alt Hacker NewsProfessional athletes and pilots have unions. They both make considerably more than your average programmer, even in FAANG and even with equity.
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Simply because it's not that easy to offshore them to India.
These "unions" in high paying fields behave more like guilds or cartels than worker's unions - they generally restrict supply. Athletes and Hollywood unions are sort of special cases too, IMHO. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that top earners in those fields earn so much because of their unions - they benefit from natural supply restriction of outliers.
For unions to be as effective in tech as for say pilots or doctors, you'd have to agree on a way to restrict supply (H1B restrictions, more licensing and credentialling etc) to give the union leverage. You have to control the supply taps and rate limit entry to the field.
I think it's hard to say if this would net out better for workers than the current arrangements, which are already the best in the world on nearly every metric.
It also seems like there's a timing issue - if tech workers DID successfully unionise enough to withhold a meaningful fraction of labour, the gains might ultimately end up in the market cap of AI companies via substitution.
This leverage all has to do with the product, how close you are to it and how valuable it is. FAANG product is valuable, but the programmers are still just creating it and usually a small part of it at that. Pilots are the product when the product is "get plane to destination" they are the 1 or 2 people providing that product (ok service). Athletes are the product of sports. It's very valuable and there's only a dozen or so of them to deliver.
Now, using the leverage is the difficulty to unionize. Athletes are a tiny group, pretty easy to organize. Pilots are a small group, also pretty easy to unionize. The fact they have to be licensed means there is a record for all the people needed pull in. Software engineers seem to be 5x-20x larger population than commercial pilots (quick/rough searches). They have no certification or registry organization and have no common affiliations. It's incredibly difficult to organize this group. There's also no regulatory capture requiring developers to be US citizens so, if you did unionize and tried to negotiate too hard the industry would just move away from the US so there's just not a lot of leverage this profession has.