[mobiletelephone]

Wages are high if the supply of labour is low and the employer has money for wages. If supply is low and the employer does not have money, then the job won't exist. This is why tech workers wouldn't benefit from a union very much.

[emodendroket]

Has everyone already forgotten that Google and Apple wage-fixing scandal? In the real world there are factors beyond the Econ 101 stuff.

[pdpi]

You're assuming that wages are the only thing worth arguing over. Work environment, tools, work/life balance are all things that you might want, and where you might need leverage to get them.

[emodendroket]

Also the stuff about age discrimination. It's weird to me that so many people here are unconcerned about that because, like... we're all going to be old someday (hopefully).

[TeMPOraL]

It's not gonna last forever this way. Unions are not very useful for developers now, but you might want to have them already in-place by the time they become needed.

[eru]

Unions are mostly there to keep out newcomers and non-union members. Eg strike breakers.

I'm internationally mobile, so I'm often the newcomer.

(And from a philosophical point of view, programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine. What we have to make sure is that forming new tech companies becomes easier and easier---so that any general cheapening of programmers benefits the customers and not the owners of companies.

Traditionally, unions are the very opposite of lowering barriers to market entry.)

[TeMPOraL]

> programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine

The problem is, taking that down a nodge will not benefit the general public. All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies.

I suppose there are two ways to view this - putting up barriers to entry vs. preventing wages from being driven down by encouraging everyone and their dog to become coders. At this point I sort of see it as both at the same time.

The reasons unions could be useful in the future is both to preserve a reasonable standard of living for tech employees and to help oppose unethical demands from employers. Right now, tech employees have some leverage over their bosses. Without unions, this will eventually end.

[eru]

> [...] All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies.

That's why we need to keep working on lowering barriers to entry. (Not just in software but all industries.)

Whenever there's an industry where owning a company confers outsized excess returns, I want a hundred copycats to come in and compete away the margins. (For lots of industries one of the most straight-forward way to get that is to make entries by foreign companies easy. This way a country can benefit without necessarily having to grow a local ecosystem of startups first.)

I am happy to encourage everyone and their dogs to become coders, if they can hack it. Over the long run and average over many people, income is ultimately determined by productivity. Let's grow the pie.

[freeflight]

> All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies.

That can easily be fixed by plugging tax evasion loopholes and generally taxing higher.

If there's a will then there's a way, the problem is pretty much finding the way everybody agrees on.

[eru]

See https://transformationdeal.org/2016/04/24/how-a-basic-income... for a very straight forward proposal.

[freeflight]

Nice to see something like this adapted to the US, I've seen comparable proposals in Germany [0], also build on a similar base of taxing land value/production facilities.

Imho it seems like pretty valid approach considering land is one of the few resources we recognize as actually being finite, so it's a good place to start for building a "base".

On the other hand it's quite frustrating how accepting we have become of creating "wealth" out of nothing by printing paper money but if we try to do the same thing based on something actually tangible, like land, people lose their shit going "you can't just make up money", sure we can, we do it all the time.

[0] http://www.wissensmanufaktur.net/plan-b

[zdkl]

Can you elaborate on the relation of your second clause and your conclusion? I'm not seeing how this relates to the role and nature of unions.