You get people pushing for unions because you deserve unions.

The tech industry is such a shitshow right now they deserve unions.

Depends on how you define "the industry." The tech workers are the ones driving the actual production of goods and services, so it's pretty reasonable to say that the workers are the industry.

Obviously this headline assumes that CEOs, managers, and investors are "the industry" in question, but I don't necessarily agree.

Time to go to private unionized companies for existing and new alternatives to existing ones

And help each other unionize!!!

Stealth mass unionize the company with a matrix community that helps coordinate everybody

Also making private unionized competitors to compete with stock non-unionized companies. The former will every time especially by making a better product, and take care of employees and customers

Let's fucking goooooo!!!!!!

I can tell it's too early, I read that twice as "unionize on prem!"

The article seems to equate the sociopathic owning class with the industry.

Yeah... fuck that.

Yeah, and they never actually negotiate anything because of the massive power imbalance. I'd call them useful idiots, if they were actually useful.

Forming new professional bodies takes time, administration, and some kind of governance structure. There aren't a lot of grey-beards that have a bunch of spare time for organizing that. Also, historically, most IT people have seen themselves as "lone wolf frontiersmen" and the rate at which the industry has changed has made any kind of professional certification obsolete very quickly. Legal statutes, the frontiers of medicine, the best practices and techniques for pipe joining and bricklaying, etc. advance very slowly by comparison. Mature industries are much easier to unionize on average. IT is spectacularly immature (in multiple ways) by comparison so it's very hard to create a professional body to represent tech workers.

Would it be good if we had something like that? Yes. Is it going to be easy to build, hell no. A better model might be the development of independent tech co-operatives, with distributed ownership. If a bunch of senior software engineers with some spare cash to pool creating a bunch of major tech competitors with a co-operative ownership model might actually serve the industry much better than the centralized corporate model we find ourselves subject to, AND provide a basis for developing industry unions, but the closest the industry has to something like that at a large scale is... well Valve, and even that's not a true co-operative.

There's no central engineering order either.

I like dancing to businesses that value AI more than employees bankrupting themselves and being replaced with better. Let them be companyless and us owning all our stuff including our homes

Omg, this. The part time legal thing is happening to me right now.

I’m building a small app for a (multimillion dollar) company. Nothing major. I tell the project manager: “hey, you guys need a EULA to publish in the app store. You can use the std apple one or write your own. Tell me what you want to do.”

This woman comes back to me with: “what do you think we should do?”

Like b#%^!, I don’t know! Why would you want me to tell you how define the legal relationship between you and your customers?

After some prodding, she forwards the request to legal and sends back a DRAFT EULA asks: “Can you review this?”

NO. I cannot review legal documents. I’m horrendously under qualified for that!!!

/end rant

The reason that IT often gets lumped with this stuff is because if you leave it to anybody else they do it wrong especially logistics.

Everyone except the IT department is now banned from ordering new IT equipment because they'll order a bunch of laptops and then act all surprised when this huge pallet of devices arrives as if they didn't just order one. So then it just sits in the entrance lobby the days on end until someone from IT comes and opens the pallet and takes the laptops upstairs. If they do that with new pens that's fine, no one's going to steal them.

The thing is: that's my favorite part about it. I'm sitting at a keyboard for five hours, then I spend a week building shit with my hands-not low level building shit, but still fun, then I'm talking to grandma doing troubleshooting.

If everything else about it weren't a nightmare shit show where you're the devil if someone else fucks up in a year, I'd be very happy in that kind of career.

A company. It's just logos.

Same, apparently its a "national security" risk.

I'm a senior IT person and not only am I in a union, but the union actually does worthwhile things for its membership. I'm not in the US, though.

Join Tech Workers Coalition, What We Will or any other tech alt-labor organization in your area. There are plenty of tech workers talking about unions.

Cooperatives seem even more ideal, as its a company with unions built-in (in a way).

Came here to say this. Not sure why they even had to add that to the headline. That can just be assumed.

That's why they don't get a say. Nobody is interested in their opinion.

Nope, Unions should be sector based, not company based or site based.

I have been part of the white collar union here for 15+ years now, so far I have not really had to use them, but I'll happily pay my dues for the membership.

Also, sympathy strikes should be legal everywhere.

Best practices, best practices for all of you!