A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn't • Hacker News Board

Re: A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn't

#31

Post by bwestergard » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

JuniperMesos wrote: post #29

bwestergard wrote: post #23

I'm a unionized software developer, and have been part of two separate organizing campaigns at two different employers. Happy to answer questions about how it all works - there are only about ~6000 dev/product/design/qa employees in the U.S., so there is very little first hand experience to go around. Among other things that my coworkers and I secured by bargaining collectively are: - Guaranteed remote work. - Guaran…

How much money do you make?

About $153k a year gross take home pay, or around $180k total compensation (including retirement contributions, healthcare, etc).

You can see the wage brackets in our collective bargaining agreement here: https://tinyurl.com/dmucontract

Re: A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn't

#32

Post by KetoManx64 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 12:59 AM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #4

Personally, after working for multiple blue collar unions (commercial roofing, machinist) I don't. But I won't oppose anyone that does. The problem is that the people that DO want them, want to force it on those that don't, usually by labor law.

Agreed. Having worked around unions while doing IT in the manufacturing industry, I had much better bargaining ability and got much bigger raises and flexibility as an individual than the union employees.

Re: A brewing battle: More IT workers want unions. The industry doesn't

#33

Post by cweagans » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #20

cweagans wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ~50% of Americans voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to them Less than half of the US population voted in the last election. ~50% of Americans _who voted_ voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to unions, but that group is only ~23% of _Americans_.

More voter turnout wouldn't have changed anything. From https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/26/2024-election-turno... , " The survey suggests that 'if all Americans eligible to vote in 2024 had cast ballots, the overall margin in the popular vote likely would not have been much different' " This also matches what Democratic-leaning pollsters like David Shor have said in their own analyses.

It's important to understand that what we have, we have because of a comparatively small group of people. That's important and interesting because it means you can influence the outcome of an election in two ways:

1. Get people to change sides. This is difficult: people who already vote in a particular way are unlikely to change because of external pressures (and in fact, are more likely to dig their heels in if challenged on their views); or

2. Get more people to vote. This can be challenging in its own way, but can also just boil down to logistics problems.

Whether or not 100% voter turnout would have the same results is neither here nor there. If you accept that premise + the premise that the vast majority of American voters vote down the party line for one of the major two, then you have potentially 2x the number of voters for your desired outcome. All you have to do is go find them and get them to vote.