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Yes! I was just thinking of this. My thinking started along the lines of tech workers getting together to apply for jobs, discussing who would be best for each
by gushogg-blake 2y ago
Yes! I was just thinking of this. My thinking started along the lines of tech workers getting together to apply for jobs, discussing who would be best for each role etc, so instead of each role getting 100 varying quality applications it gets just one reasonable application that the company can take or leave.
Then I made a couple of obvious leaps and realised I was quickly converging on existing ideas like unions, and then guilds.
Does anyone know why guilds stopped being a thing? One possibility that comes to mind is that having a third party (the guild) involved in the employer/employee relationship would make things awkward and it might eventually seem unnecessary as the relationship developed -- although this would be a pretense obviously, as the employee is ultimately disposable as far as the company is concerned.
Obviously unions are popular, but they don't seem to go very far in terms of being involved in the whole process of work -- deciding who is going to work where, what the terms will be, etc.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ajb 2y agoGuilds were anti-competitive and anti free market, in that they regulated the number of people who could enter a profession, and practice it in a particular town. As such, that's against the interest of employers and most people who want to enter the profession. I don't think guild members generally worked for employers, except for apprentices, who had to work for a guild member; they were business owners or self employed. Arguably though, medicine and academia are guilds. Early guilds probably used violence to restrict entry; later they needed the state to enforce guild restrictions, so when the state decided it didn't want to; that guild was over. I suspect that cooperatives are a better model than guilds for the modern era.