A very good point
Unfortunately, for most people in I.T., the days of getting overtime pay have ended. So, what do we now get in return for sacrificing our time? A small raise in our base pay? Sometimes. Extra bonus money? Not in this economy. Compensatory days off? Yes, but it never makes up for the time put in. A pat on the back? Maybe, but those "attaboys" are quickly forgotten. The only thing that information technology workers can count on getting in return for their efforts is insomnia, ruined weekends, angry families and stress-induced heart conditions.
During this post-boom era in the technology industry, managers have been telling their underlings that they are lucky to even have jobs, and that they should just take what they can get and wait for the market to improve. But they say these things knowing that, individually, each person has little power to make things different for him- or herself. It makes a person wonder: In the face of longer hours, cuts in pay, and the outsourcing of jobs overseas, why haven't more I.T. workers organized themselves into unions?
The problems facing professional workers today are frighteningly similar to those faced by blue collar workers for over a century-- perhaps most spectacularly during the "Gilded Age" of America's rapid post-Civil War industrialization. In that era, a number of grassroots populist movements sprouted to challenge a socially conservative Democratic party and a once-liberal Republican party that had been ignoring them for far too long. In particular the development of organized labor accelerated tremendously.
The 1990's have often been compared to a Gilded Age for the Information Age, but they were curiously absent of the type of collective action that marked the first one. Now, with the Bush economy hemmoraghing professional jobs that had once seemed untouchable, it's not inconceivable that we could see that kind of grassroots populism again. I say it's about damn time.
