I feel like I'm the only one that ever asks this, but especially with the engineering team (and software engineers in general) why haven't robo-unions become a thing yet?

While politics will be hard as always, instantly verifiable direct democracy is achievable with a distributed ledger + PGP...

In addition to that I personally think that jobs that require you to be on pager duty at all should be paying way more than they are, but everyone accepts it without batting an eye.

Not everyone thinks that direct democracy is a good system.

Cool, then do representative, or have a dictator or whatever other system people think is good -- the problem is that no one seems to be even trying.

Ideally I'd love to even see multiple unions and some competition between them, that might be a better corruption control than anything people can think up.

Many very powerful groups benifit from people thinking that way. That does not mean unions are great just that they would get a lot of bad publicity regardless so you need to adjust for that.

My personal experience is they are a large net positive for workers, but every mistake gets heavily publicized.

> But the problem with unions is that over time they are corrupted, and quickly become inefficient bureaucratic institutions.

Replace "unions" with "corporations" and the same is true.

Any hierarchy, actually. Ask an Altar boy. Even after 2000 years it's a problem for some Organizations to get it right.

This is equally an argument against forming any organization, isn't it?

Michels' classic Political Parties is a fascinating and depressing look at that problem. This stuff, problems with democracy, was fretted over 100 years ago, not so much nowadays, since democracy was redefined as what is called 'democracy' in the mid 20th C.[0]

"The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.

Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.

Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, stating "Who says organization, says oligarchy." ... "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."

All organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Democratic attempts to hold leaders accountable fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, and the ability to both control information about the organization and what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members." [1] (lightly abridged)

[0] see Michael Saward, Democracy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy