I would tend to agree with the tech-ie opinion that unions are becoming obselete in the US. Unions existed to protect workers who were unskilled and interchangeable; the endgame of tech is to automate all those jobs. But obviously I’m not a labor scholar and this is just an unfounded opinion.
They don't make sense for knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are rarely interchangeable, so standardizing contracts, job titles, pay schedules, working conditions, etc., makes little sense. There is also the chance for protectionism (closed shops) that runs counter to the freelance culture in tech.
Some sort of worker-administered group could make a lot of sense. But maybe a guild or cooperative instead.
Services that would be useful, especially (or only) if employers weren't paying the bill:
* Personal negotiation agents
* Career consultants. Lots of engineers are very underpaid and need some help holding their boss accountable. Or finding the next job.
* (Re)training. Engineers shouldn't specialize themselves into early retirement.
* Lobbying and marketing. Do you want BigCo telling your congressman what you think?
* Independent research and reporting on work environments. Some push back on penny-wise, pound-foolish facilities decisions.
* Charitable technology work not under a corporate brand
* Insurance, modulo whether competitive tax advantages can be arranged. Setting up pools for disability and life insurance, at least. Maybe healthcare if the tax advantages can be worked out.
However, the organizations you list have gone in strike as leverage in collective negotiations. That is an aspect I doubt makes sense for tech outside of basic health or ethical concerns. Both the collective bargaining and the striking.
If that was the case, no one would have been whining about H1B import companies killing US knowledge jobs.
Because your employer in tech can afford to give you a lifestyle easily in the highest couple percentiles doesn't mean you aren't replaceable and that you won't need representation as a class of worker at some point.
I'm internationally mobile, so I'm often the newcomer.
(And from a philosophical point of view, programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine. What we have to make sure is that forming new tech companies becomes easier and easier---so that any general cheapening of programmers benefits the customers and not the owners of companies.
Traditionally, unions are the very opposite of lowering barriers to market entry.)
The problem is, taking that down a nodge will not benefit the general public. All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies.
I suppose there are two ways to view this - putting up barriers to entry vs. preventing wages from being driven down by encouraging everyone and their dog to become coders. At this point I sort of see it as both at the same time.
The reasons unions could be useful in the future is both to preserve a reasonable standard of living for tech employees and to help oppose unethical demands from employers. Right now, tech employees have some leverage over their bosses. Without unions, this will eventually end.
That's why we need to keep working on lowering barriers to entry. (Not just in software but all industries.)
Whenever there's an industry where owning a company confers outsized excess returns, I want a hundred copycats to come in and compete away the margins. (For lots of industries one of the most straight-forward way to get that is to make entries by foreign companies easy. This way a country can benefit without necessarily having to grow a local ecosystem of startups first.)
I am happy to encourage everyone and their dogs to become coders, if they can hack it. Over the long run and average over many people, income is ultimately determined by productivity. Let's grow the pie.
That can easily be fixed by plugging tax evasion loopholes and generally taxing higher.
If there's a will then there's a way, the problem is pretty much finding the way everybody agrees on.
Imho it seems like pretty valid approach considering land is one of the few resources we recognize as actually being finite, so it's a good place to start for building a "base".
On the other hand it's quite frustrating how accepting we have become of creating "wealth" out of nothing by printing paper money but if we try to do the same thing based on something actually tangible, like land, people lose their shit going "you can't just make up money", sure we can, we do it all the time.
If you can read German and like some historical musings in this direction (including about money), do read Silvio Gesell. https://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/gesell/nwo/nwo.pdf
I think that's pretty offensive to a lot of tradespeople. If you think plumbers, carpenters, or electricians are unskilled, try doing what they do. Unions protected both skilled and unskilled workers. Whether they continue to do so, or whether they can serve in that role for information workers, is quite an interesting question, but skilled vs. unskilled is not at the crux of it.
On a historical note, I am currently reading A Generation of Materialism. The book has some very interesting bits about the early history of unions in Europe.