Ask the non-union folk about that.

Getting into a movie industry union is very difficult and rather expensive to boot. You don't just get into these unions by showing up at the door.

The correlation to software would be having a list of progressively difficult things you have to do, so that, ultimately, only 10% of people make it in. The rest pay their dues by working minimum wage jobs and unpaid internships.

Yes. So much of this stuff is just credentialism and maintaining barriers to entry. A union will come with arbitrary requirements that some committee decided were must-haves before one was a bona fide programmer. This laundry list will include 5 years full-time practice in the language you personally most despise. Any attempt to argue that 5 years of experience in that language is non-essential will be met with scorn and mockery, and taken as proof that you are not a serious professional.

Unions, professional societies, licensing bodies, etc., all function primarily to shore up the in group. These groups then live off of annual license fees, dues, and other types of lechery. This group grows more and more detached, sitting in an office worrying about the meta-scale instead of actually doing any real work. Eventually the union and licensing bosses consume massive quantities of the otherwise-productive value just for sitting there in the middle. By this point, their approval has been codified into major corporate contracts if not literally made legally prerequisite. Good luck extracting them at that point. Right-to-work at least keeps that apparatus somewhat in check.

I knew a young woman aspiring to become a professional actor. She had spent years trying to earn her way into SAG, and had years left to go before she realistically had a shot of actually getting in. Unions are not charities. They exist to serve themselves and the people they decide to like, and no one else.

That's them. One thing that you seem to be forgetting is that, if we made a union, WE get to decide how it works. The Screen Actors Guild has conditions for entry. Most others don't.

The parent was discussing SAG / AFTRA, which I felt compelled to correct him or her on it.

The fact is that all unions start with some exclusions. This would have to be a critical piece of any unionization as employers would have no incentive to agree to the terms laid out.

Sure. But a lot of the A-list started as struggling actors. It helps everyone in the industry over the long run.

Right, but there are no struggling software engineers. Even college kids won't touch an internship for less than $20/hour, much less be forced to take a gig for "exposure".

Are the "struggling actors" actually unemployed, or just not getting the roles they want? I don't know many people in the industry who can't find a job in programming (that pays better than the LA Times pays their journalists), but I know lots of people who are struggling to find a good job that matches their skills more accurately than "can program" and helps their career, and also lots of people who have had trouble keeping a good job once found because of layoffs / inability to deal with bad management or bad coworkers other than quitting / etc.

Actually unemployed. I have several actor friends (I live in NYC) who spend roughly half the year auditioning -- if they're lucky. On paper the jobs pay pretty well because they pay union rates but that's because they subsidize large stints of unemployment.

I don't know about SAG (movie/TV union) but I have known dozens of people in or trying to be in the NYC theater scene, and I never heard anyone say a good thing about Equity (theater union), only many complaints. Joining was an arcane process, but necessary to get roles. So one of the paths to joining was working for certain employers who had some arrangement with the union to grant membership after so many hours of work. What that meant for several of my friends is working for this now-defunct theme restaurant in Times Square with horrible & abusive management for the time required to get their Equity card.