You probably think that you do, but in reality you don't.

Large corporations have been proven to fix wages for tech workers[1]. There's literally no way that you could have any possible way of bargaining your way around that as a single person.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...

>>There's literally no way that you could have any possible way of bargaining your way around that as a single person.

Actually you do, by walking across the street and getting a big fat raise to join a different company. That is one of many reasons engineers by and large don't feel a need to have someone else bargain for them - they negotiate with their feet.

If you clicked the Parent's link, you would have seen it was discussing the anti-poaching collusion / wage fixing that was going on.

You couldn't walk across the street, because the company across the street agreed not to hire employees from the other company across the street.

The free market isn't always free.

If you clicked the parents link you would have seen that it involved 2 companies, not the market itself

There were far more than two involved. That article just covered the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

And that’s just the ones they had enough evidence against.

Looks like the US government "bargained" for me there, without the need for a union.

Sure, but there's no guarantee they'll do that in every case or at every employer. Here there was a smoking gun, so the government could easily act on it; do you think that'd be the case for everyone in our field?

Unions of professional athletes are some of the most successful unions in the US. These are people that are highly paid and have very specific skills that can't easily be replaced. These are people who already spend as much as 15% or 20% of their salary paying others to negotiate on their personal behalf. Yet these athletes still want a union to represent them as a collective class.

I don't know if the general software developer really needs a union. Some niches certainly do. Game developers are the obvious example of a group of workers who are treated worse than people with comparable skills who do comparable work in other industries. But the idea that we don't need a union because we are already paid well, we are skilled, or we can negotiate for ourselves is naive. Anytime an industry is as wildly profitable as the tech industry is, workers can benefit from a union.

Without the NBA union, players like Labron James would make much more than they do today.

Maybe, but there are also a few hundred non-LeBron like players in the NBA. You can argue that the union negotiates away the rights of players like LeBron to benefit those few hundred players. But you can also argue that LeBron is only in the position to make as much money because the union has been fighting for him before he was even born. Would the NBA have free agency, guaranteed contracts, and players making tens of millions of dollars a year without the union?

Plus LeBron would be a near billionaire even without cashing a single game check. He makes way more money from being an ambassador of the game than from the game itself. Therefore he has a vested financial interest in the health of the league overall and the hundreds of other players in the NBA.

Back to software development, the question is are you the LeBron James of software development? Are you one of the handful of the best developers on the planet? If you are, I can totally understand why you might be against a union. If you aren't, you could probably benefit from a union.

We don't have to guess if someone like Labron would make as much as he makes now without a union because MJ got paid about as much. That said, you're right that the median NBA salary is much higher now. The question is whether that came at the expense of players like Labron or at the expense of the teams.

The responses you got are borderline religious. Pro union people need to acknowledge and be up front about the cons of a union. It’s just another entity with power over a group of people and suffers from the same pros and cons. It’s not a panacea.

Deriding legitimate concerns is not how you convince people, and makes it look like you have an agenda.

Convincing staunch anti union folks that a union would help them is like trying to convince a Southern Baptist god doesn't exist. You don't bother, you organize folks who recognize the benefit and understand the tradeoffs, people who don't think of them as individual exceptionalists.

Wanting better pay and benefits for workers is an agenda, and if making that clear isn't enough (even after accounting for a cons of collective bargaining, union costs, etc), ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

You'd be mistaken to think I'm some staunch anti-union person - I think it's great that these warehouse workers unionized! I think the benefits far outweigh the cons for them.

Difference between them and myself is, we work completely different jobs, in completely different markets, with completely different incentives.

But it's not just about yourself; it's about your colleagues and others in the same industry. Your incentives are not their incentives, and their work experience is not your work experience. Important points to remember imho about why people might desire collective bargaining in order to have better pay and working conditions. Setting pay aside for a moment (which is admittedly a complex topic in this context), not everyone has the ability, agency, or leverage to obtain better working conditions (without collective bargaining).

I wouldn't mind for my pro-union co-workers to form a union but the part I hate is that they have the power to force me to pay their organization which I don't support and they also have the power to negotiate my employment contract without my consent.

“They’re too stupid to know what they want so I have to lie about facts to them.”

Why is that an acceptable strategy for your side but not the other side? Could it be that you might both have valid viewpoints?

You misunderstand my comment perhaps, my apologies if I poorly communicated the idea. I never suggested lying to staunch anti union folks, but to ignore them out of effort efficiency. If they believe their viewpoint is valid, the effort to persuade is better spent elsewhere. Majorities win, simple as that (as demonstrated by this unionization vote, as well as those ongoing at Starbucks locations).

Unions are helpful in two scenarios:

1) When workers want systemic reform of an organization.

2) When workers are more-or-less interchangeable.

Software engineers aren't interchangeable at all compared to a factory worker, which is why they have such great individual bargaining power and why (historically) they don't really feel a huge need for a union to represent them. Today, software workers have a bit more interest in unionizing because they want to change their organization's high-level goals (e.g. environmental responsibility, not making tools for warfare, hiring diversity, etc).

But both scenarios apply to Amazon warehouse workers, and union representation would almost certainly be a massive benefit for them.

Developers are absolutely interchangeable. If they weren't then job hopping every 2 years wouldn't be the optimal career strategy.

Saying that software engineers are not interchangeable is being delusional. We have some bargaining power because this is a skilled office job where the demands outweighs the supply and our added value to the business is many times what we get paid. But many SWE job hob every two years or so at best, and they absolutely get replaced without a second thought.

Your mistake is thinking a large corporation gives a single flying fuck about you as an individual employee (who's proven themselves rowdy by trying to bargain).

Every single time I put a notice in a large corporation, they tried to bargain with me to stop me from quitting, offering raises and improved working condition, eg. projects with more leadership roles. So no, they do care in some industries, especially when the cost of hiring a single worker is higher than Amazon warehouse workers entire yearly pay.

So every time you quit you found out that you were paid far less than what your labor was worth...

No, it's the company that found that, I already knew that by that point.

> mistake is thinking a large corporation gives a single flying fuck about you as an individual employee

You aren't negotiating against the corporation. You're negotiating against the people who determine your compensation. (This is a seemingly-minor, oft-overlooked and enormously-important distinction.)

Many on this forum have leverage over those people. (Some over the corporation.) For those people, unionization could be a net negative. Recognizing that doesn't mean the idea isn't worth pursuing.

There are certainly areas where this isn't true in the tech industry. It's very rare that an engineer can just say that they will no longer be willing to do on call work for example while staying on a team that maintains an online service. You can always ask for more money, but that's not everything that would be on a negotiating table.

That's awesome - I'm a skilled laborer who isn't really comfortable bargaining on my own behalf. Do you mind sharing your people skills while I share my engineering skills so that we can both get a better outcome overall?

Unless you are at the top echelon of ICs at your org (principal engineer or something equivalent), I guarantee you that you are viewed by your organization as nothing more than a replaceable "resource". To think otherwise is inexperience, or delusion. If you ever get the opportunity to observe what goes on during org-wide planning or engineer leveling, it'll be a bit of a wake up call when you see how little anyone cares about you as an individual.

So you can singlehandedly get a corporation to improve their working conditions? That's incredible

The company caters to _me_, not the other way around. Welcome to being in a high-demand job.

I guess that's good if you only care about you?

Correct. I don't care that other people don't learn to bargain their own highly paid, highly in-demand jobs to be even better.

The tech job market is favorable for workers for now. That will most likely not always be the case.

Tech is not the only field that people have jobs in. Consider the Amazon warehouse workers that just unionized which is the topic of this article