> In many existing demand cooperatives, such as rotating savings groups, there is often a trusted central coordinator — frequently an older community member — who helps maintain accountability and keep the interests of the group aligned.
Aligned with what? Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated.
This thin proposal would be more interesting if it could give any discussion about the difficult points and how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center.
To say I’m skeptical of an organization that wants to choose how to spend my money for me is an understatement.
This sort of thing had a huge social movement in the UK in the 1800s, and parts of it still survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Group , for example. The trick is that it doesn't "feel like" a co-op, for most customers it's just a normal shop with an unusual ownership structure.
The financial co-operatives, the building societies, fell victim to "carpetbaggers" in the 90s who encouraged members to vote for proposals to convert to traditional for-profit structures and get bought out by other banks. This was at the time a really good deal! Co-op members got big one-off payments.
It was only in the 2000s that we found out what the negative effects of bank consolidation were.
Not all the mutuals were destroyed by carpetbaggers. There are dozens (though smaller than the big famous ones from the 1980s) today. Some instituted "anti-carpetbagger" rules to make themselves unappetising.
For example if the Society decides anybody who became a member fewer than ten years before the vote can't benefit from a demutualization effort then it forces would-be carpetbaggers to plot this implausibly long game where they all agree to join in, say, January 2017 and then vote to tear the society to pieces in February 2027 having now all met the ten year rule. But in reality in 2026 when you send those "Everybody ready?" notes around to remind them of what to do in 2027 you'll find a bunch of your fellow plotters got money trouble meanwhile and had to quit, or found Jesus and changed their minds or died, or whatever else and so this plan falls apart.
Edited:: Also, I remember voting (as a young adult) against this because it's obvious what happens next. We didn't find out later, the usual idiots claimed they didn't know what would happen because admitting that they knew and did it anyway makes it obvious just how stupid they are.
> how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center.
Believe it or not, there’s no power structure that is immune to not having a benevolent individual at the center. That’s because most things are norms and practices developed culturally, not codified in power structures or laws.
For what it's worth, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer bands, i.e. the kind of structure humans actually evolved to live in, do seem to be relatively immune. They consist of a group of nuclear families who act together for mutual benefit. Everyone knows everyone else personally, and important decisions are made via consensus. Leaders exist, but they earn their position by demonstrating themselves the wisest, fairest, most capable, etc individual. and can lose it if they keep making bad decisions. And if one person attempts to become too dominant, the others will join together to kill or expel them, or leave to join another band.
Of course, it's not a perfect system, but it tends to avoid the excesses of control, violence and oppression that other power structures can enable. I try to avoid employers, clubs and other organisations whose internal dynamics don't resemble it (aside from the killing). As a result, I've mostly avoided the kind of stress and politics that other people seem to find themselves mired in.
The most valuable resource is trust. Follow closely by the trust-structures to deal with the ramifications of the primary trust-relationship being broken.
That is to say, the most fundamental rule is contract law.
I think you missed when I said that contract law is for when things have gone completely off the rails or for very expensive decisions. Most day to day operations are managed through societal norms and pressures. Contract law would be a poor fit. And by the way, honoring and enforcing contract law between third parties to yourself itself is a societal norm.
In most jurisdictions anyone would want to live in, a handshake deal is as good as a contract.
Additionally, and again in any jurisdiction anyone would want to live in, when you purchase a durable good you’re entering into a contract with the seller and / or the manufacturer with regard to the advertised claims of the product and any warranted considerations.
Also, consumer items usually come with some guarantees, for example that your baby spinach didn’t kill you or result in harm to a gestating foetus, and so on and so forth.
yes, I was going to write another paper on how we can have lil trusted person who evaluates proposals. My idea would be that each coop will create a charter and mission goals. These goals can be changed through quarter voting.
But after you create this charter the person who would evaluate it would be AI steward. He can tell you why your proposal aligns with the charter, why it doesnt. How it can come in line with the charter. After that given the money you need falls under a certain amount it just gets passed. If its over a certain amount though it goes through the vote.
but no proposal goes forth without AI steward being the fair evaluator of whether your proposal aligns with your coops charter.
> Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated
I've seen many co-ops fail. They never address the long-tail nature of productivity, perhaps to not offend people or because most people can't admit it or even understand it. Popular loudmouths take power. Quiet competent people leave. Co-op slowly dies.
This negative cycle is even more pathological in co-ops than in a normal corporation/for profit.
Essentially, we need more unions - I'm not sure we have to invent new names for these things. These won't be your parents' unions, or the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV—the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
I've been (unintentionally) part of two union drives in my own life and have seen friends in an unrelated field participate in a third. They make perfect sense in moments like our current one, where owners can hire dozens of attorneys to jeopardize your job while you of course are limited to whatever legal representation you've been saving up for.
My only experience with unions was as a low level employee while I was in high school. It consisted of certain employees trying to drum up willingness to unionize through a combination of unrealistic promises and threats of violence. The company I worked for at the time was in trouble and went out of business before the unionization effort came to a vote. I don't know how representative my experience was, but it definitely soured me on unions for a long time.
These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.
> These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.
What would you say are the highest salaried professions in the US outside of management/executive roles that would obviously not be a part of unions? I think most Americans would probably list athletes and actors close to the top (if not literally the first two), both of which famously have powerful unions.
The highest paid MLB player in the last year before the union in 1965 was $105,000, which after inflation maps to around $1,110,066.67 in 2026 USD, but the minimum salary for MLB players for the 2026 season is $780,000, and the highest individual salary is $61,875,000. If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union.
At absolute best, I feel like you could argue that unions are a mixed bag and some of them do more harm than good, but it's not clear why that wouldn't be an equally compelling argument against pretty much every other type of organization in our economy. There are plenty of corporations that have inflicted absolutely massive amounts of harm to society (many at levels I'd argue no union has ever come anywhere close to), but I've yet to meet anyone who's expressed skepticism at the concept of unions to have similar opinions about the concept of corporations. It's hard not to feel like people just give disproportionate weight to anecdotes about unions than they do for other economic entities because of how effectively they've been painted as the boogeyman by anti-labor propaganda.
> If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union.
The burden is on anyone to make a claim in either direction because you don’t have a control. How do you know the salaries wouldn’t have increased just due to baseball popularity and demand for good players?
The salaries for top players would have increased, sure! But there’s no reason to think the minimums would have, and an obvious supporting point is that there have been several strikes that occurred during the contract negotiations
Also, we forget the price fixing scandal in big tech. Programmers should probably all be making over 1M+ (thorough there probably would be fewer jobs).
In Belgium unions exist across industries except for the railway and I think army unions.
So I being a programmer can be in the same union as a street sweep.
There's also mutliple that compete with eachother (most of which with political alignments tho they tend to coopeerate and organise togheter in many scenarios) and fees are very low.
They have additional functions too though which are more debated.
So, the company was in trouble and the adults understood that. They probably wanted to fight to make sure they didn't lose their 401ks or pension, or be able to hold onto some insurance so the c suite didn't gut the company and leave everyone high and dry. Sounds like you just generally didn't understand the situation, being a kid.
> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
There is no such thing. A problem with a union is that everyone's going the same place, and you're not driving. Maybe that place is better than where you could get to on your own, or maybe not. But one thing that is definitely not true is that your union is going to do exactly what you want.
I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collectivism of the masses somehow drowning out the desires of the elite few, but they never seem to address the obvious counterexamples in higher-paid work; the $780,000 minimum salary for MLB players doesn't seem to have stopped Shohei Ohtani from getting a contract making almost 90 times more than that per year, and Adam Sandler doesn't seem like he's struggling with his $48 million payout last year despite the union-negotiated guarantees for anyone getting a speaking role on screen existing for decades.
(I'n not usually on the "downvoting for disagreement is bad" train, but when the major point of my comment is that there never seems to be a strong counterargument to the line of thinking here, it's hard not to find it a bit ironic when someone doesn't care to elaborate on why they don't like what I said)
You're comparing unions that cover short-term contracts (film production, MLB) with "blue-collar unions" that represent hourly or salaried long-term employment contracts.
Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?
We need to invent new names for these things to disconnect them from the boogeymans.
For example, when we change "union" to "party" (as in political party) even those who claim to hate unions latch onto it as if it was the greatest thing ever conceived, despite being the exact same thing. Marketing matters.
> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do", so why do people complain about it so much and want it gone when it does what people want?
The answer is that even democratic institutions easily get corrupted and hard to deal with. US unions seem to be very prone to this for some reason, both union leaders and corporate lobbyists wants the unions to be corrupt so I don't see that changing either. Many people would gladly take a salary penalty if it lets them avoid yet another corrupt bureaucracy above them.
Agreed. The best time to form a union was 20 years ago (Especially because Tech Workers had leverage because they were in demand). The second best time to form a union is today.
I wouldn’t mind unions except they get involved in all sorts of political battles that I would get opted into. I would rather they focus on the barebones of negotiation for compensation instead of taking it over like it’s their personal nonprofit.
It really depends on the union, mine concentrate on less hours for a salary that follow inflation, parental leaves and a gold plated drug insurance. I work 32.5 hours per week in the summer, have 24 days off, 2 personal days and 12 statutory holidays; that's 36 paid days off !
Every time I've ever seen a tech worker's union, it's always some sort of political experiment rather than legitimately advocating for the interests of the workers it nominally aims to represent. E.g. the Google AWU-CWA union just did a bunch of political stunt stuff, no salary negotiation or anything useful to the modal Google worker.
Partly because they couldn't because they didn't organize in a way that let them because... well... one could speculate.
> Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), also informally referred to as the Google Union, is an American trade union of workers employed at Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, with a membership of over 800, in a company with 130,000 employees, not including temps, contractors, and vendors in the United States. It was announced on January 4, 2021, with an initial membership of over 400, after over a year of secret organizing, and the union includes all types of workers at Alphabet, including full-time, temporary, vendors and contractors of all job types.
It's trying to cover too many different groups with competing interests (FTE, temp, vendor, and contractor).
Hypothetical negotiations that would favor FTEs may disfavor vendor or contractor contracts. That inherent conflict of interest in the negotiations would mean they can't negotiate for any of them on those matters. Also, the less than 1% of the people belonging to the union would mean the union can't represent them in collective salary negotiations either.
Of the represented group (say if they only organized for FTE tech workers), they would then have needed 50% + 1 of the employees in that classification to vote to have a union. It is possible - https://kickstarterunited.org for example (and yes, they are having trouble - but they are negotiating on working conditions and pay).
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Various "we should have a union" strings typically have been people wishing for one that is cross industry that they don't have to do anything. While industry wide union organization can exist (Kickstarter United is OPEIU - https://www.opeiu.org ) it is the local part that people forget... Kickstarter United is OPEIU local 153.
If people want a union, they need to organize at their company and get that 50% + 1 vote there.
When it is easier to switch jobs than it is to spend the several years to organize and negotiate a contract, the power of a union is diminished.
Everything is political. Politics have been heavily intertwined with work forever. The history of unions is intertwined with literal government violence.
Negotiations for compensation is like the least life-impacting thing a union can do. Tech workers are well paid and capable of negotiating.
Things like work hours, quality of life, paid leaves, etc are important and can’t really be negotiated by the individual. Every labor victory from yesterday is the status quo but every future one is politics.
Yes I suppose it doesn’t address the concern directly, and yes it’s common. I guess my point is that avoiding “politics” is a bad concern.
Why is compensation not included in “politics” when it’s very clearly a political topic? Because when people say “avoid politics” they usually mean it as a derogatory term for “all the disagreements that I dont personally care about” - and conveniently exclude the issues they care about from “politics”. Unions don’t work unless they get enough members, and getting enough support sometimes means supporting the “political issues” of other members. It’s a team, and everyone has to contribute… but of course everyone will be better off in the long run
I understand what you're saying and where you're coming from, but you can't persuasively respond to an objection by saying the person is wrong to have the objection. This is a real problem in modern tech organizing: you don't all share the same politics. People are just going to not sign up.
It's very much like the problem product marketers have when they come up with a grand vision for how their product is supposed to work and then assume customers are going to be super into it. They are not! They just want a thing that solves their problems! They don't want or need to help you achieve your vision. You have to make your vision work for them, persuasively.
I'm not saying the (broad) project is doomed --- though I think you have an uphill climb in this market --- but I do think you're going to have to address this problem to achieve critical mass.
> Because when people say “avoid politics” they usually mean it as a derogatory term for “all the disagreements that I dont personally care about” - and conveniently exclude the issues they care about from “politics”.
People use "politics" as shorthand for "things that are divisive issues that split your purported represented class". You're not going to get anyone to join your union if all you do is advocate for things that the vast majority of employees at best don't care about, or worse, disagree with.
Not really my thing here since i'm belgian and we have multiple cross industry unions competeting.
However from what i hear about american unions it starts to sounds like an argument for acting and arguing against a union if it leans against your politics and you don't have enough influence whilst also not doing enough towards your wage/work conditions.
I don’t want to waste time to fight battles within the union. This is exactly what I’m talking about. If it’s just a political nonprofit with forced donations, I’d rather see them banned than join one.
The post is written like as if consumer coops is a radically new idea (spoiler: they're everywhere in Europe). Unfortunately they have long since succumbed to the same mechanisms as their competitors and have a tremendous power concentration in top leadership, with directors making ridiculous salaries. On paper though, e.g. Coop with a 25 % market share in Norway is owned and controlled by about 1 million of its customers.
You used to get a dividend from the profits based on your share of purchases from "the Store" back in the day where I'm from. That was a consumer coop driven by the demand of its members.
This sounds like a re-branding of a cryptocurrency/DAO scheme. It's too abstract for conventional consumers to understand and too game-able for serious participants to not be wary of. Who is this for?
Interesting, but - it says it's a co-op, but this is a word with a legal definition. Every co-op I know publishes what it's legal entity is, how voting is done, etc. This just has "click to join". If your pitch is that you have more integrity than typical companies then you have to, you know, "walk the walk".
Also in some jurisdictions, calling yourself a co-op without actually being one will get you into legal difficulties. Companies that don't quite fulfil all the requirements are careful not to call themselves once. Igalia, for example, are very serious about being worker owned and run, but they made the choice to have a slightly different structure so they don't call themselves a co-op.
Mostly its what you get equity from. A consumer coop you may pay a one time fee for voting rights. A demand coop gives you equity everytime you shop or buy from a coop business that you coop either owns or gets benefits from.
In this case your demand coop might buy REI using the funds your contribute to its wealth fund, while REI you might only just be able to get items for cheap from being a member and the ability to vote on new products.
There seem to be a lot of enthusiasts of this kind of idea, and certainly there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here that is high performance?
Plus or minus tiny details, the description from the article:
A demand co-op is a cooperative that pools and directs the spending power of its members. Demand determines what gets built, who survives, and where wealth flows. Most communities already have enormous spending power, but because that demand is unorganized, the value created from it is captured by outside businesses and investors. A demand co-op coordinates that spending so economic activity can build communal businesses, assets, and long-term ownership instead of constant leakage.
covers a multitude. Eg: CBH from the 1930s onwards has pooled the spending power of grain farmers into building out farmer owned transportation networks (rail, ports, shipping, large scale silo storage) as communal assets and source of jobs for relatives and communities.
Dumbest idea i've ever seen. Complete misunderstanding of how the tech world works.
The idea is: if sufficient consumers banded together and coordinated their spending power, they can drive decisions in the executive suite of the companies.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It's neither the spending of consumer nor even the spending of business that drive decisions. The only thing that drives decisions at that level is capital allocation - not spending allocation. Wealth drives these decision - not spending.
So if all these tech workers want to band together and do something about it, they would create their own ETF or mutual fund, and put all their wealth into that fund and then have the manager of that fund direct that capital based on their mission.
Of course you will see that this won't work because there just isn't enough capital here to move the market compared to the other capital allocators who are just trying to maximize returns.
The idea is that one can drive the other. Because if you direct that capital without consumption the investment is worthless. You can do both. You can direct the consumption in exchange for part of that consumption you get equity in a wealth fund that funds product the coop will gain equity in if they use. I think one the obvious ones would be a replacement for github.
We build a replacement for github, the most you personally drive demand to the git replacement and for that demand you gain equity. And for that equity you get a larger say on how the fund is used and increased access to privileges
I'm not sure it's so black and white. Directing capital is powerful, and directing spending is powerful (but probably harder; this is marketing or government). I think it's more that directing spending requires influencing a lot more people than directing capital.
Also, if you are doing something other than maximising returns then you'll be outcompeted and irrelevant in the long run unless you attract many billions in inflows, or the government tips the scales in your favour e.g. ESG.
There are actually really interesting tech intersections here, possibly. 8 years ago I published an article[1] that ended with some speculation about the possibility of automating organized consumer action to permit, for example, people to coordinate to force companies to drop abusive terms in contracts. The co-op model is in the same family.
Back in the day, my basic idea was basically this: the reason that consumer companies can impose unfair terms on people is because it's basically only a small amount of money to an individual, and it's costly for people to coordinate. For example, the expected cost to me of some company's arbitration clause is small, because the probability of any individual into a dispute with them is low. But in the aggregate it's bad: over a million customers (say) it's almost certain that one of those customers gets royally screwed by it. So: what if all those million customers of company X could all agree to automatically cancel their service contracts with X, if and only if enough other people also agree to do so that a simultaneous cancellation would cause real pain to the company's bottom line. And then enforce that agreement with automation. Some basic game theory suggests the objectionable clause immediately goes boom.
This is just asking for the job to be hurriedly outsourced to where this is not a thing, if not eliminated altogether. It makes sense only for jobs that are tightly geographically constrained and are not subject to work visa imports.
Thats going to happen anyway but whats keep everyone from building replacement companies that arent just gonna optimize on price then buying from those vendors?
> In many existing demand cooperatives, such as rotating savings groups, there is often a trusted central coordinator — frequently an older community member — who helps maintain accountability and keep the interests of the group aligned.
Aligned with what? Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated.
This thin proposal would be more interesting if it could give any discussion about the difficult points and how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center.
To say I’m skeptical of an organization that wants to choose how to spend my money for me is an understatement.
This sort of thing had a huge social movement in the UK in the 1800s, and parts of it still survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Group , for example. The trick is that it doesn't "feel like" a co-op, for most customers it's just a normal shop with an unusual ownership structure.
The financial co-operatives, the building societies, fell victim to "carpetbaggers" in the 90s who encouraged members to vote for proposals to convert to traditional for-profit structures and get bought out by other banks. This was at the time a really good deal! Co-op members got big one-off payments.
It was only in the 2000s that we found out what the negative effects of bank consolidation were.
Not all the mutuals were destroyed by carpetbaggers. There are dozens (though smaller than the big famous ones from the 1980s) today. Some instituted "anti-carpetbagger" rules to make themselves unappetising.
For example if the Society decides anybody who became a member fewer than ten years before the vote can't benefit from a demutualization effort then it forces would-be carpetbaggers to plot this implausibly long game where they all agree to join in, say, January 2017 and then vote to tear the society to pieces in February 2027 having now all met the ten year rule. But in reality in 2026 when you send those "Everybody ready?" notes around to remind them of what to do in 2027 you'll find a bunch of your fellow plotters got money trouble meanwhile and had to quit, or found Jesus and changed their minds or died, or whatever else and so this plan falls apart.
Edited:: Also, I remember voting (as a young adult) against this because it's obvious what happens next. We didn't find out later, the usual idiots claimed they didn't know what would happen because admitting that they knew and did it anyway makes it obvious just how stupid they are.
> how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center.
Believe it or not, there’s no power structure that is immune to not having a benevolent individual at the center. That’s because most things are norms and practices developed culturally, not codified in power structures or laws.
For what it's worth, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer bands, i.e. the kind of structure humans actually evolved to live in, do seem to be relatively immune. They consist of a group of nuclear families who act together for mutual benefit. Everyone knows everyone else personally, and important decisions are made via consensus. Leaders exist, but they earn their position by demonstrating themselves the wisest, fairest, most capable, etc individual. and can lose it if they keep making bad decisions. And if one person attempts to become too dominant, the others will join together to kill or expel them, or leave to join another band.
Of course, it's not a perfect system, but it tends to avoid the excesses of control, violence and oppression that other power structures can enable. I try to avoid employers, clubs and other organisations whose internal dynamics don't resemble it (aside from the killing). As a result, I've mostly avoided the kind of stress and politics that other people seem to find themselves mired in.
Agreed.
The most valuable resource is trust. Follow closely by the trust-structures to deal with the ramifications of the primary trust-relationship being broken.
That is to say, the most fundamental rule is contract law.
I think you missed when I said that contract law is for when things have gone completely off the rails or for very expensive decisions. Most day to day operations are managed through societal norms and pressures. Contract law would be a poor fit. And by the way, honoring and enforcing contract law between third parties to yourself itself is a societal norm.
You’re wrong. Sorry about it.
In most jurisdictions anyone would want to live in, a handshake deal is as good as a contract.
Additionally, and again in any jurisdiction anyone would want to live in, when you purchase a durable good you’re entering into a contract with the seller and / or the manufacturer with regard to the advertised claims of the product and any warranted considerations.
Also, consumer items usually come with some guarantees, for example that your baby spinach didn’t kill you or result in harm to a gestating foetus, and so on and so forth.
> will be sought out by power-hungry people
Agreed.
> and manipulated.
That does not necessarily follow.
This person has a cynical view of human nature. There is likely no evidence that will change their mind.
Yep.
Misanthrops.
Anything nature does is good without limit.
Anything humans do is bad, and can be traced back to those evil white people usually referred to as “those Jewish cunts”.
Yawn.
yes, I was going to write another paper on how we can have lil trusted person who evaluates proposals. My idea would be that each coop will create a charter and mission goals. These goals can be changed through quarter voting.
But after you create this charter the person who would evaluate it would be AI steward. He can tell you why your proposal aligns with the charter, why it doesnt. How it can come in line with the charter. After that given the money you need falls under a certain amount it just gets passed. If its over a certain amount though it goes through the vote.
but no proposal goes forth without AI steward being the fair evaluator of whether your proposal aligns with your coops charter.
> Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated
The inevitable "iron law of oligarchy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
You should look up The Tyranny of Structurelessness
I've seen many co-ops fail. They never address the long-tail nature of productivity, perhaps to not offend people or because most people can't admit it or even understand it. Popular loudmouths take power. Quiet competent people leave. Co-op slowly dies.
This negative cycle is even more pathological in co-ops than in a normal corporation/for profit.
I hope some day someone figures a better way.
do you think neutral ai moderation and time limits on discussion would have the desired effect?
Essentially, we need more unions - I'm not sure we have to invent new names for these things. These won't be your parents' unions, or the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV—the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
I've been (unintentionally) part of two union drives in my own life and have seen friends in an unrelated field participate in a third. They make perfect sense in moments like our current one, where owners can hire dozens of attorneys to jeopardize your job while you of course are limited to whatever legal representation you've been saving up for.
My only experience with unions was as a low level employee while I was in high school. It consisted of certain employees trying to drum up willingness to unionize through a combination of unrealistic promises and threats of violence. The company I worked for at the time was in trouble and went out of business before the unionization effort came to a vote. I don't know how representative my experience was, but it definitely soured me on unions for a long time.
These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.
> These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.
What would you say are the highest salaried professions in the US outside of management/executive roles that would obviously not be a part of unions? I think most Americans would probably list athletes and actors close to the top (if not literally the first two), both of which famously have powerful unions.
The highest paid MLB player in the last year before the union in 1965 was $105,000, which after inflation maps to around $1,110,066.67 in 2026 USD, but the minimum salary for MLB players for the 2026 season is $780,000, and the highest individual salary is $61,875,000. If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union.
At absolute best, I feel like you could argue that unions are a mixed bag and some of them do more harm than good, but it's not clear why that wouldn't be an equally compelling argument against pretty much every other type of organization in our economy. There are plenty of corporations that have inflicted absolutely massive amounts of harm to society (many at levels I'd argue no union has ever come anywhere close to), but I've yet to meet anyone who's expressed skepticism at the concept of unions to have similar opinions about the concept of corporations. It's hard not to feel like people just give disproportionate weight to anecdotes about unions than they do for other economic entities because of how effectively they've been painted as the boogeyman by anti-labor propaganda.
> If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union.
The burden is on anyone to make a claim in either direction because you don’t have a control. How do you know the salaries wouldn’t have increased just due to baseball popularity and demand for good players?
The salaries for top players would have increased, sure! But there’s no reason to think the minimums would have, and an obvious supporting point is that there have been several strikes that occurred during the contract negotiations
Also, we forget the price fixing scandal in big tech. Programmers should probably all be making over 1M+ (thorough there probably would be fewer jobs).
In Belgium unions exist across industries except for the railway and I think army unions. So I being a programmer can be in the same union as a street sweep. There's also mutliple that compete with eachother (most of which with political alignments tho they tend to coopeerate and organise togheter in many scenarios) and fees are very low. They have additional functions too though which are more debated.
So, the company was in trouble and the adults understood that. They probably wanted to fight to make sure they didn't lose their 401ks or pension, or be able to hold onto some insurance so the c suite didn't gut the company and leave everyone high and dry. Sounds like you just generally didn't understand the situation, being a kid.
To be clear, those threats of violence were against me and my co-workers if we didn't vote to unionize.
> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
There is no such thing. A problem with a union is that everyone's going the same place, and you're not driving. Maybe that place is better than where you could get to on your own, or maybe not. But one thing that is definitely not true is that your union is going to do exactly what you want.
> There is no such thing.
There really is! I've been in three unions, every place I worked. The first and third one existed beforehand, while I helped start the second.
A union is a group of people—and like any group, your influence is what you make it to be.
You were in charge of all of the union decisions in all 3? That’s good for you but not representative nor possible for everyone joining a union.
Not in charge, I didn’t say that. But I voted in all, while I did have a bigger role in the second one
I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collectivism of the masses somehow drowning out the desires of the elite few, but they never seem to address the obvious counterexamples in higher-paid work; the $780,000 minimum salary for MLB players doesn't seem to have stopped Shohei Ohtani from getting a contract making almost 90 times more than that per year, and Adam Sandler doesn't seem like he's struggling with his $48 million payout last year despite the union-negotiated guarantees for anyone getting a speaking role on screen existing for decades.
(I'n not usually on the "downvoting for disagreement is bad" train, but when the major point of my comment is that there never seems to be a strong counterargument to the line of thinking here, it's hard not to find it a bit ironic when someone doesn't care to elaborate on why they don't like what I said)
You're comparing unions that cover short-term contracts (film production, MLB) with "blue-collar unions" that represent hourly or salaried long-term employment contracts.
Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?
We need to invent new names for these things to disconnect them from the boogeymans.
For example, when we change "union" to "party" (as in political party) even those who claim to hate unions latch onto it as if it was the greatest thing ever conceived, despite being the exact same thing. Marketing matters.
> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.
ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do", so why do people complain about it so much and want it gone when it does what people want?
The answer is that even democratic institutions easily get corrupted and hard to deal with. US unions seem to be very prone to this for some reason, both union leaders and corporate lobbyists wants the unions to be corrupt so I don't see that changing either. Many people would gladly take a salary penalty if it lets them avoid yet another corrupt bureaucracy above them.
> ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do"
What?
Unless you are Congress, you can't create ICE at your workplace. You can, however, create a union.
If stuff you want aligns with what ICE already does, then it does exactly what you wish it to do, no?
What is a union? It is another social structure, exactly same as corps are.
Agreed. The best time to form a union was 20 years ago (Especially because Tech Workers had leverage because they were in demand). The second best time to form a union is today.
Call it an association or guild or something other than a union. Lawyers and doctor have unions but they don't call it that.
Those are setting the minimum qualifications for a licensed profession... but not the pay or working conditions for those professionals.
> Those are setting the minimum qualifications for a licensed profession...
They're not even doing that! In the US, these qualifications are matters of state law.
> Lawyers and doctor
Doctors definitely have unions!
You're thinking of the AMA which is a lobbying organization, totally different thing.
That’s not what this is. Nor do we need more of them.
Arguably, we do - at least the 8k people being fired at Meta and the 7k being told to drop everything and work on AI likely did need one.
I wouldn’t mind unions except they get involved in all sorts of political battles that I would get opted into. I would rather they focus on the barebones of negotiation for compensation instead of taking it over like it’s their personal nonprofit.
It really depends on the union, mine concentrate on less hours for a salary that follow inflation, parental leaves and a gold plated drug insurance. I work 32.5 hours per week in the summer, have 24 days off, 2 personal days and 12 statutory holidays; that's 36 paid days off !
Every time I've ever seen a tech worker's union, it's always some sort of political experiment rather than legitimately advocating for the interests of the workers it nominally aims to represent. E.g. the Google AWU-CWA union just did a bunch of political stunt stuff, no salary negotiation or anything useful to the modal Google worker.
Partly because they couldn't because they didn't organize in a way that let them because... well... one could speculate.
> Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), also informally referred to as the Google Union, is an American trade union of workers employed at Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, with a membership of over 800, in a company with 130,000 employees, not including temps, contractors, and vendors in the United States. It was announced on January 4, 2021, with an initial membership of over 400, after over a year of secret organizing, and the union includes all types of workers at Alphabet, including full-time, temporary, vendors and contractors of all job types.
It's trying to cover too many different groups with competing interests (FTE, temp, vendor, and contractor).
Hypothetical negotiations that would favor FTEs may disfavor vendor or contractor contracts. That inherent conflict of interest in the negotiations would mean they can't negotiate for any of them on those matters. Also, the less than 1% of the people belonging to the union would mean the union can't represent them in collective salary negotiations either.
Of the represented group (say if they only organized for FTE tech workers), they would then have needed 50% + 1 of the employees in that classification to vote to have a union. It is possible - https://kickstarterunited.org for example (and yes, they are having trouble - but they are negotiating on working conditions and pay).
---
Various "we should have a union" strings typically have been people wishing for one that is cross industry that they don't have to do anything. While industry wide union organization can exist (Kickstarter United is OPEIU - https://www.opeiu.org ) it is the local part that people forget... Kickstarter United is OPEIU local 153.
If people want a union, they need to organize at their company and get that 50% + 1 vote there.
When it is easier to switch jobs than it is to spend the several years to organize and negotiate a contract, the power of a union is diminished.
Less open office and more conference rooms.
Everything is political. Politics have been heavily intertwined with work forever. The history of unions is intertwined with literal government violence.
Negotiations for compensation is like the least life-impacting thing a union can do. Tech workers are well paid and capable of negotiating.
Things like work hours, quality of life, paid leaves, etc are important and can’t really be negotiated by the individual. Every labor victory from yesterday is the status quo but every future one is politics.
OK, but that doesn't answer the concern of the person you're responding to. They're just not going to join. It's a common objection!
Yes I suppose it doesn’t address the concern directly, and yes it’s common. I guess my point is that avoiding “politics” is a bad concern.
Why is compensation not included in “politics” when it’s very clearly a political topic? Because when people say “avoid politics” they usually mean it as a derogatory term for “all the disagreements that I dont personally care about” - and conveniently exclude the issues they care about from “politics”. Unions don’t work unless they get enough members, and getting enough support sometimes means supporting the “political issues” of other members. It’s a team, and everyone has to contribute… but of course everyone will be better off in the long run
I understand what you're saying and where you're coming from, but you can't persuasively respond to an objection by saying the person is wrong to have the objection. This is a real problem in modern tech organizing: you don't all share the same politics. People are just going to not sign up.
It's very much like the problem product marketers have when they come up with a grand vision for how their product is supposed to work and then assume customers are going to be super into it. They are not! They just want a thing that solves their problems! They don't want or need to help you achieve your vision. You have to make your vision work for them, persuasively.
I'm not saying the (broad) project is doomed --- though I think you have an uphill climb in this market --- but I do think you're going to have to address this problem to achieve critical mass.
> Because when people say “avoid politics” they usually mean it as a derogatory term for “all the disagreements that I dont personally care about” - and conveniently exclude the issues they care about from “politics”.
People use "politics" as shorthand for "things that are divisive issues that split your purported represented class". You're not going to get anyone to join your union if all you do is advocate for things that the vast majority of employees at best don't care about, or worse, disagree with.
The cool thing about a union is that you actually can have a say in what political battles they fight
You just can't do that if you only want to be a passive member
Not really my thing here since i'm belgian and we have multiple cross industry unions competeting. However from what i hear about american unions it starts to sounds like an argument for acting and arguing against a union if it leans against your politics and you don't have enough influence whilst also not doing enough towards your wage/work conditions.
I don’t want to waste time to fight battles within the union. This is exactly what I’m talking about. If it’s just a political nonprofit with forced donations, I’d rather see them banned than join one.
> I’d rather see them banned than join one.
The only group that will benefit from this position is that of the owners.
GP must be one of those temporarily not-owning owners.
The post is written like as if consumer coops is a radically new idea (spoiler: they're everywhere in Europe). Unfortunately they have long since succumbed to the same mechanisms as their competitors and have a tremendous power concentration in top leadership, with directors making ridiculous salaries. On paper though, e.g. Coop with a 25 % market share in Norway is owned and controlled by about 1 million of its customers.
Hah, so this. USSR had it formalized in form of PotrebCoop, literally consumer cooperative in 1921.
Consumer cooperatives go back to at least 1844
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Society_of_Equitable_...
You used to get a dividend from the profits based on your share of purchases from "the Store" back in the day where I'm from. That was a consumer coop driven by the demand of its members.
This sounds like a re-branding of a cryptocurrency/DAO scheme. It's too abstract for conventional consumers to understand and too game-able for serious participants to not be wary of. Who is this for?
Fix the title: coop -> co-op
The abbreviation for "cooperative" is always spelled with a hyphen.
Or coöp if you want to be fancy.
Interesting, but - it says it's a co-op, but this is a word with a legal definition. Every co-op I know publishes what it's legal entity is, how voting is done, etc. This just has "click to join". If your pitch is that you have more integrity than typical companies then you have to, you know, "walk the walk".
Also in some jurisdictions, calling yourself a co-op without actually being one will get you into legal difficulties. Companies that don't quite fulfil all the requirements are careful not to call themselves once. Igalia, for example, are very serious about being worker owned and run, but they made the choice to have a slightly different structure so they don't call themselves a co-op.
What’s the difference between a demand coop and a consumer coop, like REI? (Or are they the same?)
Mostly its what you get equity from. A consumer coop you may pay a one time fee for voting rights. A demand coop gives you equity everytime you shop or buy from a coop business that you coop either owns or gets benefits from.
In this case your demand coop might buy REI using the funds your contribute to its wealth fund, while REI you might only just be able to get items for cheap from being a member and the ability to vote on new products.
There seem to be a lot of enthusiasts of this kind of idea, and certainly there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here that is high performance?
Plus or minus tiny details, the description from the article:
covers a multitude. Eg: CBH from the 1930s onwards has pooled the spending power of grain farmers into building out farmer owned transportation networks (rail, ports, shipping, large scale silo storage) as communal assets and source of jobs for relatives and communities.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBH_Group
Dumbest idea i've ever seen. Complete misunderstanding of how the tech world works.
The idea is: if sufficient consumers banded together and coordinated their spending power, they can drive decisions in the executive suite of the companies.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It's neither the spending of consumer nor even the spending of business that drive decisions. The only thing that drives decisions at that level is capital allocation - not spending allocation. Wealth drives these decision - not spending.
So if all these tech workers want to band together and do something about it, they would create their own ETF or mutual fund, and put all their wealth into that fund and then have the manager of that fund direct that capital based on their mission.
Of course you will see that this won't work because there just isn't enough capital here to move the market compared to the other capital allocators who are just trying to maximize returns.
The idea is that one can drive the other. Because if you direct that capital without consumption the investment is worthless. You can do both. You can direct the consumption in exchange for part of that consumption you get equity in a wealth fund that funds product the coop will gain equity in if they use. I think one the obvious ones would be a replacement for github.
We build a replacement for github, the most you personally drive demand to the git replacement and for that demand you gain equity. And for that equity you get a larger say on how the fund is used and increased access to privileges
I'm not sure it's so black and white. Directing capital is powerful, and directing spending is powerful (but probably harder; this is marketing or government). I think it's more that directing spending requires influencing a lot more people than directing capital.
Also, if you are doing something other than maximising returns then you'll be outcompeted and irrelevant in the long run unless you attract many billions in inflows, or the government tips the scales in your favour e.g. ESG.
the part of the long run before you starve to death in an empty room with a large number on your bank account
There are actually really interesting tech intersections here, possibly. 8 years ago I published an article[1] that ended with some speculation about the possibility of automating organized consumer action to permit, for example, people to coordinate to force companies to drop abusive terms in contracts. The co-op model is in the same family.
Back in the day, my basic idea was basically this: the reason that consumer companies can impose unfair terms on people is because it's basically only a small amount of money to an individual, and it's costly for people to coordinate. For example, the expected cost to me of some company's arbitration clause is small, because the probability of any individual into a dispute with them is low. But in the aggregate it's bad: over a million customers (say) it's almost certain that one of those customers gets royally screwed by it. So: what if all those million customers of company X could all agree to automatically cancel their service contracts with X, if and only if enough other people also agree to do so that a simultaneous cancellation would cause real pain to the company's bottom line. And then enforce that agreement with automation. Some basic game theory suggests the objectionable clause immediately goes boom.
[1] https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 ... sorry for the academic journal paywall
This is just asking for the job to be hurriedly outsourced to where this is not a thing, if not eliminated altogether. It makes sense only for jobs that are tightly geographically constrained and are not subject to work visa imports.
Thats going to happen anyway but whats keep everyone from building replacement companies that arent just gonna optimize on price then buying from those vendors?