> unions regularly protect injured workers from being fired (often for fabricated reasons). This is also why companies love illegal immigrants. When José loses a finger at the cannery, management just slips him a bus ticket back to Mexico and mentions that if he comes back they'll have to call immigration about some irregularities.
You are describing factory work. This has no relevancy to our career. We are in one of the cushiest job sectors on the planet currently.
I have literally never seen anything in my entire professional career in software that would necessitate a union to "protect" us. My last employer gave us massages at work, FFS, and I've always had flexible working hours where I can show up at the office pretty much any time I want.
I had a few colleagues develop carpal tunnel and work always provided time off, medical benefits, special accommodations, standing desks, monitor risers, ergo keyboards, etc.
> Again, WTF are you even talking about? What union? How does this imaginary union inhibit your ability to change jobs?
Sorry, most of this thread is about unions and I accidentally roped you into that. I don't want the specter of carpel tunnel to be a rationalization for unions.
Unions are a tool to prevent abuse of workers. We do not have a systemic issue with that in our field - conversely, we have one the cushiest careers on the planet.
I don't want us to install unions. There's very little reason to do so, and it'll damage the incredibly cushy status quo we have going for us:
1. Union seniority often means you have to stay at the same job or within the same set of employers as your union, which fractures the labor market, leads to unnecessary job specialization, and prevents mobility. This also ossifies institutional knowledge as the free exchange of ideas slows.
2. Union seniority perks mean new employees do the drudge work and senior employees get the perks. This is the wrong incentive alignment.
3. Creating barriers to fire underperforming workers will lead to offshoring. Offshoring will happen naturally as other countries get better at labor export, but unionization will prematurely accelerate this. We shouldn't be seeking to do less than our overseas counterparts, especially when our comp levels remain higher than most other professions. (I'm not biased against folks overseas, just stating that the labor markets will not mix if we don't accelerate it ourselves.)
4. Tech sectors in countries with unions pay workers significantly less and have fewer innovative companies (by volume). The tradeoff for "job security" is not worth it. Currently "job security" is the ability to provide value to your organization, and that works pretty well. This is what I mean by I don't want unions limiting my career - I have a pretty good success rate getting the jobs I want. Unions create a check box of criteria and fence people in.
5. The correct way to mitigate injuries is disability insurance, not unions. Companies shouldn't be saddled with employees that can no longer work. Companies (and employees) should instead pay for disability insurance.
There are a lot of other points, but you can see the outline of my argument. We're creating reasons to be less desirable to employers and installing barriers to career mobility.
If the situation on the ground changes, I might change my mind about unions. But as things currently stand, we still have almost everything going for us.
The real "anti-corporate" issue we should be fighting for is a trust-busting breakup of big tech into smaller firms. The FAANG companies control too much surface area, monopolize their platforms, and create barriers to entry for new companies and new markets - despite their high comp, this is what's putting the most downward pressure on the overall labor market.