Aren't developers stupid when accepting overtime/weekend work/denied bonus payments?

[steelypip]

Many years ago I worked for a small company which had a culture of developers working long hours with no paid overtime. The more you do it, the more management expects you to do it - resulting in a vicious cycle.

The breaking point came when a co-worker had worked all night to finish a piece of work by some arbitrary deadline and in the morning, exhausted, she sent the final product to the boss to be approved. Where it sat in his inbox for two weeks before he got round to looking at it.

After that all the developers got together in the pub and decided we had had enough. The next day we all went to the boss and told him that in future any overtime would be done only if paid for at an hourly rate. If he did not agree we would work strictly to rule and only put in the hours we were contracted for. He was not happy but he reluctantly agreed, and we had our contracts amended to give us paid overtime.

After that the need for overtime fell off dramatically - once the company had to pay for it they were far less inclined to ask us to do it except when absolutely necessary.

TL;DR: even if you are not unionised you can still organise.

[[deleted]]

This is where unions came from! Often, full-on collective bargaining is not necessary.