True, but that’s why you do a trade union instead of a company union. And programmers have a lot to gain. These companies, shareholders, and CEOs rake in billions that could be going to employees.

A programmer will make a feature that saves the company a million dollars and they’ll get paid $100,000 to build it.

I don’t buy it. This isn’t the only mechanism, probably not even the most important one, for why salaries are where they are. Shortage of and especially of highly competent programmers is. In fact this actually underpins why jumping ship is even as easy as it is. Uninionization will provide additional leverage, while not diminishing the shortage pressure. Part of the point is that this leverage can substitute the leverage we have due to the current shortage, if and when it diminishes.

The reason why the can get paid as much as they want is 100% based on you being able to jump ship form company to company without having to wait for a company to find common ground between you and them through a union.

How strange, were I live there are Unions but when I jump ship I get paid what I want, without waiting for the Union, what do you think a Union is for ?

The real power of a Union is to let workers to negotiate for a minimum wage level (for example, I cannot be employed for less than a certain wage because it would be illegal to do so) that are reasonable and some basic rights the workers have (for example, no at will employment, a minimum PTO days which are enforced and thing like this).

True, this has some consequences, mainly companies try to go for the legal minimum, but I would say that it is positive overall

Nothing incompatible about libertarianism and unions. It’s a free market construct, a free association of people formed to put a check on the power of wealth. With a long history of acting as a check on one of the forces that seek to destabilize a free market in favor of state control, one might add (corps love to team up with the state to gain power).

Though, caveat, libertarians might have a word against unions of state employees due to the mechanics of unions bartering against politicians who only stand to lose someone else’s funds (the public), through state mechanisms which libertarians may oppose. Obviously this is more problematic with police unions than teacher’s unions.

Of course, there’s the FOX News “libertarians” who aren’t thinking any of this through and are just rehashing whatever FOX News is slinging. Basically indistinguishable from year 2000 “conservatives” plus all the culture war and 4chan talking points of the last 20 years. (edit: They would most likely be anti-union across the board, of course).

Yeah it blows