Ignoring for the moment the non-salary benefits of a union: Look at it this way - aren't corporate profits quite high already? Yet they still merge and consolidate and cut costs and try to increase them further.
Why should labor not do the same?
Also, this seems like a reasonable question (with source for the claim!), that no doubt many others would share. I don't think the downvotes are warranted.
> "Ignoring for the moment the non-salary benefits of a union: Look at it this way - aren't corporate profits quite high already? Yet they still merge and consolidate and cut costs and try to increase them further."
Imagine your waiter at a restaurant found out that you are a well paid programmer and tried to charge you extra on the bill for your meal because "aren't programmer salaries quite high already". Does that sound reasonable to you?
It sounds like a ridiculous and misleading analogy.
I don't employ my waiter. The restaurant employs my waiter.
I would be perfectly fine with a restaurant paying a waiter slightly more in return for happier waiters - especially if it meant that I didn't need to feel that my tips were keeping food on the waiter's table, instead of the restaurant's pay.
But imagine this - suppose a waiter at a restaurant discovered the restaurant was making millions for the owners, while their pay was so low they could barely cover rent and other basics?
Does that sound reasonable to you?
That is exactly the situation many workers in the US and UK are in today.
Essentially there are two kinds of people - those who understand that this is a real problem, and those who don't.
The economy is run by those who don't - and it's much the worse for it.
I'm not saying that, because capital makes a lot of money, they should be charged more. I'm saying that labor and capital should be allowed to play by the same rules.
If you want to limit unionization only to jobs that are "bad" by some metric, fine - but then also limit the size of corporations unless they are struggling. Why should they be free to merge and consolidate and organize, but workers shouldn't?
But that's besides the point - regardless of how high their profits are, they try to increase them further. Unlike labor, they're not asked to justify this by showing that their board members and shareholders live in poverty.
Pretty sure I just lost most of my faith in my fellow liberal techies after reading these responses. It's amazing how little substance their is to the responses, and how much outrage and throwing out of the word "privilege" there is. When did being outraged become a valid stance, without having to back it up with any reason position?
I don’t know what the work environment is there, but I know that the work environment for a lot of software developers is pretty miserably: unpaid overtime, constant on-call, layoffs with no severance... they may be trying to tackle some of that.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Kickstarter-Salaries-E49199...