Confirmation bias mean that exceptional or confirmatory anecdotes are much more likely to be remembered[1]
I continue to be amazed that there armies of people who consider sentences that begin with "I know someone who..." to somehow be definitive evidence of anything whatsoever.
We are talking about benefits for people, we are not talking about abstract mathematics - you don't want to accept the situation of those people because that would be inconvenient for you, considering what you have said.
Constructive discussion is now over; you failed to convince me.
There are professional organizations for every major profession. Technically, the ACM would probably be the closest thing to a union that programmers actually need, but it's limited to the big iron scientific computing... So, yeah. I don't know if there is something for all of the webdev 2.0 gluelib writers out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_association
P.S. You're might be a good programmer. I don't know. We've never met, but stop trying to play rhetoric games. You're not very good at them.
Anyway, a professional organization will give you more far flung networking opportunities as well as intelligence on what's going on at other firms, which will increase your value as a worker, and presumably, your pay.