It's almost as if the tech industry was seeded early on with a reflexive, self-destructive libertarianism that prevents them from thinking of themselves as part of a group. If you were trying to inoculate an entire industry from unionizing early on, you couldn't have done a better job.
A lot of specialist workers need to get together and rebuild their labor cartels. The pendulum has swung very far from center, and it needs to be pushed back a bit.
As it is now, very few specialists have enough clout to arrest the current momentum, and software professionals, hardware professionals, healthcare workers, and engineers are likely the only ones that wouldn't be scoffed out of the room if they threatened a general strike.
The good times should last quite a few years before the new unions become too corrupt to be worth keeping. But after that, we still might be able to keep the 6-hour workday and obligatory foos-pong tables.
"As it is now, very few specialists have enough clout to arrest the current momentum, and software professionals, hardware professionals, healthcare workers, and engineers are likely the only ones that wouldn't be scoffed out of the room if they threatened a general strike."
..and why would they strike? This group is probably in the top 10% of workers paid in the US.
I find it a little strange that a group that has the most power, money, and benefits even thinks about striking.
Unions don't confer benefits to people not in their union and actually increase costs to them by putting up barriers to entry. Nations can do the exact same thing with immigration policies with respect to citizens and non-citizens.
A union in this case would benefit the majority, but at the cost of people not in the union.
Tighter/more strict immigration would benefit the people in the country in terms of reducing downward wage pressure, but it would remove opportunity for people abroad/non-citizens.
I don't think that joining a union would be advantageous to me either. But the words "advocate for themselves as a group" don't necessarily imply unions or collective bargaining. It could mean forming political action groups. If big companies spend a lot of money on lobbyists to put their ideas in front of politicians, why shouldn't their employees do the same?
My impression of IEEE and ACM are that they're more oriented toward academia (e.g., publishing peer-reviewed journals) and less oriented toward the average working programmer. We might do better with an organization that's primarily focused on improving working conditions rather than propagating technical information. I think there's room for both kinds of organizations.
Would you join a union if it meant you gained one or more of:
* increased compensation
* accelerated equity vesting
* cap on required hours (no more mandatory crunch time)
* increased vacation time
* protection from your job becoming off-shored
* access to better development tools
* better working environment (offices or cubicles instead of open plan)
* etc.
Put another way: Why do you (and tech workers in general) assume that you currently have personally negotiated the best possible work arrangement for yourself that the company could offer, and that no collective effort could possibly produce a better outcome?
Even assuming a union would bring most of those benefits, it would only be for a short time until the company could move my job to somewhere without a union. There's no protection from having your job off-shored beyond providing good value to your employer.
Beyond that I don't want to deal with union bosses and union dues and the fact that part of my paycheck ends up supporting politicians I don't want in office. I don't want to work in a place where the company can't get rid of underperformers, or where seniority is more important than ability. I don't want to work in a place populated by people who are comfortable working in a union shop.
Is that because you personally have such enormous bargaining power (inspite of a flood of STEM workers)?
Or is it because employers always spontaneously pay the highest wages they possibly can and never, ever treat employees unethically let alone break the law?
Or is that because the current political system is so very, very good at protecting the interests of employees or because market forces do it so very, very, well?
Personally it's because every union seems to be either so big as to be corrupt, highly inefficient and far too busy with petty power struggles to ever care about my insignificant problems or so small as to be essentially powerless.
Out of curiosity, what actually cite-able numbers regarding wages and working conditions when comparing organized vs unorganized labor lead you to the conclusion that you will always be worse off in every possible organization even including one not yet created?
None, and I'll freely admit that it's certainly possible that there may exist a hypothetical union where I may very well be better off as a member. I'll also concede that the abstract idea and theory of unions sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It's the broken, imperfect, real world implementations of those ideas that always rubs me the wrong way and that I find fault with.
The internal workings of every western democracy's govenrment vastly exceeds the inefficiencies and corruption of any union I can think of. Yet I don't find being in one so repugnant that I want to leave.
The question of relevance is whether an employee is better off or not. And when organized, employees always enjoy high wages and better conditions.
And, whether organization is personally annoying or not, as a lone individual you will have essentially no power to protect yourself let alone your profession in anyway.
I'm a professional, and as a professional I don't feel I need to coerce people into employing me. If I don't find conditions acceptable I take my services elsewhere.
And I assure you that employers, in a perfectly rational quest to maximize profits, will make every attempt to reduce that option by flooding the employment market with, for example, an excess of STEM workers and thereby oblige you to stay on under worsening or at least flat wage conditions.