You can negotiate a higher pay with your employer if you excel, the union provides the bottom from which you can negotiate.
Unfortunately, right now, that bottom is below our what our fair market-rate earnings would be.
However, in regular development jobs, I have also seen 0.1x developers, and worse. Even guys who definitely do damage if they are given access to the tools. The variation is huge.
I've never heard of a unionized industry that worked this way. Unions negotiate pay for every worker that belongs to the union. The only way to negotiate for higher pay is to quit your unionized job and take another non-unionized job.
Matt Damon is a SAG member but he does not get paid scale. Scale is a minimum wage set by the union but if you're a big enough star, you negotiate your own wages.
Bonuses and supplementary pay are usually not determined by unions and are up to you to negotiate in this situation.
Most other unions don't work that way.
I mean, it's one thing to realize that the supply/demand situation for programmers currently makes unions unnecessary, but it's quite another to slam people in other fields for doing what they have to in order to secure the same damn privilege (getting paid according to value).
The opportunity to make this extremely modest dream a reality is not some kind of right inherent to the free market! It's something we're going to have to fight for once supply/demand equilibrium has been reached.
I think this is the hard part: what is the value according to which people should be paid? Who should decide it? Not easy.
It gets particularly hairy when technological change has an impact on value. This is happening faster and faster.
Consider the classical example of Wapping dispute [0] where old hot-metal methods of printing, which unions sought to protect, were replaced by electronic publishing tools and printing machines. Today, it would look quite funny if papers still had to employ Linotype professionals to be able to print things in newspapers. The more acute concern is whether publishers print anything at all on paper, or if everything is in the net. If the unions could decide, of course you couldn't publish in the net, because it is destructive to jobs in the printing industry.
At some time, the commercial "value" of Linotype operators was very high. Now it is only historical; as a commercial operation, the machines have gone to obscurity. Who should have decided the value of those workers? I think the only one who really can decide is the one who owns and runs the operation. The unions mostly have an incentive to preserve the status quo - while happily accepting a change in other businesses, if it benefits them. No doubt that the modern-day Linotype operator would see it fit that he uses his union pay to buy an iPhone.
On the contrary, it's economics 101. I have a feeling our disagreement is due to definitions so let me be more specific about my intended meanings.
There is a minimum price at which you are willing to not switch vocations and there is a maximum price at which you can be profitably employed. The latter is what I was calling value, as in "value to the company." Relative bargaining power determines where on that spectrum your salary will be. It's arguable that the final price is "value" but that's not the meaning I intended. What should happen is a question for the philosophers. What does happen is up to us.
The Wapping dispute is an example of a union failing to recognize that the value (same definition I was using above) of their employees had fallen below their asking price. Sure, it happens -- I have no doubt that unions increase friction, which is bad and hurts the economy. But underpaying workers "because you can" is also bad, also introduces friction (increased need for loans, decreased ability of workers to bootstrap), and also hurts the economy. So I don't buy the argument that one is better or worse. As far as I'm concerned it's a zero-sum power struggle, philosophically and morally speaking. I'd rather be on the winning side and I don't begrudge others for wanting to be on the winning side.
I think such a figure is extremely difficult to calculate in many if not most jobs.
To assume that your competence will save you, you need both to assume that your evaluation of your own skills is correct and that others will confidently agree. Both of those propositions sound shaky. I've met a lot of overconfident programmers and I've met a lot of disinterested HR people.
Supply/demand of a chair takes a distance second to the value of the product of that chair. Medicine/law/finance are all oversupplied with high salaries. Try showing up to a teaching position interview and convincing them to pay you more because of econ 101.
Been hearing this for decades and the only things happening are:
1. The multiplier effect of programmers keeps going up.
2. Programming work is growing faster than the supply of programmers.
I don't plan on seeing these trends reverse during my lifetime. It's not a zero-sum game.
In Europe all I have seen is wages going down over the last 10 - 15 years. Admittedly I only started taking notice during the dot com boom, but I get the impression they were better before that.
The other thing I notice is that I personally manage a database that would have taken three of four people ten years ago. We have loads more frameworks and libraries that make the task manageable. I use Django, whereas ten years ago, the stuff done by Django would likely be done with in house libraries, so needed more people. Also I think many of the problems are "solved", we have ideas about how to do things that were not as clear when the internet was staring out.
http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr...
Good developers would not want a union, as it would likely drag down their compensation while forcing them to work with hiring mistakes.
Those who tilt at these giants mean well, but they will unhelpfully collide with windmills.
I wonder what's point in having a fast super car and complaining you are stuck in traffic often.
If you are good by a factor of 10, it hardly makes sense for you to ever work with a group of people.
Yes, but I am more skilled than my colleagues.
Unions inherently negotiate on behalf of the median worker who was employed at the time that the contract negotiations took place. As other people have pointed out, the fact the unions negotiate for current employees rather than future employees contributes to the "screw the new guy" phenomenon; the fact that unions negotiate for the median worker can result in them undervaluing their high-productivity workers.
This is why unions are effective primarily in low-standard-deviation-productivity fields: If the best secretary in the office is 10% more productive than the median, but the union manages to raise the median secretary's income by 20% compared to the market clearing rate, then every secretary benefits. However, if the top software developer is 10x as productive as the median...