Except sometimes skilled workers with the same knowledge sets that used to bring them workplace power become more interchangeable and powerless, even though their knowledge and skills are still needed.
Case in point: radiologists, who still possess a lot of specialized, expensive and highly necessary skills, but who are now seeing more competition from long-distance outsourcing.
So no, I’m not really buying it that it’s your enhanced “knowledge set” that makes you valuable to an employer as a “knowledge worker”: it’s the comparative difficulty of access that your employer has to similarly skilled knowledge workers. The most knowledgeable workers with the most complex skills can become “interchangeable cogs” as long as employers have ready long-range access to them.
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Skilled workers therefore already have more power in the workplace. They are thus less in need of unions - they can get more of what they want because the cost of replacing them is higher than an unskilled worker.
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I think this is becoming more and more wishful thinking. Remotely employed consultants and contractors on software development projects, for example, are becoming easier and easier to hire, downsize and replace via electronic paperwork. In some cases it’s actually more work to do face-to-face interviews when seeking a reliable part-time janitor who needs to physically be at the site to do their work.
Maybe not a radiologist, but if you reread my post more carefully, you’ll note that at that point I was talking about programming consultants on software development projects. Yes, I’ve seen workers in that category replaced in less time than it takes to advertise and interview for a flesh-and-blood/bricks-and-mortar custodial employee.
I think once you reach the career level of a consultant, you are in a whole different environment compared to entry-level and mid-level developers. The global IT industry makes competition fierce and developers a commodity. Those are the workers who could use collective representation.
Sounds like you’re trying to argue from your own personal experience to imply that this could never be the case for any programming consultant, which isn’t very convincing.
Sounds like you are trying to argue that it is always the case for all programming consultants, janitors, and radiologists, which isn’t convincing because it is pretty obviously wrong.
:dubious: Except that I quite clearly used the qualifiers “sometimes” and “in some cases”. If you choose to interpret that as meaning “always” and “all”, that’s on your peculiar approach to reading comprehension, not on what I actually wrote.
The difference is that any janitor can probably do any other janitor’s job with about the same level of quality. That is to say, a janitor typically does not bring specific training or subject matter expertise to servicing a particular building.
For programmers, the more complex the system they are working on and the longer they work on it, the more specific knowledge they tend to retain regarding the architecture, processes and other specific nuances related to that system. Yes, ideally a system should be architected and documented well enough that any reasonably competent developer can come in and take over. But in my experience, that almost never happens IRL.
Even when I’m managing outsourcing projects, the developers aren’t anonymous cogs in India or Poland or wherever. They may bill at lower rates, but I’m still dealing with individual people who ultimately must become experts in the system they are building.
Point is, if the janitor quits tomorrow, I can probably find someone else who can empty the trash and clean the toilets easily enough. It’s a lot harder to find a lead developer or UI expert.
That’s why I don’t think unions are particularly beneficial to knowledge workers. Unions benefit more commodity type jobs where there is little difference between individual workers. It enables them to collectively bargain as a group because individually, they have little power. Knowledge workers typically have a lot of individual power based on their level of knowledge. So why would a highly skilled programmer want to be constrained by a union when they could potentially negotiate a better deal themselves?
Again, we’re back to the unresolved question of what exactly is meant by a “knowledge worker”.
Nobody denies that comparatively rare highly trained experts with hard-to-duplicate long experience of the specialized requirements of their particular projects have individual bargaining power. But it’s not very plausible to suggest that the same kind of advantage is possessed by, e.g., entry-level game developers employed by temp agencies.
How are you going to define “knowledge worker” (which AFAICT typically is used for professions including “software developer” and “academic”) so that it includes the hard-to-find high-priced specialist experts, but excludes the entry-level programmers and adjunct faculty who are massively overworked and underpaid because they’re expendable and easily replaced?
Because AFAICT, that kind of restrictive definition is the only way that you can plausibly make the case that knowledge workers don’t need unions because they’ve got plenty of individual bargaining power on their own.