I read it as "see, didn't require forming a union to get something done in the tech industry"

Do unions allow competition among union members? It’s always seemed to me that they work in jobs where the people are replaceable.

In Google one could work to make 2x to 3x more than the next person - is that will possible with a union?

Seems like in jobs where individual talent / skills matter, a union is by definition harmful (unless you’re in the lower 50%).

Collective action / protest works fine, though, for establishing baselines. If giving employees what they want is cheaper than firing all of them and hiring a fresh batch, it should always work fine.

> Seems like in jobs where individual talent / skills matter, a union is by definition harmful (unless you’re in the lower 50%).

Professional athlete unions would be a counterexample, I believe. It really depends on how the union is structured. I doubt a union for high paid tech workers would be structured the same way as one for blue collar labourers.

That is a pretty naive view of our industry.

Personally I find us far more alike other industries than unlike.

We're a new industry but we're still full of people of all types sizes and emotional colours.

Nothing in the notion of union stops competition or talent/skill expression.

A lot of people only associate unions with factory workers kind of jobs, it’s not. Think of journalists or performing actors unions for instance.

Correct. To the point: https://www.local817.com/about-us

https://www.dga.org/resources/additional/guilds-and-unions.a...

Unions allow whatever they want to allow, and block whatever they want to block. So if Google employees wanted to form a very light touch union they could do exactly that.

I took a glance at the constitution of the Screen Actors Guild recently as part of a discussion on this topic elsewhere. It's interesting how it features very strong supermajority requirements for going on strike, for imposing a salary cap, and for amending the constitution to remove the supermajority condition.

I wouldn't be surprised to see similar clauses in other union constitutions for fields in which, like tech, there's a large and obvious talent dispersion. I think a majority-rule approach would inevitably lead to the anti-meritocratic policies you're imagining.

[1] https://www.sagaftra.org/files/2015_1002_sag-aftra_constitut...

It walks like a union, talks like a union, and quacks like a union.

It's the same idea. Workers doing things collectively.

Perhaps they can get the best of unions without getting the worst of unions with this behavior.

The worst of unions being?

Can you not think of any negative aspects of unions?