I would love to have examples of good working conditions being arrived at naturally. Given that there are many programmers of various talent levels throughout the industry I have noted a number of dark patterns in programming work: long hours, pay that refuses to follow value of work (Apple makes 400k profit per employee), reduction in workspace quality, etc.

We can all pretend that we have more economic power than our highly paid blue collar peers that worked in highly unionized work forces in the past, but the programmers that make the kind of money for that to be true are very rare. Nearly 30 years ago my father made 70k as a union welder. It is highly unlikely that I will be able to match that salary street inflation, and the world is more expensive: education and health care could eat us alive at any moment.

I don't know how much of our effort the capital owning class needs to strip from us before we take advantage of the massive productive capacities we have before we make it fair again, but I assure you, it will be organized, not natural.

>Good working conditions for highly-skilled in-demand work arise naturally through supply and demand.

But they don't necessarily arise if the demand from workers wanting to do that work is sufficient. For instance, game developers have relatively terrible work conditions by the standards of the software industry, because so many people want to work on games. You could reasonably argue that they get enough satisfaction from being able to work on games that they're willing to put up with worse conditions, but that doesn't change that their work conditions are relatively bad. The nice thing about somehow bringing about a reduction in developer working hours is that it wouldn't necessarily result in any loss in economic output or employer profit, as there's a wealth of research showing that working beyond a certain amount of hours daily is counterproductive, so it's a win-win, and could even increase productivity.

This is easy to say. Can you give examples? I'm no expert on economic history, just a run of the mill history buff, but my impression is that the divide is not between people who are unskilled and in low demand vs. those skilled and in high demand. I would say it is between owners of capital, who are not bound to work for a salary, and everyone else. Typically if you work for a salary you're worried about and dependent on the arrival of the next payment. Regardless of how easy you think it will be to find another job the loss of the current income stream is disruptive. I just finished a book that related the very long working hours of clerks performing accounting tasks for Canton-based American merchant houses during the middle 19th century. So there you had skilled clerks, who had to be imported by sailing vessel from the other side of the pacific, and still felt compelled to work essentially dawn to dusk 6 days a week.

> naturally

So collective bargaining is unnatural? Except when a corporation does it on behalf of its shareholders, of course.