In the 1930s, muscle-bound steel workers served as the poster boys for the AFL-CIO. They were in the driver’s seat of the American economy, and they called the shots. Today, it’s the decidedly unstrapping IT worker who has slipped behind the wheel. Will brainy software engineers replace the brawny men of yore as the spokesmodels for labor unions and exploited workers in the new economy? The answer is yes. And no.

According to a poll in February on TechRepublic.com, a website for IT professionals, 45 percent of IT workers are interested in joining a labor union for high-tech employees. Others are doing more than just expressing passing interest. They’re joining existing unions, such as the 740,000-member Communications Workers of America (CWA), based in Washington, D.C., and the 75,000-member International Federation for Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), based in Silver Spring, Md. They’re also forming their own unions, such as the 250-member Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech), which organized programmers at Microsoft and helped bring to resolution a lawsuit against the company for misclassifying long-term contract workers as temps and for denying benefits to those contractors.

Surprised By All This Interest In Unions? You’re Not Alone.

Randy Wiley, CIO of the state of Arizona Department of Water Resources, speaks for 60 percent of CIOs, according to a CIO survey (for full survey results see KnowPulse Poll, January 2001; www.cio.com/printlinks). "I can’t figure out why anyone in IT would want to go union," says Wiley. "We’re at the top of the scale as far as salary goes. It’s not like someone’s cracking a whip over you. 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. They often address poorly crafted corporate policies that don’t take into account the special needs of IT workers (for example, training) and IT departments (staffing), on which CIOs are already battling HR. 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.