When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.
Not so much in IT. I've seen too many public sector tech employees atrophy and fall way behind in their skill set and productivity. Most would hardly make it past an initial tech screening at a startup or FAANG. I think it's great that those guys have a union to protect them, but we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
If you look at the revenue, number of employees and cost of living in the area it isn't so hard to calculate a sensible salary.
The weird thing in the west are these MBA types who feel they must force down labor cost even if it makes no difference for the company. I've seen lots of truly absurd examples of it. My favorite are the giant factories full of state of the art machinery and near perfect automation. 90+% of the employees are gone but the business logic still instructs to squeeze them. Like trying to squeeze wine from rocks.
If LLM's live up to optimistic speculation you can "soon" have a single employee run a large complicated software project with a low bus factor. Someone somewhere will think it is their job to make sure the dev costs the absolute minimum and works day and night. To spend $100 to squeeze $1 extra out of them is a job well done.
>> When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.
Likewise for raising the retirement age. I could carry on with my email job into my 80s (health permitting). Bricklayers not so much.
> we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
I mean why would they care? If you can't get a FAANG salary due to the lack of the skills, but can laze around 32 hours a week for $85k, it sounds too good to refuse to destroy the industry.
Not so much in IT. I've seen too many public sector tech employees atrophy and fall way behind in their skill set and productivity. Most would hardly make it past an initial tech screening at a startup or FAANG. I think it's great that those guys have a union to protect them, but we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.