Ageism is on the worker's shoulders, but those workers are also managers who choose to do bullshit like lay off workers above a certain age across a company. We need ways to protect ourselves from that.
Agree with the second point on ageism
There is no "might have been". It's pretty much a matter of historical record that labor unions were fiercely anti-immigrant.
Judging by nativist comments even on a heavily moderated forum like HN whenever the topic of H1-Bs comes up, the many, many immigrants in the tech industry would be have to be bonkers to trust that a tech union wouldn't become nativist.
The old stereotype of nativist unions is just that. It's true in some cases--see the Teamsters, who also supported Trump, or police unions--but the actual union movement in the US has long fought for better treatment for immigrants.
https://www.seiu.org/cards/solutions-for-immigration-reform-...
* Better treatment against the rampant ageism in our industry (eg. access to lawyers when IBM decides to do mass layoffs of people above a certain age...)
* Guaranteeing reimbursement for self-education materials, time off for self-education purposes like conventions and hacker spaces
* Better treatment for H1B visa holders, a political push to stop the abuse of workers who cannot leave employers or risk losing immigration status
* Support for and communal funding for OSS
* A group pushback against flagrantly unethical, insecure, or straight up illegal behavior on the part of companies (eg. that non-poaching agreement back in the day that kept people's wages from being as high as they should've been)
* Standard establishment of making sure remote workers are paid for the value they bring to the company and aren't stiffed purely because of where they are geographically located at the time.