Sometimes I worry that all the stories about unions helping to end the most extreme exploitation and fix deadly working conditions has made them unrelatable.
If you make a cushy salary and the biggest physical risk is carpal tunnel, you might think ”I dont have it THAT bad. It’d be greedy and disrespectful of the sacrifices that were made to use unions in my situation”
What made unions unrelatable for me was them obviously pushing the interest of factory workers over the interests of engineers. Thanks for trying to get my job outsourced I guess.
More likely software developers are, for the most part, middle class – deriving their income from a combination of labor and land/capital.
While software developers just starting out are apt to be working class, when you receive a comparatively high income for your labor it soon becomes hard to find things to do with it if you don't start investing in land/capital, so one in that position doesn't stay working class for long.
The top-end of the working class shares more with the low-end of the working class, than the top-end of the working class shares with the low-end of the upper class.
I have never been to a politician's dinner. I have never changed a law. If I were fired, which can be done at any time for no reason, I would have no source of income. Money is the weakest form of power, and a well-paid job is the weakest form of money.
the labor movement really needs to get beyond this stereotype that it is to lift all these hunched poor little downtrodden suppliants out of poverty. workers who have successfully organized are not pitiful schlubs, and their affluence is a testament to the success of their organizing, not its triviality. political interests of the labor class just are not the same as those of capital, and therefore its methods and aims should be different as well.
one thing that i've been repeating for years now is that if you want tech to organize, unions need to sell themselves differently.
unions in the past are portrayed as remove physical dangers, limiting to reasonable hours and fair wages. but tech workers already have that stuff, so they don't see an upside.
codetermination (getting workers on the board), four day work weeks, full-time remote, sabbaticals, open source support, rethinking startup equity, ... there's all sorts of things we could be pushing for that would make our jobs better that we could to push for if we worked together.
It is still labor and we are still exploited - most the revenue we generate goes to capitalist interests, not us, the laborers, which are the creators of all revenue.
It's just that we have it comparatively good and so are less inclined to seek out systemic change - a less favorable reading would be that we are bought off to split us off from the rest of the proletariat.
If you make a cushy salary and the biggest physical risk is carpal tunnel, you might think ”I dont have it THAT bad. It’d be greedy and disrespectful of the sacrifices that were made to use unions in my situation”