1. Hollywood unions disprove this
2. Hollywood unions (SAG, DGA) disprove this
3. Unions don't mean you can no longer negotiate. DiCaprio still does
4. One upside: Unions represent members who are no longer able to work
5. Hollywood unions have some pretty specialized folk and it works well for them
The things you can negotiate for are capped at the value of your work. You can't forbid your employer from replacing you/your teammates with AI foe instance, but unions can, because the collective value of their output is beyond what the employers may gain from ML models. Not so on the individual level.
Cost of hiring increases and there are fewer gigs around. Unionisation adds nontrivial transaction costs, so there will be fewer opportunities for new entrants, and fierce competition among existing workers for shrinking number of gigs.
For example look at how women actors get their cast roles with harvey weinstein studio - did union protect them from sexual predators?
Look at average unionized actor - very few are making big bucks, most are just surviving and have other day jobs.
UAW workers are still at the mercy of their employers, and are only dragging their companies down, while non-unionized automakers are taking over market share.
I am totally fine that my bargaining chip is my ability to work - it is the only austainable way. Otherwise there will be a lot of useless dead weights who dont contribute to the topline, and leech off of bottomline. (There is already unemployment for this use case).
Look at NYC MTA - all unionized and completely inefficient, unionisation can only work in monopoly situation.
Tech in the other hand is high growth particularly because all monopolies are being attacked by more flexible and lean startups.
Hollywood is not growing at all, while big tech is carrying the whole world
Well this certainly isn't true. Hollywood has grown hugely over the last 20 years (with a massive crash during COVID):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271856/global-box-office...
It looks like it is on track to recover completely this year:
just look at labor data: it is not pretty. $28/hr mean pay in Hollywood! Much less in other areas.
There is a reason why successful actors prefer to become producers/directors: because it pays better to be your own boss, rather than be at a mercy of union. and you don't have to engage in high end prostituion and literally sell your ass to people like Weinstein and Epstein, just to get a role at a high profile movie.
Software development is a trade skill, like any other. We're in a very brief window of time where it's a very lucrative skill to have. Don't expect that to last forever. When that stops being the case you'll want something between you and the harder facts of life that you might have had the privilege of ignoring for a while. There's a reason people bled and died to make these organizations. The moment it's possible the capital class will grind you into a fine paste and sell you in tubes to make a few extra percent on the quarterly financials.
And I will be the first one to automate my job and reap the benefits of automation myself.
This is the way of life - if you cannot adapt - those more flexible, more adaptable, smarter, younger, hungrier - will eat your lunch.
There is no way any tech union can enforce monopoly, because there will always be new entrants ( ew grads) and offshore workers and immigrants willing to take the job, if union workers decide to strike.
In fact, I will be the first one to create outsourcing and offshoring consulting company to help companies fight unionisation.
This is the way of capitalism, the way of life. Smarter, faster, nimbler will get larger piece of the pie.
If union is willing to get $xxx mln in labor costs from a company, I will happily help this company fight unionisation for a fraction of that - to drive unions out of business while pocketing the profits by myself
Human augmented+automation will always be more superior/flexible/valuable and large corporations with a lot of capital will never be able to be as flexible and nimble for all customers and all their use cases, as a small player like myself can be
> it shows that you have zero experience in automation, because no high value job is fully automatable.
That's sort-of a tautology. What used to be a high value job can become a lower value job with some automation, and then be automated completely later.
Up to about a hundred years ago, many reasonably well-off people in the US and Europe used to have domestic servants. Those jobs could go to fairly high levels of skills and value. Nimbleness was rewarded. (But to be fair, they also could go down to pretty menial labour.)
Nowadays even really well-off people barely have any domestic servants. Instead they have dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and order their food delivered to their doorstep, and perhaps hire a part time cleaner for a few hours a week.
Google search or chatgpt wont gonna cut it.
Same with tech - if you create a startup with big ambitions - copilot and chatgpt wont gonna cut it for your product.
and I see no mechanism for union to provide any value to tech workers. Hell, there is no even a category of tech workers: thousands of different specializations. I would never wanna be in a union with grandpas coding in COBOL for example
Physicians and Lawyers have been around forever and they don’t unionize.
the reason why healthcare is such a mess and so expensive - is because Medical Board artificially limits supply of doctors to the market, by allowing very very few Medical Residencies perspecialty. This severely limits supply of doctors, keeps their pay high and leads to ever increasing cost of medical care for patients
No, but that's not required for the argument. Do you think any amount of unionisation would have forced society to keep lots of well paid blacksmiths and cobblers around?
(And if the answer to that is Yes, isn't that an argument against tolerating unions?)
tech is fundamentally incompatible with unions for several reasons:
I know what it means to be a union worker - and trust me, it will never gonna work in software engineering