[H8crilA]

Unions work, there's no question in my mind about that. Just look at macroeconomic stats from the 40s to 70s. All that inflation took pretty much all the wealth from capital owners and handed it over to workers.

However, most software people are clearly in the capital owners category (despite still having salaries), so maybe it is justified to keep the status quo.

[throwaway201103]

You can be both a wage earner and a capital owner. 401K or just a standard discount brokerage account are easy paths to that. I don't know why this is always presented as two sides with no overlap.

[H8crilA]

The point is you can say goodbye to the S&P500 performance if unions become as popular as in the post-FDR era. You'll experience low to negative real performance for decades.

Find old Warren Buffett shareholder letters or opinion pieces from those times if you want a capitalist's point of view, the guy has been around forever and has seen this particular story play out. Also, he's still for greater wealth redistribution, but that's just his personal political opinion.

[ghaff]

A developer union/guild system probably would build off of professional engineer certifications which exist for other fields of engineering (predominantly civil because of interactions with regulators). So if you don't have a 4-year degree from an appropriate institution and mentorship (or don't pass the appropriate exams), you're going to have some lower-status tech status. But, yes, would absolutely check the boxes for someone like myself--who admittedly isn't in a position to care any longer.

[aardvarkr]

I’d actually argue that they don’t work, and that comes from someone who is pro-labor but has worked in union shops. Unions are intended to give a voice to the voiceless but in my experience they end up promoting a toxic culture that is counterproductive to everything. Management is unhappy not because of wages but because production drops and every incentive is now to do the bare minimum. Employees are unhappy because they’re not rewarded for hard work and instead rewarded for tenure. I’ve seen so many shit employees fired for blatantly disregarding safety practices but were then brought back by the union with back pay. Support staff is unhappy because they are caught in the middle of a culture war when all they want to do is be productive. And the culture goes to shit because both sides are constantly at war with each other. The only people “happy” with the union were the old timers at the top and they hated the company and hated working there but they were trapped there because no other job will have the same perks. I worked closely with the people on the shop floor and they hated both sides, and one stands out in my mind because he preferred the underpaid and overworked Foxconn factory to his current gig in the unionized factory.

If you want to argue about economic trends from the 40s to 70s I can go down that road too. Those unions aren’t around because they clearly weren’t competitive. A great example is the truckers unions that controlled pricing thanks to heavy lobbying and regulation. Those truckers were very well paid and made a very comfortable living but the high costs meant transportation of goods was incredibly expensive. Deregulation in the 70s opened that industry to competition, rates plummeted and now truck driving is more competitive than ever which has enabled other businesses that depend on transportation to be more productive than ever.

[H8crilA]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply they work in the sense that they result in better allocation of resources. That I do not know. It's probably a balance problem, for example modern Germany has strong unions and does not experience much shit show because of that. I just meant they're effective at redirecting the capital from capital owners to workers.

Also, yes, the 70s took it over the edge and then we've had 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s all very capital friendly. What will the 20s show? Again, no idea.

This is important to remember when "planning your stock market returns" - do include the 40s-70s period in your analysis! Things are sometimes very very different.

[Frondo]

That might be true in the FAANG/bay area world, but there was a time when nearly all of my social circle was "software people" and none of them were in any way in the capital owners category.