You may have heard someone over the past few years talk about web developers like they're the new blue collar worker. There is some truth in that statement, seeing as it can take a salary from a job in the technology sector to live comfortably in America. There's at least one thing missing from this analogy. Blue collar workers have labor unions, we don’t.
The portrait of a blue collar worker
The economy in 50s America enabled a sole breadwinner in the family to provide enough to pay the bills, put food on the table and even take the family on a vacation. The uneven distribution of wealth today in America prevents blue collar workers from having the same level of freedom. This is not necessarily true of technology jobs, where the median salary for some positions can be well over $100,000 annually.
It's complicated for some people
There are some of us in the technology sector who still have a difficult time making ends meet when housing prices are high, employer provided insurance refuses to cover medical bills, student loans prohibit some of us from obtaining credit. Sometimes we are forced to trade salary for benefits and job security when converting from contract to full-time.
The recruiting situation could be way better
When web engineers are laid off they often have to rely on a disconnected network of recruiters to acquire a new job. The recruiters are often not very concerned about your well-being and solely interested in the money they make off the transaction of finding you a job. It sounds good on paper. The recruiter has an incentive to get you a higher salary. But often that can be at the expense of good benefits or even full-time status. The recruiter will also not be there for you when things go wrong. It's in their best interest for you to keep the job.
There isn't any incentive for corporations to change
There is hardly ever any accountability or incentive for the employer to change corporate culture. Maybe you are lucky enough to work in a decent environment with coworkers who also have a healthy work-life balance. That is not the case for so many people who work at corporations with a toxic environment. It is hard to change corporate culture. Sometimes it can take drastic measures like a work stoppage or a strike. But who is brave enough to orchestrate such an ordeal? It takes a lot of organization and energy to rally everyone behind the cause.
The lack of standardized testing and certification
We've all taken the unbearable tests. If someone came in and offered proper certifications, some of that could go away. When a candidate is certifiable they have already proven their expertise. Some of us have employers who will pay for continuing education, while others do not. It can be hard to stay relevant with the changing landscape of technology especially when someone is comfortable at a job. What if there was a highly visible organization that provided continuing education and industry-wide recognized certification for a reasonable fee?
The overwhelming amount of contract positions
Contract jobs are challenging for most. If you have to operate as a sole proprietorship now you have the added responsibility of maintaining a business mostly for tax purposes. You may also need to track down affordable insurance and other benefits if the company you contract with doesn't offer these perks or has really horrible options. You'll be day dreaming nine months in at your job, thinking wouldn't it be nice when vacation rolls around. But it won't, unless you figure out how to save and be able to take a hit from not getting paid while on vacay. What if someone had your back and made sure with every contract position you also got at least three weeks vacation?
The current process for salary negotiations results in inequality
The employer or recruiter will always justify it with your slightly higher salary than if you were hired full-time, but that's a bunch of baloney. There are people working full-time that make more than you do in your contract. Someone negotiated a better rate and received it. Then there's the problem where women are often paid less than men in the same position. Then there's the issue of locality. We allow corporations to pay someone in another country far less for the same job. We need an organization who can stop this inequality in its tracks and provide a fair and balanced approach.
It's hard to settle disputes when things go bad
Have you ever had a client stiff you for thousands of dollars and then claim you didn’t finish the work even though you did meet the requirements? It can be a struggle to get paid. The amount your former client owes you can be over the limit for small claims court and well below the amount that would make a lawyer interested in representing you. It can be even harder to bring a wrongful termination suit against a corporation. It also means you don’t have a reference from your last job. What if you had access to a resource that would provide legal representation in situations you are clearly owed money?
Someone needs to hold the corporations accountable
Why should we have put put up with clients not paying us for our services? Why should we have to depend on a disparate network of recruiters? Why do we put up with the state of job interviews in technology? How does meaningful change happen for women in tech when the government fails to mandate fair income laws?
It takes an organization of dedicated people to fix these kinds problems. This is where a labor union can help.
Labor unions use collective bargaining to secure better working conditions for its members. Being part of a labor union gives you negotiating power.
What are the benefits of being in a union?
- Collective bargaining
- Better working conditions
- Provides training for new skills
- Standardized wages
- Negotiating power for better benefits / pay
- Pension benefits
If people working in technology were to form a union, I'm sure they could overcome some of the bury
There has to be an incentive
There will be resistance to the idea of a labor union in technology at first. Change is difficult, especially for the conservatives who usually end up running major corporations. Greed is a powerful drug. There would have to be a huge incentive for corporations to abandon the status quo.
The labor union would have to provide a superior, well-educated and experienced workforce. The union would have to simply the process of finding and hiring talent for HR at corporations.
There are probably more incentives for corporations, but the point of a labor union would largely be to protect people working in tech. Labor unions won't solve all of our problems, however I believe a labor union could make life better for those of us working in technology.
What do you think?
Latest comments (66)
I've also been thinking about this lately! I'm not sure I think some of these goals (e.g. certification) would be best handled by a union, but I think there's a lot of room for collective bargaining over benefits and working conditions. There doesn't need to be a massive national union for you to band together with your coworkers and ask for a specific change.
I wrote a little recap piece on a recent action Wayfair employees took. This was in regards to a social issue, but I think the same type of process would work well for other types of requests. dev.to/vcarl/how-a-walkout-happens...
I appreciate the thoughtful remarks and dialogue this article has presented. I’ve pondered this thought for quite a while. Software engineering in essence seems to be a skilled trade. The main difference from a typical skilled trade like electrical, plumbing, carpentry, etc is that our trade changes monthly - sometimes even faster. While local building codes change from time to time (I don’t know anyone using knob & tube wiring anymore?), no other trade has the same high velocity of change. Every month there’s a new JS library or language feature that you MUST be using to remain relevant. Another major difference is the process to become a software engineer. All of the engineers I work with hold a minimum of a bachelor’s degree with most holding a master’s or higher. I work in advanced development at an automotive company. Unlike a typical trade track, there is no systematic bona fides apprenticeship program where one spends 3-5 year intervals at specific levels as they achieve higher rankings. Sure, we have Jr, mid level, and sr level engineers, but I believe most people would agree that the career path is one of the most obtuse of any profession. Generally, there’s so much flexibility with our careers that you could do front end, back end, dba, dev ops, full stack, data viz, data science... the list could go a lot longer. Early in our careers, we tend to bounce around to try out different roles and see what we want to do long term. Even then, it’s easy to switch to something new by picking up new skills. Another difference is the knowledge base between a tradesman and a developer. A developer could know C/++ and Java, but not a lick of anything else. That’s just scratching the surface of software engineering as it’s one of the most fields with the most verticals. You may only know 0.01% of the knowledge in the field as a software engineer. Where as the knowledge base of a skilled trade men is a lot higher - I’m talking like knowing 40-70% of everything there is to know about performing the trade. While it may seem similar at a glance, when you take a deep dive, we find that these differences make the discipline of software engineering unlike these typical blue collar jobs.
With that being said, I currently live and grew up in an automotive industrial town in the mid-west. The company made automotive electronics for vehicles and was 100% UAW in its manufacturing facility. During the peak in the 80s, my town produced the most ICs of any city in the world during a 5 year stretch. At the time, there were 8K engineers alone employed. I’m not sure how many hourly workers off the top of my head, but definitely in the tens of thousands. Today, the manufacturing buildings that produced all those components sits empty. There’s only 850 engineers left with 0 UAW employees. When the price of labor is too expensive, a business can always find a cheaper place to obtain labor. Ultimately what broke the labor unions in my town was the globalized society that exploded in the late 90s. Certainly the trade deals like NAFTA signed by President Clinton didn’t help either. Not to add additional stories of how the union’s abused their power of arbitration by protecting employees from termination even when the employee deserved to be rightly fired.
If we can apply the same logic to the technology sector, I think we would end up in a similar boat. Ultimately, what controls the market is supply and demand. We work in a sector with low supply of educated workers currently, which is why we have such high salaries. However, as more people learn to program (eg future generations learning to program in high school, etc) the skill set will become more of a commodity. That'll drive down the labor cost and these high-paying tech-centric jobs will become a run-of-the-mill middle class jobs without a college education required. It’s already transitioning that direction. With that being said, the barriers to entry as an engineer become significantly reduced which allows foreign workers to take the American technology sector’s jobs. The company will operate in the best interests of the share holders and will find lower cost labor elsewhere. If a labor union gets formed, it will just accelerate lowering the barriers to entry even faster to get more skilled individuals into the job market quicker. Thus, I think forming a labor union could be one of the most detrimental avenues going forward. The system is broken, yes. But creating a new system with all this promise will just net you the same results because humanity is broken. Greed and corruption exists in everyone, including unions.
The solution to inequality isn’t more bureaucracy - the solution is for individuals who share your view of the world to get into management positions within the technology sector to change your companies policies and practices. Diversity is an asset. Ultimately, what causes the demise of most companies is a mindset where going against the grain becomes unacceptable. Group think ensues. Due to the lack of diversity of thought, no one challenges the status quo. However engaging in diversity, in true capitalistic fashion, the company will accelerate faster than their competitors thus forcing their competitors to follow similar recruiting practices. The solution is to be better than the rest: Being redemptive.
Strongly agree that there has to be some kind of standardised certificare a developer needs to pass before working on products which has effects on other people. Not only tech-basics, but also ethics need to play a large role in this. Especially nowadays, when software has more influence on our daily lives than ever.
A bit off topic: I really don't like the use of "blue-collar" in the context of software-engineering. I find it a bit derogatory to all the workers who work long and hard fixing, carrying, driving, building society.
But "white-collar" also doesn't quite hit it. I'd say we use "Gold-Collar" from now on.
I don’t think we deserve any special treatment. How don’t people in technology “work long and hard fixing, carrying, driving, and building society” when their peers work for corporations that have changed how we think about transportation, currency or even housing? We are the new blue collar in many ways.
Im not 100% sure why you are assuming a union made for us would have to be 100% like every union that came before it? We work in an industry that encourages disruption, so let's disrupt the model and make it less corruptible.
I'm not about to get into a debate about taxes and such.
There are a million things to do in a business and treating your employees right should be a top priority, no matter what stage of the business you are in. Just one more thing isn't going to break everything. Change happens and businesses need to be flexible enough to adapt to change. If some business isn't making enough profit and has to tack on debt just to pay employees then maybe you're right it shouldn't be in business.
Having been stiffed by a small business for a large amount as an independent contractor, I have no remorse for the full weight of the law being brought down on that small business. But we live in an environment where you can't gain legal representation because the sum is not attractive enough for a lawyer. In America even hard workers who meet all agreed upon requirements for a project can just not get paid for their services and then have to hear the argument "you didn't finish the project". That's supposed to be OK because it was a small business?
That’s a myth. I hear this same argument from small business owners in regards to making the minimum wage in America $15/hr.
I've long thought having a trade union would be helpful for web developers.
Web dev is more of a trade than a profession - we build stuff, we lack any sort of definitive professional body the way accountants have, and I have personally known people who entered the industry via apprenticeships, so to say it's not a trade is wrong.
We also have certain structural problems in the industry. The demographic is predominantly young and male, which comes with its own set of problems:
This is all stuff unions can help with.
In addition, I believe in trade unions as a (usual) force for good. I'm in the UK and normally vote for the Labour party, who grew out of the trade union movement. I'd like my industry to have more role in shaping government policy, and having a trade union for us that would be affiliated with the Labour party would be one way to achieve that next time Labour are in power.
Most of the testing and certifications I've seen have very little to do with your ability as a developer, rather just focusing a tiny piece of non-related code.
And the types of developers vary quite a lot too. ie. the difference between a deeply focused google back-end engineer vs a broad spectrum small business solutions builder. How do you compare the two??
The coding/programming teachers (academics) I've met don't code or build for a living, hardly the type to be the judge of your ability in your field.
So this will be difficult, especially on a global scale, but I actually like the idea, because I've grown terribly allergic to coding tests!
It REALLY depends on how the test is administered. I don’t know how many times I’ve had other engineers looking over my shoulder while I’m taking the test. Enough times to crack the joke “What you don’t know the answer?” But seriously for a moment, I’ve seen brilliant people freeze the moment they feel people have the opportunity to be judgemental and the person who is giving the test has no idea how to communicate effectively so it results in just an unpleasant experience for everyone.
haha, yes. I think those timed online ones are the worst.
The last one I had (sitting at home) just started, then a notification came through about a webinar with Peter Diamandis starting that I had registered for but forgot about. Absolute panic, trying to listen to him talk about solving worldwide problems whilst trying to remember to put 15 return statements in a javascript function!! uuughh
In the previous companies I've been involved with, new recruits would just be thrown into a small parts of the actual work and they would be free to get into the code at their own time. Absolute beginners (fresh out of college etc.) would be brought up to speed over the course of a few weeks to learn the stack etc.
i feel conflicted about this article, while a part of me daydreams about being a labor leader for CSS workers in sub saharan Africa, ensuring everyone in my group is treated fairly with fantastic wages and insurance. the reality is, technological innovation is too radical compared to the industrialization age that birthed unions. plus corporations are way more powerful and smarter.
if you believe in company culture, then you believe in company-moderated labor unions. i dont see much of a difference either way. mind you this is just my opinion.
I guess it depends where you live/work. In my region, we're pretty well protected by "les normes du travail". There's still unions in some industries, but most of them are just corrupt thugs not looking out for the union members. As for certifications, I guess we have some, but not that much, for example, you can't be an engineer without a degree and a license. Also, it kinda grinds my gears when people say that web development is a blue collar job. A blue collar job is manual work, web development is the furthest thing from blue collar work, it's insulting to blue collar workers. Great article nonetheless.