[lsc]

Ah, the spirit of Glompers. "More" - fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with that, but really, there's no reason for anyone outside of your group to support you any more than there is for you to support my own personal quest for more money. It's just a larger empire of crumbs.

The problem is that I don't think this will work, for the same reason that management generally doesn't unionize. Management doesn't unionize because their role is to act in the interest of capital. If capital thinks that management is in it for themselves, management becomes dramatically less useful. (and really, I think that we see a lot of management capture of resources that would normally flow to capital. Management is less useful to capital than it has been in the past. Capital knows this.)

In the ways that matter to these discussions, people who create and manage automation infrastructure are management. It's just that we manage machines that do work, rather than humans that do work. For the same reason that management that was not seen as acting in the interests of capital is worthless, developers who are seen as not acting in the interests of capital will be seen as worthless, too. (I mean, from the perspective of capital.)

Now, I do think that culturally, we are very different and there are some things we could argue for that would improve our lot and that of capital. really, in some ways, I'm very much in agreement that technical workers should be getting a lot of what capital currently gives to management. We can start by making a culture of open salaries. this will eliminate a lot of what management's job is, at our level, which is to individually and secretly negotiate salaries. There's no reason to pay tech workers who negotiate well more than those who don't, so job roles should have pay rates that are known throughout the company. (Of course, there is still negotiation involved in who gets what role, but I think that's negotiation that the technically inclined are better equipped to deal with than straight secret salary negotiations.)

[Frondo]

OK, fine, so you don't think it'll work. That's a whole different story from "we shouldn't want more, we're already well paid".

If I'm going to be an Adam Smith-style rational economic actor, I'm going to seek to maximize my profit. If I don't, I'm leaving money/time/autonomy/working conditions on the table, and why on earth would I do that?

If the most effective way to do that is to organize and negotiate together with my fellow workers at Megacorp X--which is both ethically permissible (freedom of assembly, etc) and our legal right--why wouldn't I do that??

If your answer comes down to "you have enough" then you're already behaving like an irrational economic actor and I have no idea why I'd listen to you.

If your answer comes down to "it's hard," well, buck up, kid, life is hard.

[lsc]

>If the most effective way to do that is to organize and negotiate together with my fellow workers at Megacorp X--which is both ethically permissible (freedom of assembly, etc) and our legal right--why wouldn't I do that??

Sure, if that's the best bang for your negotiation buck... but there are a bunch of problems with the approach; the hardest to overcome is the fact that many technical jobs are essentially management jobs, except that we're managing machines for capital rather than managing labor for capital.

Do you understand what is special about 'management' as opposed to 'labor' here? I mean, management is labor, but it's different, because in labor, traditionally, you expect a human to execute a task. Management figures out what tasks ought to be executed in order to maximize the return to capital. You can see how this precludes management from unionizing in the traditional American way.

My argument is that same thing applies to the higher end individual contributor technical jobs, too. If I'm right here, American-style unionization would decrease the value we bring to the table and probably the value we can take from the table.

If you want to usefully organize, I suggest you spend your time looking at the IT jobs that are more regimented, where you follow procedures. Those jobs could be usefully unionized.

[Frondo]

Again, it sounds like you're trying to justify leaving money/time/autonomy/working conditions on the table.

You want to do that? You do you.

That's not the mark of a rational economic actor, willingly selling themselves short on a deal.

You can dress it up by saying "well, we work with machines," but at the end of the day, the machines don't own the company, the machines don't sign your check.

The bosses do, and they're the ones you've decided to give up your maximal time/money/autonomy/working conditions to.

Again, you do you, but the minute you say "we should all willingly give up some of our time/money/autonomy/working conditions to the bosses and owners," well, now you're telling all of us to stop being rational economic actors, which I can't get behind.