It is one of the oddities of the US that we celebrate the labor movement on the first Monday in September when most of the rest of the world celebrates it on May first… and all the more so because the May first date, for labor at least, commemorates a general strike here in the US to push for an eight hour work day.

Though, to be honest, I am surprised that here in the land of capitalist excess we’re allowed to have a Labor Day holiday at all, be it in May or September.

In the US where billionaires openly buy elections, buy the media outlets that shape public opinion, buy supreme court justices, and spend their idle hours spending money on rocket programs that are barely disguised expressions of their manhood to rub in our faces, the idea of a day set aside to honor the workers they so despise for daring to want anything for the privileged of serving them seems positively quaint.  We’re in a new gilded age and the powers of wealth are being moved to impoverish the masses because it has been made clear being a billionaire isn’t sufficient, you must also make others suffer to really feel the power of your wealth.

The irony is that many of these billionaires claim fondness for the 50s in a barely coded white nationalist clarion call, conveniently forgetting that the 50s were not just a time of prosperity in the US, but also a time of strong unions, lots of regulations on companies, high wages, and heavy taxes on the rich.

I mean, I would advocate for that too… just without the segregation and racism and lynchings and McCarthyism and all of that.

What do I, a product of Silicon Valley, know about unions?

Actually, I do have some first hand experience with unions.  But I have also been on the “we don’t need a union” side of the fence as well.  My grandfather was a small business owner and pretty conservative, and my father and uncle went to work for him and eventually took over the business, so they too inherited that outlook and continue to this day, long after having sold off the business and retired (no room for a third generation there), remain rabid Fox news fans with all that goes with it.

So my foundation was that unions were bad and corrupt, something that we illustrated by my time working at Safeway, then a union chain here in the valley.  All the grocery stores were, even the independent ones over a certain size.  The power of the union back in the 50s and 60s was able to lock that down.

But by the time I landed on the scene, the union was in serious decline.  In hindsight, in the late 70s to mid 80s, being a grocery clerk was a decent job.  You were never going to be rich, or even be a one income household if you wanted to buy a house and have a family, but there were lots of people who did buy houses in the valley… out in the periphery, in the cheap end of town to be sure, but it was seriously a thing.

We also had astonishingly good health care coverage.  I had a Kaiser card, did not have to contribute to the cost, had no co-pay… it was a shame I was young and healthy and didn’t need it.

But as with so much of my youth, I was there just in time for things to fall apart.  The current contract had already sold out new employees, creating a two tier wage system to protect more senior employees and created new, lower paid category of employee who couldn’t do all the things the food clerks could… no running the cash register or doing inventory control… but could stock shelves for specific categories.

The next one hit hard as well.  Stores were only closed four days a year, New Years Day, Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Labor Day, with the latter being the day for the annual union member picnic event.  That all went out the window.  The union told us that we would be open those days, but that it would be a voluntary assignment with holiday pay.  They failed to mention that if there were not enough volunteers that the store could just tell you to work… it was there in the contract… so it essentially because another day and the boss could put anybody they wanted on the schedule.

Then Safeway was bought in a leveraged buyout by KKR in the sort of Gordon Gecko style of deal that meant stripping the company of assets to sell off and eventually selling the company to a competitor.  Meanwhile other chains were consolidating, giving them more power, and WalMart started showing up on the scene and offering grocery services… and nobody hates unions or their employees like the grasping Walton family for whom billions in riches are never enough.  (Seriously, unless you work at WalMart HQ, the company despises you and isn’t shy about letting you know.)

But I didn’t dwell on that because I went off to high tech, where the demand for skill, semi-skilled, or even enthusiastic fans was practically bottomless.  They had to pay us well because we could… and often did… just move to another company if wanted a pay raise.  You were strange if you stayed at one company for more than a couple of years, unless you were at some company like Apple where the pay and benefits were at the top of the heap.

Sure, we worked long hours.  Crunch time isn’t just a video game development thing.  I spent a lot of nights and weekends getting things together to meet arbitrary deadlines.  And the execs knew they couldn’t push people too far unless they expanded the pool of talent.  HP, as an example, funded a huge expansion to the computer science program at my alma mater, San Jose State, which is where a lot of the devs in the valley come from.

That, however, was not enough and as the dotcom bubble was reaching its peak, a lot of new grads were showing up asking for hubristic starting salaries.  I remember working the booth at an month recruiting event called Brass Ring and the mood being very much that the applicants held the upper hand and could demand more than they were likely worth.

That was not a sustainable situation, and Silicon Valley went looking for a cheat code.

The first was to offshore development, to have engineering in places with much lower pay scales do the work.  And this has been successful for many companies… but was an abject failure for many more because, in the typical Silicon Valley way, nobody wanted to invest in these overseas groups, they just wanted to buy code like they were ordering a sandwich, and not give a shit about the people doing the work.

It turns out that, effective off shore development projects require investment and a strong partnership with your remote teams.

When that wasn’t a simple “I win” button, they found the next cheat code, the one currently in favor, which is the H1-B visa, which allows a company to sponsor an employee in a position for which they cannot find suitable local talent.  The sponsored employee is stuck with the company… you can change employers, but it is difficult… at a discount rate of pay.  It isn’t quite indentured servitude, but you have to look close to tell the difference.

I will say right here that my brothers and sisters in tech who came here on those visas are welcome in my book.  The country has reaped the benefits of their talent.

But the companies had to prove they needed those H1-B visa employees, that they could not find suitable local talent.  So the started to manipulate the situation.  One tactic, favored by IBM, was to transfer currently staffed jobs to a remote location, far from the current office.  You won’t move?  You’re fired!

Meanwhile, it turns out that there isn’t a ready and waiting cadre of devs looking for jobs at a facility outside of Ames, Iowa.  So IBM goes to the government and pleads that they can’t find staff and please could they have a couple hundred more H1-B visa slots?  They are always granted them, it doesn’t matter who is in office, big business always wins, and then they hire them and put them back in the original office because it turns out they didn’t have space for them on that campus outside of Ames.

The other tactic, favored by many companies, is just to have HR write impossibly steep skill requirements relative to the pay rate, reject all local applicants because none of them will meet every single item on the list, then go ask for more visa slots.

This one happens all of the time.  HR knows how to get around regulations around hiring practices and does it every day of the week.  So, for example, the last time I was laid off, my position was eliminated, all the justification needed, but another position doing my exact same job was created, only it required a masters degree in computer science.  No job for me.  So it went to somebody on an H1-B visa.  A good person and a find for the company, but paid less and unable to find another job easily.

That is the way it goes.

Which brings us to now, when I am once again in a union.  State workers are represented by various unions, but we’re almost all in some represented bargaining unit.  My union, which is somewhat weak, has all the union problems I am familiar with.  They have been undermined by laws allowing people to decline to be part of the union, even though they get all the benefits.  But they have also fallen prey to what happens with any organization after a certain time, an obsession with preserving themselves becoming the highest priority.

So they spend a lot of time selling their value to the members and often feel like the only way they can show that is by having an extremely adversarial position relative to the state, which is not always helpful or good for their members.  And, like my old union at Safeway, they lie by omission.  Our current contract had a 3% pay raise in it for the current fiscal year, which the governor wanted to take back… and which he can do with a simple vote in the legislature… due to the current budget crisis. (The state is in a budget crisis three out of every four years… and the fourth year is largess which makes them expand programs, which leads to the next crisis… our representatives at work!)

After some negotiation, the union came back and said they saved the 3% raise and got the state to back off on its return to office initiative.  Well, in knew the RTO thing was a bust because the state let go of so many leases during Covid there was no place for all of us to sit.  So hardly union magic.  Meanwhile, the 3% raise was not, in fact, saved.  Instead we got some special vacation time for this fiscal year.  Fine, I don’t mind a little more time off, but don’t tell me I got a raise then, in the fine print, say that the raise would not be coming in the form of actual money.

So it goes.  Still, a 3% raise, even in vacation time, beats a lot of what we were seeing here in the valley over the last decade, where 3% is in the realm of a special high achievers rate and a lot of people were seeing 1% raises if any.  And as companies drink the poisoned AI Kool-aid, that is only going to get worse.

The union doesn’t make me happy, but I still let them take some money out of every paycheck.  They are working against the VCs and billionaires.  I get junk mail every month from a billionaire backed union-busting political action committee that has a tear off post card that I need only sign and put in the mail to withdraw from the union.  These cards often point out things I could do with that money, like buy the kids an XBox.  I’d rather send money to the union that let those awful people win.

Unions are an imperfect tool, and one without much power these days, having been constantly undermined by regulation for the last 50 years.  My old union has consolidated enough that the old Local 428 down on Market Street in San Jose that represented just Santa Clara County was part of a consolidation such that it is now UFCW Local 5, which represents all of Northern California.

Jobs at Safeway are still union jobs.  But while I was making $13.78 an hour in 1985 as a journeyman food clerk, a position obtained after 2,080 hours of work through three levels of apprenticeship, the equivalent position in 2025 makes $23.48 an hour after 7,800 hours rising through nine levels of apprenticeship.  Compare that to the price of housing in the valley over the same 40 year period.

A reckoning will come some day.  It always has in the past.  It will take some time.  Probably more time than I have left.  And it will be accompanied by violence as the billionaires will use their bought and paid for government to crack down on anything that would keep their own personal wealth line from going up.  But it will come.