"Accept it or leave it" is a post-facto event: one accepts or rejects the contents of the contract. What the OP is referring to is participation ("having a say") in the drafting of the contract itself. By definition "accept it or leave it" is not having a say in it.

Having a say in the contract you end up signing (which may be at a variety of different companies) is more personally useful to the individual than having a say in the specific contract of a specific company. So the claim that unions give you more say in the employment conditions of a specific company is irrelevant because it's an optimization towards the wrong objective.

> If 100,000 people are voting on a contract your 1/100,000th share of the influence functionally rounds to zero.

Assuming that you make no effort to influence any of the hypothetical 100,000 people voting on the contract in any way.

> The contract will reflect your coworkers aggregate preferences, which will in general be completely orthogonal to your own preferences.

This is a fairly surprising assertion for me - I can't recall a time I've personally found this to be the case professionally. May I ask how you encountered this in your own professional experience?

> Assuming that you make no effort to influence any of the hypothetical 100,000 people voting on the contract in any way.

And if all 100k people all try to influence each other to different ends that ends up a wash.

> This is a fairly surprising assertion for me

Some people prefer better work life balance, other people prefer higher compensation. Some people want job security, others want higher risk and higher upside. Labour market mobility allows people to sort into the jobs that match their preferences, which is impossible to achieve through collective bargaining because the parts of the collective want different things.

>The contract will reflect your coworkers aggregate preferences, which will in general be completely orthogonal to your own preferences.

Can you elaborate on your thoughts here or cite evidence to support it? On first thought, it doesn’t ring true to me. E.g., most of the union contract conditions seem to benefit most individuals with the exception of some edge cases

Plenty of union contracts emphasize seniority when it comes to pay/benefits/promotions etc, which makes it harder both for younger employees to get pay increases and promotions out of turn and for people to job hop for career progression.

That’s a real concern in terms of meritocracy, but I don’t see how it makes your goals orthogonal to everyone else’s, unless you are always a young out-performer. Almost by default, if you’re not job hopping (presumably to get a raise) you won’t always be one of the younger employees. The out-performance piece is by definition an edge case.

The original comment seemed to lay claim that each individual will sacrifice for the collective to become a net negative. I think there’s a good case to be against seniority rules, but it’s almost impossible to claim they are against every individual self interest.

Most of these problems are industry wide, poor work life balance is the rule in tech jobs, and jobs that are better have such high competition almost nobody will actually be able to shop around.

Flexibility can be built into union contacts, and its unlikely each of the 100,000 people will have entirely different and opposed interested to you

Tech jobs have by far the best work life balance among any job where you can make well into six figures right out of college. How many hours do you think investment bankers, biglaw attorneys, management consultants, medical residents etc. work?