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.
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.