• Require employees to strike even if they don't want to / can't afford to.
• Prevent employees being fired, for any reason or under any circumstances.
• Harass or even force non-members to join.
• Get involved with extreme-left politics and use union fees to fund the union leader's own political views / ambitions, regardless of the views of the workers themselves.
• Segregate workers into types, and attack the workers themselves if they do the "wrong kind" of work. The attendant removal of any flexibility cripples working speed and causes great frustration. For instance imagine being ticked off or even fined because you wrote a Docker config or created a monitoring dashboard, and that's the job of devops only, not developers.
• Block any kind of labour saving automation. Imagine being told you weren't allowed to deploy a script that checked your dependencies for CVEs because that was Joe's job and he's been doing it by hand for the last six months, so he's going to keep doing it by hand for the next 10 years. Now imagine that any task that anyone ever mentions is immediately given to a human to do instead of waiting for it to be scripted, so effectively nothing can ever be automated.
• Losing interest in advocating for workers rights.
These examples may sound absurd but unions of all types across all industries have engaged in this kind of behaviour in the past. It's a power thing. Because unions use their power to fight the government they can often get laws passed in their favour, granting them even more power, giving them even less incentive to work for the workers instead of themselves, etc.
Everyone expects to change jobs every 2 years. Unions don't help you get a new job, they help you keep your old one. Changing jobs would probably be more difficult.
If a union can work for actors (SAG-AFTRA) who often change jobs many times a year, they can work for people who only change jobs every few years. Unions don't have to be limited to a single company, they can organize across a whole industry. For example, AFL-CIO represents >12 million workers, far more than any individual company employs.
It would force the organization to its knees in my opinion. Unions for work in showbiz are ridiculous in that they restrict people to members of a specific union; e.g. All adjustments to an actor'a appearance must be done by the appropriate member of the cast, insofar as a sound guy couldn't brush a hair off of the shoulder of an actor.
Imagine the same craziness applied to which kinds of code you would be able to work on. I don't see the need for crippling the actions that enable our employers from innovating quickly for what amounts to more beaurecracy.
Imagine ... is not an argument. It is fabricating a non-existent scenario. I can imagine a whole lot of things non of which factor into whether labor should collectively bargain for better conditions.
This whole thread is made from 93.4% paper tigers and straw men.
It is an argument and it is not a straw man, because that argument is based on historical precedent. It's simply observing what has happened repeatedly in the past and pointing out it'd likely happen again. There are no logical fallacies there - if you believe the future would be different to the past, despite implementing the same policies, it's on you to argue why.
I am not going to argue on the merits of unions based another union and industries separation of duties taken out of context. It is an argument killing trope, "look at the ridiculous separation of job responsibilities in the film unions!" OMG, What would happen if we took this to the extreme in tech? Imagine, in a world where one person types statements and another enters semicolons. If you can't solve this problem, unions are bad.
It has no bearing on the validity of labor collectively bargaining for better conditions.
I am curious what your ideal software engineering union would look like.
I'm personally quite opposed to unions since they all seem to abuse their power in the long run, but I am curious what you would want a union to do for you.
There are actually unions in technology (particularly, but not exclusively, in the public sector) so while that might be a valid argument as to why adapting a particular element of showbusiness union policies in a particular way would be a bad idea for a tech union, it's not actually an argument against unions in tech.
Public sector unions are public sector unions, not technology unions. AFSCME does not represent the interests of technical workers. And since when are public sector tech workers (truthfully the bottom of the barrel in terms of technical skill) something to aspire to?
