This kind of sentiment is both in tech and also in every other field that has or could have unionization, and it's never true.

You tell that to car manufacturers in Detroit.

That happened because Detroit manufacturers failed to keep up with quality and supply chain innovations, plus the lack of smaller cars during the energy crisis. Asian manufacturers ate Detroit’s lunch AND dinner, it wasn’t the evil unions screwing things up.

This is correct. The only reason these manufacturers are still standing is because they are propped by the government, eg bailouts is just one example.

The market has otherwise already decided their shitty approach didn’t work.

It's pretty well documented in primary sources that just about every manufacturer has moved their factories in pursuit of lower labour costs. Jurisdictions without labour protection regulation tend to unsurprisingly have lower costs for unskilled and semi-skilled labour. This isn't just about unions, but (very costly) safety regulations too.

This was all a fully predicted outcome of international free trade. US-based manufacturers simply can't compete with unregulated labour pools of people willing to work capably in toxic and dangerous conditions for most of their waking lives just to survive. It's the same reason we have to import enormous amounts of agricultural labour.

Depending on your political leanings you may take this as a cry to deregulate labour, or to increase tariffs. The status quo however dooms most domestic manufacturing to be noncompetitive.

CAFE was written in a way that protected UAW workers jobs at the expense of fuel economy and the ability to make and sell small cars. In the end, the only vehicles that were still profitable for the big three were vehicles riding on truck frames. Unintended consequences strike again.

American automobile manufacturers lost to European and Japanese carmakers, both of whom have heavily unionized workforces.

This has been a bogeyman for software engineers for multiple decades, all while salaries have increased considerably.

Does the hockey stick growth of companies like Deel today not change things?

> they might as well get them for 1/4 of the price from Central and South America.

Where can I find these mythical Central and South Americans that are "just as qualified as US engineers" and 1/4 of the price?

I keep hearing about them, but the only devs I've met who would match that description were very much charging US rates.

I'd guess that most software work doesn't require super-specialized roles. You can get good quality engineers for generalist tasks (web app dev, API dev, etc.) all over the world.

I agree, the end game for remote work for non-specialists isn't an obvious positive for those in HCOL countries

People think this, but after a stint in boutique consulting it just is not true.

We worked for companies that had a lot of extra cash but didn’t want to hire for these roles out of stubbornness. We were basically there to clean up messes and attempt to build/handoff AI backed solutions to off shore teams… the generalists just were not good and were drowning in work.

We even assumed that in a few cases we were typically not talking with the person on teams and instead got a random employee of their own consulting place. Face to face meetings were RARE.

I guess my point is that people working these “quarter of the price” roles are not great and the companies hiring them aren’t trying to build anything of quality.

Healthcare companies trying to get their piece of the govt money without providing any real value

> You can get good quality engineers for generalist tasks (web app dev, API dev, etc.) all over the world.

The issue here is that, while code is easy to write for these tasks, the hard part is understanding the requirements and engaging with stakeholders.

There's a good level of business/domain expertise required. Of course, someone else could do that and just the coding part could be offshored. But at that point how is that different than the US analyst/offshored programmer business model of the 90's?

Isn't that the opposite of the direction that (Western) countries are looking to go after COVID exposed the fragility of global logistics dependencies? (and China's manufacturing power and Russia's energy production power).

On-shoring, in-sourcing, are the trends, from a country perspective anyway.

If that’s how your employer views your work, sounds like unions are in order. I don’t think workers should feel afraid of asking for better working conditions, and if workers are afraid, we’ll unions are the best answer to that problem.

If Amazon could replace workers for 1/4 the price then why haven't they done it already?