[taraindara]

The hard part is these workers are doing the job to survive life. Without the job, the unsure future is terrifying.

I’m all for taking action. I just don’t know what action best suits my needs, other than finding a new job or starting my own business and hoping I don’t become one of the greedy ones too.

[gitremote]

> I’m all for taking action. I just don’t know what action best suits my needs, other than finding a new job or starting my own business and hoping I don’t become one of the greedy ones too.

Tech workers shouldn't punch down against unions. We should be pro-union in general.

[ryandrake]

For some reason, too many tech workers think they are some kind of top 1% of tech workers, captains of their industry, and master negotiators: Each of them are a unicorn worker that unions couldn't possibly help.

[bpt3]

Why? Assuming you're talking about a standard US union and not something like a guild, it would ultimately suppress wages for the top talent to provide job security to the other end of the bell curve.

[dietr1ch]

It's even worse when under a work visa. You can't even defend yourself when figuring out the legal course takes longer than you can stay in the country.

[recursivedoubts]

tying healthcare to employment and making two-earner households the norm has been a disaster for labor power

now your employer holds you hostage via health care & if one spouse loses a job the other is not able to quickly replace part of that income

[bobthepanda]

i mean, the income replacement thing was a lot worse when there was only one breadwinner. at least with a two income household you have something.

[echelon]

> The hard part is these workers are doing the job to survive life.

Tech companies used to hire all the brilliant engineers because they were worried about startups eating their lunch.

Without antitrust enforcement, they've grown large enough that they can essentially bleed money in any of their non-core markets for decades without it impacting them. So this clearly isn't the case anymore.

We need to:

(1) get the DOJ/FTC/EU/ASEAN/etc. to slap the FAANG / Mag 7 hard. Bust them up into many companies. It would probably even result in greater market value being created as these companies are inefficiently sitting on gold mountains that they do not monetize and also making insane malinvestments that simply waste millennia of human engineering in stupid ways that have absolutely no potential of succeeding. But more than anything, this oxygenates the field for competition and provides greater upside to the financial / labor / innovation capital that are actually doing the work.

(2) start lots of startups that erode the key money makers of these companies. They're quite vulnerable right now. And they've laid off a lot of highly skilled labor.

Google should be four or five companies, at minimum. And it's time that the governments of the world demand it.