[pegas1]

Have you ever seen unions concerned in improving work results, quality of the product and productivity? Accepting Even if workers conditions that could be more demanding?

the contrast is much more apparent than the analogy.

I worked in waterfall shops long enough to know that those were like unionized jobs where you could fair better by producing more code lines by copy/paste than by thinking. And the worst programmers moved the ladder to better paid non-programming "analyst" or "architect" jobs faster, not wasting their time on code details.

[wildgift]

There's that saying, you can have it done right, fast, and cheap... pick any two. Generally the construction unions go for right and fast, not cheap. Often, they won't even do fast, mainly because speed and safety are often at odds with each other.

Of course, the meaning of cheap here is different. Cheap in the general market is $10 an hour, and union is $15. Qualified is around $20 to $30 an hour for the more common things, and a lot more for exotic skills like building bridges.

The logic is simple, though. Because construction unions aren't involved in producing product, they aren't interested in increasing speed and productivity. What they can increase is skills and quality and safety. So construction unions own training centers - gigantic warehouses and lots with classrooms and vocational education facilities. They force their members to get training.

In industrial unions in factories, the dynamic is different. Everything is based on the assembly line, so it's a different situation, and the unions have different strategies centered around that.

Likewise, trucker unions and other unions in the supply chain are increasingly strategizing around the supply chain.

I think you mischaracterize the waterfall shops. What waterfall did wasn't create union-like conditions. Waterfall rationalized the software production process, and created a kind of "factory" for software. The union-like behavior you notice is really factory behavior; when people in a factory resist management, even individually, it'll end up looking like a factory union's resistance.

When a union in a factory decides to do a "slow down" or "work to rule", it's resisting by putting pressure on the factory's workflow.

Unions operating in other sectors have different strategies. In the service sector, they use public campaigns to gain sympathy in the community. Teacher unions tend to use the political process (being a public sector that is popular with the electorate).

Agile's strategy was to improve quality, and give the programmer more autonomy. A side effect of autonomy (and TDD) is to allow the programmers to leverage productivity gains of new libraries and even new languages.

We don't associate what agile did with unionization, but that's largely because the craft-guild style union is moribund. It hasn't really revived and adapted for the age of data and software. That said, there are things like FOSS, GNU/FSF, Creative Commons and other organizations that operate in the space. The PC revolution, and then desktop publishing, and the internet, and now 3d printing and open hardware have all created a kind of "labor movement" of individual workers. It just lacks a political voice and a labor strategy.