Happy to answer questions about how it all works - there are only about ~6000 dev/product/design/qa employees in the U.S., so there is very little first hand experience to go around.

Among other things that my coworkers and I secured by bargaining collectively are:

- Guaranteed remote work.

- Guaranteed forty hour work week, with compensatory time within two weeks if management asks us to work overtime.

- Not on call 24/7/365. Everyone is in a defined rotation, and you are guaranteed three hours off just for being on call for a week, and a whole day if you receive a call. I believe that partly because of this policy, after hours incidents are extremely infrequent now.

- Guaranteed floor on wage increases every year.

- Just cause for discipline. People still get terminated if they don't do the work, but if you want it (and almost everyone does) there is an elected coworker in your corner to guide you through a PIP and make sure standards are enforced evenly. You can't suddenly be terminated for no reason. - Extra time off each year through self-directed times between sprints and quarterly increments.

- Right to review all code done by outside contractors if you're going to have to maintain it in the future.

The problem is that the people that DO want them, want to force it on those that don't, usually by labor law.

Yet, ~50% of Americans voted for the party that is diametrically opposed to them; a paradox.

That said, with only about ~10% of Americans being employed in a union role, it's more like the grass is greener on the other side than an actual understanding of the pros and cons of union membership.

Collective bargaining vis-a-vis unionization allows workers to more effectively push back against bullshit like RTO mandates and mass layoffs. They help reign in the massive pay packages to executives who directly benefit from laying folks off. And there's a reason why companies monitor internal communications and engage in retaliatory actions against employees for even discussing organizing. Yes, that's technically illegal under US labor law. But corporations do not care and will accept the risk of a non-guaranteed fine to make an example and enforce a chilling effect for other workers.

The fact that unions aren't a perfect solution to the overwhelming might of capitalist interests at each and every workplace does not mean that unions are bad, worthless, or not on the side of the individual worker. They are designed to make the tilt of power more equitable.