[tropshop]

I was hoping this was an entity for independent software developers to group together to have access to health, dental plans, maybe a network to find bookkeepers, lawyers, etc.

Seems like there is a greater movement towards the freelance economy, but these things still suck to deal with when you are independent.

[cjensen]

Professional organizations provide access to health and other insurance plans. ACM for CompSci. IEEE for Electrical Engineers. I recommend ACM for you.

ACM also comes with free access to Safari Books Online which gives me electronic access to 95% of all professional books I'm interested in.

[abecedarius]

I was a member of both, years ago, but both had recently dropped the health insurance when I joined. (They still offered other kinds of insurance which I didn’t care about.) Has that changed?

[Nullabillity]

> ACM also comes with free access to Safari Books Online which gives me electronic access to 95% of all professional books I'm interested in.

That's probably my only real gripe with unions. I want the benefits and collective bargaining (of course), and I like the courses they occasionally hold, but I have no desire to effectively donate money to parasites like O'Reilly.

Thankfully my local union (Sveriges Ingenjörer -- Sweden's Engineers) doesn't have the O'Reilly agreement, but I'm still stuck paying for crap such as https://www.nyteknik.se/.

[Bluestrike2]

O'Reilly?

[Nullabillity]

Owns Safari, publishes a bunch of mediocre programming books.

[s73v3r_]

You might try the Freelancer's Union (https://www.freelancersunion.org/)

[kakwa_]

I was hoping for a lot more to.

I was hoping for a global union with a broader scope.

This union could defend workers in areas of the industry where abused are public knowledge, like the video game industry or workers sold like meat by IT service companies.

Defending and organizing freelance workers is also a goal, individually and isolated, it's really hard for member of this group to have any weight.

It's also very common to have companies asking for very long hours. Just for reference 48 hours per week/8 hours per day is the baseline from the ILO. And the same could be said for workers that have to take on calls at night or over the weekend (ILO set a 24 consecutive hours rest time per week).

Gender equality is still somewhat of an issue, specially since the industry is mostly male, it's still can be an hostile for women to work in.

Another subject that is not directly linked to the self interest of workers, but in my opinion deeply important, is: the social responsibilities of the companies we are working for.

Tax evasion is really common for tech companies, specially the bigger ones. These taxes are our roads, our schools, social services, police and the list goes on.

Personal data collection is becoming critical. Some companies are collecting personal data in a scale never previously seen. Limiting the collect to what is necessary, ensuring the data is not sold, making sure it's properly secure and displaying clearly and transparently what is collected and why, all of this is really important. Workers having a say in it is important specially since they see the collect from the inside.

Lastly, Internet and tech companies are increasingly important as free speech platforms. Twitter and Facebook were instrumental in the Arab spring for example. These platforms must act ethically, they should not influence people for their self-interests and they should not be a place of censorship. (all this is analogue to journalism ethics and standards in fact).

In most cases, being a tech worker is far from being the worst job ever. The pay is generally good, the working conditions are far from horrible and the job is far from stultifying. There are still some abuses however and these must be dealt with. But we cannot ignore the social impacts of our jobs, this should be the other great subject dealt with by a tech workers union.