Collective bargaining is the only way to stop the autocratic march of America and business. It fixed the great depression, it will be the only way to fix the coming depression. They think AI will replace all of tech, but it's not ready.
All the naysayers have no clue just how much manual work goes into maintaining the illusion of this bank never going offline. If tech even took one single day off, the bank would suffer a huge financial impact. I work with one of the tech prod support groups, and you would not believe the amount of emails about things breaking. It's non-stop.
If IT wants to push back, form a union. Yes, the people who've been here forever (yours truly, over a quarter-century) would probably make out like bandits. So what? 5–7 years of being compensated what I'm actually worth, and I'll sail off into the sunset, never to work again, opening that job to the next person who has been paying their dues with personal time, for decades.
Management only has control if you let them have control, and you all - for some reason or another - are willing to let them run roughshod over you. So what if the economy is garbage? Anyone who works a real IT job here knows it takes a minimum, bare minimum, of 2–6 months to get someone onboarded and trained up. Even then, you start them out with smaller, more forgiving work, because it's a depth of knowledge job, not a breadth of experience job.
Just think back to how they thought they didn't need QA, laid all the QA groups off, then 6 months later, everyone you knew who worked in QA was back in the GAL.
Collective bargaining works, history proves it.