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Comment by zarkov99 | Hacker News Reader

What if you do not want a future where you have to pay union dues and give up individual agency in your relationship with your employer? Unions might be a necessary evil to rectify massive power imbalances but that is hardly the case in tech, so all we are left with is the evil part.

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I don't want to start a debate about solidarity or not since you made your position implicitly clear, but I am genuinely interested: Do you apply the same logic to having a police force while not being robbed, getting insurance or paying taxes? (these are various degrees of the same logic to me, not the same)

Solidarity to whom? A group of people that have the same super valuable skills as me? Why do they deserve any of my solidarity any more than anyone else? As to your point, I agree, it is all about degrees, and in my mind the degree to which we, in tech, need unions is 0. I don't buy, at all, the argument that if we should get unionized, with all the negative that implies, just in case we cannot do it when it is needed. Power moves slowly, compared to crime or natural disasters, and we will have plenty of time to react in the unlikely event unions in tech will ever benefit anyone beyond the union leaders.

As a start, you could join unions that organise cross-domain and make life for QA, tech support and many others nicer. Or achieve any other corporation specific goal that you can't change achieve your own (higher quality standards, 20% time etc., Better bonuses...make sure you get as much of the value you create as possible). Life could be even nicer basically.

If you are convinced you can still do it when programmers aren't in demand anymore and they won't immediately offshore those jobs, I won't convince you otherwise.

No union can force you to join it, same as no company can force you to work for it.

A union should not do much (and therefore not cost much) when the times are good.

Still, it could lobby for the workers' interest in, say, laws. God knows Big Tech is lobbying:

https://www.statista.com/chart/26673/highest-lobbying-spendi...

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