The spirit of Mother Jones
This week a commenter on one of the mailing lists I follow asked, perhaps somewhat plaintively, why, after watching 20 years of attempts to organize Silicon Valley workers that have led nowhere, suddenly the push of workers at Big Tech to unionize seems to be gaining traction. "What has changed?"
Well, for one thing, the existence of a history of 20 years of attempts to organize tech workers - which could be the nearly-flat portion of the famous venture capital hockey stick - by itself is a profound change,. "Why is she running when she has no chance?" people asked about Shirley Chisholm in 1972. Her campaign opened minds for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, VPOTUS.
The next month should give a solid indication of whether tech worker unions' moment is now. It very well might be. The same trend toward unaccountable power that have led the US Congress and many other countries to scrutinize the practices of the big platforms is surely felt even more by their employees. It shouldn't be a surprise; when you recruit people with the promise that they can improve the lives of millions of people you should expect them to be angry when they realize their efforts are being used to cause worldwide damage, especially when they see that little progress has been made on long-standing complaints such as the lack of diversity surrounding them.
One reason today's unionizing moves may come as a surprise is that the image of the tech worker has remained stuck on highly-compensated programmers and engineers and the perks, stock options, and salaries they receive. And yet, in 2014, Silicon Valley software engineers discovered that they, too, were just workers to their employers, who were limiting their career prospects via a no-poaching agreement in which Apple, Google, Intel, Dell, IBM, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intuit, and dozens of other companies agreed not to recruit from each other's workforce. The result was to depress compensation across the board for millions of engineers and programmers.
And these are the high-caste workers; for years "lower-class" occupations have been filled at many companies by workers under all sorts of arrangements designed to keep them from being classed as employees to whom the company would owe medical insurance, paid leave, and other hard-won benefits. In 2018, Microsoft bug testers cited the Republican environment in Washington as the reason they gave up on a successful unionizing effort that had won them the right to negotiate directly with their temp agency. More recently, Uber and Lyft drivers have demanded employee status in numerous countries.
At Google, temporary, vendor, and contract workers, the majority of the workforce, have complained of being invisible. In November 2018, after the New York Times reported that the company had given seven-figure payouts to two executives accused of sexual harassment, 20,000 of these workers walked out demanding transparency, accountability, and structural change. Google's response was apparently enough to get them back to work at the time.
However, in December 2020, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint on behalf of two employees who said they were fired for their organizing efforts. Last month, hundreds of Google workers created the Alphabet Workers' Union, open to both full-time and contract workers. This union won't be formally recognized for collective bargaining, but will use other means to push for change. More than 200 of its members have signed on with the Communications Workers of America.
In an op-ed in the New York Times software engineers Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw, the leaders of the new Alphabet Workers Union, cite that earlier walkout, the recent firing of leading AI researcher Timnit Gebru, as well as the company's general behavior. "Each time workers organize to demand change, Alphabet's executives make token promises, doing the bare minimum in the hopes of placating workers," they write.
The original question was, I think, inspired by the news that voting began Monday at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama on whether to unionize. As Lee Fang reports at The Intercept, Amazon has been campaigning against this development, hiring a union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis to mastermind a website, Facebook ads, and mass texts to workers. This is not really comparable to Google's union. The fact that these warehouse staff and delivery drivers work for a technology company is largely irrelevant except for the extra-creepiness of the surveillance Amazon is able to install in its warehouses and delivery vans. The same goes for Apple's retail store staff, whose efforts to organize failed in 2011.
Plus, the overall environment has changed. The pandemic has cast many issues of structural unfairness into sharper relief, and the US's new president has promised to strengthen unions. Add in generational shift to a group whose bleak present includes burdensome education debt, the climate crisis, and shrinking prospects. Yes, it really might be different now..
Illustrations: Union organizer "Mother" Mary G. Harris Jones, "the most dangerous woman in America", in 1902, (via Wikipedia). The title is a reference to the folksinger Andy Irvine's biographical ode to the Union Maid, The Spirit of Mother Jones.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.