I had a page on here with that title, and it got a little traffic. This was back in the 2000s. Times have changed a bit, and there are now a lot of programmers with union contracts.
Here’s a blast from the past, 2010: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/9481/are-there-any-unions-for-software-developers
Here’s a brief outline of what I recall reading that encouraged labor union organizing and computers and programming.
I didn’t know anything about Michael Hauben, but he was an activist in the auto worker movement, and very forward looking, eventually coining the term Netizen in the early 1990s. Before that, I read some of his text files, the Amateur Computerist, and they’d often start with the history of the UAW sit down strikes in Flint. Not being a unionist in the late 80s, I didn’t understand what that meant.
In college, in the late 80s, I went to a Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility meeting, and they were talking about workplace conditions and ergonomics. I did not understand what CPSR meant at the time. It’s modeled on Physicians for Social Responsibility. While this wasn’t a union, they were concerned with work conditions.
One big impediment to organizing was the Californian Ideology, and a general “liberatarian” attitude, but the real impediment was Silicon Valley businesses being extremely anti-union. This includes Apple, Google, etc. All the “liberals”. I basically thought like the Cal Ideology folks.
Another impediment was the H1B question. I was in a Yahoo group, in the early 2000s, called the Programmers Guild, run by John Miano. As interest in the yahoo group waned, it took a strong anti-Indian turn, and I split. There were other alarmists like Ed Yourdon whose 1992 The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. Later, Michelle Malkin jumped in with Sold Out in 2015, another anti-immigration screed.
In the late 2000s, I was working at AFL-CIO, I read an article that raised the idea of a merger between the JAW and UAW (the Japanese and American auto worker unions). It seemed fantastical, but the logic is obvious: the production is global, so the union should be global, so they can run global strikes. This was, obviously, a course that a programmers’ union could take, to merge with the Indian programmers union. This idea was also far out of the mainstream compared to the above.
At the time, the only union trying to organize programmers was WashTech in Washington, and they eventually affiliated with Communications Workers of America.
Sometime around the 2010s, I participated in an IBEW action that helped pull IT worker interest. The actual action was to deal with some Edison worker contract issues. The IT workers were basically cheerleading, to get some interest in their issue, which was having their jobs sent to India. (Once again, another split over H1B and Indians. People just keep holding onto nationalism.)
My gripe with nationalism in labor
Simple as that.
The labor movement is supposed to create solidarity between workers. It’s supposed to unite the working class. How can it develop good relations with workers, all workers, if they single out one group as “the enemy”. How can the expect solidarity, when they demonize the group?
Also, if you are making a worker organization that’s against H1B visa holders, and your workplace has H1B workers, you’re not likely to get a majority of votes to certify a union.
