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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

> Cafeteria workers need unions. The maids who muck out hotel room toilets need unions. Coal miners who work in horrific conditions for little pay need unions.

aren't all those jobs ripe for automating? unions feel like an intermediary measure to the end goal: no more humans in shitty jobs.

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In tech we talk about automation like it’s an inevitable thing but for as long as the cost of developing robots to do all of these jobs is much more than hiring humans it’s not happening. Even that stupid pizza oven Zune is all about won’t replace workers anytime soon.

for sure. but once the cost is lower than hiring and training a human, it's almost inevitable getting that robot instead of the human.

Everyone needs unions - not just the little people.

why thou?

We are all workers in the end

i think very few are the kind of workers that need unions. and the numbers are falling constantly. more workers than ever before are independent human beings, fully able to take care of their own interests. even more so in our field of software development, where the pay is monstrous, the hours very low, and everyone's a contractor. i'd rather have my freedom both from a worker's pov and from an employer's.

Would you like to cite any studies on why the 99.99% of tech employees /workers don't need unions.

An most tech workers pay is not "monstrous" compared to our peers in other professions - even more so out side of SV

The CTO of a telco was in my branch before he retired a few years back.

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