I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.
It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's what they get.
Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.
> without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.
In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board.
It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.
Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.
A good chunk of the readership here is in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy and have their incentives firmly aligned with their employers thanks to superb pay and equity grants. Poor? Powerless? Certainly not them.
Yeah, right up until the point where you get sucked into a massive layoff right as your company is posting record profits and boasting how much code is written with AI now.
I think a lot of people in tech are realizing how helpful unions could be right now.
