[minimuffins]

> Forming a union is not competitive, it’s the opposite.

Yes.

> that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.

This is so muddled.

Anti-trust and pro-labor policies are not at odds. Corporations and the people who do their work for them are not cut from the same cloth. When the owners of the world's productive capacity collude to fix prices, that's a trust. When laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity, it's not. It's a union. These are two different words for two different concepts about two fundamentally different kinds of entities (capital and labor).

Thinking of the wage relation as a bargain between equals is a cope. You're not as powerful as Google.

There is a reason we don't talk about employers (especially enormous ones Like Alphabet that are becoming so deeply integrated into modern life and politics that it's now difficult to fully conceive of) and individual working people as if they are the same kind of thing.

One is a supranational bohemoth that owns an enormous productive capacity, the other relies on wage labor to live. (That's not a sob story, just a true fact. You can rely on wage labor and still live pretty comfortably. I do.)

[DarmokJalad1701]

> laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity

Is this really true for a job like SWE where all you need to do the job is a laptop and internet?

[minimuffins]

Yes because to actually produce the way Google produces you need more than a bunch of laptops. Think about all the kinds of capital Google owns from IP to massive data centers.

On top of that they have huge sway with governments and a hand in control of cultural production.

It's easier to start a software company than an oil company because it takes way less fixed capital but the same rules as the rest of political economy apply on the whole.

[8note]

The SWE does not own the data center though

[scsilver]

You also need a developer community, standards bodies, universities, regulatory bodies. You are made valueable by the interplay of all those institutions. Guess who makes your laptop and provides access to your internet, its directories, and communication channels, the same companies you have to work for.

[minimuffins]

Yes, this is the commodity fetish in action. The laptop seems to just appear before me when I fork over a thousand bucks, conjured out of the ether of "the market." But of course there are long (often blood soaked) supply chains, all with their own interesting international, political, developmental history, that brought the thing to me. But the details are mystified by the complexity of all the actors and processes involved.

The feeling that tech work is mostly mental and somehow "immaterial," like we're just beyond all that concrete meatspace stuff, is really an illusion.