why are you not in a labor union...?

[Egalitarian Thug]

64. My apologies. You've certainly seen what happened to our profession. The Clintons wiped out

more than half of an entire generation of IT professionals in the 90s creating and appeasing the billionaires. And every one of those workers was providing for a family, paying a lot of tax dollars, churning the economy, and raising the standard of living across the board. Kids saw their parent's lives wiped out overnight, and now we are wondering why too few are interested in pursuing post-secondary education in technical fields? Why should they when the social contract has never existed in their experience?

They used the excuse of a temporary worker shortage and rising wages to open the floodgates of low-wage foreign workers and turned a blind eye to blatant criminality on the part of the industry. You might remember the lawsuits regarding M$, Oracle, and other's abuse of temporary workers that did the work for them, for over a decade in some cases, but were forever "temporary". Robert Reich's DOL simply refused to enforce existing (already inadequate) law until forced by the courts and even then the corporations were never forced to hire them, they simply made a work-around and continued on.

Anyway, there were a few of us (I was based in LA, but worked all over the country) that tried to bring our fellow IT pros over to the idea of organizing in order to prevent exactly what was starting and eventually happened. And almost without exception we were met with the arguments you wrote. I'm making a good salary, my company is taking good care of me, why should I pay to get what I've already got, I'm so good that that will never happen to me, etc. And most important of all, IMO, the very nature of the industry is that we are all always working ourselves out of a job. Once the system is developed most of the staff becomes redundant.

By 1999 there were 150,000+ H-1(b) workers coming in and demolishing wages in every area of the field. You know the names, Infosys, Wipro, Tata, etc. The positions I had then, today pay about a third of what I made and the skill level has fallen through the floor. "That's good enough" should be motto of American tech today.