The whole concept of labor organising is anathema to many IT professionals. In an industry with a decidedly Libertarian bent, the idea of joining a union strikes many as quaint. For a recent computer science grad with his or her pick of job offers near the six-figure mark, where's the urgency about an issue such as job security? If for some reason such a candidate loses his or her current job, many think, there's plenty more where that came from.
But if the dot-com economy continues to cool down, some labor experts predict the old-fashioned labor union might become intriguing to some of the same people in the high-tech industry who used to spurn the idea. IT workers watching the issue, however, say it would most likely take a catastrophic change in the U.S. economic landscape to make this happen, simply because IT workers are content with the status quo.
Harry Kelber, an 86-year-old labor historian and editor of The Labor Educator magazine, writes a weekly column for that magazine's Web site. Lately, the focus of many of Kelber's columns has been his prediction that high-tech -- and IT workers in particular -- just might be the next wave in labor organising. The increasing reliance on foreign workers imported via the H1-B program is likely to be the impetus for this, Kelber said.
"H1Bs are simply high-class indentured servants," Kelber said. If American-born programmers, database administrators and other IT workers see their companies hiring increasing numbers of such workers, they might well ask what the impact is on them -- and whether their jobs are really secure, he added.
Kelber urged American-born IT workers to keep a close eye on their employers' H1-B policies -- and to speak up if they feel either themselves or the foreign workers are being taken advantage of. "It's hard to predict what might happen over the next couple of years," Kelber said. "I don't see many parallels between the high-tech labor force of today and the workforce in decades past. Back then you had a largely stable workforce tied to fac-tories. Labor organising was tied to physical location. People stayed in the same job for 30 years. You just don't have that today."
But John Miano, a member of the board of directors of The Programmers' Guild, an association formed "for the mutual aid and assistance" of programmers, is a lot more skeptical. Even though his organization sponsors a petition for abolishing the H1-B program, Miano says that even this political issue isn't likely to spur many programmers to unionise. "The unions themselves are out of step with programmer thought," Miano said. "In fact, I don't think anyone who has joined the Programmers' Guild has men-tioned a political affiliation other than 'Libertarian.' Every programmer thinks he or she can survive on their own."
