Tech workers are organizing and demanding democracy in the workplace

Unpopular opinion:<p>As a recent graduate (last 5 years), I can&#x27;t agree with most works desire to unionize for one reason: demand for your skills.<p>When I was looking for my second tech job, I turned on that switch in my LinkedIn that lets recruiters contact me. I was immediately inundated with 10-20 messages a day from recruiters asking if I could speak with them about &lt;Role with my expertice&gt;. For me this was the most insane luxury in the workplace, instead of having to go out and look for jobs, those jobs were coming to me and knocking on my door.<p>What I took from that is tech workers have an incredible choice in where they can go work because their skills are highly in-demand. So why unionize? Don&#x27;t like where you work? Flip a switch and suddenly you have 10-20 offers a day from other companies looking to hire someone with your skillset. Yes, you have to spend time combing through the messages, on the phone with recruiters and going to interviews but at the end of the day with that level of attention to your skillset, you can basically decide where you want to work. Company A seems great but the culture is toxic, ok great let&#x27;s see what company B has to offer. Company B has a good culture but their data collection practices you don&#x27;t agree with, ok let&#x27;s see what company C has to offer. Company C has a great culture and doesn&#x27;t do the things you consider unethical with data collection, bam we have a winner.<p>Also on the topic of general democracy in the workplace regarding decisions. As an engineer you don&#x27;t make those decisions, you just implement them. Don&#x27;t like the decisions, go somewhere else. Want more&#x2F;total control over decision making? Start your own company.

A lot of counter arguments here say that this isn&#x27;t necessary because we can easily find new jobs. Yes that&#x27;s true, but that&#x27;s not what I want to always have to do in my career.<p>I don&#x27;t always want to cut and run. I want to invest in a workplace and have a meaningful say about my circumstances there and the work we do. I don&#x27;t want to quit or have to suck it up and deal. I don&#x27;t want to have to go into management and then have dueling loyalties (what comes first, ethics or keeping my team employed?) If I work at a big company like Amazon, I want a say in what our tech does and who uses it. Even if I cut and run from them, I&#x27;m not going to catch up to Amazon anytime soon. In a place like that positive change could much more easily come from within than from competition.

I always thought it was strange that we live in a democracy but spend most of our time working in corporations, which are more like autocracies than anything remotely resembling that of a democracy.

I&#x27;ve never been convinced that unions are necessarily the best approach to resolving the employer&#x2F;employee power differential, but I do believe that in the coming decades something will be necessary.<p>By luck, the explosive growth of software in the states and relative scarcity of developers has resulted in a lot of wealth and luxury for engineers. There&#x27;s no reason to believe this trend will continue indefinitely.<p>On the other side of the spectrum, another country that has explosive software growth but a large supply of engineers and STEM workers is China. China&#x27;s 996 work policy has been getting a lot of attention lately and I think it should highlight the risk we face in a matter of maybe a generation or two if the software industry does eventually cool down.

As someone who was pretty heavily invested in getting tech workers to organize, I&#x27;ve watched with interest as some version of this article gets written every three or four months. There is always a small group of people actively tilting at this windmill, and they make for a good story.<p>What I am waiting to see is a significant demand being met by any major tech employer. The end of forced arbitration at Google was a promising development, but the failure of the Google walkout organizers to get their key demand—an employee representative on the board—doesn&#x27;t bode well.<p>I continue to believe that tech workers enjoy a temporary position of immense leverage in the workplace, but turning that into substantive gains has so far proven beyond anyone&#x27;s capacity. I wish the current crop of organizers the best of luck in trying to make it happen.

This seems like an all or nothing type of thing. I for one would never join a union so if some tech workers started to unionize I would always be available to take their place for the right price. It seems like incomplete attempts to unionize our industry will benefit those that <i>don&#x27;t</i> want to unionize the most by making them more attractive employees.

I think it is time for tech workers to force their companies to pursue an agenda that is in-line with the worker&#x27;s ethics. We <i>are</i> highly paid, we are also highly valuable to the US economy. If we can effectively unionize - we can use that leverage to pressure the government to act in ways we support with regards to surveillance and climate change.

This headline is misleading as it should be “Some tech workers” or maybe “a growing few tech workers.”

For low-skilled factory workers a union is largely about defending their rights and making sure they&#x27;re treated fairly.<p>For a tech worker, a union is largely about providing a worker-focused counterbalance to your companies decisions. Who buys the tech we make? What tech do we make? Do we allow ourselves to make tech that evades, impedes or outright destroys a person&#x27;s rights?<p>I don&#x27;t want tech employees to quit those facial recognition companies. I want a large group of employees with a seat at the table saying that their work should be used ethically. Those companies can always find employees who for a variety of reasons will do the work. My hope is that there is a group of employees there who want to do the work and for the right reasons. More power to them.

Unions for tech workers are ridiculous. We’re not coal miners, we are highly skilled white collar professionals that should be more than capable of finding work that suits us without extra regulatory bullshit.<p>I find the people who are clamoring for unions in tech are among the least talented and skilled of employees, and they should probably find a new industry entirely instead of trying to change the one they’re in to be more hospitable to the lowest common denominators. Perhaps we can help the process along by putting these people on hiring blacklists and ensuring they never work in this town again.

Unionization is the incorporation and concentration of human capital to gain leverage in negotiations. If that isn&#x27;t smart capitalism, I don&#x27;t know what is.

These kinds of articles are laughably tone deaf.

This trend bothers me. Employees are not shareholders, or if they are, they ought to do this in their capacity as shareholders. If they want to govern the company, they ought to buy in or move to management.<p>Or, they can always move companies. This is always an option.<p>Also, socialism is an awful idea. I can&#x27;t believe people actually support it. I have a massive moral objection to its core tenets: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?

Socialism aside, the unionization of tech workers is extremely important. Failing this, they will be exploited at every damn job. Unions exist in local governments, so why not at private firms too. It&#x27;s time to organize. A lot of CEOs and CTOs will hate this idea, of course, and will do anything to make you believe otherwise.

I&#x27;ve noticed this trend here on HN beyond workers organizing for their own benefit. The idea of regulating the internet, for almost any reason was abhorrent to the tech community a decade ago.<p>Now, most people seem to think the likes of Uber and AirBnB need to be regulated. A majority of comments here about GDPR seem to support it, and I regularly see calls for more regulation of the sort. I&#x27;m not sure if the same group of people have changed their views, or if a wider range of people have brought new perspectives to the community.