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Comment by cactusfrog | Hacker News Reader

The amount of unioned workers keep decreasing because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced. I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy. The consolidation of patents in other engineering fields has killed the industry in the US.

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I'm traditionally pro Open Source but I don't see how it helps much in this case, because whatever effort you put into Open Source software equally benefits the corporations you are fleeing from who can just take your work for free now.

And this is more true now than ever before since they can (so far legally, if not morally) also use LLMs to whitewash off GPL and other such licenses that would in the past have put practical limitations on their usage.

If you've built up lots of experience working on a closed-source in-house code base that expertise will be tied to the company you're working for and once you're fired all that knowledge becomes useless to you.

If you've built up expertise in an open-source projects that lots of other companies use that knowledge is a valuable asset on your resume.

Yup. The GPL is the software version of a union. You know it works because of how aggressively companies like Apple avoid and hate it.

>because the firms with unioned workers fail or the work is outsourced

Sorry, you misspelled "decades of Republicans disassembling labor protections and enacting garbage like right to work laws, corporations hiring thugs like the Pinkertons to break up and discourage them, and conservative media spewing lies to discourage membership".

You're totally correct, but it wasn't _just_ Republicans. The Democrats are incredibly anti-labor. Even Biden, who was marketed as "most pro-labor president since FDR" forced the railroad workers back to work.

Both parties are so in capital's pocket that, at least on labor issues, they are essentially the same.

They are absolutely not, and at this point anyone claiming as much is being malicious.

Yes, Biden could have done better on railroads, but his administration:

* Made millions more workers eligible for overtime pay

* Installed union leaders on the NLRB (contrast to Republicans who fired members, defunded efforts, and gave access to NRLB data to Musk/Palantir/etc.)

* Those new NLRB members issued the Cemex decision making it harder for companies to suppress union voting

* Issued any number of rules in favor of workers i.e. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/olms/olms20230727

* Raised the contractor minimum wage

* Increased funding for the NLRB

* Ensured that companies couldn't avoid penalties by forming smaller companies - a process the Trump NLRB created to make it harder to penalize companies unionbusting

This is only a few things. There is a world of difference.

None of the little technocratic nonsense matters though if you blow it when workers are actually trying to directly exert their power. The power of the workers doesn't come from the NLRB or any of these government institutions, it comes from their ability to withold their labor, and when they do that it becomes clear that both parties are funded by the same oligarchs because both of them will step in and stop it.

So that makes rhem "essentially the same??"

I don’t think there is a contradiction here. Cheap, un-unionized labor has put many unionized firms out of business. It is extremely rare for a firm to be “de-unionized”.

> I think open source software is the best protection against abuses because workers can take the means of production elsewhere if a company becomes dysfunctional or greedy.

OSS? You mean copyleft? Who does that? Who would use that?

OSS, even MIT licensed, embodies an radical idea that is counter to how most other engineering fields operate. The software required to design a chemical plant can cost 60K+ per year, per license, which locks in engineers and drives down their wages.

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