Many of us have grown up in fiercely anti-union cultural environments. These early experiences guide our beliefs about the role of unions in society throughout our lives. It's time for us to understand this and re-examine those beliefs with a critical perspective.

So long dental plan

For many of us, our first encounter with the concept of a union was Last Exit To Springfield. This is rightly one of the most beloved classic Simpsons episodes ever made. It's a great story and it's packed with big laughs. It's also brimming with anti-union messages. Here's a clip.

In less than 30 seconds it portrays the union as corrupt, violent, feckless, stupid and ineffective. Even the eventual victory is a skin-of-the-teeth retention of the status quo that's only secured through luck. It's ahistorical and wrong. It certainly doesn't reflect lived experiences of workers in Sweden where union membership has been in the 65% - 80% ballpark for decades, powering world-leading productivity and happiness simultaneously.

We grew up watching this stuff, and our employers did too. Those experiences shape our beliefs just as they shape those of our employers. We're accustomed to seeing our employers as authority figures and as domain experts in their field of business, so when they reflect those same early cultural influences back at us during the early stages of unionisation it can be very demoralising.

It's critical that we're consciously aware during those conversations that our employers' domain expertise ends at the boundaries of their field of business. Employers are generally not amateur historians of the labour movement. We can and should feel a strong sense of empathy with them when they share their worries about a change they've been taught since birth to fear.

What we don't owe them is to assign a false sense of authority to the things they say about this topic. We can listen, empathise, then push it from our minds and form our own opinion based on the observable reality around us. For those of us in Sweden, that reality is consistently high quality of life rankings and over two thirds union membership.

Stories that don't go anywhere

In my very first job after graduating from university we got to leave early on Friday afternoons, and let me tell you, it was fucking fantastic. Half of us went directly from the office to the nearest pub where we'd stay until we were almost too drunk to stand.

If we'd made moves towards unionising there, they'd have undoubtedly pointed to those Friday afternoons as something that may only have been possible thanks to the flexibility of their carte blanche authority over the terms and conditions of work.

Thing is, the employers in this case benefited from that policy too. They loved leaving early on Friday, and on more than one occasion they even followed us to that pub. Under a collective bargaining agreement they'd have had every right to propose that policy during the negotiation period. But they might not have known that, and their cultural biases would have filled in that knowledge gap with anxiety. Then they'd have presented that anxiety to us as if it was an authoritative warning.

And as fun as it was getting blackout drunk by 5pm on Fridays with the bosses, if we’d had a proper channel of communication for negotiating about the terms and conditions of work, we might have suggested that a pension scheme was a more urgent need. Employers and workers tend to have quite different incentives and experiences like that. And if workers don’t talk among themselves and organise a coherent, unified negotiation, we leave employers to fill in that gap with guesses informed by their vastly different lives.

You can like your boss on a personal level and also believe you understand your own needs better than they do. You can feel gratitude for their generosity while acknowledging it could be harnessed more effectively through proper negotiation.

We have similarly generous terms governing working time at my current job. And just like at my first job, our employers here love those policies too and benefit greatly from them. It would be understandable for them to issue a few anxiety-driven "warnings" in the coming months and we should be mindful to correctly interpret those as well-meaning but misguided.

The decision making process about the terms and conditions of work will be strengthened - not weakened - by the meaningful inclusion of workers in those decisions. If you've experienced the guilt-laden cognitive dissonance of knowing that your compensation is good but simultaneously wishing it was different, what's missing from your life is collective bargaining. Without collective bargaining the amount of negotiating flexibility available to you is approximately zero. Don't allow yourself to be demoralised by these "flexibility" and "innovation" stories that don't go anywhere.

Imagine a business transaction. Maybe a CEO is negotiating new terms with an important supplier. The supplier offers to handle both sides of the negotiation and promises the CEO better terms in exchange for this concession. Patently ridiculous, right? This is the offer we're accepting by choosing not to negotiate collectively on our own behalf. Even if the CEO's lifelong best friend is in charge at the supplier, it's an offer they'd refuse anyway as it'd set a precedent that would be difficult to change later if either of them moved to a new company.

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times

Speaking of CEOs leaving companies, today is exactly one year since November 28th 2021, which was the last ever normal Sunday for the employees of Twitter. As far as they knew, everything was wonderful and would be wonderful on Monday too. If you'd asked them about unionising that weekend, they might have suggested that they didn't need to because things were so good. The next day, Jack Dorsey resigned, setting in motion a chain of events leading to mass layoffs and significantly worse working conditions for those left behind.

Would an identical company with a strong union have been such an attractive hostile takeover target for a CEO with those intentions? Could that union have influenced the outcome of the takeover bid through industrial action? Might they have been able to offer some resistance to the onslaught of ultimatums and dictates regarding working conditions? Perhaps we can make an educated guess based on Elon Musk's long established opposition to unions.

The best time to join a union is when things are good. To do so is to recognise that things are good, and that it's worth taking steps to protect what you and your employer have built together. At its best, signing a collective agreement is an act of deep mutual respect.

The worst time to join a union is when it's too late to make a difference because you waited for a crisis. In Jane McAlevey's A Collective Bargain, she refers to this scenario as a "hot shop".

The employer did something horribly wrong, which enraged a majority of workers pretty much overnight, and they rushed into a drive to organize. Most hot shop efforts in our current climate end up similar to Winmore's: they fail, despite the agitation ("heat") for a union.

Even if they'd begun to organise on November 29th, the workers at Twitter might have been too late to stop what happened to them. From what I've heard it sounds like they'd built a really special culture there, and now it's been destroyed. Obviously it feels quite far fetched to imagine that happening at any of the companies where the rest of us work. It would have seemed far fetched at Twitter too.

The idea that unionisation is primarily a crisis response tactic is a widespread cultural trope. It's incorrect. Unions make good companies better.

They have the plant but we have the power

Will you work at your current job for the rest of your career? Are you sure? How sure? As sure as those engineers at Twitter were a year ago?

If there's a particular innovative policy that you like at your current job, then the rational thing for you to do is to use the power available to you via the labour movement to help that policy spread throughout society at large. In Sweden there's a well-defined process for this. For next year, they're prioritising a higher-than-normal wage increase and further expansion of the flexible pension system.

Offering unique one-of-a-kind benefits is in your employer's interest because scarcity increases their power in their relationship with you. Improving the terms and conditions of work in general across society is in your personal interest as a worker because it decouples your basic quality of life from the randomness of the financial markets. This is the mindset that keeps Sweden at the top end of those "happiest country in the world" lists.

Is it possible you may have conflated your employer's interests with your own? Do you want a unique one-of-a-kind dental plan that vanishes from your life forever when you're laid off in the next financial crisis, or do you want that same dental plan to be table stakes for all employers so that you can keep it in your next job?

The idea that unions are primarily a tool for workers with weaker leverage at the lower end of the compensation scale is culturally widespread. It's a key reason behind the low union membership in the tech industry. It's incorrect. The basic laws of physics are the same for all workers regardless of how many ping pong tables are at their employer's headquarters.

There's no amount of individual brilliance and luck that can overcome global macroeconomic forces. Even those world-class engineers who've taken the time to master that whole LeetCode interview rat race and gotten into Facebook are being laid off in their thousands now.

If you're a software engineer wanting to secure your current quality of life for the future, you could grind LeetCode for a few months and passively hope you come out of the recession lucky. Or you can do something with some actual impact and join a union now.

In the 2010s, a new Swedish way of organising product development work took the tech industry by storm. Henrik Kniberg's whitepaper about scaling agile – full of hip new words like "squads" – was the defining management fad of the decade. If you're in tech, you probably have fond memories of a day some five or six years ago when you found out you and your colleagues were soon to be re-organised according to this model.

Some of us were so impressed that we were inspired to emigrate - leaving behind our families, friends, and favourite burrito places - and go to work for the company where the model originated. Many of us were astonished by the contrast between Sweden and the countries we’d left behind. World-leading union membership levels had won a level of dignity for workers here that was unimaginable back home. Six months of parental leave on full pay is commonplace here thanks to unions.

We didn’t have a collective agreement of our own back then. We didn’t much care either. We were more excited about that world famous agile methodology. And besides, we still benefited from the herd immunity of all the other Swedish companies’ collective agreements, since matching those collectively bargained compensation packages was a prerequisite of competing for talent in Sweden.

The 2010s are behind us now, and the 2020s are shaping up to be quite a different kind of decade. One thing I want to carry forward, though, is Sweden being an exporter of cool, progressive ways to improve organisations. For the 2020s, Sweden’s 70% nationwide union membership is what the world should be copying.

To explain why, I want to share this modern reimagining of that infamous 2012 scaling agile whitepaper, and try to bridge the union knowledge gap using ideas we’re already familiar with in tech. Just like the whitepaper was back then, this is somewhat aspirational. My colleagues and I haven’t achieved our collective agreement yet. This is the way for us to help keep Sweden at the vanguard of the tech industry, and give our employer a chance to enjoy another ten years as the most exciting, relevant and influential employer brand.

Command and control

We need to lay down some foundations first to create some perspective for the model itself, so let’s begin with a completely blank slate. Here's a hypothetical company with 24 employees.

The individual worker is the basic indivisible unit of this org chart. Each one sells their labour power to the employer in exchange for a salary.

The most simplistic organisational model is direct command and control, where the employer assigns tasks to each individual worker one by one. Here’s an illustration that visualises the employer’s line of communication with the workers under the command and control model.

Looks like absolute chaos, right? Siloing each worker like this would disincentivise collaboration and inhibit the formation of communities. People facing similar challenges wouldn't build relationships with each other, so opportunities to share experiences and uncover economies of scale would be missed. Nonexistent collaboration would lead to significant duplication of effort. The lack of transparency would breed suspicion and resentment about fairness. And if a worker became ill, for example, whatever tasks they were responsible for would simply stop happening. Bottom line: you'd make less money this way.

This approach to management is not trendy at all. Capital recognises that workers achieve better outcomes through organisation. Workers agree.

Squad

Let’s assume the different arrow colours in the diagram above represent different business goals that the tasks contribute to. Under Henrik Kniberg’s model we should get the people with the same mission together in squads and give those squads ownership of that mission instead of assigning each individual task from the top down. So let’s get our re-org started and set up some squads.

Company owners who are accustomed to the command-and-control model can find this quite a scary transition. And it’s understandable. Superficially, it’s a lot of power to relinquish. And all those new squads have leaders insisting on new things like autonomy and ownership, which initially feels more like a challenge to their central authority than a new kind of collaboration.

The results are impossible to argue with though. The increased engagement alone is worth equivalent to a doubling of the headcount. Workers pool their knowledge and discover that each individual had their own unique workflows and workarounds. The best workflows spread now, and everything speeds up.

The company owners discover that they have a lot more free time. Under command-and-control, workers required their constant attention. Each time a task was completed, a new one had to be assigned immediately. This reactive work ate up most of their time, reducing their availability for initiatives to explore potential new sources of value.

In exchange for a bit of trust and autonomy, the workers are able to deliver a significant increase in surplus value to the employer. Everyone's happy. The employer can grow the business, and the workers are that little bit less alienated from their product.

We're not finished yet, though. The dependencies and relationships between the squads are important, but this org design doesn't address them yet. If one squad needs something from another, but they're busy on another project, what takes priority? How do we ensure that the squad missions are working towards a coherent overall goal? Is that the company owner's job?

Tribe

Continuing our re-org, let's identify our squads with related areas and put them in tribes accordingly. Our imaginary company has two. They're quite small for tribes really, but this model is all about scaling anyway so let's assume there are big expansion plans for both tribes.

This extra organisational layer maximises the strategic impact of the work of the squads. Tribe leads have a very broad perspective of the tribe's business context, enabling them to identify opportunities that may not be apparent at the lower level to product managers in squads.

It also further streamlines the communication between the employer and the workers.

The broader missions of tribes means they operate on longer timelines than squads. This enables employers to set a long-term goal and make the tribe leads accountable for delivering it. It deepens the strategic maturity of the company's operations, which are now unrecognisable compared to the command-and-control model from the beginning.

The incredible popularity of this model throughout the 2010s demonstrates that employers and workers understand that organised, autonomous groups of workers can deliver superior outcomes as compared to siloed individuals. Some of us felt strongly enough about the importance of this that it played a role in convincing us to move to Sweden to be a part of it.

But this old model only covers the employer's side of the business relationship. And employers are right to focus on their side: running a successful product development company is very difficult. Applying the lessons of this model to the workers' side of the relationship to meet the challenges of the new decade is our responsibility as workers. Only we can do it.

Union

In much of the world, it's still considered normal to manage the worker's side of the business relationship with the command-and-control model. Each worker negotiates the terms of their employment individually with the employer, with very little transparency. Cooperation between employees is discouraged in favour of maximising the employer's influence.

This has the same inferior outcomes in this context as it does for product development.

The absence of a clear organisational channel to communicate about shared challenges leads to significant duplication of effort. Without a structured way to negotiate, workers resort to a system of ad-hoc petitions and word-of-mouth pressure campaigns. Each time workers undertake one of these campaigns they have to repeat time-consuming networking and promotional work.

For the employers, responding to these petitions is reactive work that's impossible to manage satisfactorily. Without a defined negotiation period, there's no way to get a holistic look at the workers' full set of demands. Last month they wanted reforms to the stock option program. This month they want to change how the fitness stipend works.

Put yourself in the employer's shoes and imagine trying to decide if this current request is the right one to fund. You can't fund them all. How do you know there isn't a more impactful and cheaper request coming next month that you'll regret not waiting for? The workers don't even know that themselves yet, because they're completely disorganised.

This is a solved problem, and the solution is the Swedish collective agreement system. Let's re-org our workers one more time. This time, they're joining a union.

This is an easy re-org compared to the squads and tribes. For one, it creates an order of magnitude fewer new leadership roles. Also, because the workers are very happy with their current terms, the initial collective agreement is easy to achieve.

Just like the transition from the command-and-control approach to product development, this moment is understandably a little scary on the employer's side. And the results are just as impossible to argue with: unions are how Sweden so successfully balances the needs of its workers and its employers, leading the world in quality of life and innovation simultaneously.

In our imaginary company, the chaos of the command-and-control model is gone, and the lines of communication between the employer and the workers are significantly streamlined.

The union's ownership of its mission empowers it to develop a deep understanding of the workers' current likes and dislikes about their working conditions. These can then be collected together, prioritised, and negotiated over in a structured way each time the previous collective agreement expires.

The holistic perspective of the workers' requests means the employer is more readily able to respond to them. The commitment to peace once the agreement is signed gives them a guarantee that there really isn't another set of requests just around the corner. That certainty empowers them to give workers more in return for their labour.

The time is now

My colleagues have inspired the world before. For years after I moved to Sweden, I would periodically hear from yet another friend back home in the UK whose employer was adopting Henrik Kniberg's agile model. It felt like the whole UK was doing squads and tribes at one point.

Thatcherism mortally wounded the union movement in the UK, kicking off a political crisis that's still smouldering today. Union membership levels back home seem to have finally hit rock bottom after decades of decline. What I really want right now is for my colleagues in Sweden to inspire all my friends back home one more time and kickstart their recovery.

If they see us do it, they might do it too. We hold tremendous power in our hands right now. We can be part of a hugely consequential international tipping point if we can find the will to use that power. Many of us packed up our entire lives and moved countries to be a part of the old model. So we already know we're brave enough to do a quick Bank ID signup for this new one.