I think a lot of people (especially tech employees and HN commenters) have this idea from the 80s and 90s of what a union must be, like they are all necessarily just like a Teachers' Union. Usually bad stereotypes like "Unions rank members by tenure and reward only the old timers!" and "Unions make it so only union members can plug a cord into an electrical outlet!" and "Unions only negotiate for salary, never things like equity, 401K features, IP assignment / moonlighting policy, implementing an ESPP, Remote Work, better development workstations, and so on." Like, who made these rules up? Why can't a new union negotiate to allow Remote Work? Why can't a new union rank its members by something other than tenure? Is there some "union police" that makes sure every union is exactly like the Teamsters and United Auto Workers?
A tech worker union could fight for non-salary things, things that tech workers care about. There's no law saying it can't.
>bad stereotypes like "Unions rank members by tenure and reward only the old timers!" and "Unions make it so only union members can plug a cord into an electrical outlet!"
This isn't a "bad stereotype", this is purposely pushed propaganda, and it sits on the shelf next to the training video you watch about how horrible unions get in the way of you negotiating with the company all by your lonesome, and the poster that says "Don't give a union $300, buy an Xbox instead"
The reason that tech workers hate unions is that it's a highly middle class male employee field, and they were targeted hardest by anti-union propaganda for a century.
There's no law saying a union can't fight for things besides salary. But in practice that's what it's often about.
Take the NYTimes tech worker union, for example (previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41504026). It really only has 2 objectives on its platform: indefinite remote work, and "pay equity". Notably, their objective is for pay equity regardless of different representation across different jobs. So not even "equal pay for equal work" but rather "equal pay for different work".
Union incentive align mostly to more members not more salary or benefits. Similar how companies tend to go for more revenue unions benefit more from additional member and less from higher salaries
The two are not mutually exclusive. The incentive for seniority-based pay is that low-performers are dissatisfied with lesser career advancement, so they form a block within the union electorate and vote in leadership that flattens pay.
You are correct that unions are also incentivized to increase membership, that's why unions often oppose more efficient work practices. More efficiency reduces the number of personnel needed to perform the job. An example of this is the longshoremen's unions in the US. They have consistently rejected the automation that most other developed countries have long-since adoped [1]. The result? American ports are some of the least efficient in the world, despite also being quite expensive [2].
A tech worker union could fight for non-salary things, things that tech workers care about. There's no law saying it can't.