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.
- Guaranteed forty hour work week, with compensatory time within two weeks if management asks us to work overtime.
- Not on call 24/7/365. Everyone is in a defined rotation, and you are guaranteed three hours off just for being on call for a week, and a whole day if you receive a call. I believe that partly because of this policy, after hours incidents are extremely infrequent now.
- Guaranteed floor on wage increases every year.
- Just cause for discipline. People still get terminated if they don't do the work, but if you want it (and almost everyone does) there is an elected coworker in your corner to guide you through a PIP and make sure standards are enforced evenly. You can't suddenly be terminated for no reason.
- Extra time off each year through self-directed times between sprints and quarterly increments.
- Right to review all code done by outside contractors if you're going to have to maintain it in the future.
Yet, ~50% of Americans voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to them; a paradox.
That said, with only about ~10% of Americans being employed in a union role, it's more like the grass is greener on the other side than an actual understanding of the pros and cons of union membership.
> actual understanding of the pros and cons of union membership
Many of us have worked in $MEGACORPS with substantial union representation among the employees, have seen what it does and how it works in practice, and as a result want nothing to do with it. I wasn't represented due to my job classification, but now due to my firsthand exposure to unions I absolutely never will be by choice.
I know plenty of line level engineers (mostly non-software) who's main interaction with unions is things like waiting for a week to move their desk to the other wall of their cubical because that's a union job and they're not allowed to touch the Ethernet cables.
Notice the story has cubicals, how nice! Most these stories are pretty old. I suspect because there are less jobs in some big F500 campus with colocated engineering, accounting, etc and a unionized manufacturing plant all in the same place.
> ~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.
Single-issue voting is something I consider a very large threat to the democratic process in the US, and is also something that both parties have become exceedingly good at creating in the elctorate.
The reason I consider it a threat is that it allows either party to meta-game the fact that many voters can be persuaded to vote against their own interests.
How could any decision that voters make about how to cast their votes be a threat to the democratic process? A voter grounding their decision about who to vote for on a single issue is democracy working as intended. If this is bad it's only bad in the sense that voters in a democracy can vote for bad people or policies - but this is not something democracy as a system does or can promise to avoid.
I don't think it's so obvious
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters didn't officially endorse any candidate for president in 2024. This was because internal polling said that their members overwhelmingly supported Trump over Harris, while it seems like the union leadership supported Harris over Trump
This is not the only Union who had a difference of opinion between leadership and membership in 2024
To my knowledge, there isn't a single definition of a union. In America, it seems to mean something wildly different than what I'm used to in my part of Europe.
To me, it is simply an organization by workers to collectively bargain with capital (who have their own equivalent to unions). The unions also typically offer unemployment insurance as well as income replacement in case of strikes, which are a possible measure that can be organized by the unions to force capital to come to the negotiation table. An employer has no right to know if you're in a union or not, so it would be quite impractical to try to hire only non-union members, and most companies don't mind either way, because the collective bargain agreements go both ways and can make it simpler than negotiating individual agreements with each employee.
In the US, it seems like unions are what I would call a guild - very highly coupled to a particular profession. Where I'm from they typically accept anyone who works in a general sector (say medical, government, transportation, etc.), as typically most workers in the same sector would have similar challenges and goals.
About as unevenly as every other human social tribe.
Was part of SEIU at one point. At least where I worked SEIU reps were fucking useless. My team was stuck in a basement with mold growing in the corners. There are so many other layers of by-laws, local, state, federal laws the union was essentially useless.
But people in SEIU elsewhere said they were great. So as always YMMV
Grocers union members where I live, while on strike, tried to block people going in a grocery store to use the pharmacy which was technically on a different labor contract; the grocers union members were to leave pharmacy customers alone. They hassled them anyway. In the end neighbors and community at large ended up being against the grocers union due to a handful of cringe, edgelord members in utilikits over-stepping with their "uh ackshully" shit.
Unions are just more social tribe bullshit for people to leverage as magical words of power.
Google it; there's union success story's and union members suing unions/reps after members claim they were forced into just acquiescing to the rich ownership class anyway.
So much of the western way of life is just the same old rhetorical tribal bullshit, social darwinism no different than how it works among some random clusters of nomadic groups in Africa. Any sort of differentiation is merely semantics and rhetoric.
Bird song and banner logo, whether they bleed for prophet or prophecy are the only things humans can claim to make them different. Roughly same old human meat suits end of the day.
I am 100% all in on letting the robots, monitored by subject matter experts, make sure shit gets made and ending this forced obligation to kowtow and prostrate ourselves to other clearly normal and ultimately forgettable meat suits like most middle managers and union leaders, etc etc
> In the end neighbors and community at large ended up being against the grocers union due to a handful of cringe, edgelord members in utilikits over-stepping with their "uh ackshully" shit.
This reflects poorly on the neighbors more than the union members, IMO.
In the US, most unions are majority unions, i.e., they unionize an entire workplace by majority vote, and then demand that the company allows them to require all hired employees to belong to the union. Hiring scabs is a breach of contract, with the added weight that unions have extra protections ( for example, you can't just fire anyone who talks about unionizing. That's big illegal).
Besides the legal protections, the primary leverage a union has is the fact that in manufacturing, agriculture, etc., companies start hemorrhaging money if work stops. So a relatively short strike (and thus more easily weathered by the members) can have a massive impact. This worked even before there were legal protections for unions, because the union can strike faster than the company can hire scabs. Of course, prior to the protections, companies could decide that taking the hit was acceptable, and then just hire a bunch of scabs to replace the workers. Or they could threaten the union leaders with violence. Which of course lead to the unions using threats of violence against management and the scabs.
After a couple decades of increasing hostilities, accelerated by the re-introduction of a bunch of combat trained WWI vets back into the workforce, the US established a robust set of worker protections to eliminate the necessity of violence.
So if the company doesn't sign a contract that they will hire union labor they are free to hire whoever they want? I wonder how this will work with IT since there seems to be an abundance of labor and still decent salaries being offered.
the union is free to strike if they don't sign. It's about what's less expensive for the company and who has the more leverage. If the union is well-organized, they have disproportionate power over the management and the management concedes everything.
The problem with union is that it also centralizes the power to the top which also then attracts sociopaths and/or psychopaths who are better are playing the political game.
In principle I support the idea of organized labor, but I hate to admit that every real-world experience of unions I've witnessed (second hand), the union has just been another layer of rent-seeking administration.
I don't know enough about the history and structure to understand if the current tech union movement is more of the same or if there is some reform included.
Came here to say something similar to this. If the industry were to unionize, there are good examples of good unions and good leadership. But I also don't want to pay membership dues so that some executive director of a union makes $900k/year salary so they can show up 5 times out of the year to resolve issues and then disappear and have no experience with software or the industry at all.
My fear is that union leadership will just attract someone from another completely different industry, who has no passion for computing, no experience, but wield tremendous power in how employees and employers conduct business. I'm not OK with that. I don't want some 65 year old curmudgeon MBA type politically connected bozo telling everyone what they can and cannot do. These types of committees and decision making are a killjoy and harm creativity.
There's just no way to guarantee that union leaders are regular folks like us who aren't power hungry but want to truly help the people. It rarely ever ends up attracting clean, nice, good personalities and then end up in cahoots with other nefarious players.
Having said all that, I would like to see a few changes in the industry:
- Interviews. The process is a complete mess right now. If we could standardize on a few things, that would go a long way. Guaranteed yes or no feedback immediately after the last step. Capping the process to just 2 days. You phone call, initial screen. Come in, meet the team, problem solve something real. Lunch. Some more team sessions to solve real problems, and then done at 2PM. Feedback at 4PM. No ghosting, no "oh we hired someone internally", no week long writing assignments and coding sessions to reverse a linked list.
- Salary. Just post the exact salary on the listing, without ranges. And then just tell the candidate up front, this is the salary. That's it. Stop with the tremendous waste of time on the back and forth. RSUs, etc. also posted full transparency. And just say "no negotiations, this is it".
- Layoffs. Provide a good cushion for the person to find a new role, health insurance. We're not asking for much here, just give the young folk less time and older folk more time since ageism is real.
if your union is not democratic, it's not really a union. It's a business scam exploiting union rights. There's a difference between yellow unions (pro-business) and red unions (pro-workers). Just because something is called a union it doesn't mean it's one.
Too many random folks coming out of the woodwork to denounce unions by way of vague personal experience without anything concrete to back it up. Be evidence based, people! Anecdotes are meaningless! Like, I know there's astroturfing here, but damn.
Collective bargaining vis-a-vis unionization allows workers to more effectively push back against bullshit like RTO mandates and mass layoffs. They help reign in the massive pay packages to executives who directly benefit from laying folks off. And there's a reason why companies monitor internal communications and engage in retaliatory actions against employees for even discussing organizing. Yes, that's technically illegal under US labor law. But corporations do not care and will accept the risk of a non-guaranteed fine to make an example and enforce a chilling effect for other workers.
The fact that unions aren't a perfect solution to the overwhelming might of capitalist interests at each and every workplace does not mean that unions are bad, worthless, or not on the side of the individual worker. They are designed to make the tilt of power more equitable.
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.
- Guaranteed forty hour work week, with compensatory time within two weeks if management asks us to work overtime.
- Not on call 24/7/365. Everyone is in a defined rotation, and you are guaranteed three hours off just for being on call for a week, and a whole day if you receive a call. I believe that partly because of this policy, after hours incidents are extremely infrequent now.
- Guaranteed floor on wage increases every year.
- Just cause for discipline. People still get terminated if they don't do the work, but if you want it (and almost everyone does) there is an elected coworker in your corner to guide you through a PIP and make sure standards are enforced evenly. You can't suddenly be terminated for no reason. - Extra time off each year through self-directed times between sprints and quarterly increments.
- Right to review all code done by outside contractors if you're going to have to maintain it in the future.
How much money do you make?
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.
Could you share why you feel that way to help add more to the conversation and give context to your own opinion?
68% of Americans supposedly support unions: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel...
Yet, ~50% of Americans voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to them; a paradox.
That said, with only about ~10% of Americans being employed in a union role, it's more like the grass is greener on the other side than an actual understanding of the pros and cons of union membership.
> actual understanding of the pros and cons of union membership
Many of us have worked in $MEGACORPS with substantial union representation among the employees, have seen what it does and how it works in practice, and as a result want nothing to do with it. I wasn't represented due to my job classification, but now due to my firsthand exposure to unions I absolutely never will be by choice.
No way, no how, not ever.
Translated: Management ("wasn't represented due to job classification") doesn't like unions. Shocker.
I know plenty of line level engineers (mostly non-software) who's main interaction with unions is things like waiting for a week to move their desk to the other wall of their cubical because that's a union job and they're not allowed to touch the Ethernet cables.
Notice the story has cubicals, how nice! Most these stories are pretty old. I suspect because there are less jobs in some big F500 campus with colocated engineering, accounting, etc and a unionized manufacturing plant all in the same place.
> ~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.
This is why one issue wedge voting works. You may vote against something you want to vote for something you want more.
Single-issue voting is something I consider a very large threat to the democratic process in the US, and is also something that both parties have become exceedingly good at creating in the elctorate.
The reason I consider it a threat is that it allows either party to meta-game the fact that many voters can be persuaded to vote against their own interests.
How could any decision that voters make about how to cast their votes be a threat to the democratic process? A voter grounding their decision about who to vote for on a single issue is democracy working as intended. If this is bad it's only bad in the sense that voters in a democracy can vote for bad people or policies - but this is not something democracy as a system does or can promise to avoid.
I don't think it's so obvious The International Brotherhood of Teamsters didn't officially endorse any candidate for president in 2024. This was because internal polling said that their members overwhelmingly supported Trump over Harris, while it seems like the union leadership supported Harris over Trump This is not the only Union who had a difference of opinion between leadership and membership in 2024
How do unions work? Can a place just not hire union workers and it takes a whole profession to unionize to make them effective?
To my knowledge, there isn't a single definition of a union. In America, it seems to mean something wildly different than what I'm used to in my part of Europe.
To me, it is simply an organization by workers to collectively bargain with capital (who have their own equivalent to unions). The unions also typically offer unemployment insurance as well as income replacement in case of strikes, which are a possible measure that can be organized by the unions to force capital to come to the negotiation table. An employer has no right to know if you're in a union or not, so it would be quite impractical to try to hire only non-union members, and most companies don't mind either way, because the collective bargain agreements go both ways and can make it simpler than negotiating individual agreements with each employee.
In the US, it seems like unions are what I would call a guild - very highly coupled to a particular profession. Where I'm from they typically accept anyone who works in a general sector (say medical, government, transportation, etc.), as typically most workers in the same sector would have similar challenges and goals.
> How do unions work?
About as unevenly as every other human social tribe.
Was part of SEIU at one point. At least where I worked SEIU reps were fucking useless. My team was stuck in a basement with mold growing in the corners. There are so many other layers of by-laws, local, state, federal laws the union was essentially useless.
But people in SEIU elsewhere said they were great. So as always YMMV
Grocers union members where I live, while on strike, tried to block people going in a grocery store to use the pharmacy which was technically on a different labor contract; the grocers union members were to leave pharmacy customers alone. They hassled them anyway. In the end neighbors and community at large ended up being against the grocers union due to a handful of cringe, edgelord members in utilikits over-stepping with their "uh ackshully" shit.
Unions are just more social tribe bullshit for people to leverage as magical words of power.
Google it; there's union success story's and union members suing unions/reps after members claim they were forced into just acquiescing to the rich ownership class anyway.
So much of the western way of life is just the same old rhetorical tribal bullshit, social darwinism no different than how it works among some random clusters of nomadic groups in Africa. Any sort of differentiation is merely semantics and rhetoric.
Bird song and banner logo, whether they bleed for prophet or prophecy are the only things humans can claim to make them different. Roughly same old human meat suits end of the day.
I am 100% all in on letting the robots, monitored by subject matter experts, make sure shit gets made and ending this forced obligation to kowtow and prostrate ourselves to other clearly normal and ultimately forgettable meat suits like most middle managers and union leaders, etc etc
> In the end neighbors and community at large ended up being against the grocers union due to a handful of cringe, edgelord members in utilikits over-stepping with their "uh ackshully" shit.
This reflects poorly on the neighbors more than the union members, IMO.
In the US, most unions are majority unions, i.e., they unionize an entire workplace by majority vote, and then demand that the company allows them to require all hired employees to belong to the union. Hiring scabs is a breach of contract, with the added weight that unions have extra protections ( for example, you can't just fire anyone who talks about unionizing. That's big illegal).
Besides the legal protections, the primary leverage a union has is the fact that in manufacturing, agriculture, etc., companies start hemorrhaging money if work stops. So a relatively short strike (and thus more easily weathered by the members) can have a massive impact. This worked even before there were legal protections for unions, because the union can strike faster than the company can hire scabs. Of course, prior to the protections, companies could decide that taking the hit was acceptable, and then just hire a bunch of scabs to replace the workers. Or they could threaten the union leaders with violence. Which of course lead to the unions using threats of violence against management and the scabs.
After a couple decades of increasing hostilities, accelerated by the re-introduction of a bunch of combat trained WWI vets back into the workforce, the US established a robust set of worker protections to eliminate the necessity of violence.
So if the company doesn't sign a contract that they will hire union labor they are free to hire whoever they want? I wonder how this will work with IT since there seems to be an abundance of labor and still decent salaries being offered.
the union is free to strike if they don't sign. It's about what's less expensive for the company and who has the more leverage. If the union is well-organized, they have disproportionate power over the management and the management concedes everything.
The problem with union is that it also centralizes the power to the top which also then attracts sociopaths and/or psychopaths who are better are playing the political game.
In principle I support the idea of organized labor, but I hate to admit that every real-world experience of unions I've witnessed (second hand), the union has just been another layer of rent-seeking administration.
I don't know enough about the history and structure to understand if the current tech union movement is more of the same or if there is some reform included.
Came here to say something similar to this. If the industry were to unionize, there are good examples of good unions and good leadership. But I also don't want to pay membership dues so that some executive director of a union makes $900k/year salary so they can show up 5 times out of the year to resolve issues and then disappear and have no experience with software or the industry at all.
My fear is that union leadership will just attract someone from another completely different industry, who has no passion for computing, no experience, but wield tremendous power in how employees and employers conduct business. I'm not OK with that. I don't want some 65 year old curmudgeon MBA type politically connected bozo telling everyone what they can and cannot do. These types of committees and decision making are a killjoy and harm creativity.
There's just no way to guarantee that union leaders are regular folks like us who aren't power hungry but want to truly help the people. It rarely ever ends up attracting clean, nice, good personalities and then end up in cahoots with other nefarious players.
Having said all that, I would like to see a few changes in the industry:
- Interviews. The process is a complete mess right now. If we could standardize on a few things, that would go a long way. Guaranteed yes or no feedback immediately after the last step. Capping the process to just 2 days. You phone call, initial screen. Come in, meet the team, problem solve something real. Lunch. Some more team sessions to solve real problems, and then done at 2PM. Feedback at 4PM. No ghosting, no "oh we hired someone internally", no week long writing assignments and coding sessions to reverse a linked list.
- Salary. Just post the exact salary on the listing, without ranges. And then just tell the candidate up front, this is the salary. That's it. Stop with the tremendous waste of time on the back and forth. RSUs, etc. also posted full transparency. And just say "no negotiations, this is it".
- Layoffs. Provide a good cushion for the person to find a new role, health insurance. We're not asking for much here, just give the young folk less time and older folk more time since ageism is real.
if your union is not democratic, it's not really a union. It's a business scam exploiting union rights. There's a difference between yellow unions (pro-business) and red unions (pro-workers). Just because something is called a union it doesn't mean it's one.
Too many random folks coming out of the woodwork to denounce unions by way of vague personal experience without anything concrete to back it up. Be evidence based, people! Anecdotes are meaningless! Like, I know there's astroturfing here, but damn.
Collective bargaining vis-a-vis unionization allows workers to more effectively push back against bullshit like RTO mandates and mass layoffs. They help reign in the massive pay packages to executives who directly benefit from laying folks off. And there's a reason why companies monitor internal communications and engage in retaliatory actions against employees for even discussing organizing. Yes, that's technically illegal under US labor law. But corporations do not care and will accept the risk of a non-guaranteed fine to make an example and enforce a chilling effect for other workers.
The fact that unions aren't a perfect solution to the overwhelming might of capitalist interests at each and every workplace does not mean that unions are bad, worthless, or not on the side of the individual worker. They are designed to make the tilt of power more equitable.
[dead]
that industry: capitalism