at its weakest. When tech labor was at its strongest, it became super-libertarian, started discussing sous vide and $300 shirts, became YIMBYs, and told the flyover states to learn to code while creating the gig economy. FAANG colluded to fix salaries in the valley for years, and they just sighed and paid their $3000 rent to live with 3 roommates.
I'd add shouldn't be saved. There were far too many programmers before AI, and everything was getting worse. They were mostly vastly overpaid, except for the extremely productive ones who contributed to society the most, who were vastly underpaid or worked on a volunteer basis. Their salaries were a function of ZIRP and quantitative easing, and their acquisition (and now their layoffs) were to juice the stock prices that were the engine of the entire thing.
Learn to dig ditches. If we used less immigrant slaves, ditch diggers might be able to start a union.
The reason AI is failing is because it's replacing programmers that were totally superfluous and bringing in zero marginal revenue. Laying off your programmers and not replacing them with AI is going to be the new black.
edit: I got a lifetime subscription to Jacobin when it started (because I thought we needed a glossy lefty magazine) but I really hate it and keep accepting issues out of pure spite because I know it costs them money. I don't know what makes them think they can talk about economic issues yet avoid any math or actual discussion of economics. The suburban child of immigrants upper-middle class Liberal Arts majors on the left are its albatross. Please stop saying Gramsci.
The union would only serve to make sure that transition never took place.
No thanks, I'll take my seven figure options please.