Employees are more threatened by the prospect of offshoring and H-1B replacement labor than by their egos. Unlike cops or plumbers who can’t be easily replaced by remote teams abroad, tech workers face the real risk of being replaced. Strong unions exist across many industries precisely because workers naturally form them to protect their interests and to preserve their way of life.
The ‘tech bro’ mentality is no different from ego in any other profession. Unionization isn’t about eliminating individual personalities, but about collective worker protection.
Since unions are about common interest and ideally orthogonal to ideology, I’ll add that my subjective interest, as someone living in Russia, is that US tech workers were offshored and/or replaced by immigrants. Because that will long-term weaken the US as an aggressive nation, by losing qualifications.
At the same time if US tech unionized, that could mean weakening the incentive for that aggressive behavior, and weakening big companies.
Hard to decide really. Basically the only bad variant is if it’s half-done, enough unionization to stabilize, but also not too much so that they’d still have enormous foreign labor resources. That would mean very powerful corporations and no change in politics.
tau@infosec.pub 8 hours ago
Employees are more threatened by the prospect of offshoring and H-1B replacement labor than by their egos. Unlike cops or plumbers who can’t be easily replaced by remote teams abroad, tech workers face the real risk of being replaced. Strong unions exist across many industries precisely because workers naturally form them to protect their interests and to preserve their way of life.
The ‘tech bro’ mentality is no different from ego in any other profession. Unionization isn’t about eliminating individual personalities, but about collective worker protection.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 5 hours ago
Since unions are about common interest and ideally orthogonal to ideology, I’ll add that my subjective interest, as someone living in Russia, is that US tech workers were offshored and/or replaced by immigrants. Because that will long-term weaken the US as an aggressive nation, by losing qualifications.
At the same time if US tech unionized, that could mean weakening the incentive for that aggressive behavior, and weakening big companies.
Hard to decide really. Basically the only bad variant is if it’s half-done, enough unionization to stabilize, but also not too much so that they’d still have enormous foreign labor resources. That would mean very powerful corporations and no change in politics.