Rising anger over widespread layoffs, disillusionment with Big Tech, and threats of mass displacement by AI have tech pros taking a good, hard look at unions.
Forming new professional bodies takes time, administration, and some kind of governance structure. There aren’t a lot of grey-beards that have a bunch of spare time for organizing that. Also, historically, most IT people have seen themselves as “lone wolf frontiersmen” and the rate at which the industry has changed has made any kind of professional certification obsolete very quickly. Legal statutes, the frontiers of medicine, the best practices and techniques for pipe joining and bricklaying, etc. advance very slowly by comparison. Mature industries are much easier to unionize on average. IT is spectacularly immature (in multiple ways) by comparison so it’s very hard to create a professional body to represent tech workers.
Would it be good if we had something like that? Yes. Is it going to be easy to build, hell no. A better model might be the development of independent tech co-operatives, with distributed ownership. If a bunch of senior software engineers with some spare cash to pool creating a bunch of major tech competitors with a co-operative ownership model might actually serve the industry much better than the centralized corporate model we find ourselves subject to, AND provide a basis for developing industry unions, but the closest the industry has to something like that at a large scale is… well Valve, and even that’s not a true co-operative.
Also other than a few outliers (gaming) IT and development jobs have been pretty good in recent history. There hasn’t been much push for change until the circumstances shifted.
Valid point. Thus far, tech workers in general have had a pretty comfortable relationship with the executive class by comparison to other industries. That made it a little to easy to dismiss the risks of being that cozy with them without some kind of protection.
Forming new professional bodies takes time, administration, and some kind of governance structure. There aren’t a lot of grey-beards that have a bunch of spare time for organizing that. Also, historically, most IT people have seen themselves as “lone wolf frontiersmen” and the rate at which the industry has changed has made any kind of professional certification obsolete very quickly. Legal statutes, the frontiers of medicine, the best practices and techniques for pipe joining and bricklaying, etc. advance very slowly by comparison. Mature industries are much easier to unionize on average. IT is spectacularly immature (in multiple ways) by comparison so it’s very hard to create a professional body to represent tech workers.
Would it be good if we had something like that? Yes. Is it going to be easy to build, hell no. A better model might be the development of independent tech co-operatives, with distributed ownership. If a bunch of senior software engineers with some spare cash to pool creating a bunch of major tech competitors with a co-operative ownership model might actually serve the industry much better than the centralized corporate model we find ourselves subject to, AND provide a basis for developing industry unions, but the closest the industry has to something like that at a large scale is… well Valve, and even that’s not a true co-operative.
Also other than a few outliers (gaming) IT and development jobs have been pretty good in recent history. There hasn’t been much push for change until the circumstances shifted.
Valid point. Thus far, tech workers in general have had a pretty comfortable relationship with the executive class by comparison to other industries. That made it a little to easy to dismiss the risks of being that cozy with them without some kind of protection.