Silicon Valley’s white-collar workers have been largely detached from organized labor. Artificial intelligence and ICE are giving employees new reasons to unionize.
I would think knowledge work is really compatible with unionization, as it has less “fungible” employees.
If one assembly line shift goes on strike at GM, they can switch in another crew, or hire scabs and get pretty close to back to normal.
If your software dev team goes out, any replacements don’t have 200 years of experience on exactly where the bodies are buried in the specific design and architecture. You will suffer ramp-up problems. A strike threat is way bigger, especially if it cuts into keep-the-lights-on stuff like SRE and operations too.
That’s actually a bit part of why unions have not traditionally been seen as necessary in tech. Employees had more leverage even without strength of numbers than many other jobs. Combined with the relatively high number of employers, the threat of an employee saying they’d just leave if they don’t get better conditions was real.
Current economic conditions change that. Fewer companies are hiring, and AI makes it easier for a new employee to learn what’s going on in your system. So the need to unionise grows.
Employees had more leverage even without strength of numbers than many other jobs.
That was always the dream, but in practice, the pricing power of a form that employs many thousands of people is vastly greater than that of all but a 99.9 percentile individual.
I would think knowledge work is really compatible with unionization, as it has less “fungible” employees.
If one assembly line shift goes on strike at GM, they can switch in another crew, or hire scabs and get pretty close to back to normal.
If your software dev team goes out, any replacements don’t have 200 years of experience on exactly where the bodies are buried in the specific design and architecture. You will suffer ramp-up problems. A strike threat is way bigger, especially if it cuts into keep-the-lights-on stuff like SRE and operations too.
That’s actually a bit part of why unions have not traditionally been seen as necessary in tech. Employees had more leverage even without strength of numbers than many other jobs. Combined with the relatively high number of employers, the threat of an employee saying they’d just leave if they don’t get better conditions was real.
Current economic conditions change that. Fewer companies are hiring, and AI makes it easier for a new employee to learn what’s going on in your system. So the need to unionise grows.
That was always the dream, but in practice, the pricing power of a form that employs many thousands of people is vastly greater than that of all but a 99.9 percentile individual.