[themacguffinman]

Your points make sense, but it stands in contrast to unions of other industries like voice acting (SAG-AFTRA) where voice actors/actresses can vary a lot in quality/desirability and aren't exactly a commodity. I actually honestly don't know how voice acting unions could be successful.

[pessimizer]

By getting the highest quality people into the union, setting minimum rates for union talent, and throwing people out of the union who work for people who pay lower rates (to them or anyone else.) Offer auxiliary services like health insurance, pensions, and anything else that can be gotten at a group rate at cost to your members. Organize training in the profession to your members, and facilitate networking between members. Form mutual relationships with other unions to support each other in times of conflict with bosses.

Unions are best when practitioners in a field vary a lot in quality and desirability. When anybody can be quickly trained to do work, unions have to rely on physical means to help their members. That's why Taylorism/Fordism destroyed the unions.

Tech is an ideal place for unions skillwise, the problem is how easily offshorable the work is. A tech union would have to be a world union.

[barry-cotter]

> By getting the highest quality people into the union, setting minimum rates for union talent, and throwing people out of the union who work for people who pay lower rates (to them or anyone else.)

Dualisation, making a labour market with insiders and outsiders certainly helps those on the inside. But that comes at the expense of those on the outside. If this is the goal how would punishment of those hiring self taught developers and those who didn’t pay union dues be coordinated?

This model has a problem in that programmers are closer to lawyers or accountants than electricians. An individual lawyer/accountant/programmer can be tens or hundreds of times more valuable or productive than another. So you can see professional services firms. You’re not going to see electricians doing that because the productivity differential isn’t that enormous. And those programmer professional service firms can either continue that way, as consultancies, or augment themselves with capital and make a product. That’s a startup. The economics of knowledge workers are radically different from production workers. Even voice actors and script writers are inputs into the final product, a film. Knowledge workers can make the entire product and capture far more of the productivity thus generated.

[pessimizer]

> Dualisation, making a labour market with insiders and outsiders certainly helps those on the inside. But that comes at the expense of those on the outside. If this is the goal how would punishment of those hiring self taught developers and those who didn’t pay union dues be coordinated?

Those on the outside should come inside. There's no reason why self-taught developers can't be on the inside, as long as they learn and adhere to professional standards (as agreed upon by the membership.) If they refuse, I have as much sympathy for them as I do self-taught doctors. There's nothing that needs to be coordinated; if a business hires non-union labor, union members cannot work for them and remain union members.

As for the rest, if you are good enough that employers would be happy to ignore the union because you're worth 100x any of them, you shouldn't have a problem, and the people you work for shouldn't have a problem. The union doesn't affect either of you, because they're paying you a boatload, and you're giving them all the work they need. [edit: and tbh, there's also nothing to lose by being in the union except what is probably a trivial amount of dues in return for group rate insurance, refresher training classes, and discount software licenses.]

> Knowledge workers can make the entire product and capture far more of the productivity thus generated.

And should. Co-ops and the self-employed don't need a union, they are a union.

[barry-cotter]

> Those on the outside should come inside. There's no reason why self-taught developers can't be on the inside, as long as they learn and adhere to professional standards (as agreed upon by the membership.)

If the members have enough market power to enforce union exclusivity they have no incentive to allow self-taught developers to join and every incentive to keep them out. A union is a labour cartel and economically it works the same as a capital cartel by capturing more of the productivity than they would under free competition by reducing supply of the input they control.

> and tbh, there's also nothing to lose by being in the union except what is probably a trivial amount of dues in return for group rate insurance, refresher training classes, and discount software licenses.

Because unions try to represent the average worker, in areas with low productivity differentials they generally aim for seniority based pay and last in first out firing. This is another instance of the general pattern of helping members at the expense of non-members. In areas with large productivity differentials line the SAG they set minimum wages while punishing employers of non-members.

Unions grab a bigger piece of the pie by taking it from someone else, either the employer or potential competitors and they often redistribute the pie from higher to lower productivity workers.

[fredophile]

I could be wrong but my understanding is that SAG sets minimum rates. If you want someone particularly desirable you will probably be paying a premium.