{"id":28687,"date":"2021-02-06T06:59:57","date_gmt":"2021-02-06T06:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/02\/tech-workers-organizing-class-position\/"},"modified":"2021-02-06T12:27:08","modified_gmt":"2021-02-06T12:27:08","slug":"tech-workers-at-every-level-can-organize-to-build-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/06\/tech-workers-at-every-level-can-organize-to-build-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Workers at Every Level Can Organize to Build Power"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Tech workers occupy a contradictory location in the American class structure. On the one hand, many are well paid and identify both as professionals and with management. On the other, the proletarianized aspects of their work can offer opportunities to seize for organizing as workers.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Tech workers are the strongest line of defense against the threat posed by the large tech employers. (Marvin Meyer \/ Unsplash)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

While the COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the US economy, the tech industry remains its most profitable sector. While government institutions responded clumsily to the crisis, tech companies, large and small, offered convenience to consumers and employers alike. Tech companies have continued to extend their reach<\/a> into our lives at work and at home.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bright spot to be found, however, in the continued progress that tech workers have made over the last year in organizing to put Silicon Valley founders in check. The research project Collective Action in Tech<\/a> documented more than one hundred workplace actions in 2020 alone, despite the interruption of a global pandemic, along with a multitude of preexisting challenges.<\/p>\n

The rapid growth of this movement over just a few years has far exceeded the expectations of even the most hopeful organizers and activists. The disenchantment with the supposedly noble principle to \u201cdo no evil\u201d fueled high-profile protests against the moral bankruptcy of tech employers, which in turn gave way to greater skepticism and anger over an often exploitative and discriminatory workplace culture.<\/p>\n

The global walkout of more than twenty thousand Google employees against sexual harassment in 2018 raised the aspirations of the movement and demonstrated that organizing in the tech industry is possible. It also drew the watchful eye of big tech employers. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against Google in early December after determining that the company spied on its employees and retaliated against those who engaged in protected organizing activity.<\/p>\n

Much of the organizing that\u2019s taken place in the tech industry has occurred through informal networks, outside the official labor movement. But the success of workers at Kickstarter and the software start-up Glitch in securing union recognition has shown that unions have an important role to play, both in providing a legal foundation for collective bargaining as well as providing valuable organizing resources \u2014 most notably, the practical experience and knowledge of staff organizers. More recently, Googlers formed the Alphabet Workers Union<\/a>, a membership organization to strengthen collective action within the company.<\/p>\n

While union density in the United States across all sectors is abysmally low, the tech industry has a uniquely successful track record in avoiding unions. Few workers in the tech industry have any experience with the labor movement or the basic workplace organizing skills needed for building power on the shop floor.<\/p>\n

What the movement has achieved already marks a significant turn in the history of the tech industry. But there are significant challenges to sustaining and extending these achievements. One persistent question has been how to effectively draw more of the industry\u2019s white-collar workforce, who often receive significantly higher salaries and enjoy many of the other perks that come with having technical knowledge in high demand, into the movement, while bridging the divide between these workers and those in less advantaged layers of the industry.<\/p>\n

Below is an exchange between Aaron Petcoff, a tech worker in New York City, and Ben Tarnoff, a tech worker and a founding editor of Logic<\/a><\/em> magazine, exploring the story of the tech labor movement so far, with an eye toward its future.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

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Aaron Petcoff<\/dt>\n \n

Preparing for this conversation about the class structure of the tech industry, I came across this passage, which opened a brief history of engineering unionism published in 1969<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Are engineers professional workers, who identify with management and find unionism and collective bargaining distasteful and damaging to their professional status and image? Or are they employees who, regardless of the nature of their work, share common problems which they are likely to solve only by combining their economic strength? These basic questions, along with the relationship of organized engineers to technicians and production workers and the use of the strike weapon, have plagued the organization of engineers . . . since the movement appeared.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was striking to me how closely this expressed the scope of our discussion, despite being published over half a century ago. It also emphasized to me the fact that, while the tech workers’ movement is still only a few years old, there is still useful history that we can study to help inform our work today.<\/p>\n

You and I started talking about this subject together after you spoke to a meeting of the Tech Workers Coalition<\/a> about your Logic<\/em> magazine pamphlet “The Making of the Tech Worker Movement<\/a>.” In that piece, you raise a lot of the same questions posed by the excerpt above. To help find an answer there, you draw on some prior work by writers like Barbara Ehrenreich, Erik Olin Wright, and others.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with exploring why these particular questions are so urgent and practically important, and what history and political theory can bring to the table.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Ben Tarnoff<\/dt>\n \n

The passage you quoted poses the following question. How should one understand the social position of nonmanual salaried workers, the kind we typically call “white collar” or “professionals”? In advanced capitalist societies, such workers compose a significant portion of the workforce. And they perform a lot of different kinds of work: they include software engineers, of course, but also teachers, nurses, lawyers, journalists.<\/p>\n

What is their class experience? How are these workers classed<\/em>?<\/p>\n

This is actually a very old question. Marxist theorists have been struggling with it since the late nineteenth century, when white-collar workers first began to proliferate with the consolidation of the modern corporation and the rise of modern management. Broadly, Marxists have come to two different conclusions.<\/p>\n