I once used the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement (union contract) as a model for a hypothetical software engineering union at Apple. Pro athletes are a great example of white collar organized labor.
If Apple devs had the same revenue sharing agreement the NBA players do and received a similar share of Apple’s revenue, the median pay would be around $600k. That’s just the median, think about that.
Just because engineers are well-compensated compared to the rest of the economy doesn’t mean that we can’t benefit from organized labor.
I like the structure of that thought experiment, but if anything I’m surprised that the median Apple engineer (pay around $200k?) has within a small integer multiple of the leverage of NBA stars.
I’d expect the latter to be much harder to replace than that.
