>The railway strikes in Germany from beginning of this year prove
That's because national railway and other such national critical infrastructure workers like policemen, teachers, healthcare workers, etc have actual leverage. Like what are you gonna do then? You can't outsource your infrastructure maintenance, healthcare or policing to remote offshore Asian workers, but you can for other non-credentialed internet connected professions in the private sectors where the language is Englisch, which correlates to their unions being very weak in negotiation power, like IT workers for example.
The recent tanking of IT/tech jobs in some high-CoL countries has made IT workers there realized that without the low interest rates to artificially inflate the market demand, they have virtually no leverage over their employers unlike those in credentialed professions with unions.
> but you can for other internet connected professions in the private sectors
You can certainly try, but the quality will be noticeably poorer. You can get away with that for a while, especially as a big business, but I think the tide is already turning there. Everyone's tired of broken shitty tech that doesn't work properly with no one to really contact about it. Skilled IT professionals are in huge demand nowadays, it's only the fleas on the rats complaining that the ship is sinking. Rats can swim, they'll be fine as long as land isn't too far. Mechanics and firefighters that can actually keep the ship going (if you pay us well enough), are on the other hand doing quite well these days. Unions are great, especially for tech professionals. As long as you're still allowed to negotiate personally as well, there's no reason not to.
>You can certainly try, but the quality will be noticeably poorer.
I know HN loves repeating this outdated trope to feel good, but that's not always the case and not in many I saw where they offshored and product quality didn't drop because they made sure to hire qualified people and managers, and not bottom of the barrel on the cheap.
Sure, you won't find many rockstar workers abroad, but most companies don't need that many rockstar engineers especially for CRUD work which is a commodity now, and plenty of countries have upskilled their workforce in the last 20 years especially in web CRUD, that they can take on the maintenance of stable products on the cheap.
>Everyone's tired of broken shitty tech that doesn't work properly with no one to really contact about it.
You mean like the one Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, etc. build in he US and not by offshore workers?
>Unions are great, especially for tech professionals. As long as you're still allowed to negotiate personally as well, there's no reason not to.
That's not how unions work in France and Germany. The unions set strick salary bands so that a newcomer can't earn more than someone who's been longer in the company so your negotiation doesn't get you anything, you let your union negociate for you.
> product quality didn't drop because they made sure to hire qualified people and managers, and not bottom of the barrel on the cheap.
So they didn't save much money, they just chose not to pay their domestic talent. Much better.
>Sure, you won't find many rockstar workers abroad, but most companies don't need that many rockstar engineers especially for CRUD work which is a commodity now,
Sure, we're mostly in tech and tech is one of the "easier" factors to outsource. I think your underrating how much even Crud work needs, but that's besides my main point.
You can't outsource everything. If you need people in a physical store, or on a physical setting in a building or in government land, you'll need to negotiate with your labor or shut down the project. I guess you can immigrate aliens who you can pay under minunum wage with the promise of citizenship, but that's clearly beyond the gray area at this point.
>You mean like the one Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, etc. build in he US and not by offshore workers?
In the grand scheme of things, most of my CS nightmares came from financial issues, not technical. And yes, they want to make that experience painful.
Sure, Crowdstrike happens but domestic labor means it's mostly fixed (and actually fixed) in a weekend instead of a week with precarious results.