It's bizarre that people working in an industry that claims to be all about innovation and disruption immediately assume that unions cannot innovate from their Industrial Era forebears.
And the actual, real life results for most unions today... is not great. I am not even talking about industrial era stuff. I am talking about existing examples of unions.
If this innovation and disruption of the union industry was so easy, then someone would be doing it. But they aren't.
And I have no reason to believe that techies would be any better at solving the inherent problems of unions, better than all the other people who have tried. IMO, it would inevitable run into exact the same problems as the ones you see today in existing unions.
How else should we judge things, than based on their results?
How can there be any results if so few have tried reviving unions, in recent years? That’s like writing off electric cars in 2003 or virtual reality in 2011. There’s always a Musk or Luckey working behind the corner. People just have to try.
With virtual reality and electric cars, there has been a slow but steady increase in technology and quality for these products, that has been noticable at all times.
IE, the existing electric cars in 2004, were better than the electric cars made in 2003. And the same for 2005 cars, compared to 2004 cars.
This happened, until eventually they became good enough that people started using them, but there was still noticable progress along the way.
The same is not true for unions.
The unions in 2000, were not noticably better than the unions in 1990. There is no steady and obvious progress, or linear regression that can be extrapolated into the future.
IE, for these other technologies, they were clearly getting better by X% every year, using a measureable, objective metric. Battery life, or screen resolution or whatever.
You do not see an x% increase in an obvious objective metric for unions.
By what objective metric were taxis improving by prior to the technology that enabled ridesharing? Sounds like the intersection of workers' rights and high-tech is awaiting the Kalanick of unions.
The two can go together. The gig economy, social media, crowdsourcing, open source are just some examples of social and technological innovation happening together. No one’s just bothered to apply it to unionization, yet.
