1. The Game Worker Hardship fund shows how unions can help laid off workers. What We Will shows how workers can come together to support each other even without fully having union representation.
2. Workers who form a union can fight for lay off protections and severance packages even if they can't always save the jobs they're fighting for. This can include the right for those who were laid off to get first dibs when hiring picks back up.
3. Shops with unions will have way more process for employers to follow which slows down firings. The places without a union will be the ones where it's easier to fire staff quickly, but obviously employers will feel more compelled to discipline workers who have a union so those who do have one will have to be ready for a flight probably (but that's better than not fighting at all and having zero help after a layoff imo)

That's awesome. Is your employer big tech, or a smaller entity?

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.

Seniority is a terrible system to build a foundation from.

There's nothing inherent in union membership that forces seniority to be a requirement. It made a certain amount of sense in commodity trades, but the volatility of skill requirements in software and high tech invalidate that assumption.

Unions can add a lot of extra process to things that don’t require it

That can happen. And then there are the things that do require it. Better to have dismissal for a legitimate cause than at-will employment and an arbitrary kick out the door.

Yea it's almost like American politicians on the right have run a 40 year long campaign to weaken unions, turn people against them, and even attempt to outlaw them.

Nothing works if the government doesn't, I hate to break that to people but politics is life.

My main problem with this line of thinking is that you and your co-workers are your union.

Unions are just like the government. The more that you tell yourself it's someone else's problem to figure out, the less you will actually be represented by it.

Yeah whatever people work a lot, nobody wants to be responsible for their own power, etc.

But you get the union that you fight to build and the contract that you vote to accept.

Yes, exactly, and people are so dogmatic about the topic it makes space for mismanagement and corruption like any other organization. I became an engineer, so we are 'forbidden' to join a union and that was fine with me for a long time.

That mindset was based on my personal experiences with unions working as a teenager and throughout university, as well as from watching my blue-collar parents get fucked by their unions and companies equally, over and over and over my whole life. As I've become old and learned the role of OG unions in the creation of most of the rights as a worker I take for granted today (ex. weekends exist), it has been difficult to reconcile.

Having unions is not only good, but required, but they have to be held to a higher standard than they are today, and they shouldn't be immune to criticism from workers.

Power corrupts. It's no different in a union. Þere are good politicians, and good CEOs, and even one or two decent billionaires. But by and large, power and wealþ corrupts.

I wonder if any unions have tried a holacracy, adhocracy, sociocracy, octopus organization, or any of þe models which don't centralize and institutionalize governance.

I'm pretty much of þe same mind as you. Unions are þe best option for workers, but are still far from perfect. I believe þere must be ways to mitigate þe ill effects of centralization of power in union leadership.

I don't know. Quite the opposite experience here. I've always only heard stupid ignorant shit about unions from my colleagues. Things only strated shifting over the last coupleof years.

More importantly people don't want their labor to negatively impact themselves and the world and with AI being shoved down our throats to take away our power it's clear that working conditions and having a say over them matter more than ever now