This is learned helplessness. It's not going to get better for software engineers anytime soon, I'm afraid.
The time to organize is like planting a tree: the best time is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now. Especially if you're an early-career SWE, you seem to have little to lose anyhow.
Aside from that, you need to contribute with money for something that will not get you anything in the short term. Also the lack of transparency incentives corruption
A software engineer’s union would just kick whatever offshoring is happening into overdrive.
Where I live now in Austria, there's some union of IT workers, but it's small and toothless because they know their work can be offshored and have no leverage especially that the country is already not attractive to investors as-is due to high costs, high taxes and regulations. IT workers giving themselves even more benefits and protections through unions, like the rail workers have for example, would just mean non critical IT work leaves the country ASAP to neighboring Hungary or Slovakia or something.
In a globalized free market without trade and regulatory barriers, where the products and the "labor" travels freely over a wire with no borders or tariffs, the best value players win all, and everyone else is stuck in a race to the bottom trying to match that even if their operating costs are higher due to regulations, taxes, etc
Unions only worked in jobs where the workers could collectively use the leverage they had all along against their employer but were too afraid to use due to retaliation, but unions can't fix real world economic and trade facts that make your leverage zero to begin with. See the VFX industry for best example.
However, the experienced reality repeatedly doesn't live up to the promise.
Nobody would risk disrupting smooth running operations by introducing offshoring to save a few pennies, when free money was raining from the sky, but now that money is getting tighter and covid opened the doors to accepting more work done remotely and less work done in sync face to face, then offshoring is now a lot less risky and off-putting than in the past.
Plus, unlike the Indian offshoring scare of ~20 years ago, besides the remote work thing, offshore labor is a lot more skilled at IT task now. There isn't that massive gap anymore, where only Americans or Germans new how to write SW, and the eastern world only knew to make sneakers and do call support. Thanks to STEM universities, access to good education sources, FOSS and self learning, people outside the west can code just as good but at a lower cost when you keep the same hiring bar and don't just pay some offshore middleman consultancy for the cheapest labor.
And the proof is in the pudding as most big tech companies have large pools of workers in India at this point. You can say all you want, that offshoring isn't gonna work because of quality or culture or whatever, but it sure seems like it is working for them, and I don't think this genie is going back in the bottle.
However, the second an IT union gets established they’re just going to say the hell with it, India ain’t so bad.
How isn't it working? Most big tech companies have large pools of workers in India/Asia/LatAm/CEE at this point. So something must be working if they keep growing there.
In such an environment, H1B workers will actively fight union formation.
Remember, H1-Bs and immigrants, that a union would be not be on your side. They would have a large percentage of pro-nativists, regardless of what they say officially. There's a long, long history of unions in the United States opposing immigrant labor that is worth reading up on.
https://www.professionalsaustralia.org.au/Professionals/Prof...
United Kingdom:
https://prospect.org.uk/tech-workers/
https://www.unitetheunion.org/what-we-do/unite-in-your-secto...
France: (Someone asking which of the many unions to join for SWE)
https://www.reddit.com/r/union/comments/1bcx6z6/which_union_...
It's like planting the seeds, it might not work from time to time and from places to places, but sometime the result might surprise you. But you'll never know if you don't give it a try.
It's like... (maybe an inappropriate example) how NRA brainlessly defending gun rights. They don't first spend 500 billions on gun safety research trying to prove gun is safe, no, they want guns, and then they come up reasons why guns are good.
In the recent years I'm started to think maybe this NRA-style method is actually how to set things in motion (if it's not the only effective way), as any added prerequisite or cations may eventually bog things down to a stop. You all read the CIA sabotage manual right? There's a chapter detailed how you can stop a plan by adding complexity (i.e. bigger committees etc).
I don't know about how a union would affect the standard salary being offered. I'd say that it could be higher for those essential enough to be "core staff", those that the company hires permanently knowing they'll be hard to get rid of and who drive the company forward because they're motivated with additional means.
So a union might drive the salaries and employment conditions up for the "core" team, while driving them down for the "temps". I've been through this as a unionized tech worker in both categories, and this is how it played out.
This is a boom and bust industry by nature. Projects finish or cancel, and work winds down. You can always be laid off. Seven years of plenty, seven years of famine.
It’s having all of humanity or all the country subsidize you/your industry.
I suppose there was a time when American manufacturing had a big power/equality/productivity and social stability imbalance over Chinese manufacturing and the US unions did play a role in correcting that and promoting Chinese wealth and power. So in principle I agree. I'm just less sure that AWS employees are going to benefit from doing the same thing in software.
The only good unions are the ones that serve geopolitical interests of states that are positive for humanity. A steel workers union is subsidized by the rest of society, but if it keeps steel production in the US, making the US more formidable and able to project humanity-advancing policy, then it is good.
Unions freeze market forces, which raises wages, but those raised wages come directly from other parts of the economy and do so inefficiently (cost more than a dollar elsewhere to increase the wages by a dollar). This is because it distorts comparative advantages. Inequality can be reduced by unions, but only in short term. By freezing market forces in this pocket you are creating inefficiencies, which come at a cost over time (like competitive and bad actors becoming dominant).
Wages and inequality was better in the 1950s/60s US despite of unions. The US was 50% of the global economy, had dollar dominance, just about the only industrial base intact, a skilled workforce with a clear competitive advantage. These are what made wages high and inequality low.
Take the long-term perspective and center humanity rather than picking winners and losers. Unions are an emotionally charged topic because labor groups reap power from them and business groups lose power from them. This is noise. We should make decisions like this based on what serves humanity’s long term interests, and unions (and business cartels/lobbies) hold humanity back.
Humans organize together in many different ways for many different reasons. Your own assertion belies that — if my negotiating my terms of working for someone is crime against humanity, why should the guy controlling the capital have that right?
The dude for whom I work is worth $10-15B. What should he make for the benefit of humanity and efficiency? He negotiated a deal with the board for his comp.
Rent-seeking behavior of any kind holds humanity back.
You’re right: all things should serve humanity, including markets.
Rent-seeking behavior of any kind, including unions, including business engaged in rent-seeking, are anti-human.
Well-being needs to be properly understood though. Well-being is the state of being most sustainable and perfectly aligned with forwarding humanity.
That means valuable work that contributes to the progression of humanity, the circumstances that make reproduction viable and abundant, the resources to support cultivating oneself and others to your and their maximum potential serving humanity.
It doesn’t mean the ability to spend your days on the couch, or sitting on the beach, or devoting all your time to a hobby that does nothing to serve humanity.
> Preventing efficiency in markets slows growth, which slows the progression of living standards.
(but the time to organize was back when we still had the upper hand)