That is hard because you have to convince many other people to agree. It's easier for me to just undercut other people by taking less pay. I can for example going remote and live in low living cost area.
On the side of the employees, unions have proven themselves to be good means to improve the situation for employees. Here in Germany they definitely have helped in many industries.
My comment was more about the companies though which may form cartels to drive down employee wages. Companies forming cartels is illegal, while unions are legal in many places.
Yeah but even at that point faang (or well at that point apple, Ms, google, Netflix didn't exist and Facebook broke the cartel) compensation was significantly more than people in Europe were making.
And with anti-collusion labor protections, engineers stood to make even more.
In the US, union workers make between 10% to 30% more than their non-union peers[1].
You're comparing pay across two different economies and only looking at unionization as a variable. It's like wondering why engineer rates in Omaha, Nebraska aren't on par with those in New York, and concluding that it has something to do with differing fire codes.
I've said that they are good means, not the best means. And I guess the reason why they are paid so little is the higher profit margins of FAANG companies as well as probably the alternative in SV that you can found a startup and make much much more if you're good (and lucky).
Unions are basically legalized price fixing. What happens is that the union negotiate a "fair" price, and then all companies decide to pay no more than said "fair" price. See for example (original is in Swedish):
The problem is that the numbers that gets published by unions in Sweden are taken as law by employers. You don't really know what unions are like if you haven't heard your employer say "We can't give you a bigger raise due to our collective agreement". And since basically all other employers follow the same guidelines you can't get competing offers for significantly more. There is a reason why salaries are very flat in Sweden.
Another way to see it, collective bargaining goes both ways, ie both workers and employers will come to a joint agreement. So if we created a FAANG engineers union and created a joint pay-scale for them, then that would basically be equivalent to the non poaching agreement often derided in discussions like this.
Not all union models have sector bargaining and it certainly doesn't work for professional unions - and I am not saying that European unions really get the needs of m&P members and need to change.