One of the problems that most unions try to address is that companies will often fire employees for union organizing if they can get away with it (generally the

One of the problems that most unions try to address is that companies will often fire employees for union organizing if they can get away with it (generally they can make up some secondary excuse, like poor performance). In some unions, firing happens by seniority; the company can only fire employees in the reverse order they joined. In software development, we obviously don't want to have to work with under-performing coworkers, so we need some way to remove those people that isn't based on seniority. If it can't be at management's discretion either, then what's a good solution? I think one answer may be to have a union-negotiated peer-review process -- you can be laid off or fired if your coworkers don't vouch for your work, or consider you indispensable. Depending on the process, this could work okay or it could be awful. At best, it would seem to encourage a sort of Lord-of-the-Flies atmosphere and some unpleasant office politics. Another approach would be market-based. Maybe projects within the company are allocated some sort of virtual currency units which can be claimed by employees when they finish units of work. Employees with a surplus of currency units but not enough time to finish their tasks by themselves can put bounties on subtasks. Worker's pay should be proportional to their credit surplus; if it's not, they can have their pay reduced or they could be asked to leave. This would less political and less personal, but working out the details could be tricky and it doesn't address the problem of highly productive people that no one wants to work with because they treat people badly. I expect there are other possible solutions. How does the Screen Actor's Guild, and screenwriter's and athletic unions deal with this problem?