Steel workers, pipe fitters, air-traffic controllers, electricians? There are LUs for each of these popping up all the time. Admittedly they are new chapters for existing large unions but also these jobs have existed for a lot longer, in larger numbers, than "software developer" and barista.

I don’t understand your comment. Do you not know what a pipe-fitter is? What about the trade strikes you as a larp?

I’ve never been to lunch with one, although my son worked as a welder’s helper at a pipe-fitting company.

The larp is that software unions are anything like blue collar unions, and that socialists want to selectively act as the voice of blue collar when they are in a completely different class and do not interact with them.

I’ll note one key difference. Software output and skills vary on a power scale. Blue collar work is often heavily defined by formal procedures and codes so that trained personnel are largely interchangeable from a business perspective (not always or completely true). So without a union it’s a constant race to the bottom because the labor is fungible and the only requirement for success is passing minimum criteria.

The people you are describing are not liberal. They are progressive which is very much anti-liberal. This is why terms like left and right are so loaded. You can have people who do not agree on almost anything being lumped together. For fun, you can take old Clinton or Obama quotes, post them on progressive forums and watch them call you (them) every name in the book. This is because progressives actually hate liberal policies but will do anything to not admit it because they want to wear the Dem brand as a suit.