Good luck...the "scabs" crossing your picket line all WFH and you'll never even know who they are.

WFH means work-from-anywhere, which dooms the leverage of a union

While I don’t agree with your hot take, it would be amazing if all the C-suite hand wringing about RTO being the best thing ever resulted in strong unions as a result.

I had an idea regarding this. What if a new CC license was developed for open source projects where that code could only be used by union-participant companies/individuals?

They would develop a tool based on ChatGPT/Copilot to automatically transform FOSS software into an obfuscated form such that they could invoke plausible deniability in court cases.

That would be interesting, but it would probably only pressure small to midsize businesses without resources to just develop everything in-house anyway, and even then, only if it starts to comprise the majority of open source software

A competitor would just recreate it without union requirements.

This was thought to be the solution in the 90's en early 00's, offshore everything (basically wfh but wf-lower-income-country). Turns out it works sometimes but is hardly a panacea.

Digital work leaves lots of traces. Unions, at least where I live, will kick you out for strike breaking.

kick who out of what? foreign workers wouldn't be in, or care about, your union

If a foreign worker could do what most of us do, they would already have your job, because they are infinitely cheaper.

30 years after first trying to replace all of us, they have still been unable to do so because it just doesn't work that well, even with a hybrid WHF company.

The union would kick out members who are strike breaking. It isn't possible to break the strike if you're not part of it. It wouldn't be effective to hold a strike in the first place if it was only a small minority of employees.

that's such a good point. hell they could just have them create a new app.

The best time to unionize is when you're in a strong bargaining position to set a sustainable baseline in your first contract and build the infrastructure to make a strike credible. Unions are strongest when they have a huge fund to support their members through a strike.

Tech workers have been warned about this all through the latest tech boom. It might be too late. Any union formed now will be broke and desperate at any negotiation. It's like trying to buy flood insurance while you're on the roof waiting for rescue.

I think tech workers are currently in a weaker position but still a fairly strong position to unionize. There are plenty of people still employed enough to be able to support those laid off, and tech workers as a whole earn enough that many should hav a significant savings for emergencies like strikes. I think we should be organizing to have similar protections like a guild, where we guarantee minimum quality of treatment for us workers but no maximum on perks and wages, not even pegged to tenure.

Strikes are probably the least effective tactic for a tech union. Software isn't a coal mine or a railway. Plenty of products have glided along for a while with very few people maintaining them. Sometimes even zero.

I imagine if we do see tech collective action it'll probably be done quietly in the form of silently exploding technical debt, with documentation that misleads more than it informs and products that collapse under the weight of their own unmaintainability.

Most companies don't have twitter levels of overengineering.

Work to rule would kill any tech company. Imagine your biggest contract having to wait 2 weeks before you can fix the bug that is crashing their business.

Imagine zero tech support because unpaid after hours tech support is horse shit.

This has me wondering, how might a union be formed so as to avoid common misbehaviors of unions? I’m aware of many examples of unions behaving pathologically, but well-run unions hardly make headlines. Are there any noteworthy examples of the latter?

Off the top of my head, paths to explore would include:

- no full-time/paid positions as union officials

- term limits on union officials

- limited budget

Perhaps I’m naive, but the last item seems especially appealing. I don’t quite see why unions need big budgets, as it seems to me their activities should more or less revolve around the kind of collective discussions that can take place on Zoom or a forum. As such, expenses would be more or less limited to operational expenses for these tools.

I’d actually consider joining a union that was sufficiently restricted in scope, and narrow in its focus.

The trickier question is how to avoid the failure mode of unions defending known-bad employees. Having worked a few union jobs in the past, there were more than a handful of colleagues I sincerely wished would get fired, but for whom the union afforded undue protection.

> The best time to unionize is when you're in a strong bargaining position to set a sustainable baseline in your first contract and build the infrastructure to make a strike credible. Unions are strongest when they have a huge fund to support their members through a strike.

I might be wrong, but I don't think the average employee salary would be nearly as high as they are, given unionisation costs quite a lot of money, that drives up the cost per-employee massively. You might say now is the best moment ever to do this, but I don't see why that would be true.

>given unionisation costs quite a lot of money

In what made up reality is that even remotely true?

Everyone I know in a union pays a couple hundred bucks tops. Is it really not worth an xbox to help your fellow worker be happy, healthy, and sustainable?

That's not the cost I mean. Why would union fees drive up the cost of an employee?