It's hard for me to understand when you look at other similar industries. We're not talking about blue collar unions here: we're talking about white collar unions. They're very different.

Take Hollywood as an example. You have incredibly wealthy individuals who are all members of unions. Kevin Feige makes Disney billions of dollars, but he still pays his PGA dues.

The purpose of unions like the WGA, PGA, DGA, SAG, and Equity aren't to "make it harder to fire poor employees" - they're to provide equal protection to all members regardless of whether they're making millions upon millions of dollars or just getting started in the industry.

Sometimes I feel people in tech forget there is a highly skilled, highly unionized industry just a few hundred miles south of Silicon Valley that seems to be doing OK. Is it perfect? No, definitely not. Is the film industry better to work in with the unions than without? Almost certainly yes.

Yet demand for software engineers are higher than ever. It seems like market forces should counteract these issues, however SV is impervious to these issues.

If you want to start an industry wide programmer union, by all means, start one and then try and get people to join it. I'd love to hear what benefits you think I would get by joining an industry wide programmer union.

The WGA was grandfathered in with the law, but you’re not allowed in the US to create sector wide programmers union. It is cool to imagine what you could accomplish with sector-wide software strikes though.

Have you considered using the AMA or similar in your examples instead?

And so if someone wants to convince people how effective unions are at worker protection, Hollywood's unions aren't the most convincing example.

Another personal view - as somebody from Europe, I really don't feel any need for any unions. I am not trembling from fear that I will get fired. If I will, there will be good reasons (my poor performance or employer getting into financial troubles). For me, that's a good trade-off for extra pay and interesting work. When I was consulting, I had nano-fraction of current job security, but again it was offset by salary. Again, fair deal for me and for employer too.

Another reason - anytime I even remotely interfered with Union people in my previous jobs, they literally reeked of internal politic games, keeping their comfy jobs as safe as possible. You get this kind of folks in any company, even in my current one, although we don't have unions. They try different ways (ie managing pension fund or other 'political' positions that require little work but add friction to firing process). Needless to say they are never stellar performance workers.

This all obviously doesn't say anything about Google or generally SV culture, my experience is local to 3 European states only, and cca 6 companies.

We in IT are vastly overpaid compared to any other engineering degree holders. Not complaining, but its a fact. Just talk to other engineering folks. High salaries and positions can be achieved quickly, not over 30 years of gradual rise of staying within same company.

If/once market saturates and salaries go down significantly, there might be more need for unions. But most folks are not there I think.

It's hard to concevive of a more asymmetrical partnership, and a partnership in which one party uses all their power, legally and socially, to increase the intensity and duration of work, and dictates the method in which it is done.

Your employer doesn’t feel that way.

Understand: I make no claim that malevolently exploitative companies don't exist; of course they do.

But your position seems to be that any company that makes any profit is malevolently exploitative.