Marketplace just did a piece yesterday about how union membership has fallen to 1930's levels, and may fall further as younger professionals in growing industries have a perception of the union model as obsolete. I wonder if agreements and practices such as these, if escalated, would lead to a new union model? I can't shake the idea that there's little difference between the engineers of our grandfather's age and the engineers of today other than labor scarcity. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/labor-union-member...
We're a profession, the existing model to follow if we wanted to organize would be forming a professional body. The IEEE has been trying to fill that role, and we've largely (and for good reason) ignored it. To see why consider being regulated by the kind of people who call themselves "software engineers" and mean it.