Overall, IT people have it pretty good. I know I ve always felt like I have. Wiley and his CIO colleagues are perplexed by the news media s obsessive attention to the topic of labor unions. Though headlines from The New York Times, Computerworld and The Industry Standard, among others, read as though unions will soon infiltrate your office, poison your workers with propaganda and bring your IT department to a standstill with a strike, the organizing efforts that have erupted in IT are unlikely to pose an immediate, if any, threat to CIOs. Nevertheless, IT executives should not dismiss the groundswell of interest as media hype or a passing fad especially if they are concerned about their staffs' productivity and well-being.
Common themes run through the tiny web of unionization efforts, and they're worth listening to.
In fact, the high-tech unions that are forming look less like the locals in a mob movie and more like a professional guild interested in promoting its craft. As CIOs struggle to attract, recruit, retain and reward top IT workers, they might find that unions and their contracts actually provide them with extra might in the fight against stodgy corporate policies to obtain additional training and benefits for their staffs. CIOs might even learn that, contrary to popular belief, unions actually boost productivity. Researchers at Tufts University and the New York Federal Reserve found that unionized enterprises tended to adopt formal quality programs and that reported productivity levels rose 16 percent in such organizations. Whether you want it to happen or not, it can happen.