[spangry]

I agree with the what (I think) the parent post is getting at: if you're going to form a union, form a union. As in, a labour monopoly. This might sound radical, but I think there is good reason for developers and tech workers to consider this.

There are strong network effects and nearly unlimited economies of scale in most tech markets. In these cases, given enough time, the end result will be a monopsonist employer.[0] This results in lower employment, lower wages and, ultimately, the replacement of labour with additional accumulated capital (e.g. ML algos) and/or cheaper substitute labour (e.g. imported foreign workers). Even in cases where there are a few large firms in competition (e.g. Google and Apple), they will have incentive to collude and make illegal agreements on hiring practices, wage ceilings etc (and there have been documented instances of this).[1][2]

The logical way for software developers to avoid exploitation is to form a labour monopoly (i.e. a union or a guild).

I've noticed some interesting features of the software development labour market: quite a lot of the work is creative in nature, you produce non-rivalrous products (i.e. my consumption of 'software x' does not block someone else's consumption), and the workforce is supposedly peppered with unusually talented individuals who produce 50-100x the value that the average worker does.

There are two other industries that have similar features: traditional screen entertainment (TV & Movie), and professional sports leagues. In both of these industries, the content producing workers (baseball players, actors) are invariably a member of an industry guild or union, and they operate more like independent contractors than employees.

Food for thought.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony#Welfare_implications

[1] https://www.cnet.com/au/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[chimeracoder]

> In these cases, given enough time, the end result will be a monopsonist employer.[0] This results in lower employment, lower wages and, ultimately, the replacement of labour with additional accumulated capital (e.g. ML algos) and/or cheaper substitute labour (e.g. imported foreign workers).

Unions that have closed-shop contracts with employers are, by definition, monopsonies on labor. Employees are required to be union members in order to be employed, and the union is the sole purchaser of the employee's labor (before reselling it to the employer).

Some of the earliest and most successful unions formed in industries in which there already was a single, monopsony employer for an unionized market (think: "company towns" in the Rust Belt). But that's a very different situation from taking a competitive market and turning it into a monopsony.

[spangry]

Sorry for the late reply. It's true that unions tend to have more success forming in monopsony employer situations, usually because of the labour force abuses that tend to follow. The other context where unions have high coverage (and tend to be unusually militant) are industries where the job carries a high degree of risk for the worker.

Historically this risk has almost always taken the form of physical danger (e.g. miners, steelworkers, construction workers etc.). Whether intellectual labourers will be motivated to organise by less proximate, but no less real, risks (e.g. the risk of being automated out of a job, being denied ownership of one's own IP/thoughts etc.) remains to be seen.

The other interesting factor is that there seem to be parts of the tech industry where a worker produces orders of magnitude more surplus value for their employer than they are paid for their efforts. I suspect this may have been a factor in the unionisation of screen entertainment workers and professional sports people (particularly when radio and TV turned those markets into 'winner-takes-all' markets).

And I'm not sure I'd personally characterise many of the markets in the tech industry as competitive. The most lucrative markets seem to be either dominated by a de facto monopolist (e.g. search, social networking) or duopolists (e.g. Windows vs OSX, GFX cards and CPUs, the android and iOS platforms etc.).

[AndrewKemendo]

Yes, despite a lot of tech workers insistence of unique professional distinction, there is plenty of well worn ground for the exact kind of labor we provide being unionized.