[goatinaboat]

as long as there is demand like right now for programmers, the conditions and pay is good.

The time to assert your rights is when you have leverage, if you wait until you need those rights because you have no leverage it’s too late.

[CryptoPunk]

Unionization could very plausibly weaken the US tech sector. It's happened before (US Steel, the US passenger rail service, high-volume manufacturing, the Big Three auto makers).

[iwintermute]

Yeah, just remember what those pesky unions did to german automakers

[CryptoPunk]

(copy-pasting)

Germany seems to have strong unions and a strong auto industry, but the German economy as a whole has suffered decades of wage stagnation. One outperforming industry alone doesn't negate the broader correlation between restrictive labor laws, and degraded economic performance.

Also, Germany has many advantages in manufacturing that are independent of its labor laws, like a strong work ethic and tradition of engineering, good trade schools, etc. So an argument can be made that it has a strong tendency to be a manufacturing power that is capable of counter-acting the harmful effects of bad policies.

One possible indication that unionization has had a harmful impact on German economic development is if you look at Germany's past compared to its present you see that it developed more rapidly relative to its contemporaries before embracing the social-democratic/unionized-workforce model.

[AstralStorm]

Every country developed more rapidly at some point in time. What's your correlation coefficient?

Is the optimal social order defined near ancient Euphrates or in the industrial revolution era UK?

[CryptoPunk]

I don't have an answer to that, but economists have largely found the effect of unionization and labor laws on industrial and labor market efficiency to be negative, and that's a predictable finding according the economic theory.