A lot of folks take the fact that most high-tech industries appeared in the modern period of anti-union rules and thus there are few unions in such industries to mean that unionism itself doesn't "work" for high tech, high-skilled workers. But then you have one of the original high-tech industries-- modern aviation -- and a massive union of engineers and technical workers who just approved their contract with Boeing:

Nearly 21,000 engineers and technical workers for The Boeing Co., most of them in the Puget Sound area, have approved new labor contracts that will give them more say in the company's controversial outsourcing decisions and the use of contract workers. They also will receive more for retirement and a pay raise that will average about 20 percent over four years.

Of course, high-skilled workers have always been unionized. In fact, the conventional wisdom among some sectors of the labor movement before the New Deal was that only the most skilled workers could be unionized, since their skills were no indispensable that it gave them the leverage to win strikes. Before the New Deal, a few industries like the miners and garment trades in locations like New York had managed to organize less skilled workers, but it was only in the 1930s that massive numbers of manufacturing workers in routine, assembly-line jobs got organized in unions. And a new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had to break off from the original AFL federation, because the original craft union leaders were so doubtful of the possibility of organizing anyone other than skilled workers.

The irony is that the New Deal union organizing was so successful that the conventional labor wisdom flipped and many came to believe that unions were so identified with blue collar work that unions made no sense for skilled workers. Of course, unions did persist among a whole range of skilled and even high-tech industries, from Hollywood to the telephone industry to most government-employed engineers to Boeing and the aerospace industry, mostly because those unions organized in industries already thriving at the same time as the overall New Deal unionizing explosion.

But in a world of corporate restructuring, outsourcing and financial manipulation, it is incredibly foolish to think that even the most skilled workers don't have something to gain by being able to assert some collective restraints on management power. In the case of the Boeing engineers, they have demanded in the most recent contract that current Boeing outsourcing practices be better coordinated and, not coincidentally, better preserve existing high-skilled jobs for workers currently at Boeing:

In fact, if the company had listened to the workers in the first place, it would have been better off itself financially:

Outsourcing was an important issue for SPEEA, just as it was for the Machinists union. Boeing's oft-delayed 787, according to SPEEA, represents everything that's wrong with outsourcing.

On past programs, Boeing took the lead in manufacturing. But for the 787, its partners in Japan, Italy, Kansas and South Carolina produce the large composite structures, and Boeing workers assemble them in Everett. Boeing argues this business model will significantly reduce the cost of making airplanes.

But those partners quickly fell behind with the untested manufacturing and production system, and Boeing engineers and Machinists have been forced to play catch-up during final assembly of the first 787s. As a result, the Dreamliner's maiden flight has slipped from August 2007 into 2009. Some customers have been told their planes will be up to three years late.