Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class

Only if you get fired.

Afaik you’re allowed to stay in the country as ling as you are employed by the employer on your visa regardless of whether you are working or not.

Can you be fired for going on strike?

Tricky to say, as software engineering is a somewhat unique profession.

Going by what happens in other industries, you'd reasonably expect a flattening of wages (both inter and intra firm) and an increase in the average wage. You'd also expect entry into the field to become harder, and exit from the field (both voluntary and involuntary) to become rarer. Fewer workers would be employed overall, though per capita productivity would increase; the overall effect would probably mean more money allocated to labor, less to capital holders, and higher costs for consumers. Work rules would increase, e.g. no one allowed to be on call for more than X hours a year, or a SWE not being allowed/required to take on job responsibilities outside the scope of the initial job offer except as facilitated by formal processes.

Many of these effects will disproportionately benefit women and racial minorities (this is a rare case where "racial minorities" includes Asians of various sorts, as they're paid less than white people in the field, though that's in large part to the power employers have over visa holders).

Some of those guilds set minimums in part to provide barriers to entry. They're not solely acting in the interests of compassion and kindness. We do nobody any favors by pretending there's no economic logic at work.

Unions were great at stifling innovation and destroying some of our former industries such as Steel and Automotive - see what's left of former very wealthy Detroit. The classic example is the unions not allowing the Toyota Lean Production system in, as then you would need fewer workers. So in not allowing innovation, the unions were key factors in destroying entire industries which have now been built elsewhere.

If this were to happen to software etc, it will just destroy innovation here and the other freer parts of the world will take the work.

The title "Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class" does the topic a great injustice, obfuscating the origins of many modern labor unions (including the AFL-CIO) as functional white supremacist organizations.

If you were Chinese or Indian, unions were directly responsible for your deportation. If you were Japanese, unions were directly responsible for your family's forced internment. If you were Puerto Rican, unions were responsible for the genocide that was committed against your mother, wife, and daughter. The AFL wan't shy in the least about its intentions. If you read the contemporary writings of its leaders, as well as the mass media that they produced (flyers, pamphlets, etc.), they were very blatant about their desire to protect jobs for white members by stripping naturalized Americans of Asian descent of their citizenship and deporting them. The language that was used to describe Chinese workers mirrors the exact same dehumanizing comparisons to animals that were later used by the Nazis[0].

If you dislike the current US visa system, with its draconian system of per-country quotas, you have labor unions from the 1950s to thank for that as well.

It's highly unpopular to talk about this, and so I fully expect to take a hit for bringing this up, but it needs to be said.

[0] They even published a pamphlet which referred to the Chinese as a "race question" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_question)