Not all unions are for factory workers. We all have to get beyond that stereotype. There are unions for journalists, social workers, teacher, police officers,

Not all unions are for factory workers. We all have to get beyond that stereotype. There are unions for journalists, social workers, teacher, police officers, college instructors, and nurses. What the union represents in these fields is generally resistance to becoming "factory workers", or more specifically easily replaced workers. Early factory unions also tried to retain special skills, but automation prevailed... so the union instead went along with the automation, but demanded a greater fraction of the gains from productivity increases. Agile is adopted because it's a system that works better for some situations. The "deal" is that to get the Agile product, you have to hire Agile programmers, who have a belief that they must work a certain way. Refusing to allow management to control the process is adversarial to management, even if management is happy to go along with it to get the end result. And speaking of adversarial... what could happen is that UCD will end up being even less adversarial with management than the programmers. After all, they are going to be iterating designs to find the balance between "works for the business" and "works for the user". The programmers will be implementing after all the iteration, and be considered a cost center that can be squeezed for more output for less money.