> There is already work happening to unionize some of the biggest tech companies, I think it's actually going to happen because it's a huge win/win for both the employees and employers. Employees get fair equity agreements and the right to own their side projects, and employers get a reduced cost of hiring because unions can take on part of the burden of vetting candidates and making sure they can follow security practices.

I don't think these big companies lose a lot in hiring, although onsite interviews really can suck up a lot of money every year. But for the biggest companies on this planet, they can write off that item like dropping a ten-dollar bill out of a million dollar (if we were to scale down from billions).

If this is a win-win, then employers would not mind making salary transparent and work on pay equality. Companies generally don't want union because that's like dealing with your political constituents as politicians, except union has the power to shut down a company's operation overnight. Imagine Google is in danger of shut down because the whole company goes on a strike? Google has to agree and Google will always have its throat tied. I really doubt these big SV companies would want a union, ever. I can probably say, well, Google can learn from a strike and have a disaster protocl for the most extreme case: what if half of the planet goes missing and half of the Googlers are gone after a nuke or after a deadly contagious virus killing half of the population?!? That would be a very good disaster protocol to develop.

I am not really being sarcastic. In the age of global conflict and more viruses and bacteria becoming immune to existing medication, perhaps we should ponder one whenever we have a five-minute break. HK (where I was from) was in terror and "lock-down" mode in 2003 during the SARS disease. More than 1750 people died in HK. HK had one of best trained medical workforce and system in the world at the time, yet, HK was surprised and hit so hard we ran out of supplies and medical personnel. Just for the record, SARS also spread to the rest of the world with some causality. So we are not prepared. Another example: NYC's MTA union strike in 2005?2006? made pretty much half of the city, if not, most of the city public transportation went in sleep mode with very minimum service. It definitely wasn't fun walking 5 miles to school, and then another 5 miles back. Finally, look at hurricane disasters this year.

Sorry for going tangent, but there is a control the top wants to put on the workers, so there is no surprise. Dictatorial governments don't want surprise so they lock oppositions up, and give the "good" citizens something nice to keep them from getting too angry. So for these SV companies, actually, any companies, they will give some raise, give out "generous" benefits, to keep most of their employees "happy". Is it worth it to get $150,000 salary for staying late (and continue to work after going home)? Of course not. But many engineers do anyway because they don't want to lose anything that comes with this job, especially if they are not ready to move to another job yet, which is probably many months later (or years later) for so busy with work and whatever remaining time for family.

My stand on this, as a worker, is union is a hard sell to SV, but I see the benefits of having a union. It takes a lot of people, and it can happen, but not a win-win like you stated. So nah, not so optimistic.

Also what kind of security practice? Safe coding? "We are going to have a threshold on number of security bugs"? Bugs are inevitable. I am not sure how one can create ANY deals out of that. Can you clarify?