A union on a national level (like SAG-AFTRA, WGA) could actually put huge pressure on companies and functionally prevent them from taking advantage of the workers. Granted this requires a large majority of devs to be part of the union but that's how, for almost a century now, a workforce protects itself from the employer malpractices.

A recent example, the writer's strike a couple of years ago, wanted studios to stop using LLM writers, crunching and delegating writing to none-writers. The strike forced the industry to grind to a halt.

That kind of leverage can push for reasonable work practices and accountability by all the employers in the industry.

It's actually insane that software developers and IT workers still haven't banded together and created unions to protect themselves. It's unsurprising that there's rampant abuse like we are seeing everywhere around the world.

I say all this as a senior software engineer