A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize

So imagine a union of software contractors - that union would have no power because anyone wanting to use a contractor could sidestep them immediately by hiring a non-union contractor of which there are many.

How it could work is this - imagine you took the top 20 researchers in machine learning and they unionized, and refused to work except under a contract negotiated by the union. If Google wants "that guy" then they have to use that union contract. "That guy" has power, because people want to hire them. That can form an umbrella under which other ML researchers can sign up. Suddenly you can't effectively do ML without working with the union.

Companies with people like that keep those people under extremely lucrative contracts so its unlikely they would be financially motivated to form such a union. There's also the factor that "what even is the top-20 researchers". In movies you know if you have Brad Pitt or not. But you 100% need as many top people as possible to somehow become union-minded. I'd hope that this group of Google workers grows quickly. Its great that they've voted to form.

Note of course I'm just spitballing here and am not at all an expert in labor relations or how unions really form or work. Maybe it didn't go like that. Here's an interesting article thats paywalled, but it at least describes an early unionization and then a big back and forth struggle. It would behoove us all to understand how the labor movement of the 1890s to 1960s came about, because it would appear we are just about to enter such a period.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3815030?seq=1

Do you support dictatorships or monarchies on the grounds that democracy enthusiasts cannot tell you exactly what the populace will vote for?

To use your phrasing, where in the fuck is the actual case study about the structure of the status quo's constraints, influences and incentives?

Apart from the lobbying, the quiet silencing of health and safety and maybe ethics violations, the de-facto expected longer hours and 24x7 on-call, the decades of open-secret poor working conditions in the gaming industry, the constant complaints of tech worker burnout, tech often being considered a cost center and reporting to MBAs and CFOs and not getting a board level representation that reflects the value tech creates, the use of stack ranking that doesn't get applied to sales / management teams, the standard advice that the only way to get a significant salary increase is to change jobs, the often poor or misaligned or unreachable incentives and targets, the situation where a company paying more in perks instead of money is considered good, and etc.

You didn't demand a study before agreeing the current approach is good, did you?

> "Don't tell me I want a union contract, tell me what the terms of the contract will be"

Exactly what people negotiate for will be a representation of what isn't being taken seriously in any specific workplace. "Divide and conquer" - one employer with tens of millions of dollars and a team of lawyers united on one side and every individual employee divided with a fraction of a lawyer and a small amount of money on the other side. How can this ever result in great things for the employee side?

Unless you're the 1% with your pick of FAANG jobs and high 6-figure salaries, in which case you're the exception everyone else should ignore because we aren't you and a system where only the 1% can get desirable working conditions for most of their life, and everyone else deserves to suffer for not being good enough, is a bad system.