{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "TWC Newsletter", "home_page_url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "feed_url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/feed.json", "description": "News and inspiration for worker power in the tech industry", "icon": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png", "favicon": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/favicon.ico", "expired": false, "language": "en-US", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "items": [ { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/06/13/issue-10/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/06/13/issue-10/", "title": "Writers to the Front, AI to the Back", "date_published": "2023-06-13T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2023-06-13T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "
Tomorrow, the Writers Guild of America is calling for an international day of solidarity for their strike. So today, we hear from L.E. Correia, a TV comedy writer and WGA member, about the union’s precedent-setting fight against corporate power grabs with AI. Over 11,500 members are holding the (picket) line while pushing for better pay, improved workplace conditions, and a new type of demand on the bargaining table: protection against AI plagiarism.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Tomorrow, the Writers Guild of America is calling for an international day of solidarity for their strike. So today, we hear from L.E. Correia, a TV comedy writer and WGA member, about the union’s precedent-setting fight against corporate power grabs with AI. Over 11,500 members are holding the (picket) line while pushing for better pay, improved workplace conditions, and a new type of demand on the bargaining table: protection against AI plagiarism.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy L.E. Correia
\n\nHi from the picket lines, I’m L.E. Correia.
\n\nIn the six years I’ve spent in the WGA as a TV writer, I can’t say I’ve once considered myself to be any kind of tech worker. But, when allies from TWC asked for my thoughts about our current strike, I did consider it. I considered that (in regular life) almost every writer I know, including me, works for a streaming company. Then, I considered the fact that if my wifi goes down, all television suddenly ceases to exist. Two thoughts later, I’m here to tell you that screenwriters are definitely some kind of tech worker, and so are almost all of our industry colleagues.
\n\nFor those of us who began our careers within the past decade or so, the current streamer-dominated landscape has never even felt new. We’ve long taken for granted that having cable is passé, that an algorithm decides what shows Netflix makes, and that Amazon Prime boxes will turn Masel pink and Minion yellow with the changing seasons. It’s all been normal for long enough that I often forget how different things were, and how recently.
\n\nBut scripted entertainment’s transformation-by-internet only really began around 2007, which was also the year the WGA last went on strike against the studios. I wasn’t in the guild then, but I’ve brushed up: a central issue was compensation for what we now call streaming… except it was the aughts, so we had to call it something twee like “vodcasting.” Anyway, there was plenty of future-tense skepticism at the time. Would this TV-via-laptop thing even catch on?
\n\nI mean, of course it would. The ’07 guild saw where our industry was headed and they fought for their contract accordingly. That foresight won me more or less every protection I enjoy today as a writer on a Netflix show. I think about this often when I’m out on the picket lines now, shouting about AI, wondering about the future that might arrive next. Will they really try to replace us with chatbots?
\n\nI mean, of course they will. Try, that is. But the good news is that the WGA is stacked with just as many smart, prescient thinkers as it was sixteen years ago, and we’re all pretty hellbent on humanity.
\n\nHang on, though. Can I pause catastrophizing about the robot takeover to quickly tell you what I was doing back in ‘07, while my forebears were in the streets securing my future? I was crossing their picket lines, sort of.
\n\nIt was my freshman year of college, and I’d Amtraked to New York with a friend to see a “Daily Show” taping during holiday break. Outside the studio, picketers were trudging their small circle through wintry sludge, which threw me at first. I dimly recalled something about a writers’ strike being in the news? But any detail about what exactly they were striking for had been bleached from my brain via dorm-binged vodka. The writers had formed their picket line behind a barricade away from the entrance – so strictly speaking, I never had to cross their ranks to get inside. (The ‘07 pickets were by and large visibility demonstrations, not actions meant to interrupt production, as many of ours are this time around.) Let’s face it, though – I was a mortifying comedy nerd to whom a live John Stewart monologue was some Eras-tour-caliber bucket list shit. Faced with the direct choice between crossing and not, I may well have chosen wrong.
\n\nThe shameful truth is that the presence of a picket line just didn’t mean much to me then. (Or, you know, to John Stewart. But we’re both atoning.) Labor politics wasn’t something I’d yet formed a consciousness around.
\n\nGrowing up, I mostly thought of unions as quaint dead things, strongly associated with the crumbling textile mills of Fall River, MA where my aunts and grandmother had all worked at different points in their lives. My Auntie Ellie, an older third parent to me during childhood, often talked about the “sweatshops”, and never fondly. Seamstressing was the kind of punishing physical labor that has always been undervalued as “women’s work,” and was undervalued further in the context of a rapidly-dying U.S. industry. As textile jobs moved abroad, Ellie’s diminished clothing and textile worker union would have had less and less power to fight the forces of globalization, Nixonian austerity, and good old-fashioned corporate greed that immiserated them. During Ellie’s years, I think they fought more than they won.
\n\nSo what trickled down to me when I heard her stories never felt much like union pride – more like class shame, or class exhaustion. When I finally joined the WGA, years into my own adult life, I found myself relearning everything I assumed about labor unions, and what membership could mean. For me, it meant a reprieve from piecemeal production work and paycheck-to-paycheck nervousness. It meant residuals, and great health insurance, and the ability to swipe my debit card without having to double-check my account balance first. (None of this should suggest that my pre-guild life was ever as precarious as my aunt’s or my parents’ – only that I came up in the early ‘10s, when all millennials were marks on a prank show called “The Economy,” executive produced by Alan Greenspan and God.) Above all, joining the WGA taught me that labor unions – my labor union – could win as often as it fought.
\n\nWhich brings me back to our current fight against the studios, as they attempt to roll back every single protection and benefit I mentioned above. And yes, they’ll use AI to do it if they can.
\n\nIt still feels absurd to talk about. Like, even as I write this, I’m entirely aware of (and very entertained by) how much of a hot mess AI currently seems to be. Bing chat? Girl. We read your texts and we’re worried about you. ChatGPT? Before the strike, a “Big Mouth” coworker of mine jokingly prompted it to pitch an episode idea, and its response was, to be generous, word chowder from turdland. So I’m decidedly not worried about an all-AI writers’ room existing tomorrow, or even next year. But after a quick look at who’s making AI, there’s still plenty to dread.
\n\nI believe the Sarandoses and Zaslavs of the world have an awful little dream in which they eliminate most writers, but not all. They’d then turn the few of us who remain into AI custodians — paid as little as possible to rewrite the stream of secondhand garbage generated by their proprietary software. They dream of this because they’re dull people who can only dream of cost cuts. On some nights I’m sure these guys are honk-shooing in their mansions having the exact same dream about voice actors, or about costume and production designers. Animators. Editors. Storyboard artists…
\n\nThe resulting content would obviously be grim, the economics grimmer, and the CEOs… would celebrate all of it. As the studios’ contract proposals make clear, their goal is to destroy as many of our jobs as possible, consequences irrelevant. Here are some other things these handsome men don’t seem to care about:
\nWhy would they care? After all, this is the same executive class that chose to enslave children abroad rather than pay people like my aunt a living wage. They gave it a bloodless term (“outsourcing”), watched entire economies wither, and didn’t blink once. They won’t blink this time either if we give them the chance to implement their new wave of outsourcing, whatever they decide to call this one. “AI Liberation” probably, because corniness does not scare them. Organized labor alone scares them, and (even better) agitates them. They hate our stubborn refusal to embrace our own oblivion, and their huge pale foreheads – I’m certain of this – get redder each day we hold strong.
\n\nBy the way, I know “oblivion” is a dramatic word choice from a lady who, while not on strike, gets to write crotch and ass jokes for a gorgeous dumb show about crotches and asses. But hey — these are dramatic times.
\n\nThat’s almost certainly why we’re seeing such unprecedented support from our sister Hollywood labor unions. SAG-AFTRA members are organizing tirelessly and showing up to our pickets in droves. (They also just passed their own strike authorization vote by an undeniable margin. Hell yes, let’s boogie.) IATSE crews and Teamster drivers are honoring WGA picket lines on both coasts, halting productions and costing studios tens of thousands in a day. Beyond historic. The class and labor consciousness that eluded me as a clueless young “Daily Show” fan now feels widespread, and intergenerational. I’ll never forget the first time I witnessed an entire crew sitting on a sidewalk outside of their soundstage, risking or forfeiting pay, refusing to work for as long as we held the line. My soul filled up. Somewhere, a forehead darkened from ruby to scarlet.
\n\nThe solidarity has been incredible to see, not in like a sweet kumbaya way, but in an urgent fuck-these-fucking-fucks kind of way. My Auntie Ellie died this past January, but I know she’d be in equal parts proud of what we’re doing, and ashamed as ever of my profanity.
\n\nWhile no movement is a monolith, I’m confident leaving you with this overview of ours: Everybody’s mad, no one’s confused, and it’s working. We know this is our last best shot to carve a livable future out of Hollywood’s mega-conglomerate hellscape. I’m so proud to be a member of the guild currently leading the charge, laying the foundation for what labor power looks like in the face of AI. We’re out of work, out of patience, and we have nothing to do but win.
\n\nThank you to Raksha, Kaylen, Tamara, and Danny of TWC for helping put solidarity in writing (pun). Readers, please support our crew members who require financial support during this strike with a donation to our Entertainment Community Fund.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/06/02/issue-9/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/06/02/issue-9/", "title": "Chatbots Can’t Care Like We Do: Helpline Workers Speak Out on World Eating Disorders Action Day", "date_published": "2023-06-02T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2023-06-02T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Today, World Eating Disorders Action Day, we hear from Abbie and fellow workers of Helpline Associates United about their efforts to provide quality care to their community – in the face of union-busting by a faulty, dangerous chatbot currently all over the news. Their struggle at National Eating Disorders Association, a traumatized, flawed organization, is a clear case of the need for trauma-informed organizing and a helpline built from the ground-up.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today, World Eating Disorders Action Day, we hear from Abbie and fellow workers of Helpline Associates United about their efforts to provide quality care to their community – in the face of union-busting by a faulty, dangerous chatbot currently all over the news. Their struggle at National Eating Disorders Association, a traumatized, flawed organization, is a clear case of the need for trauma-informed organizing and a helpline built from the ground-up.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Abbie Harper of Helpline Associates United
\n\nI trained in theater and dance, worked in improv and sketch comedy, and have lived in New York for almost 20 years, so I’m not afraid of speaking truth to power. And like many fellow NEDA Helpline workers, I come from direct experience dealing with the reality of eating disorders. Getting support from folks with lived experience made a huge difference in my life. So, unlike most jobs in most tech-enabled service organizations, my coworkers and I care immensely about providing quality support to our community.
\n\nIn honor and celebration of World Eating Disorders Action Day, my union, Helpline Associates United, put out a statement about NEDA’s union-busting, urging our community to find better options for care.
\n\nThe contrast between NEDAs mission and their recent retaliation really makes it clear that both eating disorders and workplace toxicity thrive in isolation, and that solidarity is the greatest tool for change. Upon my initial hiring in January 2022, NEDA leadership appeared to be welcoming and inclusive. I went through Helpline training super fast, and everyone was encouraging. They officially tasked me with advocating for both helpline and volunteer needs. Then, after months of expert carrot-dangling, leadership asked us to forfeit our last two summer Fridays after experiencing burnout all summer long, so we took our first collective action: two of us said no. Later, we took another action: we announced our intention to form a democratic union for the purposes of collective bargaining.
\n\nNEDA’s retaliation was no surprise. They failed us and our community by refusing to support a psychologically safe workplace, by firing us instead of recognizing our union, and by attempting to replace our humanity with a chatbot. Importantly, the chatbot isn’t a misuse of generative AI. The chatbot can’t care because it simply parses stock language, which NEDA claimed would prevent mistakes, but the results are even worse: it gave people dangerous, fatphobic advice and had to be pulled almost immediately.
\n\nUnder the guise of a sound business decision, NEDA abandoned the tens of thousands of people struggling with eating disorders who reach out each year which left a hole in the community only human empathy can fill. Many organizations say “I’m helping!” despite being dysfunctional and having no ethics, but as a mental health nonprofit, NEDA’s gaslighting and bad-faith treatment of workers makes it extremely, uniquely clear that we need trauma-informed care work – as well as trauma-informed organizing.
\n\nWe envision a world where a trauma-informed eating disorders helpline exists. Today is World Eating Disorders Action Day, and we need a change when it comes to advocacy and support for folks struggling with eating disorders. We are eager to share our statement and urge everyone in the eating disorder community to redirect all support, resources, energy, and time to those non-profit organizations committed to advocating for all people with eating disorders.
\n\nYesterday, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) shut down the helpline that supported the eating disorder community for decades.
\n\nWe, Helpline Associates United, stand now and forever in solidarity with the eating disorders community. Our first and only purpose in this fight has been to provide you with the best, most accessible, and most ethical support possible. We are and always will be a union, with or without NEDA.
\n\nWe organized for the ability to provide better service to our community because this work is deeply personal, and we care in immeasurable ways. But during our fight for a safe and sustainable workplace, it often felt like no one in management or elsewhere was listening, or worse - nobody cared. In the days since announcing our request for voluntary recognition of our union from NEDA, we’ve been amazed and humbled by the far-reaching outpouring of support for our union, and deeply moved that our story resonates with so many people. For the first time in what feels like forever, our concerns have been met with empathy, understanding, and validation - we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for caring.
\n\nNEDA management eliminating the Helpline and attempting to replace it with a faulty, dangerous chatbot named Tessa is a stain on the organization. NEDA leadership will bear complete responsibility for the consequences. Technology should never replace first line human support and NEDA is doing a great disservice to those in need of genuine empathy, understanding and community by putting them in Tessa’s “hands.”
\n\nIn light of recent events, we feel it is imperative to expose the truth about our time working at NEDA. We are appalled that NEDA would shutter the helpline at all, let alone without some kind of tested support in place. But rather than invest in psychologically safe working conditions, trauma-informed training, and adequate staffing for the workers on the front lines, NEDA invested in a chatbot. This demonstrates NEDA’s strong preference for profits over people.
\n\nThe recent spotlight on NEDA has exposed a problematic and troubling pattern of slighting the lived experiences of others and silencing dissenting voices, no matter the cost. NEDA’s refusal to prioritize our mental health and psychological safety exposes a clear pattern of ethical hypocrisy and an alarming lack of concern for the wellbeing of their own employees, volunteers, and the eating disorders community at large. NEDA claims this transition to Tessa is part of an evolution, not a revolution, but we fully and completely disagree.
\n\nNEDA says a chatbot cannot replace human interaction - yet, they have replaced human interaction with a chatbot. NEDA says there is no union busting - yet, they knowingly violated the National Labor Relations Act, eliminated our jobs and left a chatbot in our place. NEDA knew the workplace concerns we raised were valid - yet they refused to take meaningful action to help us best support ourselves, our volunteers, and our contacts. These kinds of statements are designed to cause confusion, and are classic examples of gaslighting.
\n\nThe Helpline Associates who petitioned NEDA management last September for a safer and more sustainable workplace dealt with a months-long campaign of targeted retaliation. NEDA management created a hostile workplace rooted in lies, intimidation, harassment, humiliation, and bullying - all for requesting better working conditions.
\n\nAs helpers on the front lines providing services and support to individuals, families, and groups who are in crisis, we are susceptible to this trauma vicariously as individuals, teams, leaders, and organizations as a whole. NEDA is a traumatized organization that has no interest in becoming “trauma informed” as evidenced by their knowing exposure of employees to unsustainable working conditions they only admit to behind closed doors.
\n\nThe Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a “bad actor” as a person or group who purposely (and usually repeatedly) engages in very bad behavior, such as causing harm to others. We no longer have faith in the National Eating Disorders Association to act in good faith on behalf of the eating disorders community. NEDA has positioned themselves as the leading and most trusted eating disorder advocacy non-profit, yet they have repeatedly failed marginalized communities including (but not limited to) Black people, people of Color, the LGBTQ+ community, fat people, and disabled people. Furthermore, NEDA is a mental health organization that refused to invest in the mental health of their front line workers. We have all witnessed how the current iteration of NEDA treats communities who dare to question them, even when they are communities they claim to serve.
\n\nTo those who have felt invisible, we see you.
\n\nTo those who have felt silenced, we hear you.
\n\nTo those who have been bullied, we believe you.
\n\nTo those who have tirelessly advocated for organizational accountability, we stand with you, and believe we need a change.
\n\nIn celebration of World Eating Disorders Action Day, we urge you to take the following action with us:
\n\nWe call upon the public and NEDA’s sponsors to direct their admirable support to other eating disorder organizations committed to the liberation of all people with eating disorders, including the following:
\nThese organizations provide direct services and support to individuals struggling with eating disorders. We encourage you to reach out to these folks for help if you or a loved one are in need, and we urge you to energize others to do the same.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/05/30/issue-8/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/05/30/issue-8/", "title": "After the #EtsyStrike, Crafting a Co-op Alternative", "date_published": "2023-05-30T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2023-05-30T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Today we hear from Valerie, a leather crafter and Etsy seller based in Oregon. After excitement around the 2022 #EtsyStrike evaporated, she and other artisans grew frustrated with strike organizers insistent on repeating the same strategies against the giant online marketplace. So, taking a little-known page from union history, Valerie and two co-founders formed a co-op to preserve the traditions, politics, and livelihood of handmade crafts.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today we hear from Valerie, a leather crafter and Etsy seller based in Oregon. After excitement around the 2022 #EtsyStrike evaporated, she and other artisans grew frustrated with strike organizers insistent on repeating the same strategies against the giant online marketplace. So, taking a little-known page from union history, Valerie and two co-founders formed a co-op to preserve the traditions, politics, and livelihood of handmade crafts.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Valerie Schafer Franklin
\n\nMy partner Geoff and I have been leather crafters since 2009, when the Great Recession was looming. We knew layoffs were coming for our desk jobs and began looking for other ways to earn an income. Geoff was one of many architects looking for work, and many architects have other creative skills. We were also passionate cyclists in Portland, Oregon, and Geoff was making leather bicycle accessories inspired by vintage Italian cycling.
\n\nOn a whim, I threw some of Geoff’s creations up on Etsy. I didn’t expect it to turn into a career, but the business took off. I left my job to work with Geoff full-time as a Etsy seller.
\n\nIt took a few years to see problems with relying on Etsy. The galvanizing moment came in 2012 when Etsy began featuring high-volume sellers who clearly did not represent the spirit of handmade in their coveted homepage promotion. Crafters were angry, organizing a “walkout” and other protest activities dubbed “Protesty.” The red flag was the way Etsy handled the crisis: censoring public forum posts, taking down protest treasuries, and backchanneling with one seller to make her story appear more craft-y, while insisting that no mistakes had been made. But it was clear that Etsy chose revenue over its founding principles. They had sold out.
\n\nFor Geoff and me, all of our eggs were in Etsy’s basket. In response, we diversified where we sold our goods. We built our own website in 2012 on Shopify and tried many alternatives over the years – even Amazon, which we came to deeply regret.
\n\nFlash forward to 2022: There are still no good marketplace alternatives. Etsy became a publicly traded company and abandoned its B Corp status in the interest of profits. They doubled seller fees, forced a mandatory advertising program, and increased demands on sellers – for example, the Star Sellers program requires you to respond to messages within 24 hours, 365 days a year, or you get dinged. Rather than working as an entrepreneur, this feels like any other job with a demanding boss.
\n\nEtsy squeezed us until we hit a breaking point. In February 2022, Etsy raised fees again, this time by 30% – in the same week they announced record profits in 2021. This hit a nerve with sellers everywhere.
\n\nA few social posts started what became the #EtsyStrike. We found it on Reddit and decided to participate. Since most of our sales come from our website and we were full-time crafters, we were financially able to participate in the strike, making our products unavailable for sale on Etsy for an entire week. We recognize that it’s not easy for everyone to commit to such an action.
\n\nIt was exhilarating at first. The whole strike was organized in just seven weeks, totally online, and attracted mainstream media attention around the world. Strike organizers claimed 30,000 shops joined the strike, which is supported by a 1% drop in listings of 5.3 million shops tracked by Etsy blogger CindyLouWho2. A Coworker.org petition netted 80,000 signatures. But Etsy ignored all of this. When asked about the strike at a Wall Street Journal event, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman was dismissive: “Each of our sellers is a blade of grass in a tornado. They’re someone you haven’t heard of.”
\n\nAfter the strike, I had a chance to take a breath and ask, Now what?
\n\nTowards the end of the strike, I volunteered as blog manager and media tracker. I proposed to the leadership that we consider making our own marketplace, but that was declined. I proposed polling their followers to see what they wanted the movement to do next, but that was also declined. The strike wasn’t as effective as I would have hoped, but the leadership wanted to do more of the same. They organized a letter-writing campaign to Etsy HQ, which went unnoticed, and were planning monthly protests. They decided to form a union-like nonprofit organization to fight against marketplaces for “indie” sellers (not just handmade, and not just against Etsy): the Indie Sellers Guild.
\n\nI found myself not wanting to fight Wall Street, to bang my head against a wall. Instead of directing my energy against Etsy, I wanted to do something for crafters and makers. Having worked for nonprofits in the past, I was already weary of the Guild’s proposed model. I wanted something self-sustaining, not reliant on constantly asking for donations and pandering to donors.
\n\nI didn’t have a deep history in co-ops, but one of my first jobs in college was working at a food co-op. It was my favorite job because they were good people who believed in what they were doing. So I started doing some self-learning and research, checking out books on co-ops and researching cooperatives online. The more I thought about how to be for crafters, the more I realized that the best way to help shops like mine and compete with Etsy was to create an artisan-owned marketplace.
\n\nAs John Curl writes in “For All the People,” the strike-to-cooperative transition appears throughout history: fed-up workers strike, get disappointing results, and decide they can do better by forming a cooperative instead. Since at least the 1830s, it was even a conscious union organizing tactic taken in anticipation of future hard times, with co-ops providing employment for striking workers.
\n\nFor me, the issue with Etsy was more than just the increased fees: it was about quality of life and meaningful financial participation in the value I create. I don’t want artisans to have a seat at the table, I want us to own the table! What’s more, Etsy has no like-for-like competitors, and Elo7, DePop, and other competitors get gobbled up by Etsy. If they’re honest, investor-funded start-ups are hoping someday for the same. They’re just starting the enshittification process anew.
\n\nI figured that by organizing a co-op, we can share the labor of maintaining a website and pool our customers. And I had confidence in the idea because I saw others thinking similarly on social media posts about the strike. Even one business reporter covering the strike suggested the same idea: “[business] analysts, though, said that those who rely on platforms for their livelihoods could emerge victorious by joining together in cooperatives or establishing different platforms.”
\n\nBut on the #EtsyStrike Discord server, admin squelched conversation about a co-op. They created a bot that auto-replied to the word “co-op” with a message that said they weren’t building a co-op. They made the channel I created to discuss co-ops “invitation-only” instead of open to all. Fortunately, I had developed relationships with people through direct messages. One of them, Dani, a Discord power-user, suggested we start our own server so we could reach out to others and talk freely.
\n\nThe first thing Dani and I did was see if we could join an existing co-op rather than create a new one. Only one matched our vision, Guild.art, and we reached out to the founder, Marc, about joining forces. Marc was a programmer who wanted to support artists but he hadn’t begun developing a community. He agreed to merge efforts. Dani, Marc, and I were a well-matched trifecta: Marc was the technology specialist, Dani was the social specialist, and I was the business specialist.
\n\nWe started building Artisans Cooperative in July 2022 on our own Discord. While we were growing our community, the most important thing we did was attend a co-op webinar. Co-op allies were welcoming and transparent, and would help us. That webinar gave us the confidence to keep going, even though we were basically starting from scratch.
\n\nThis is how we built our model and brought it to life. We announced our plans in October 2022 and continued adding more volunteers, growing our email list, and getting a few donations. In January 2023, we applied to the Start.coop business accelerator and got accepted, which came with $10K. We used most of that for legal incorporation in May, becoming a multi-stakeholder cooperative corporation with 3 types of members: artisans, supporters, and workers.
\n\nUnlike Etsy’s overly broad scope, we developed policies to preserve craft traditions. Our Handmade Policy helps solve the problem with “handmade-washing” that goes on in marketplaces like Etsy. It has a community-powered verification system that doesn’t rely on bots; we moderate the marketplace ourselves, motivated and incentivized by our cooperative business model.
\n\nCo-ops reward dividends based on patronage activity, but rather than divide contributions by class, our Points & Tiers Policy rewards all kinds of contributions by all members equally in one currency. Artisans can earn patronage for purchases like supporters, as well as from sales. They also earn points for handmade verifications. When we hire staff, which will be soon we hope, they will be worker-owners.
\n\nThis summer, we are growing our membership and building our marketplace in three phrases. We aim to raise $25,000 from memberships by July 31. Members help us fund the initial pilot website development and help us secure financing from co-op friendly lenders by demonstrating demand. This first round of membership will pay for the pilot website using Shopify.
\n\nTo get the word out, we’re tapping on the shoulders of people we know. We couldn’t connect in obvious ways. Etsy makes it hard to meet your colleagues; we don’t know who is selling handmade or where they are located, and we can’t reach them through the Etsy platform. We also haven’t found a way to work together with the #EtsyStrike organizers, and haven’t been able to share our story with their petition list of 80,000 or their membership list of 350.
\n\nSo, we continue to grow our community bit by bit through blog posts and social media, but most of all, word of mouth. We have a grassroots tool kit for members, with graphics, flyers for local bulletin boards, cards for events, and even simple ideas like adding us to your email signature. And today, we’re writing in this newsletter, the kind of software solidarity we believe in.
\n\nIf you want better goods, or if you know an artisan looking for a better selling channel, please send them the link to our Membership page or tell them to get in touch. Artisans Co-op is part of a bigger story of how undervalued, less protected workers need alternatives. Etsy crafters are home-based gig workers, too. It’s also a story about moving beyond a strike against a giant online marketplace with another form of collective action that can lead to stable, dignified, meaningful work.
\n\nWith gratitude to TWC for the support, and especially to Tamara Kneese for her contributions to this piece and her past writing on the topic.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/05/02/issue-7/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/05/02/issue-7/", "title": "Research is a Job that Benefits Businesses First, Users Second", "date_published": "2023-05-02T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2023-05-02T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Research is not neutral. In the device insurance industry, user research gets used to drive profits – or else it gets ignored. Today, Claire talks about her almost-impossible situation at a giant company, ideas for restructuring to help research do its job, and why she quit.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Research is not neutral. In the device insurance industry, user research gets used to drive profits – or else it gets ignored. Today, Claire talks about her almost-impossible situation at a giant company, ideas for restructuring to help research do its job, and why she quit.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nby Claire S
\n\nI come from classic graphic design: create a visual that communicates an idea. Over time, I moved to research and eventually, I showed up at Asurion because I found an opportunity to work in a place that I thought could provide real help to people: protection plans and repair services for electronic devices.
\n\nA huge proportion of Asurion’s staff includes the technicians who do the face-to-face work with customers; answering support calls, diagnosing malfunctioning devices and appliances, and doing repairs. The company refers to them as “experts,” some of whom previously owned and operated independent businesses. People who know what they need better than me, or anyone. My role was to learn from these experts and identify the improvements they needed from us, the makers of their tools, in order to streamline processes and make their work more efficient.
\n\nAs an example of a very typical usability project, I did research asking, “How might we make X tool better?” I collected and synthesized over 2,000 comments that experts submitted. Eventually I figured out how to say, “This tool isn’t working. But, there are several improvements that could help people – that they asked for – and could also make a business impact.”
\n\nDespite having concrete evidence and presenting it to leadership, the recommendations were ignored. Why? Because the data was collected from the bottom up, not from the top, which automatically gave the research a second-rate position. The irony was shocking but expected, as it was not a VP decreeing what was important. Even though the job was done, and a complete business case was presented to decision-makers based on concrete research done in the field, nothing changed.
\n\nSo, as a researcher, I began searching for an explanation. I think this situation is easy to explain. In this case, my review of 2,000 comments was coming from somebody who doesn’t hold nearly the same power as someone who has a VP status or above. But I knew that would be a hurdle to overcome, which is why I took the effort to make it into a business case. Nevertheless, the ship had sailed on my research. It stayed ignored because the product team backlog was already filled to the brim with requests from our VPs and from everybody else who has decision-making power, more authority than I had. There was no room to add important fixes and tasks that probably wouldn’t even take that long to implement. But it didn’t matter.
\n\nPart of my work as a researcher involves getting to know these experts, building trusted relationships with them to learn about their goals, needs, pain points, and more. And several of them have told me that the protection plans are often not worth the money customers spend – that’s how insurance becomes a profitable business! The greater the difference, the greater the profit. The company spends much of their time and effort trying to prove that various new and specialized protection plans are indeed worth the cost, but it ends up looking less like a company that’s helping people and more like a sales company. If you ask people working on the frontline, they’re not doing the job of customer support representatives, or of experts – they’re making sure somebody buys something that day. That’s the real goal.
\n\nThe basics of what Asurion is are interesting, because what the company claims and what it sells are somewhat disconnected. If you ask what they do, they would say, “We protect and repair your most important electronic devices.” But we know that insurance is, for the most part, misleading. These are expensive protection plans that most people get coerced into signing up for and can’t always use, thanks to coverage that actually covers very little. Nevertheless, Asurion continues creating more and more and more of these protection plans for all sorts of different use cases. Additionally the system is built to find any reason to deny the claim, so there’s a good chance customers won’t get a replacement, or it will be significantly delayed. There’s so much red tape and fine print in those protection plans, that you might not even get the help you’ve been promised.
\n\nThat is when I saw the writing on the wall: the company would always care more about business goals than the end user. That’s also when it became a very difficult place for me to feel like I had any positive impact. I felt like I wasn’t helping anyone at that point other than C-suite executives. I also realized that this position limited my ability to grow as a researcher or as a designer, because the company only wanted us to do two things: one, learn how a given decision was going to make them more or less money, and two, figure out how new ideas could make them more money or less money.
\n\nSo, I did a thought experiment: What if I were a vice president at the company with the authority to act on my research? What would constrain or enable my efforts? People working in HQ and in corporate don’t see the disconnect between company claims and actual sales as viscerally as people working on the frontline. This is because they’re just managing the business, while the frontline workers are directly supporting customers. Frontline workers go into a job with a duty to help people. Maybe someone has a broken phone or network connectivity issues, and we need to fix the screen or replace the device. At Asurion, frontline jobs are marketed as being able to help people solve these kinds of problems.
\n\nInstead, through all these convoluted plans, products, accessories, and other services, we turn a problem into a sales opportunity. If a customer has a problem, management tells workers to use a certain script to sell them something, even if they came in with something as simple as a broken phone. They don’t need a protection plan on their big screen TV; they need a new phone, so why can’t we give them what they need?
\n\nFrontline workers see this hypocrisy every single day, in almost every interaction. But in HQ, we’re not as close to the people we impact. That’s what made the 2,000 comments so much more real to me. And again, I realized, where does the rubber really meet the road? In our business decision making.
\n\nAs a researcher, I’ve seen many opportunities for real improvements. I did my best to support experts in succeeding at their job, and to help customers with their precious devices, often their main links with the world. And so, I built relationships and got input from thousands upon thousands of individuals. Another former researcher colleague said that relationships are the wires along which research runs. A total company restructuring might begin to help foster healthier relationships where grassroots ideas get taken seriously. For example, if frontline workers sat on our board of directors, then maybe I would be reporting to them, not our current VPs who saddle the product team with their ideas.
\n\nI recently found myself in a weird philosophical place where I wondered, “Can I even do this work, and also help people?” Going deeper, I’ve begun to wonder what accountable research looks like. How might someone create a role that serves user objectives first, business objectives second? Are there any software companies where research works this way? I didn’t see an opportunity at Asurion, so last week, I quit. I need to take the time and to see if it’s possible to find a role where research is motivated by an understanding of people’s needs rather than profit.
\n\nThis has been a slow and complicated learning process. I’m grateful to TWC for the ongoing conversation and constant encouragement. If you want to connect, email me at cryptid.seeker@proton.me.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/04/27/issue-6/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/04/27/issue-6/", "title": "Why Our Union Contract is Stalled at Code for America", "date_published": "2023-04-27T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2023-04-27T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Workers are building a union at Code for America, a nonprofit started in 2009 that now calls itself a company with a CEO. And two years after leadership slowly voluntarily recognized the union, CfA leadership is now also dragging its feet at the bargaining table. Senior software engineer Jacky Alciné tells us how he aligned his passions with his work, and how anti-union activity works in civic tech.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Workers are building a union at Code for America, a nonprofit started in 2009 that now calls itself a company with a CEO. And two years after leadership slowly voluntarily recognized the union, CfA leadership is now also dragging its feet at the bargaining table. Senior software engineer Jacky Alciné tells us how he aligned his passions with his work, and how anti-union activity works in civic tech.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nby Jacky Alciné
\n\nI live in the politically hot and messy state of Florida, so working on services for people who are routinely overlooked rings another bell in my chest. I joined Code for America during the pandemic in a time where people needed (and still do need) support from their governments to make ends meet. The organization’s work around fighting poverty, giving formerly incarcerated folks a better chance at life, and improving financial stability through tax benefits and e-filing hit right at home for me as the kind of work I want to be doing in these times. After reading Cyd Harrell’s insightful book about civic tech engagement, and after years of working in the private sector, it convinced me that this organization, when working with government, could be a lever of change.
\n\nDays after receiving my offer, I was greeted by a representative of the union - something I wasn’t fully aware that Code for America had when I applied. As an organization working under a representative democracy and given the history of labor’s ability to enact change, having a democratic structure internally clicked very easily for me. But I’ve also come to see how worker power doesn’t quite click the same way for CfA’s leadership.
\n\nIt’s clear how much people here find passion in what they do. The people working on GetCalFresh, a service allowing people to apply for food stamps quickly, are incredible and I enjoy seeing their presentations about the delivery, research and impact they provide. It’s fulfilling to see how these multiple disciplines overlap to provide high-quality services that interface with government in a way that works for both citizens and the state. California isn’t the only place this type of work is happening! The ability to work with government to build out these tools for the public requires a particular kind of empathy that I think contributes to why workers at Code for America are quick to understand why a union - a democratic form of control of your work - is important and needed.
\n\nI was excited to see my first bargaining session unfold as I figured that such an organization wouldn’t have an issue coming to a contract. The act of bargaining for improving the livelihoods of workers was something that I expected leadership at Code for America to grasp. As the session went on, I was then disappointed to see how that eager energy for balanced proposals from the bargaining committee was not reflected back to them from management. After that session, I found found out that management had formally hired Jackson Lewis, a law firm known for union busting. It wasn’t enough to keep my head down and work on impactful projects - I had to stand with the workers I’m building these services with and I joined the bargaining committee.
\n\nSo far, we have managed to come to agreement with management on nine proposals. These include no invasive monitoring systems (that are extremely harmful at scale) on our machines, leading by example and changing how we hire people with complicated backgrounds (combating the harm of how our industrial prison system operates), and recognition of the union itself! We are still fighting for breaking the inequitable nature of geographic pay bands and enacting systems that would account for inflation changes to our pay. We consider these proposals very important - especially in a country where rising inflation is one of our leading metrics. It has been frustrating to hear leadership push back against these changes that, if we were in the Senate, would be hailed as change towards the benefit of the American public.
\n\nTwo days ago, we published an open letter about the bargaining process and immediately, tensions with leadership piled up. Even though they are expressing they want to move in good faith, in reality, Code for America has continued to refuse to do so - to a point now where they’ve halted bargaining altogether in response to our actions and demands. They have been denying terminated employees representation, shrinking the number of eligible members and going as far as blaming the presence of a unionized environment for a reduction in benefits. This kind of behavior, punishing bargaining unit members for organizing by reducing benefits for those within, is a textbook example of intimidation intended to dissuade people from organizing.
\n\nSo, we’ve sent complaints to leadership about how their representatives acts to intimidate or belittle the unit members. Leadership has run meetings during working hours to hold update meetings about union activity in a place where union representatives have no space to provide information or respond to claims made in those sessions - resulting in more worker confusion and conversation about what had just happened. Leadership is also targeting three of the four committee members by denying them union representation, despite them being on the voluntary union recognition agreement list of workers. It’s getting clear that a worker democracy is something Code for America is fighting against.
\n\nThe NLRB defines this behavior by CfA leadership as bad faith bargaining and there’s a lot of overlap with what Code for America’s leadership is doing. We’ve filed multiple charges with the National Labor Relations Board in hopes of holding Code for America accountable to the laws around labor organizing. All of this behavior runs counter to their recent response to us going public. There’s mention of pride in providing the best in the industry but with the internal pushback against things like flexible working weeks which other groups have implemented in a unionized environment, it’s clear where the effort is being directed - it’s not at the bargaining table, since those meetings have been canceled!
\n\nBut the NRLB won’t build our union for us. The way people who’ve been here longer than me (and even not as long!) are so eager to rally behind these causes, fighting this fear of talking about how work is done at work, what rights and benefits we’re eligible to under the law, and the needs of the unit. My coworkers standing up to leadership, in spite of these setbacks, is something that continues to motivate me today, especially in our landscape where workers are fighting injustices. I’m encouraged that some of Code for America’s bad faith actions have encouraged more of my coworkers to attend bargaining sessions due to the frustration that they’ve heard from peers (as we exercise our right to unionize).
\n\nAfter nearly two years of voluntary recognition, we’re eager to win a contract. If you want to show your support and stay connected, please sign our anti-union busting petition. You can also check out our ally toolkit to send messages via emails and social media to Code for America, demanding that they address our demands.
\n\nFollow our organizing online at Twitter @CfAWorkers. Thank you Sunny R and Danny S for the ongoing conversation, and to everyone in Tech Workers Coalition for real solidarity with fellow workers.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/04/04/issue-5/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/04/04/issue-5/", "title": "Beware the Hype: ChatGPT Didn't Replace Human Data Annotators", "date_published": "2023-04-04T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2023-04-04T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Last week, data annotation workers around the world woke up to news reports claiming that ChatGPT can label text more accurately than the human annotation workers on the crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, AKA Mturk. Today, workers organizing for better working conditions with Turkopticon respond to these claims as people who do the actual data labeling work.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Last week, data annotation workers around the world woke up to news reports claiming that ChatGPT can label text more accurately than the human annotation workers on the crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, AKA Mturk. Today, workers organizing for better working conditions with Turkopticon respond to these claims as people who do the actual data labeling work.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Turkopticon
\n\nWhat do you get when you run a quick experiment using the new software tool a whole industry is talking about?
\n\nLast week, researchers Fabrizio Gilardi, Meysam Alizadeh, and Maël Kubli put a draft study on arXiv claiming that Chat GPT annotates data better than humans for certain tasks. The press jumped on this, suggesting that ChatGPT can replace workers to train AI.
\n\nData annotation workers like us started discussing the study on forums and in chats. We quickly realized its claims – and the press around them – were missing a lot. Fortunately, journalist Chloe Xiang at Vice reached out to us and heard and published our side of the story. We’ve been organizing with Turkopticon for several years, developing an analysis of our work and collectively campaigning for better working conditions on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Now, we’re faced with new challenges related to ChatGPT and perceptions from academia and industry.
\n\nToday, we want to outline our perspective on this study and the related hype, and why it matters to us and everyone who works in software.
\n\nFirst, does the study apply to all or even most uses of automated data labeling? No. The study only looked at tweet classification – a far cry from all of AI. The authors had ChatGPT classify tweets for “relevance, topic, stance, problem or solution framing, and policy framing” and found that different runs of ChatGPT agreed with each other more. They claimed that coding would be much cheaper this way. Even then, ChatGPT is still trained by humans – data annotators go through its outputs before it hits the public to make sure the results make sense and are not toxic. Computers don’t have access to our changing norms of what is appropriate speech or what is respectful. There is no ChatGPT without human workers.
\n\nSecond, were the findings and subsequent study published on arXiv put through a peer-review process? No, they were not. Publishing hype harms our collective understanding of technology, beyond just workers. In a world that rewards clicks and attention, journalism and academia are both at risk of prioritizing hype. If we slowed down for peer review, we would find some of the obvious shortcomings. Even better, the most impacted workers and communities should have a say before these findings land or the press has its day.
\n\nThird, do the claims like the ones made in the study have real-life consequences? Yes, absolutely. Amazon Mechanical Turk already hides us, the data workers, from the requesters who have us sort, classify, label, and judge their data. Requesters often blame us when something goes wrong, thinking we must be bots or “low skill” rather than looking at the design of their own tasks. We worry studies like these encourage AI requesters who typically post work to MTurk to think about automating without understanding how to generate high quality results, impacting the quality of data and AI we all get. We worry that studies like these focus on us as costs to be cut rather than people with skills and knowledge we bring to the process.
\n\nLanguage is a living, breathing thing. A computer program doesn’t go out into the world to fact-check what it scraped off the internet. Similarly, ChatGPT might generate text, but a human still has to read it to decide if it is “good” text. With all the hype about ChatGPT replacing writers, data annotators, and artists, we have to remember that writing and knowing is not just making words or assigning categories, it’s about judgment.
\n\nWe appreciate you, our reader, for taking a moment to consider our perspective as workers in the hidden realm of AI. Thank you also to TWC for providing us with another opportunity to connect with workers and allies in the sprawling software industry. It takes time to organize, and for gig workers like us, time organizing is time off the job. Please donate to Turkopticon to make sure data annotation workers can lead our own organizing efforts. Recurring donations are best, but we appreciate whatever you can afford.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/03/28/issue-4/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/03/28/issue-4/", "title": "Abolish Palo Alto", "date_published": "2023-03-28T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2023-03-28T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Today, Kristen Sheets interviews Malcolm Harris about “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World.” The book reveals labor struggles and entrenched militarism at the heart of software.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today, Kristen Sheets interviews Malcolm Harris about “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World.” The book reveals labor struggles and entrenched militarism at the heart of software.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKristin Sheets interviews Malcolm Harris about “Palo Alto” in a recent book talk.
\n\nThis is a particularly long feature today, but it’s relatively short given the book length (708 pages) and the history (over a century). To start, Kristin introduces Missile Suburbanism, a way of life that is strangely familiar today. The interview discusses Stanford’s legacy, the legacy of The Octopus, anti-colonial movements, and labor actions in the face of snipers guarding weapons manufacturers on indegenous land. Perhaps most importantly, Malcolm urges us stop reminiscing about the 1967 theatrics of levitating the Pentagon and to start retelling the bombing the Pentagon and other direct action to dismantle the war machine built by software company leadership.
\n\nKristen Sheets:
\n\nThanks again for joining us, Malcolm. The first question I have is around orienting to the history that you lay out in “Palo Alto.” This book is about the history of Silicon Valley, but it’s not really the same history we’re used to hearing from the people that we generally associate with Silicon Valley today. One thread that runs throughout your book is the dark side of any technological innovation. When you tell the story of what you call Missile Suburbanism: The Role of the Defense Industry in Creating a Middle Class in Silicon Valley Post World War II, you are not celebrating it, you’re casting a moral judgment on the specific technology developed and the way the wealth is distributed as a result. It’s pretty clear when reading your book that this is not a win-win rising-tide-lifts-all-boats situation. There are winners and there are losers. There are people who live in beautiful houses in Silicon Valley and there are people whose houses get bombed. I was wondering if you would say a bit more into what Missile Suburbanism was and how this framing can help us understand the wealth generated by Silicon Valley today.
\n\nMalcolm Harris:
\n\nThat’s a great question to start with because it goes to the heart of the book, and I think starting there is even better than starting chronologically or whatever. We can start by thinking about how, 100 years ago, the question of the equality of the world was newly at stake. The inequalities in a globalized system seemed harder and harder to maintain, even to capitalists, someone like Keynes would say, “100 years hence, by like the 2020s, economic problems would be solved. All people would live with the resources that they need.” This was commonly understood, both among progressive capitalists, as well as all communists.
\n\nAt the same time, the anti-colonial movements were starting to kick off around the world, and this question of, How could the inequalities of the past be maintained into the future in a world that was rapidly equalizing? This was the question that Silicon Valley and Palo Alto was really built to answer, and I say Silicon Valley very specifically. The first generation of silicon chips that come out of Fairchild Semiconductor all go into Minuteman I nuclear missiles. The point of the Minuteman I nuclear missile was to point a gun at the world’s head and say, “If anything happens to America’s position in the world, everyone dies.”
\n\nWe maintained a policy in which we would use a first strike nuke to maintain security within what was called the nuclear umbrella. That meant that U.S. corporations could operate abroad in places that would be otherwise politically insecure, they could operate under this U.S. nuclear umbrella that was provided by the tech of Silicon Valley. When I started working on this project, and I think most people when they think of 20th century Silicon Valley and they think of what is the archetypical product of that era and that region and that industry, maybe they think of the transistor, maybe they think of the personal computer, maybe they think of the internet, depending on how old they are, I guess, probably.
\n\nWhen I was going through this history, it is very clear that the tool and the object that Silicon Valley produces in this time is the nuclear missile. If you look at the composition by value of these nuclear missiles, so much of it was the electronics and the testing instruments needed to test everything in the production, and that was really coming out of Silicon Valley. Lockheed was at a big headquarters in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, Santa Clara. Mike Malone, who’s someone I quote in the book about missile suburbanism, he’s a great commentator on Silicon Valley. People should definitely read his stuff.
\n\nHe talks about growing up in this place where everyone was making all this money, everyone was doing great, they were buying gadgets all the time, they’d come home with home movie cameras, and you can go on the Prelinger Archives now and watch the home movies that this generation of entrepreneurs and electronics engineers and the guys who went and made this stuff at these companies took about their homes, and it was a very exciting time for them. At the same time, they went to work every day and built this giant gun that was aimed at the world’s head.
\n\nWe get to think of the internet as like a peaceful military technology because none of those nuclear missiles ever got launched, but we were very close a number of times. Insofar as that missile suburbanism is the basis for Palo Alto, and it really was, right? You take the money that you get from your job making missiles and it provides the basis for Palo Alto and suburbia of the ’60s and ’70s. Insofar as that was based on nuclear proliferation, like, yeah, that’s a bummer. That’s not a win-win. That was used for something, to keep people down and to maintain those inequalities that seemed to be unmaintainable into the 21st century. We can look now and see the inequalities that structured the world 100 years ago are very much still in place.
\n\nKristen Sheets:
\n\nYou mentioned the computer, which I think is an invention that Palo Alto is very much associated with. I think in common histories about the origins of the modern computer, there’s often this techno-utopian bent, despite its origins in World War II and the Cold War. Over the course of the 20th century, it’s almost been cast as this tool for collaborative and personal liberation, and I think this history is something that’s very much contested in your book. I was wondering if you could walk us through that.
\n\nMalcolm Harris:
\n\nI like to describe the history as it’s commonly told, and it has two versions, because there’s a positive and negative valence. The positive valence is the hippies invented the computer and the internet, and that’s good, which is the version where you’ve got the techno-utopians who act on their techno-utopian impulses in this place of California. They take acid, they write lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and then they also invent computers and the internet.
\n\nThere’s the version which is that the hippies invented the computers and the internet and that’s bad, where their thoughtless individualism leads to the neoliberal age in the form of the computers and the internet that we know. They treated artificial aesthetic gains as concrete gains and misunderstood their historical position and ended up screwing us all with their individualism. When I went through the history, I just don’t think either of those are right, and I end up not including the techno-utopians in the story at all.
\n\nThe Grateful Dead only come up once, and it’s them deciding not to play at Altamont after they watched people get fucked up in front of the Rolling Stones by the Hell’s Angels. Instead of that history, I put the global struggle for the system of production at the center of the history, and that’s an intentional choice. I’m saying the most important thing in the world at the time was not the Grateful Dead. Sorry, I don’t think this crowd is a Grateful Dead crowd, but when I talked about this in Palo Alto, some people are offended by that stuff.
\n\nThe Grateful Dead is not the most important thing in the world. The most important thing in the world was the Cold War, was U.S. imperialism, was the war in South Asia, was the struggle over the system of production, and so that’s where I was talking about computers. The personalization of the computer and the suburbanization of the computer is very much a reaction to the struggles over data processing infrastructure in the late ’60s and early ’70s, in which the new left, which is often conflated with this counterculture. We see that all the time in both versions of the story, the conflation of the new left and the counterculture, but the new left was trying to blow up every computer in the country, like very, very intentionally trying to blow up every computer in the country because they saw them, correctly, as war tools, and they were intervening on the side of North Vietnam in the war. That’s why they were attacking computers.
\n\nI think it’s interesting that when we talk about that era, a lot of people know the story about the Yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon. This is like an archetypical story about the foolish New Left and how goofy they were that the hippies wanted to levitate the Pentagon. We tell the story much less about when SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, bombed a bathroom in the Pentagon, taking out the computers that were doing air targeting over Vietnam for two weeks because they blew up a bathroom in the Pentagon and the water destroyed a computer. Who’s interested in telling the story of the Grateful Dead inventing the computer and being the same as the New Left or whatever, and who’s interested in not hearing these stories?
\n\nWhy do we tell the one about levitating the Pentagon, that didn’t happen, and not the one about bombing the Pentagon that did happen, that did matter? It strikes me as still as the most profound ethical act that any Americans took during the war. Yeah, I don’t tell that story. That story’s been told a lot of times, I’m definitely telling a very different story and a much less flattering one for the area.
\n\nKristen Sheets:
\n\nOne thing that I found really striking about your book is which stories you choose to tell, and the importance of understanding one’s historical position, which is how you just framed it. I found this a recurring theme in your book, especially early on when you discuss forces. You include an excerpt from a 1901 novel called “The Octopus” by a journalist named Frank Norris, in which a railroad baron, a Leland Stanford-esque character, claims he’s unable to control the railroad that he is in charge of because the railroad is controlled by a force greater than himself. These forces seem to surround everyone throughout this history that you tell. You tell the stories of so-called great men who submit to these forces, people like Herbert Hoover and Leland Stanford, as well as the stories of people who are committed to fighting these forces. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that decision to frame the book in this way.
\n\nMalcolm Harris:
\n\nThe history of Palo Alto is the history of this era of impersonal forces. It’s not a universal history of man, it’s a particular history, and there’s a reason that it gets embodied or represented in the railroad. The role that the railroad plays in the history of Palo Alto is very interesting. Obviously, Leland Stanford is the head of the railroad, and Frank Norris uses the railroad to represent these impersonal forces that seem unstoppable, that will crush anything and that transform the landscape. That really is how capitalism hits California, which, to that point, everyone else has had a very hard time colonizing.
\n\nIf you look at California before 1849, before the gold strike, Alta, California, was very poorly colonized. The Spanish had coastal missions, but ultimately, their presence there was very thin, as was Mexico’s after independence. The Russians looked at colonizing it, the British looked at colonizing it through the Northwest Territory, lots of people were looking at it, but this was the very edge of the world at that point. Very quickly, it gets transformed into the center of this new world, this world of impersonal forces in which the whole world is united under a single system of production and circulation for the first time. That’s planetary capitalism.
\n\nThe emergence of these unified impersonal forces that are structuring life around the world, and Mike Davis talks about how a market corner in Chicago could starve people in India now for the first time. That these impersonal forces that were structuring lives around the world really step up and become present in this way at the same time as California, and so they really fit and define Anglo-American Alta, California, at least. It’s great that we have stories like Frank Norris’s where he has these awesome sentences about the railroad representing these impersonal forces in that scene.
\n\nI love that scene. I read that scene last night in New York with the audiobook narrator playing the railroad baron, Shel Grimm, and me, myself playing the naïve socialist journalist, Presley. The scene has this socialist journalist confront, it’s this very surreal scene where he makes his way back to the office of the head of the railroad, the head capitalist, and knocks on his door and says, “Can I come in?” The railroad baron lets him in and says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah – hey, didn’t you write that poem about the socialist poem, the toilers in the last issue of that magazine? I like the painting better.”
\n\nHe finds that this railroad baron is familiar with the socialist poem and he’s totally thrown off guard and doesn’t know how to respond to this guy, and he wants him to stop what the railroad’s doing. He’s like, “Look, I can’t stop what the railroad’s doing. I can go broke if you want. Someone else can do it. The guy who harvests his wheat, he could burn his wheat if he wants, he could sell it at a loss, but you can’t change what happens, not personally, not just through this market system.” It’s this awareness of impersonal forces that really arises at this time, and that’s because they really are arising globally at the time, and we still live in that same world. That’s the beginning of this epoch that we still live in now.
\n\nKristen Sheets:
\n\nOne final question to wrap up before we open up to a more broad discussion. In Palo Alto, you talk about the people committed to fighting these forces as well. I’m curious which histories you think in particular workers in today’s Palo Alto should be looking to for inspiration.
\n\nMalcolm Harris:
\n\nThere’s a lot. When I started this history, I knew I would be talking about the ’60s a little bit. I probably knew I was going to be talking about the ’30s and farm worker struggles in the orchards, because people will tell you, “Palo Alto used to be apricot orchards. All this area used to be really bucolic.” They don’t tell you that they were cartels financed by the incipient financial industry controlled by what was going to become Bank of America. They were high-tech orchards based on the same mode of production. It’s important to remember what the actual history is there, but I didn’t know that it goes back even further from the beginning of the instantiation of this place that you have anti-colonial rebels in particular who make a home in Palo Alto, just like when you start this university, there’s no way to keep the tensions out of it.
\n\nThat’s because capital is always going to be reliant on labor, and there’s going to be struggle. Palo Alto (and Silicon Valley) is a center of capital, but that also has meant it’s been a center of labor struggle. I’ve tracked that whole history all the way through, and I think the ’60s are particularly useful, as well as the ’70s and the early microchip industry, because it was really tough for people at the time. I think there’s a lot to learn from the rough history of trying to do labor organizing in Silicon Valley.
\n\nWe have a bad tendency of assuming that people in the past didn’t know what they were doing too often. It really is these larger historical forces, these impersonal forces that are structuring their choices. When you look at workers trying to unionize the early Atari lines, the production lines at early Atari as a company, when the pre-Apple Silicon Valley starts, and they just shut down the factory and moved it abroad. They did it twice, and then the third one stopped their election because they realized that they were stuck. It wasn’t because they were stupid, it wasn’t because they were cowardly, it’s because they were up against a really tough historical situation. The same thing happened with Fairchild Semiconductor workers. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a best-selling American historian, she wrote “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of America” (full PDF here), but I didn’t know that she was a line worker at Fairchild Semiconductor in Silicon Valley, organizing on the line, until I was reading through this history.
\n\nShe tells these amazing stories of Indigenous workers in the Bay Area organizing in solidarity with Fairchild workers at their plant in Shiprock, Arizona, at the Navajo reservation, and doing a sympathy demonstration at the Fairchild headquarters in Silicon Valley. They get met with rows of snipers on the roof. They were planning on walking in, going inside, and trying to get line workers, many of whom were Indigenous in the Bay Area, to walk out, and they’re met instead with lines of police snipers. That’s what people would face down, and they faced down that at the waterfront in San Francisco in the ’40s. You look through these histories of the people who’ve risked their lives, pushed very clearly to points where they’re forced to risk their lives just to try to organize, and still lost. The idea that we can improve on what they did without similar risks or similar levels of organizing and similar struggle is hard to square with the history.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/03/22/issue-3/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/03/22/issue-3/", "title": "Blowing the Whistle on TikTok Content Moderation", "date_published": "2023-03-22T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2023-03-22T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Today, a content moderator completes their careful analysis of how TikTok misleads workers and the public about its overseas data storage and individual user tracking. This is not about a specific country – “I do not endorse the campaign by the US government to pathologize China” – but about protecting people wherever they are.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today, a content moderator completes their careful analysis of how TikTok misleads workers and the public about its overseas data storage and individual user tracking. This is not about a specific country – “I do not endorse the campaign by the US government to pathologize China” – but about protecting people wherever they are.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nby a TikTok content moderator
\n\nI’m from a part of the US where there’s not much organizing, or much to keep people there. But, through getting involved in elections as a teenager, I bumped into elder labor organizers and learned about solidarity – which I learned all over again when the pandemic began and people started helping each other with food and basic necessities.
\n\nDoing content moderation started off just like any other number of jobs, a way to get by. I found a job at Webhelp, a company that does content moderation for ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. And I thought to myself, I’m going to be moderating, how bad is going to be? I was also attracted to the slightly better pay, benefits, breaks, and beliefs about making a difference in the world by taking down harmful content. But then I started to notice a fair number of things.
\n\nWorking in software is incredibly strange. Content a person creates to express themselves through a screen may not be what it seems. The same goes for the companies representing their policies and practices to the public.
\n\nI was under the impression that although ByteDance was a Chinese company, it kept its American operations separate. I learned almost immediately that this was incorrect. From the beginning, the training system we used - elearning.kondou.cn - was entirely in Chinese and hosted on a Chinese domain. So too, were other systems. TCS, a ByteDance browser that’s used to moderate videos - and Lark (ByteDance’s equivalent of Microsoft Teams), are based in China and have their data stored there, contrary to what has been told to the public. Lark functions as a chat program almost identical to Microsoft Teams in its layout and functionality, except ByteDance has the ability to moderate every user and chat done on it directly.
\n\nMany policies and many trainings directly affect my content moderation role. I learned through my trainer and other members of management, that all communications on new policies - of which, there is approximately 120 – apparently come directly from ByteDance in China. According to those inside the company, ByteDance establish these new policies and tell us how to moderate current world news and events. These policies can include things ranging from abortion controversies to the Paul Pelosi attacks to just controversial TikTok trends like subway surfing.
\n\nPerhaps most disturbing for me, though, was that I saw ByteDance also has access to location data. The videos I was moderating would have location data visible by region. I would therefore know as I was moderating a video in what region that video was taken. It was upsetting to think that if they could tell me the region where it was taken, that they might also be able to pinpoint more specifically the individual’s location, especially if there were identifying landmarks in the video. All of this was potentially available not just to me, but to Webhelp and ByteDance.
\n\nIt might be my attention to detail and thousands upon thousands of repetive tasks each day that makes me hyper aware about discrepancies in the company where I work. What made me decide to blow the whistle on all of this was observing inconsistencies in the guidelines for how we moderate versus the company narratives for the public. This is something the public deserves to know. If a job requires you to hide something unethical to maintain people’s livings, then that job just shouldn’t exist.
\n\nNonetheless, I worry about what will happen to all the content moderators currently employed by Webhelp. There are a lot of people who I know personally who have also been down on their luck and took this job for the benefits that they were promised. They deserve what was promised to them. They also deserve to be able to work in a job they can be proud of – and one that does not ask them to engage in unethical behaviour.
\n\nAs a principle, I am firmly against mass surveillance by software companies. The issues here are not unique to TikTok, but are prevalent among all mainstream social media companies - Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. I believe mass surveillance should come to an end, and that these sites need to undergo massive revisions to become nonhierarchical and decentralized.
\n\nAlso, I want to clarify that I do not endorse the campaign by the US government to pathologize China. They have an approach of “It’s okay if we do mass surveillance, but not you,” which is fundamentally wrong. Mass surveillance and data collection by megacorporations and governments is highly unethical, regardless of who does it - if I were moderating for a different tech company, I would likely have become a whistleblower as well. It just so happened that I ended up moderating for TikTok.
\n\nI appreciate everyone I’ve talked with who supported my efforts doing safe and effective whistleblowing, which I believe is part of a larger collective effort to protect our rights as workers and human beings.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/03/07/issue-2/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/03/07/issue-2/", "title": "Layoffs? Come to Italy, We'll Teach You How to Fight", "date_published": "2023-03-07T00:00:00-08:00", "date_modified": "2023-03-07T00:00:00-08:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Today we hear from Laura, an Italian worker at a factory producing coffee machines, and part of a union that won a 100-day battle against relocation. Recently, Laura and fellow workers made headlines with a invitation: “To the workers of Facebook and Twitter being laid off, come to Gaggio Montano, we can teach you how to form a union like ours.” This story is printed in English and Italian.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today we hear from Laura, an Italian worker at a factory producing coffee machines, and part of a union that won a 100-day battle against relocation. Recently, Laura and fellow workers made headlines with a invitation: “To the workers of Facebook and Twitter being laid off, come to Gaggio Montano, we can teach you how to form a union like ours.” This story is printed in English and Italian.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA conversation with Laura, a worker at SaGa Coffee Factory
\n\nGaggio Montano, a town of 5,000 inhabitants near Bologna, Italy is 10,000 kilometers from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The distance is not only physical but also cultural and social: life in the small, quiet Italian town could not be more different from large tech company campuses. Yet this distance did not stop the women workers of SaGa Coffee, a company that produces Italy’s best-known coffee machines under the Saeco and Gaggia brands, from sending a message to Facebook workers.
\n\nIn the months since SaGa Coffee workers’ statements, many American software companies have seen mass layoffs – without much opposition from employees. Meanwhile, unionized SaGa workers won a 100-day battle preventing the relocation of the plant by the Evoca Group, SaGa’s owner. Their protest centered around a permanent garrison on factory grounds to prevent management from taking away the machinery. In a victory speech, SaGa workers said: \n“Come, we’ll teach you how to fight. Don’t be passive in front of layoffs. Form a union like the FIOM, and if you don’t know how, we can teach you.” (FIOM is the main Italian union for metal workers, which, for various reasons, also includes most IT workers.)
\n\nGiven the unusual offer of dialogue, we as members of TWC Italy decided to interview Laura, a SaGa Coffee employee and union representative. We want to tell the story of these workers to the U.S. public and find out where the idea of reaching out to employees of big tech companies came from.
\n\nThe spark that started the dispute was the sudden news that ownership was planning to dismantle the plant. If you had not realized in time, the corporate owner probably would have notified you of the closure at the last possible moment. How did your consideration of the company and the employer change?
\n\nWe, six months earlier, had come to an agreement with the company: we had found 50 volunteers who would come out with good severance pay so that the plant and the work would still continue. However, at some point one of our colleagues intercepted an email saying that by Thursday evening the plant had to be emptied. There, I decided to contact my union contact: we immediately held an assembly to understand and to explain to the workers what was happening. We decided to block the factory exit.
\n\nThe relationship between the union and HR had always been very good: we had discussions, we got along, we always found a solution, and they recognized me as a union representative, so when there was a problem they would call me, we would try to solve it, and so it was really a cold shower for us. In a conflict with a company where the relationship is already bad it’s different, but in our case the relationship was good until the day before.
\n\nWhat was it like, on a psychological and personal level, to experience this change?
\n\nAt first I was angry because I’ve been working at Saeco since ‘96. I started working at the company when I was basically still a child. It angered me because they took away our brand, because Saeco was born here in Gaggio and we grew the brand with our work.
\n\nThen there was the disappointment towards these corporations, towards these big giants that don’t look at people. To them you are just a number. They only do things in their own interest, and that creates a distance.
\n\nLiving In the mountains and in a small town helped keep the community strong. The union presence also played a key role in managing the dispute. Did you, as a union delegate, witness a change in your colleagues and the whole community’s relationship with the union?
\n\nBefore the dispute, inside the plant we had our long-standing members, about 50-60 people out of 220, mainly FIOM members. The moment the picket started, our membership grew dramatically: basically everyone signed up.
\n\nThe community has also been very supportive: everyone, from neighbors, to neighboring businesses, to restaurants, stores, factories in Bologna, Ferrara, Imola and Florence, everyone came to bring their solidarity, verbally or even financially. Sometimes some people showed up with a cake to share at the picket. We really felt the warmth of the whole mountain.
\n\nWe could not have done what we did and achieved what we achieved with our dispute if there had not been a strong union. The strength, tenacity, and perseverance that the FIOM showed is unfortunately lacking in other unions in Italy.
\n\nI take as an example the fact that politicians and institutions came to us at the picket. This has never happened in the area. We didn’t have to go to them but they came to us, because anyway the picket is there, that’s where the struggle was. In my opinion the FIOM made a difference.
\n\nThe workers in the first place, but also people outside, even today one year later they all say, “It’s a good thing that the union is there, it’s a good thing that anyway you guys had the strength to fight for 100 days.”
\n\nIs your appeal to Facebook workers a call to break down the geographic, cultural, and skills boundaries and distances that exist between workers? Did the mass overnight layoff at Facebook, which is a multinational corporation, remind you of your dispute? Where did the idea of addressing such a seemingly distant reality come from?
\n\nWhat I wanted to say to the Facebook workers with my message is to start thinking not only about themselves. They need to start thinking beyond the idea that “I don’t want a union because I can manage just fine on my own.” It doesn’t work that way. Unfortunately, without a union, without someone to protect the workers, it then happens unfortunately like what happened for example at Twitter, where overnight you get fired and no one can give you any hope. I thought that if they had a union like the FIOM, things would have been different.
\n\nWhen I made that statement, I didn’t think I would make such a fuss. It came out of me spontaneously, without thinking about it too much.
\n\nI know that programmers, but also our office employees for instance, don’t join because they are afraid of exposing themselves. They think that joining a union makes them more vulnerable targets and they are afraid. I don’t think so, if the union is strong. To have a card, to have a union, is to protect yourself, is to protect your job, is to protect a national contract [an Italian form of collective bargaining that groups workers by category], is to protect your children’s future.
\n\nI can see myself in their situation: the kind of violence is the same. I don’t know if these workers are protected by having a union behind them. I don’t know if they fought for their jobs or are fighting now after the fact. If I were them, I would expose myself more, look for connections to go on television, make announcements, make a fuss.
\n\nIf you do nothing, you get nothing.
\n\n\n\nGaggio Montano, un paese di 5.000 abitanti vicino Bologna, dista 10.000 chilometri dalla sede centrale di Facebook a Menlo Park, in California. La distanza non è solo fisica, ma anche culturale e sociale: la vita nella piccola e tranquilla cittadina italiana non potrebbe essere più diversa dai campus delle grandi aziende tecnologiche. Eppure questa distanza non ha impedito alle lavoratrici di SaGa Coffee, azienda che produce le più note macchine da caffè italiane con i marchi Saeco e Gaggia, di inviare un messaggio ai lavoratori di Facebook.
\n\nNei mesi successivi alle dichiarazioni delle lavoratrici della SaGa Coffee, molte aziende americane di software hanno visto licenziamenti di massa, senza molta opposizione da parte dei dipendenti. Nel frattempo, i lavoratori sindacalizzati di SaGa hanno vinto una battaglia di 100 giorni per impedire il trasferimento dello stabilimento da parte del Gruppo Evoca, proprietario di SaGa. La loro protesta si è incentrata su un presidio permanente all’interno della fabbrica per impedire alla direzione di portare via i macchinari. In un discorso di vittoria, i lavoratori della SaGa hanno detto:\n“Venite, vi insegneremo a lottare. Non siate passivi di fronte ai licenziamenti. Formate un sindacato come la FIOM, e se non lo sapete fare, ve lo insegniamo noi”.
\n\nVista l’insolita offerta di dialogo, noi di TWC Italia abbiamo deciso di intervistare Laura, dipendente di SaGa Coffee e rappresentante sindacale. Vogliamo raccontare la storia di questi lavoratori al pubblico americano e scoprire da dove nasce l’idea di rivolgersi ai dipendenti delle grandi aziende tecnologiche.
\n\nLa scintilla che ha dato il via alla vertenza è stata l’improvvisa notizia che la proprietà aveva intenzione di smantellare lo stabilimento. Se non ve ne foste accorti voi, probabilmente la multinazionale vi avrebbe comunicato la chiusura nell’ultimo momento utile. Come è cambiata la tua considerazione dell’azienda e del datore di lavoro?
\n\nNoi sei mesi prima avevamo trovato un accordo con l’azienda: avevamo trovato 50 volontari che sarebbero usciti con delle buone uscite per far sì che comunque lo stabilimento e il lavoro continuasse. Tuttavia ad un certo punto un nostro collega ha intercettato un e-mail dicendo che entro il giovedì sera andava svuotato lo stabilimento. Lì ho deciso di contattare il mio funzionario sindacale: abbiamo fatto subito un’assemblea per capire e per spiegare ai lavoratori cosa stesse accadendo. Abbiamo deciso di bloccare permanentemente l’uscita della fabbrica.
\n\nIl rapporto tra sindacato e HR era sempre stato ottimo: avevamo confronti, andavamo d’accordo, trovavamo sempre una soluzione e mi riconoscevano come delegata, quindi quando c’era un problema mi chiamavano, cercavamo di risolverlo e quindi\nè stata proprio una doccia fredda. In un conflitto con un’azienda in cui i rapporto sono già pessimi è diverso ma nel nostro caso i rapporti erano buoni fino al giorno prima.
\n\nCom’è stato, a livello psicologico e personale, vivere questo cambiamento?
\n\nAll’inizio ha provocato tanta rabbia, almeno da parte mia, perché lavoro in Saeco dal ‘96: ho iniziato a lavorare in azienda quando ero praticamente ancora una bimba. Mi ha fatto rabbia perché hanno portato via il nostro marchio, perché la Saeco è nata qua a Gaggio e il marchio l’abbiamo fatto crescere noi, col nostro lavoro.
\n\nPoi c’è stata la delusione verso queste multinazionali, di questi grandi colossi che non guardano le persone. Per loro tu sei solo un numero. Loro fanno solo il proprio interesse e questo crea una grande distanza.
\n\nVivere In montagna e in un paese piccolo ha aiutato a mantenere salda la comunità. Anche la presenza sindacale ha avuto un ruolo fondamentale nella gestione della vertenza. Tu, da delegata sindacale, hai avvertito un cambiamento delle tue colleghe e della comunità intera nel rapporto con il sindacato?
\n\nPrima della vertenza, dentro allo stabilimento avevamo i nostri tesserati storici, circa 50-60 persone su 220, principalmente membri FIOM. Nel momento in cui abbiamo iniziato a\ncostruire il presidio, abbiamo molte ricevuto molte più iscrizioni: praticamente tutti hanno fatto la tessera.
\n\nAnche la comunità è stata di grande supporto: tutti, dal vicino di casa, alle aziende limitrofe, ai ristoranti, alla bottega, a tante fabbriche di Bologna, Ferrara, Imola e Firenze, tutti sono venuti a portare la loro solidarità, sia con una parola che anche economicamente. A volte alcune persone si sono presentate con un dolce da condividere al presidio. Abbiamo proprio sentire il calore di tutta la montagna.
\n\nNon avremmo potuto fare quello che abbiamo fatto e ottenere quello che abbiamo ottenuto con la nostra vertenza se non ci fosse stato un sindacato forte. La forza, la tenacia e la costanza che ha mostrato la FIOM purtroppo manca negli altri sindacati.
\n\nPorto ad esempio il fatto che i politici e le istituzioni sono venute da noi nel presidio: non è mai successo in zona. Non siamo dovuti andare noi da loro ma sono venuti loro da noi, perché comunque il presidio è lì, è stata lì la lotta. Secondo me in questo la FIOM ha fatto la differenza.
\n\nI lavoratori in primis, ma anche le persone fuori, anche oggi ad un anno di distanza dicono: “ma meno male che c’è il sindacato, meno male che comunque voi avete avuto la forza\ndi lottare per 100 giorni”.
\n\nIl vostro appello ai lavoratori di FB è una chiamata ad abbattere i confini e le distanze geografiche, culturali, di competenze che esistono tra lavoratori e lavoratrici? Il licenziamento di massa di FB, che è una multinazionale, da un giorno all’altro vi ha ricordato la vostra vertenza? Da dove è venuta l’idea di rivolgervi ad una realtà così apparentemente lontana?
\n\nQuello che volevo dire ai lavoratori di Facebook col mio messaggio è di iniziare a pensare non solo a sé stessi. Devono iniziare a pensare oltre il “non voglio un sindacato perché ce la faccio benissimo da solo”, perché non funziona così. Purtroppo, senza un sindacato, senza qualcuno che comunque tuteli il lavoratore, succede poi purtroppo come è successo ad esempio in Twitter, in cui dall’oggi al domani vieni licenziato e nessuno può darti qualche speranza. Ho pensato che se avessero avuto un sindacato come la FIOM, le cose sarebbero andate diversamente.
\n\nQuando ho fatto quella dichiarazione non pensavo che avrei fatto così clamore. Mi è uscito spontaneamente, senza pensarci troppo.
\n\nSo che i programmatori, ma io vedo anche i nostri impiegati, non si tesserano perché hanno paura di esporsi. Pensano che unirsi ad un sindacato li renda dei bersagli più vulnerabili e hanno paura. Io non penso sia così, se il sindacato è forte. Avere una tessera, avere un sindacato, è tutelare te stesso, è tutelare il tuo lavoro, è tutelare un contratto nazionale, è tutelare il futuro dei tuoi figli.
\n\nIn parte mi ci rivedo nella loro situazione: il tipo di violenza è lo stesso. Non so se questi lavoratori sono tutelati avendo un sindacato alle spalle. Non so se loro hanno lottato, per il posto di lavoro o stanno lottando adesso a cose fatte. Io, se fossi in loro, mi esporrei di più, cercherei degli agganci per andare in televisione, farei degli annunci, farei confusione.
\n\nSe non fai niente, non ottieni niente.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/02/28/issue-1/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2023/02/28/issue-1/", "title": "Who’s Cleaning Twitter?", "date_published": "2023-02-28T00:00:00-08:00", "date_modified": "2023-02-28T00:00:00-08:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Today we hear from Twitter’s former cleaners, a group of unionized workers who are wondering who replaced them. Dozens of workers rallied last month at Twitter offices in San Francisco and New York to demand their jobs back, and they called on allies for support. If you can provide any information about the new (scab) cleaning company that Twitter contracted to replace these workers, email us at twcnewsletter@protonmail.com.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today we hear from Twitter’s former cleaners, a group of unionized workers who are wondering who replaced them. Dozens of workers rallied last month at Twitter offices in San Francisco and New York to demand their jobs back, and they called on allies for support. If you can provide any information about the new (scab) cleaning company that Twitter contracted to replace these workers, email us at twcnewsletter@protonmail.com.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn behalf of the fired Twitter cleaners of 32BJ SEIU in NYC and SEIU Local 87 in San Francisco
\n\nTwitter is a mess lately.
\n\nIn San Francisco, Twitter’s office ran so low on supplies that employees brought their own toilet paper. False scarcity from missing toilet paper to janitorial staff job cuts create fear and division across the software industry and everything it touches. As tech companies laid off almost 80,000 workers last month, these conditions also reflect the tensions between executives and their workers.
\n\nSo, who’s cleaning Twitter these days? It’s not the unionized workers of 32BJ SEIU in NYC and SEIU Local 87 in San Francisco.
\n\n“Without this job and the union health benefits I would be thousands of dollars in debt from medical bills,” said Merita Gashi, a fired janitor, to a crowd in front of Twitter’s NYC office. “I know what it is like to work as a non-union cleaner. I can’t go back to that.”
\n\nMerita and her daughter Pajtesa shared their family’s experience after Merita and her coworkers lost their jobs as cleaners at Twitter. They were given notice by a single email through their supervisor near the end of their shift, informing them to finish, and not return to work. Merita is a single mother supporting 4 children and her elderly father. She worked to keep Twitter’s NYC offices safe and clean since 2015. But 2 weeks before Christmas, after almost 3 years on the frontlines of pandemic safety, she and her coworkers were fired.
\n\n“We work to support our families, we work to have healthcare – the same things as everyone else,” said Pajtesa. “Everybody – everybody – has to go to the doctor. How would anybody feel if this was their own family?”
\n\nBoth San Francisco and New York City mandate workplace protections for cleaning staff. Under New York’s Displaced Building Service Workers Protection Act, incoming cleaning contractors must retain cleaners employed by an outgoing contractor for a transition period to prevent workers from experiencing this type of abrupt displacement. If any professional cleaning is taking place currently in Twitter’s New York offices, the company would be in violation of the Act.
\n\nSo, fired cleaners demanding their union jobs back need info about the new cleaning company that Twitter contracted to replace them. Send tips to twcnewsletter@protonmail.com.
\n\n“If there is cleaning taking place in that building these workers have a right to that work,” said 32BJ SEIU Secretary-Treasurer John Santos. “We are going to make sure those rights – that unionized office cleaners in this state worked hard to secure – are honored. These workers put their lives on the line to keep workers and the public safe throughout the pandemic and are essential to the city’s economic recovery. These union members and their families now face extreme hardship.”
\n\nIn San Francisco, officials are investigating Elon Musk for repeated claims of worker mistreatment. “Elon Musk has had a long history of flouting labor laws,” San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said. “We’re going to be investigating what has happened here.”
\n\nWhile Musk began his reign at Twitter by firing nearly 50% of the company’s entire workforce, workers with the most to lose bore the brunt of typical corporate acquisition logic. Unlike Twitter’s engineers, janitors were not offered any severance package, said SEIU Local 87 union president Olga Miranda. “We’re out of a job and this is nothing more than an assault on working families that are represented by contracts,” she said. “We didn’t pick a fight with [Elon Musk]. He picked a fight with us.”
\n\nJulio Alvarado, another fired janitor, was told that he’d be replaced by robots. \n“We have [union] cleaners at Facebook, cleaners at Google, at Microsoft,” said 32BJ SEIU vice-president, Kevin Brown. “That’s why we’re here. To make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
\n\n“They did this three weeks before Christmas,” said Olga Miranda. “I think we were fired because we’re a union.” Twitter, along with many other tech companies, is cracking down on union activity, following a major upswing in tech labor organizing. In many tech offices, cleaners and cafeteria workers are some of the only unionized workers, but that has been changing in recent years as a wider range of tech workers join contractors and gig workers in solidarity for workers rights. To CEOs like Elon Musk, nothing is more threatening than his workers standing with each other against his efforts to divide them.
\n\nIn closing out her speech to the fired up community of supporters and workers, Juana Laura, another fired janitor, reminds us:
\n\n\n\n\n“Sabemos los derechos son los que nosotros contamos tenemos un unión que nos respalda políticos los medios que gracias a dios ellos están encargados de que todo Estados Unidos o el mundo entero sepan la manera en que estamos siendo desalojados de nuestros trabajo. Vamos a estar allá día y noche hasta que sean respetadas nuestras peticiones. En final, nuestra historia lo vamos a escribir nosotros, no ellos.”
\n\n“We know the rights that we can count on. We have the media that is backing us up politically. Thank god the media have made themselves responsible for letting the US and the rest of the world know that we are being let go from our jobs. We’ll fight every day and keep going day and night until they meet our demands. In the end, we are going to be the ones who are going to write our history, not them.”
\n
Thank you to TWC for amplifying this story, and for spreading the word to current and former Twitter coworkers and all people in software. Thank you especially to Raksha Muthukumar for showing up in NYC, talking with us, and compiling this story.
\n\nMarceline Donaldson, a long time women’s right and racial justice activist and former IBM worker we featured last year, is starting a new research project and looking for people interested in stewarding the effort together. The project is looking into Robert Bennett, the first Black PhD student at Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, and in the Cambridge area. It is and was an area fraught with extreme racism because those who did such studies were called on for consulting, etc. by the Intelligence Communities. There would not be another Black student in the department for another 20 years. At this stage, Marceline is looking for partners to conceptualize the project. It could take the form of a paper, a documentary, and/or a book. The project is a fascinating opportunity to look into the history of racism in Cambridge and in higher education. Please reach out to Marceline at bettina-network@comcast.net if you’d like to get involved!
\n\nCome learn about Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World. RSVP at http://bit.ly/twcpaloalto. Can’t wait? Can’t make the time? Watch the 2min book trailer or listen to this 45min interview.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/29/issue-19/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/29/issue-19/", "title": "It’s Not Science, Just Surveillance (and it's Under Your Desk)", "date_published": "2022-11-29T00:00:00-08:00", "date_modified": "2022-11-29T00:00:00-08:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Today we hear a story of swift collective action in the face of bad science. Last month, the Senior Vice Provost for Research at Northeastern University did worse than bad science; he installed heat sensors at groin level under the desks of graduate student workers, without their consent. So, the students, many of them PhD students in the Privacy and Cybersecurity Institute, organized to fight back. Within 24 hours the sensors, Northeastern removed the sensors. As similar interference creeps up at Carnegie Mellon University and other campuses worldwide, it’s a story worth sharing.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today we hear a story of swift collective action in the face of bad science. Last month, the Senior Vice Provost for Research at Northeastern University did worse than bad science; he installed heat sensors at groin level under the desks of graduate student workers, without their consent. So, the students, many of them PhD students in the Privacy and Cybersecurity Institute, organized to fight back. Within 24 hours the sensors, Northeastern removed the sensors. As similar interference creeps up at Carnegie Mellon University and other campuses worldwide, it’s a story worth sharing.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Oct. 6, Northeastern’s Senior Vice Provost David Luzzi had motion sensors installed under all of our desks in the Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC) at Northeastern University. ISEC contains workspaces for graduate student workers across Computer Science, Neuroscience, Engineering, and other disciplines, and is a highly desirable workspace on campus. The sensors were installed overnight and without our consent.
\n\nThe alleged reason for the sensors was to conduct a study on desk usage. Reader, we have assigned desks, and we use a key-card to get into the room, so, they already know how and when we use our desks. Most likely the sensors were installed as part of a coordinated effort to push us out of our existing work-space, or to make us share our desks with other students via a hotelling system, an en-vogue new cost-saving measure that’s terrible for research.
\n\nSo, we – Northeastern students and faculty – wrote a letter to David and to Northeastern’s President Joseph E. Aoun requesting the sensors be removed, noting:
\nThe letter was widely signed, and, I think, ignored by David. He did an impromptu “listening session” with the 6th floor Khoury College of Computer Sciences students, in which he said something about how we as students “you must trust the university since you trust them to give you a degree.”
\n\nObviously, we contest the use of the word “give.”
\n\nAnyway, the 6th floor ISEC students removed all the sensors and stuck them on the kitchen table. You can find a PDF spec for the sensors here.
\n\nThen a few days later, with less than 72 hours warning, David scheduled another “listening session” at 9am, and only told the professors. So, we disseminated flyers to impacted graduate students.
\n\n\n\nIn the listening session, David claimed that the devices are not subject to IRB because they don’t sense humans in particular - they sense any heat source. Implying that there are, I don’t know, rats and kangaroos walking around the 6th floor of ISEC?
\n\nSubsequently, the sensors found a new home, as a public art piece on the floor of the ISEC lobby. In the spirit of ISEC, this is an interdisciplinary work, with contributions from surveilled graduate students in a myriad of departments.
\n\n\n\nBelow is a screenshot of my email to David. I won’t include his response, but it suffices to say, it was entirely dismissive and in bad faith.
\n\n\n\nAnother gem: in the meeting, when asked why he didn’t seek IRB approval, David said, “we are not doing any science here.” Leading to this gem on the 6th floor ISEC window, below:
\n\n\n\nI’ve created a repository to hold relevant PDFs & other documents. I’ve uploaded a PDF of the widely-circulated flier here, and meeting notes another student recorded from the “listening session” with David, here.
\n\nSome highlights from the notes:
\nAs is often the case, some conversation about this whole mess can be found on Reddit, here.
\n\nBut in the final round, we won. Luzzi wrote to concede:
\n\n\n\nNevertheless, I am confident they will make more attempts to surveil us in other ways, and/or justify taking our research space from us. And they may win. More broadly, I’ve been alerted that similar crap is happening at Carnegie Mellon University, another engineering-heavy school – which has installed networked microphones in the offices, hallways and conference rooms of its newest building (read David Gray Widder’s account of this here!). Non-consensual surveillance is never OK and must be fought, whenever and wherever it happens.
\n\nThis kind of nonsense is precisely why we, graduate students of Northeastern, need a union. If you are a graduate student worker at Northeastern University and want to join the majority in forming a union, email me at maxvh@hey.com. I’ve got union cards in my backpack and will happily oblige.
\n\nThank you to TWC for amplifying our organizing.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/15/issue-18/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/15/issue-18/", "title": "Junkware is Elder Abuse and a Menace to Society", "date_published": "2022-11-15T00:00:00-08:00", "date_modified": "2022-11-15T00:00:00-08:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "The wave of tech workforce layoffs and radicalization continues, including thousands of Twitter content moderation workers and more workers last night who talked back to the boss. So today, we’re re-sharing this Layoff Guide for Twitter Workers, broadly applicable to all workers in and around tech. But to put things in perspective, we’re featuring a story by lifelong software wrangler Danilo Campos about fighting junkware to make computers functional for our elders.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "The wave of tech workforce layoffs and radicalization continues, including thousands of Twitter content moderation workers and more workers last night who talked back to the boss. So today, we’re re-sharing this Layoff Guide for Twitter Workers, broadly applicable to all workers in and around tech. But to put things in perspective, we’re featuring a story by lifelong software wrangler Danilo Campos about fighting junkware to make computers functional for our elders.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI’ve been building and shipping software since I was 19 years old, when I learned to code in Second Life. It was an accident – I was just poking around. Still, that got me on the path a career I was so excited about. What I never counted on was the values mismatch I’d find once I arrived. It’s not always easy to answer whether my industry is actually doing good for the world.
\n\nAs a consequence, I volunteer helping seniors with their technology issues. A lifetime with everything from dialup modems and selling flip phones, to modern stuff like shipping mobile apps and hacking development boards, means it’s hard for people to stump me with a tech problem. It’s an easy way to give back to my community while learning more about the gaps between what we build and what people actually need. It’s also a small way to atone for the many sins of this business.
\n\nRecently, one of my regulars came in with a Lenovo laptop. It still had a retail sticker; I imagine she bought it used, but she still paid over $500. She was baffled:
\n\n\n\n\n“I bought this so recently, how is it already so slow?”
\n
“Slow” is a pretty subjective complaint, but I make it a policy to take my clients at their word. It’s often hard for them to work up the will to blame their computer and not themselves.
\n\nSo I fired up the task manager to get a look at things. She’s right: her CPU capacity was saturated at regular intervals. This laptop was barely usable. Digging into the list of processes, there was all kinds of Lenovo branded crapware running in the background. A quick Google search confirms this is a common issue on these machines. I try to launch Lenovo’s frontend for all of this junk…
\n\nAnd it gets so much worse. All this hideous Lenovo branding in an unnecessary, animated splash screen the computer can barely render, leading to a poorly designed app of zero value to my client. As I was digging around I realized what’s going on: Lenovo wants surveillance turf. They want a “relationship” with the customer that’s a thinly veiled back door into their machine. How often does the trackpad really need a firmware update?
\n\nI asked my client for consent to remove it. I know a lot about the tech, and I’d worked with this person before, but this is still their property, their space, their world. I don’t want to do anything surprising or high handed. That’s the whole cultural issue I’m fighting through this volunteer work in the first place.
\n\nThe challenge is that with this garbage program running in the foreground, the whole machine has truly ground to a halt. It took me five minutes (!) of the limited time in our appointment even to access the Add/Remove Programs window, so slow was this computer running.
\n\nAfter explaining the situation to the client, I purged everything related to this Lenovo branded surveillance garbage from the machine, just as we’re running out of time. Instantly: it was usable again. The CPU graph cooled down, the UI became reliably responsive again.
\n\nThis technology is non-negotiable, at this point, even for seniors. They need it to keep in touch with people, to participate in cultural and civic life. These companies are just contaminating the every day experience of using them with incompetently-built surveillance crapware. My client paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of using a machine that had been sabotaged by the greed and incompetence of its manufacturer, and they had no recourse at all.
\n\nHow are they supposed to figure this out? With what mental models?
\n\nIt’s funny, working in the industry, how often you can smell some weasel’s little OKR in the inexplicable frustrations of someone who just wants to use their laptop, phone, tablet… but they’re derailed by a popup, unnecessary login or other waste of time. These malignant incentives are an affliction amplified across the scale of any successful technology now.
\n\nMaybe the most frustrating thing for me is how often I’m working with people who are apologetic and unsure because of these derailments. They think it’s their fault! They think they’re not capable of doing and learning on their own because they keep getting fucked with by this user-hostile crap at every turn.
\n\nI spend a lot of time explaining the same thing over and over again:
\n\n\n\n“It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re completely capable of making sense of this machine. It’s just that some asshole got a bonus for trying to confuse you so a little graph would go up.”
\n
A Twitter thread based on this story went pretty viral, and it was clear from others that a version of this conversation happens far too often. So many of us are working hard to restore a sense of confidence and agency to people who are thrown off track by code designed to meet someone else’s goals.
\n\nFor me, it’s a reminder that we have so much more to do in our work to remind this business that there are real human beings at the other ends of our CI pipelines and deploy scripts. The decisions we make, the code we agree to build, lands in the laps of people just trying to get things done, sometimes with limited understanding of their tools.
\n\nThat’s a serious burden of responsibility. Crappy algorithms means scalable exploitation. We can’t fix it all overnight, but we can look for our own points of leverage. Technology used to make me excited. I want us all to have the feeling that these tools are working in our interests, amplifying our abilities.
\n\nThank you to TWC for running this story. Talk with your neighbors, coworkers, youth, and elders.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/08/issue-17/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/08/issue-17/", "title": "Critiquing Surveillance in San Diego with a Flying Photo Lab", "date_published": "2022-11-08T00:00:00-08:00", "date_modified": "2022-11-08T00:00:00-08:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Welcome back to our regular newsletter. Today we hear from working artists beck and Katie, who are launching Floating Photo Studios over San Diego’s Hilltop Community Park over the course of four weekends. This project creates an environment for talking through and learning about the interrelated issues of surveillance, photography, power, and place. Park goers are invited to fly a kite with a camera, take pictures from the sky, and print them as postcards. On the last day of the project, the postcards are dispersed to everyone who has opted in to participate.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Welcome back to our regular newsletter. Today we hear from working artists beck and Katie, who are launching Floating Photo Studios over San Diego’s Hilltop Community Park over the course of four weekends. This project creates an environment for talking through and learning about the interrelated issues of surveillance, photography, power, and place. Park goers are invited to fly a kite with a camera, take pictures from the sky, and print them as postcards. On the last day of the project, the postcards are dispersed to everyone who has opted in to participate.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Katie and beck AKA @floating_photo_studios
\n\n“Have any of you been to the Horizon before?”
\n\nFor the past six years, we have been collaborating on art projects interrogating issues of photography, power, and place. We performed as a tour guide company, Horizon Tours, made drawings on road trips, and measured the horizon with string.
\n\n\n\nSo of course when I (beck), noticed a camera installed in a streetlight above my head as I waited for the bus near University of California, San Diego, I immediately texted Katie. We both thought it was weird and way creepy. We mused about performing for these cameras and discovered the Surveillance Camera Players, a group who performed plays such as Waiting for Godot for New York City’s surveillance cameras. While researching the issue in San Diego, I came across a map in the San Diego Union-Tribune of all of the active cameras in the city, confirming that I was indeed regularly commuting under the gaze of several different ones. I found a town hall event sponsored by the TRUST Coalition. I started following the issue and joined wherever I could.
\n\n\n\nLater that year, we were commissioned by the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture’s Park Social initiative to design a temporary, site-specific public art work in a park within council district 5, which includes northeast San Diego and the communities of Rancho Peñasquitos, Scripps Miramar Ranch, Rancho Bernardo, San Pascual, and others. While researching the district, we came across a number of aerial surveys of the area that had been used as a part of real estate development and planning. This top-down view reminded us of one of our favorite essays, Free Fall: Notes on Verticality, by Hito Steyerl. In the essay, she describes how the shift to satellite imaging has erased the horizon as the organizing principle of looking at land: “One of the symptoms of this transformation is the growing importance of aerial views: overviews, Google Map views, satellite views. We are growing increasingly accustomed to what used to be called a God’s-eye view.” Steyerl goes on to discuss how the aerial perspective risks exacerbating militant uses of imaging and visual languages of domination. However, she suggests, there may be something special to this visual paradigm if we can attune to the complexity and distortion it affords—an instability that “promises no community, but a shifting formation.”
\n\n\n\nWhen we visited Hilltop Community Park in Rancho Peñasquitos, it was love at first sight. Located adjacent to Black Mountain Open Space Park, Hilltop had stunning 360 views of the surrounding community and a vast, flat, treeless circular field. This makes the park a favorite for flying kites. This got us thinking: what if we could fly cameras on the kites as an entrypoint to thinking through these interrelated issues of power and photography?
\n\n\n\nFloating Photo Studios (FPS) is a community photo lab popping up over the course of four weekends at Hilltop Community Park. Park goers are invited to fly a kite with a camera, take pictures from the sky, and print them as postcards. They can keep a postcard for themselves, and also offer one to a growing community aerial archive. On the last day of the project, the postcards are dispersed to everyone who has opted in to participate.
\n\n\n\nFlying a kite is a physical activity that requires constant collaboration with the pull and push of the wind, maintaining gentle tension on the string to keep the kite afloat. It can be awkward, silly, and difficult. Language of group play and coordination spreads between us: “Alright, who wants to launch? And who can steer the kite line? Who wants to hold the camera? And for whom is this image we’re making?” Care and attention is required to fly kites at Hilltop, and we think about what it would be like if our imaging technologies required the same kind of public engagement to operate.
\n\n\n\nFPS aims to model an alternative that is joyful, expressive, collaborative, and fun, while asking what kind of world is necessary to practice these loving modes of observation?
\n\nWe are delighted by the imperfections of the images produced by our kite-cameras. As they are used, they fly high in the sky and tumble low to the field, dragged along the surface collecting grass and dirt. The lens carries the traces of these encounters, and occasionally bits of the earth block the visibility of the land below. The scale of a piece of grass becomes equal to a human standing nearby.
\n\nWe pick the camera back up and anchor it to another kite. As we slow down the assumed automation of photography, we look around the park and see the group that made this joy possible. We see members of the San Diego Kite Club pointing and looking at the sky. We see members of the Tech Workers Coalition sitting on the grass and dispersing zines for organizing against surveillance in San Diego. We see our loved ones writing messages on a scroll of blue paper to be seen from the clouds.
\n\n\n\nThere were more images made that will never be shared here, or anywhere. A family photograph. A very cute dog close-up. The authors of these images did not want them to be shared. As artists, we felt a small internal pang—such a beautiful photo! But the beauty of it does not necessitate its sharing, and the fact of its existence doesn’t mean it should be automatically made available to all. These types of agreements are central to the project and the way we navigate consent and sharing.
\n\nWe hope to use this project to engage the PQ community in reflection about how images of themselves and their community are related to systems of power in our city. On the back of the postcards are reflective questions for participants who want to go a little deeper. One asks: “What does ‘loving observation’ look like for you?”. The response: “Nothing about us without us.”
\n\nOur Floating Photo Studios will fly for its final weekend at Hilltop Community Park on 11am to 2pm on Sunday, November 13, 2022. You can follow our archive on Instagram at @floating_photo_studios. Thank you to Tamara, Erik, and Danny for the conversation that led to this narrative.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/03/issue-16/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/11/03/issue-16/", "title": "A Layoff Guide for Twitter Workers", "date_published": "2022-11-03T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-11-03T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Tomorrow, Twitter management will reportedly fire thousands of workers. So, today, a collective of Twitter workers are sharing tips on how to prepare.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Tomorrow, Twitter management will reportedly fire thousands of workers. So, today, a collective of Twitter workers are sharing tips on how to prepare.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHello fellow Tweeps,
\n\nShort version:
\n\nA few realized there were a lot of great tips floating around and we wanted to put them all in one place. We created a published version so these tips could reach Tweeps who were feeling isolated and support one another. If you want to connect with us, email us via collectiveactionintech@protonmail.com.
\n\nLong version:
\n\nThe next few weeks will continue to be difficult. We will see many of our colleagues laid off and some may be maliciously “terminated for cause.” Across Twitter, our coworkers are sharing what we’ve learned about layoffs and how we can get through this as safely as possible. We’ve collected the best advice from alums offering mutual aid and our many thoughtful colleagues who continue to face the stark reality that we might not have jobs tomorrow.
\n\nMany of us feel isolated and alone right now. It can mean a lot to get a DM from someone you work with that demonstrates we’re here for each other. Here’s how we suggest you reach out safely:
\n\nTweeps across the company have been pulled into new projects and asked to work 24/7 to deliver in unreasonable time frames. These requests are often coupled with the empty promise that it might save your team from the layoffs as a manipulation tactic.
\nSo much is out of your control right now but what happens to your data isn’t. It can be extremely helpful to proactively save resources and data belonging to you just in case your access is suddenly revoked.
\n\nDownload all payslips by going to “view profile” in Workday (by clicking on your face in the top right hand corner). Most information can be downloaded in a single PDF from the link at the top of the blue sidebar, just next to your employee photo.\nGo to the My Compensation and Metric Letters tab to download all pdfs. \nGo to the Performance Review tab, click “create new pdf” then “notify me later” for each doc. The PDF links will appear in the table after a minute or so, then you can download them all.
\n\nYour benefits are part of your compensation and you’ve earned them. Although these are owed to you, it is not guaranteed that you will be reimbursed. Keep this in mind if you spend your benefit stipends. Use your benefits if you still can (or while they still exist), at your own risk. You can find your full list of benefits at go/benefits. File all pending expense reports in Concur and immediately ask your manager to approve.
\n\nThe new leadership has dramatically changed the expectations of workload across the organization. It is now expected that teams work evenings and weekends to ship products. Work progress is being tracked by the hour in spreadsheets to build precedent for terminating workers “for cause” to avoid paying severance. Here is what you can do now to ensure you’re best suited to defend and refute an unjust termination:
\nFrom your friends and coworkers, we sincerely wish you remember that you’ve done great work. No matter how long you’ve worked at this company, what role you hold, what projects you’ve worked on, you have a bright future ahead. The folks who wrote this resource might not be here tomorrow and you might not be here tomorrow but together we built the most impactful social media platform in history. No one can take that away from you. Not even the person who spent $44 billion to own and control your great work.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/10/13/issue-15/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/10/13/issue-15/", "title": "Practical Solidarity: Action for Next Week’s Teach-In ", "date_published": "2022-10-13T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-10-13T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Next week is the start of our first intergenerational teach-in on tech, labor, and organizing. We have 32 presenters hosting 13 workshops and roundtables over three days, Oct. 19–21. See the final schedule, register, and donate to our event accessibility fund at twcteachin.org.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Next week is the start of our first intergenerational teach-in on tech, labor, and organizing. We have 32 presenters hosting 13 workshops and roundtables over three days, Oct. 19–21. See the final schedule, register, and donate to our event accessibility fund at twcteachin.org.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt’s been a year in the making, with many decades of history before it, but our first teach-in starts next week. Today’s newsletter includes a few updates we want to share with you.
\n\nTo imagine better futures, we look to history as a teacher. We as a collective believe that workers in tech are and have always been historical actors, but learning from history in tech – even the past few years – is challenging. We also believe history shows that reforms have never been enough to unite workers across race and class and create a world where we can live with joy and self-determination. So, in this teach-in, we will celebrate our elders, gather wisdom from history, and use it to guide our future organizing.
\n\nWe have a mix of 13 workshops and roundtables with 32 presenters, featuring many elders who have organized many decades ago, including:
\n\nSee our full program, schedule, and presenter list at twcteachin.org/program.
\n\nFor a positive and lasting experience at the teach-in, we recommend people invite friends and friendly coworkers to form groups and attend together. You can join the full event, or specific sessions. Sign up at twcteachin.org/program.
\n\nInequality is growing in and around tech, but mutual aid unites us across race, class, & workplaces. That’s why we set up a fund for our teach-in. The event is free, but we realize people have financial needs related to taking time to attend a 3-day event (lost wages from missing work, child care, etc.). People can request up to $500, no questions asked. Our goal is to collect $15,000 to cover mutual aid requests and event accessibility costs, and as of today the fund has about $6,000. If you need funds to attend, register for the teach-in and we’ll follow-up. And if you have the means to help fellow workers attend, please consider a suggested donation of $50–500 to our Open Collective.
\n\nSee you at the teach-in! For questions or ideas, email twcteachin@protonmail.com.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/09/15/issue-14/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/09/15/issue-14/", "title": "On Oct. 19-21, Join our First Intergenerational Teach-In", "date_published": "2022-09-15T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-09-15T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "What do workers today need to learn from elders to guide future organizing?
\n\nWorkers in tech are and have always been historical actors, but learning from history in a fast-paced industry is challenging – even the past few years can feel inaccessible. We hope to change that with this first intergenerational teach-in event. On October 19-21, we’re bringing together elder and younger workers in and around tech to share perspectives and learn skills for organizing, solidarity, and healing. By situating worker perspectives and collective actions in history, we’ll all be better equipped to face the demands of today’s workplaces and organize for the future ahead.
\n\nRegister to attend the teach-in\n
What do workers today need to learn from elders to guide future organizing?
\n\nWorkers in tech are and have always been historical actors, but learning from history in a fast-paced industry is challenging – even the past few years can feel inaccessible. We hope to change that with this first intergenerational teach-in event. On October 19-21, we’re bringing together elder and younger workers in and around tech to share perspectives and learn skills for organizing, solidarity, and healing. By situating worker perspectives and collective actions in history, we’ll all be better equipped to face the demands of today’s workplaces and organize for the future ahead.
\n\nRegister to attend the teach-in\n
What is it?
\nThis teach-in is an intergenerational learning event. It consists of sessions including oral history, skillshare and training, games, connections among workers, and more. We hope this will be the first of many events.
Who is it for?
\nThis event is for elder and younger workers in and around tech, as well as allies in labor and community organizations.
When and where is it?
\nThe teach-in takes place over 2.5 days, Wednesday, October 19 at 9am PST to Friday, October 21 at 12pm. We’re hosting the event online via Zoom.
Where can I learn more?
\nRead about our vision and see the tentative program at the teach-in website.
How can I help?
\nDonate to our mutual aid event fund.
In our last issue, we spoke out about Project Nimbus and what it means to us. Now, as we kick off a week of action with demonstrations this Thursday, 15 more voices have joined us. Read more and sign up to join us, too.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "In our last issue, we spoke out about Project Nimbus and what it means to us. Now, as we kick off a week of action with demonstrations this Thursday, 15 more voices have joined us. Read more and sign up to join us, too.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Workers Against Project Nimbus
\n\nLast week, worker-organizer Ariel Koren resigned publicly from Google, one of many people speaking out against Project Nimbus, a $1.2B contract with the Israeli apartheid government and military. Her resignation letter and accompanying New York Times piece cites a pattern at Google of silencing and retaliating against Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, anti-Zionist Jewish, and other allied Googlers who speak up for Palestinian rights and in opposition to Project Nimbus.
\n\nToday begins a week of action calling Google and Amazon to drop Project Nimbus. Join us this Thursday, September 8 at demonstrations in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York to demand No Tech for Apartheid. You can also sign here to add your name.
\n\nAs a part of our coworker’s public resignation, 15 Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, anti-Zionist Jewish, and other allied Googlers told their stories about their experience with anti-Palestinian racism within the company, and how this culture of fear and repression enables Google to justify doing business with Israeli apartheid through Project Nimbus. You can listen to their full stories at bit.ly/Google-Voices. We’re sharing a selection below.\n
I’ve been a Googler for nearly a decade. For a long time, I felt like I could bring my whole self to work. All that ended in May 2021. As a Palestinian, I was deeply impacted by the Israeli assault on Gaza. Seeing people who look and sound like my family being killed, injured, and losing their homes took a massive toll on my mental health. At work, I heard leaders giving condolences to Israelis with no mention of how Palestinian googlers might be impacted (despite the majority of the death toll being Palestinian, including 66 Palestinian children killed). This experience made me feel my identity was being erased at work.
\n\nMy feelings of marginalization only grew when I began seeing my coworkers getting accused of antisemitism and called into meetings with HR for voicing pro-Palestinian sentiments. Many of them were issued warnings, just for having empathy for Palestinians. It’s clear Google has a financial interest in Israel, and internally that’s translated into systemic policies that weaponize antisemitism against anyone who criticizes Israel or raises concern about Palestinian human rights.
\n\nIn one instance, I attended a diversity meeting hosted by someone reporting to Melonie Parker, our Chief Diversity Officer. During this meeting, Google DEI announced a series of new formal partnerships with nonprofit organizations. The team said these partnerships were intended to promote religious tolerance at Google. Two out of three of the organizations mentioned have content on their website explicitly linking support of Palestine to antisemitism. This sort of partnership is another example of Google explicitly endorsing and funding groups and efforts that harm Palestinians, and weaponizing the notion of “DEI” to do so. I tried to raise to the DEI Team that this harms me, but I was repeatedly brushed off and ignored by them.\n
Something I have exceptionally struggled with is Google’s apathy towards the suffering that it benefits from and profits off of. I joined the company around the same time as Israel’s latest siege of Gaza in May of 2021. The calamity-induced doomscrolling made it difficult to focus on my onboarding. This persisted for a couple weeks before our CEO Sundar gave a stanceless show of support to all Googlers affected. It hurt when the messiness of the situation exonerated us as a company, as it seemingly always does, from any pursuit of justice or accountability. And so naturally it hurts even more when Google takes obvious stances against aggression and suffering as it rightly did with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but not with the abuses that directly affect my family. It would be one thing if we as a collective simply didn’t know better, but we do: countless employees have tried to speak out about the same violations the Palestinians have endured and have been intentionally ignored. So when opaque military contracts arise like Project Nimbus, it makes me feel overwhelmingly like my and my family’s suffering are a known and accepted byproduct. It makes me feel like social causes are only taken up by Google when there is no real possibility of backlash. It makes me feel, despite all the time I spend trying to convince myself otherwise, like I am working for the bad guy.\n
I feel Google focuses heavily on diversity and inclusion, but then neglects the voice of Palestinians. I’m not Palestinian, but I care about making sure we do the right thing as often as we can. Learning about the Project Nimbus deal and seeing with my own eyes how leaders in the company completely neglected Palestinians while standing in solidarity with Israelis in the region made me sad and really disappointed in this company.
\n\nThis has made me question whether I want to stay at Google, and to be honest, I don’t see a future in this company because of how disappointed this has made me feel.
\n\nI’d like to think I’m someone who stands up for what I believe in and stands against injustice. Google even claims they want me to bring my whole self to work. But while I’d love to send this message without being anonymous, unfortunately Google has made it clear that there would be serious ramifications of speaking about this on the record. I know from what I have seen at Google that speaking freely with my name would have a significantly detrimental impact on my career, my life, and my family by leading me to be unfairly and incorrectly retaliated against and even accused of antisemitism, simply for defending Palestinian rights.\n
The Jewglers [Jewish Googlers Employee Resource Group] claims to represent and advocate for “all Jewish people at Google”. This is clearly not true, because I am Jewish, and the Jewglers’ behavior has been one of the biggest sources of my mental health struggles at work since 2018. Jewglers steering and other members have shamed, bullied, and silenced me simply because I don’t agree with Zionism. In many cases, Jewglers have even reported people, sometimes even fellow Jews, to HR for quote-un-quote “antisemitic behavior” simply because they spoke up for Palestine…
\n\nIt is a grave danger for one of the world’s most powerful tech companies and the world’s largest search engine to continue to endorse false information about how antisemitism operates within our society. Google is purposely dividing the Jewish community from other protected groups, driving a wedge between the Jewish ERG and other internal communities. It is making us all less safe but it especially harms our Palestinian coworkers by creating a company culture that erases their experiences even while Google continues to claim that it’s a leader in diversity and inclusion in the industry… Not only do we disagree with Jewglers, we have been actively harmed by them. They have never been held accountable; instead they have managed to get the company to send official financial donations to pro-Israeli army organizations. The company shamelessly does this in my name as a Jewish person even though many of us Jews have asked company leadership to stop this.
\n\nIf they truly cared about antisemitism, Google would actually bother to meet with their Jewish employees who have been harmed by the fact that Jewglers is company-funded and continues to shame fellow Jews for supporting Palestinians.
\n\nThis would be a different conversation if we hadn’t tried so hard to write to leadership begging them to listen to us. But we have. I saw my anti-Zionist Jewish colleague receive a letter with death threats and still leadership refused to even let that person have a meeting. I saw a Palestinian colleague get called into HR for simply wearing traditional clothing in their ID picture. HR told them they were reportedly being “divisive” simply for wearing clothing that represents their culture!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/07/26/issue-12/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/07/26/issue-12/", "title": "Workers Against Project Nimbus Calling to Community", "date_published": "2022-07-26T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-07-26T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "It’s been months since the last operation by Israeli armed forces caught public attention, but today we hear from members of Workers Against Project Nimbus, a major military contract for cloud computing. This coalition of workers at Google and Amazon and community members discuss the origin, vision, and impact of their efforts in the face of extreme pushback by management and fellow workers – and how they continue to grow.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "It’s been months since the last operation by Israeli armed forces caught public attention, but today we hear from members of Workers Against Project Nimbus, a major military contract for cloud computing. This coalition of workers at Google and Amazon and community members discuss the origin, vision, and impact of their efforts in the face of extreme pushback by management and fellow workers – and how they continue to grow.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Workers Against Project Nimbus
\n\nWe are tech workers who don’t want our labor to be used to fuel Israeli apartheid, violence, and oppression against Palestinians, so we’re organizing.
\n\nFirst, before we share our story, we have an invitation: join us for a community briefing this Thursday, July 28 at 5:30pm Pacific/8:30pm Eastern. The call is hosted by Jewish Diaspora in Tech, but a broad range of Google and Amazon workers will share their concerns with the harms of their companies’ contract with the Israeli military and government and exciting opportunities for tech workers to get involved–including taking direct action together. \nNow, let’s go back to May 2021. Israeli military bombs dropped on Gaza and killed over 250 Palestinians, including over 60 children, and images of Palestinian activists defending their ancestral homes from settlers and Israeli military forces spread on social media.
\n\nAround this time, we found out that our companies, Amazon and Google, had signed a $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” cloud contract with the Israeli military and government. We were reeling, experiencing so many emotions at the same time. One of our Palestinian comrades organizing with us put it this way:
\n\n\n\n\nYou have to understand, during the bombing of Gaza in 2021, we as Palestinian tech workers felt completely unsafe at work. For that week, we were going to work each day, but we weren’t really present or in our bodies. We were like zombies. There are no words to describe what we were feeling at that moment, when we witnessed what the Israeli military and government was doing to our families. Our loved ones in Gaza were running from one house to the other every minute to seek refuge. And there was nothing we could do for them.
\n
\n\n\nTo be going through all of that at work and to not be able to speak freely about what we were going through – it was isolating and traumatizing. We couldn’t express our feelings or solidarity without being reported to Human Resources – even while our community and in some cases our families were being attacked.
\n
\n\n\nAnd then we find out that in that precise moment of suffering our companies had signed the Project Nimbus contract? We wanted to just rip our hearts out of our chests and stop working. Everybody was trying to figure out a way to get another job and get out. How could we possibly continue working here?
\n
We realized that our companies would soon be enabling such violence, what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have deemed a kind of apartheid. What’s more, we had to face the fact that those of us Palestinian tech workers with family and loved ones in Gaza or the West Bank, those of us living in diaspora, would now be enabling violence and oppression against our own communities – all while professing the importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
\n\nWe as workers – the very people that make our companies run and make them profitable –were deliberately kept in the dark until the last possible moment about this contract to avoid worker protest. In our experience, even for those of us who work in non-cloud departments, contracts of this scope and magnitude are advertised and celebrated across our companies, pointing to the fact that company leadership knew that they would face “inconvenient” ethical opposition by their own workforce. We also learned, along with the rest of the world, that the contract included [a provision])https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/israel-government-says-aws-and-google-cant-boycott-nimbus-project/_ that stipulated that neither Amazon nor Google could have a say in providing or not providing services to any particular institution in the Israeli military or government. Even if our companies wanted to act more ethically, they had signed away their rights to do so.
\n\nIn that moment, we started to find each other and build community on company-hosted platforms and, eventually, outside of them. On a company platform, someone would see a coworker posting an article or a petition, or a letter to management, and we immediately jumped on the opportunity to connect with another like-minded coworker.
\n\nIt was through those communities of support that we found other worker activists – Palestinian, anti-Zionist Jewish, Muslim, Arab, and other allies – who wanted to work together to change our situation. The same co-organizer elaborates:
\n\n\n\n\nTo find other workers at Google and Amazon who were organizing, who were taking action to end this harmful contract – that was incredible. While I had once felt detached from what was going on – like there was nothing I could do – now I had an outlet. Other coworkers who had connections with human rights organizations and community groups that wanted to support us secured all types of backing for us; from legal support so that we knew our rights and could feel safe and secure speaking out, to support with contacting press interested in amplifying our voices, to organizing support in getting dozens of human rights and racial justice organizations to come out in support of us publically.
\n
\n\n\nThis level of support – from other tech workers, from coworkers, from community organizations – was something that a lot of us had never had in our entire lives.
\n
In June of 2021, we built a joint Amazon-Google committee and started talking about our fears about the harm this technology would cause – as well as what we could do about it. The cloud technology we build, market, and research would now be used to host an apartheid identification system – one that determines individuals’ freedom of movement and rights based on their identity and where they are born. Such tech would be used to store massive amounts of information collected about Palestinians – from capturing CCTV footage and taking photos at checkpoints and even biometric data – that could be used to surveil and criminalize civilians. Apartheid Israeli government ministries such as the Israeli Land Authority, which systematically segregates and confines Palestinians while allowing for illegal settlement expansion for Jewish Israelis, would use this tech.
\n\nIn mid October 2021, we went public to protest the contract, and received an outpouring of support from human rights and civil society groups, who began campaigning alongside us. Over 50 groups endorsed the campaign in support of our worker organizing and spurred almost 40,000 people to send petitions to Google, Google Cloud, Amazon, and Amazon Web Services executives calling on our bosses to end Project Nimbus and respect worker voices. Supporting legal organizations, such as Palestine Legal, the National Lawyers Guild, Law4BlackLives, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, sent letters to our companies’ supporting our organizing and reminding our bosses of our protections under state and federal law. Our organizing and the supporting community campaign was all over the news, and instead of shrink, we continued to grow.
\n\nNow, we have the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of a long legacy of worker participation in the Palestine solidarity movement and racial justice movements to end apartheid. For example, port workers worldwide – in Italy, South Africa, and West Coast of the US – collaborated with local community organizations, answering the call to refuse to unload Israeli shipments of cargo and munitions in solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation and apartheid. These actions follow in a long tradition of worker organizing. In 1970s, Polaroid workers joined the call for boycotting apartheid in South Africa after they discovered that their company was partnering with the South African government manufacture apartheid IDs and documents.
\n\nAs the workers that build, design, market, research, and sell the technology enabling Israeli apartheid, we have tremendous power in ensuring that our labor is not used to further violations of human rights.
\n\nSo we’re organizing with students and community organizations to leverage our power as tech workers. We’re collaborating with students at key universities who are refusing to work or take internships at Google and Amazon until these companies stop doing business with Israeli apartheid – hoping to show leadership that the next generation of bright, diverse recruits in our industry want companies to value human rights, not enable violence and oppression. We’re building connections across companies of tech workers who don’t want their labor being used to violate Palestinian human rights so that we can, together, organize to make sure that our companies are not complicit in oppression and apartheid. Here’s what you can do:
\n\nThank you to the TWC crew for championing our organizing and helping us develop our narrative. We’re grateful to be in community with a broad and diverse set of allies.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/07/05/issue-11/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/07/05/issue-11/", "title": "CWA Tech Unions, Then and Now", "date_published": "2022-07-05T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-07-05T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Karen Estevenin talks about organizing since the early 2000s, including her experiences with WashTech, a CWA-affiliated campaign at Microsoft, Amazon, and other companies. Despite 20 years of changes in and around tech, the story remains the same: we can only count on worker solidarity to overcome union busting and internalized fears of becoming part of a union.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Karen Estevenin talks about organizing since the early 2000s, including her experiences with WashTech, a CWA-affiliated campaign at Microsoft, Amazon, and other companies. Despite 20 years of changes in and around tech, the story remains the same: we can only count on worker solidarity to overcome union busting and internalized fears of becoming part of a union.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn 1998, a group of Microsoft workers in perpetual temporary contracts began organizing in opposition to their precarious working conditions. Roughly one-third of Microsoft’s workforce in Puget Sound was hired through temporary agencies at that time, which meant contract workers lacked the healthcare, paid vacation, and sick leave that the permanent employees they worked next to enjoyed. Contract workers were also constantly worried that their jobs could suddenly be eliminated. These workers launched the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, more commonly known as WashTech. While WashTech’s initial attempt to unionize the entire Microsoft workforce failed, they won a few advances by 1999, resulting in improved benefits and many temporary workers being hired permanently. The pressure made clear how integral the contractors were to Microsoft’s operations, and the company was forced to respond.
\n\nThe history of WashTech offers key lessons in the ongoing struggles of TVCs. It also highlights the vital importance of building worker solidarity to overcome legal challenges and union busting – and to become a union at all. The contract workers first connected and formed a committee through the King County Labor Council and were supported by labor allies in the National Writers Union and the Communication Workers of America (CWA). Then, through the financial and logistical support of the CWA, WashTech became a union by affiliation. WashTech initiated campaigns to organize temporary and contract workers at Microsoft, Amazon, AT&T, and other companies.
\n\nWashTech attracted academic attention for its new model of organizing in a white collar yet precarious workforce, including Enda Brophy’s System Error, Michelle Rodino-Colocino’s Technomadic Work, Danielle Dorice Van Jaarsveld’s Collective Representation, and Alan Hyde’s section on immigrant support networks. Enda Brophy, a professor of communication and labor studies at Simon Fraser University, interviewed Karen Estevenin about her organizing work with WashTech as part of his dissertation, The Organizations of Immaterial Labour: Knowledge Worker Resistance in Post-Fordism, and related articles.
\n\nToday, more than 15 years later, Karen describes her experiences in her own words. When even recent history within the tech industry is easily forgotten, Karen’s willingness to share her experiences is an important part of keeping tech labor history alive.
\n\nMy organizing career started in the dotcom era, in the early 2000’s, as a worker organizing my own workplace. Back then, “tech work is so great!” was the old line. I worked for Enthusiasm.com doing proofreading/editing and gathering data and content. Enthusiasm.com was bought by Metro One Telecommunications, the 411 people, for the use of the data we gathered and formulated. Before the move to Metro One, we were a small company, and perks included having control over your work schedule and enjoying free sodas from the office fridge. It was hip to work at this small company, but there was always lots of talk about Microsoft and other booming tech companies in the area. Young people really wanted to work in tech. These companies have changed a lot since then; now they’re older, established, and gigantic corporations.
\n\nThe changes that took place between the transition from Enthusiasm.com to Metro One surfaced a lot of issues. The owners received massive bonuses, but us workers got notified that our health benefits were getting worse and costing more, among many other changes without our voice. So we decided to unionize with CWA, the Communication Workers of America. Metro One lawyered up and began a long union busting campaign that beat our union back by a loss of two votes. It was devastating. If we had stronger laws, allowing for immediate recognition by the National Labor Relations Board, management would have had to recognize us right away: as soon as we had sent in our petition for recognition, we would have won by a lot. We had over 80% of our workplace signed onto a petition. Even 20 years later, it still makes my blood boil.
\n\nIn organizing conversations I’ve had over the years, I reference those experiences of inequality and the disproportionate power an employer can have when there is no union. Sometimes bosses come down really hard and bust the union before it’s formed, sometimes they try to bust an existing union. In either case, and the many other ways employers come down on working people, I can relate to that feeling. That is part of what grounds me in my work to continue fighting and advocating for justice, and building power for working people.
\n\nThe CWA organizer who was working on our campaign became a mentor and encouraged me to get more involved with the labor movement. I started out volunteering with WashTech and then got hired doing administrative work and then later became an organizer.
\n\nOrganizing was a little different before the rise of social media platforms. I learned how to build worker power with a group in my living room, with a pencil and legal pad. But many of the issues that workers face today, like concerns over employer-sponsored visas that make workers vulnerable and nervous about retaliation for organizing and lack of transparency around pay equity, were present in the dotcom days, too.
\n\nCWA has been organizing in the tech industry for a long time. After my first organizing campaign within my own workplace, one of my early experiences organizing tech workers was a campaign in 2001 with Cingular wireless (now AT&T) call center and IT workers who were organizing. Through a national “neutrality agreement”, over 600 people won a union in their call center workplace. CWA won a neutrality agreement with Cingular Wireless to allow a more neutral environment to organize, should the workers demonstrate a majority. This gave us access to work spaces and a “card check” process from the employer to avoid the lengthy waiting period and contentious election that my coworkers and I went through at Metro One. With a level playing field, the organizing campaign at Cingular was a huge win, despite the fact that “neutral” is a vague term and management didn’t always remain neutral in practice.
\n\nI wasn’t at WashTech when it started, but when I was coming in there was excitement in the air. WashTech started with Microsoft and Amazon, just when those companies were really getting big. There was a lawsuit at Microsoft around “perma-temp” workers, or long-term temporary workers, who didn’t have the same benefits as traditional employees. It resulted in a victory, which led to benefits for temp workers that previously only existed for regular employees.
\n\nThis created some momentum, and WashTech used a method modeled on the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies. Workers coming together through WashTech didn’t have a contract and didn’t have a formal bargaining unit. Instead, they were just trying to create density in a certain workplace. The idea was that once there is enough density, then you can file or demand recognition from an employer.
\n\nIn many ways, we are still in that phase with tech workers today. There are many tech unions that are working to make change without formal recognition. Now we are also starting to see more successful union elections (like the Times Tech Guild) and some official contracts, such as the one recently won at Kickstarter United. But there are still many organizing efforts that fall outside of formal union campaigns and ratified contracts.
\n\nIn the 1990s and early 2000s, workers in tech were also geographically dispersed and often working remotely, as they are today, but we had fewer digital platforms to make communication easy back then (no Slack, for instance). Information is power. There weren’t on-the-ground connections and water cooler conversations happening. People didn’t know there were disparities between their wages and working conditions. Workers came in on different work visas. Employers would leverage visas against workers and make them fearful that they would be forced out of the job and the country. Management would demand that people work long hours, sometimes 80 hours a week. So finding ways of coming together and sharing that information are a crucial part of building power.
\n\nWe had a national online news platform – TechsUnite.org – that shared stories, organizing information, and issues in the industry, and periodically gathered people together over conference calls. This was an important way to build density in these disparately located tech workplaces. Several hundred workers paid 11 bucks a month as dues to keep TechsUnite going. We had an organizer who would set up meetings to get workers to talk openly about issues with each other. There were similar issues across the industry and across companies. Amazon was so small when initial organizing and mobilizing was taking place; it was just a bookseller. But it’s such a behemoth now, which makes that kind of cross-company organizing harder.
\n\nWorkers today should keep in mind that even without a formal union contract, people can pressure their employers. Stories are so powerful. Once people can connect, talk, and share stories, they have more power in density.
\n\nI see deep connections and similar fights in the dotcom organizing days and today, and in the public and private sectors, too. I worked for CWA/WashTech for about 2 years. In early 2006, I went to work at UFCW21, now UFCW3000, first as a Union Representative and then as an organizer, for close to nine years. I then did a short stint with PTE17 (now PROTEC17), and then went to work with Teamsters 117, as the Director of Internal Organizing for about five years. And now, I’ve had the honor and privilege of serving as the Executive Director back at PROTEC17 for three years. I’m also on the Executive board of the Martin Luther King County Labor Council. Time flies!
\n\nIn the past, organizing issues were largely centered on wages, benefits, and hours, such as when we formed our union at Metro One. Now workers are talking about the cost of housing, the community in which they live, racial equity, climate change, and how their employer is either moving the dial in a positive way on these issues, or being obstructionist. When I talk to workers, I like to relay the purpose of our union as a vehicle to help drive some of these changes with positive impact. Racial justice and climate justice were not really surfacing as workplace issues 15 or 20 years ago.
\n\nOrganizing conversations were more workplace centric. Now broad-based community issues are bringing people together. Pushing for policies and procedures, such as hiring practices and career development that are put through a racial justice and equity lens, is also an important component of negotiations. This is all on the table now. I’m so inspired by this, and so hopeful and excited about the energy that is coming into the labor movement. We need it. Unions have to take a look at systems that are oppressive and work to get rid of them. I will add that unions and the labor movement have our own work to do on this as well – massive amounts, to be clear. Not doing so will be detrimental to our movement as continued systemic inequality has been present, honestly, since the beginning.
\n\nSome of what we experience in public sector IT is that a lot of people come in from non-union private workplaces, so it is a more challenging area of the public sector. They have been inundated with anti-union rhetoric. But many are also coming because they are looking for a different kind of workplace, one that is more collaborative and less stressful. We are pretty successful at getting new employees to sign up for the union. When we meet with public sector workers for the first time, we say congrats, you got a job with the City of Portland or King County, etc. It’s a great job with a rich contract in a workplace that has been unionized for a long time. It’s important to join your union and sign up to be part of that collective power. These first interactions with IT workers always stand out from others. They consistently make comparisons to their previous and often private sector workplace. Public sector IT jobs typically don’t pay as much as in the private sector, but we do have unions, the ability to negotiate a strong contract with guarantees, job security, and a voice in decisions that impact their job and life, and that counts for a lot.
\n\nTechnology has also changed so dramatically. I’m only 45, but feel really outdated when it comes to some of this. We have giant conference calls with people from all over the county. People are finding the convenience of virtual spaces and calls, along with social media, really helpful. We still try to have face-to-face conversations when possible. Nothing really beats a face-to-face organizing conversation, but we’re getting pretty effective with video conferencing.
\n\nI think it’s fair to say that tech worker culture has changed a lot since the late 1990s. Workers – in tech and elsewhere – are connecting their experiences at work to their health and well-being. Work/life balance is a bigger issue than it was in the last decade. People want flex time, they want time to contribute to their communities and be with their families, and for self-care. People are talking more about the stress of their workplace being understaffed and being overworked; they don’t want to be burned out. People don’t want to be in 6-8 meetings a day and be exhausted, or not valued for their labor, especially in the pandemic. That’s a shift.
\n\nThank you to Enda, Tamara, Bronwen, Sahil, and the TWC crew for championing this story. And reminding me that although it feels like a blast from the past for me, the themes, lessons, and (many) issues are still so relevant.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/06/28/issue-10/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/06/28/issue-10/", "title": "Your coworker’s abortion story", "date_published": "2022-06-28T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-06-28T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Today, a worker you might know shares her story of getting an abortion. We also offer a list of resources for abortion funds and mutual aid networks plus tips and toolkits for safe and secure abortion planning.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today, a worker you might know shares her story of getting an abortion. We also offer a list of resources for abortion funds and mutual aid networks plus tips and toolkits for safe and secure abortion planning.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbortion touches everyone. Abortion is a necessary part of bodily autonomy and an essential component of health care.
\n\nOn Friday, the United States Supreme Court reversed 50 years of legal precedent by overturning Roe v. Wade. This ruling will have ramifications for your coworkers and community. But abortion bans will not lower abortion rates – we know they will only make them less safe and disproportionately impact Black people and transgender and gender-nonconforming people who can become pregnant. We know denial of abortion perpetuates poverty, and forced pregnancy is an egregious human rights violation that can also be deadly. Black organizers in the South have been preparing for the fall of Roe for decades and have already developed grassroots networks for providing abortion care in the face of hostile state legislatures and limited resources.
\n\nIn response to Friday’s ruling, some corporations and major tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Netflix promised to pay for expenses for employees who might have to travel to other states to receive abortion care. However, they refuse to say whether or not they will comply with law enforcement and hand over user data that could be used to prosecute abortion seekers. It is also unclear how such a policy would be actualized, through HR, medical, and legal bureaucracies. While Meta promised to pay for employees’ abortions, the company has also banned internal discussions of controversial topics like abortion and the Roe v. Wade ruling in particular. Meanwhile, a few social media accounts tried to help by suggesting abortion seekers use NFTs to cover costs. Don’t do that.
\n\nCompany promises seem conflicted at best, harmful at worst. In contrast, established abortion funds and networks sprang into action. We urge our fellow workers in tech to follow the lead of experienced organizers who have been working towards reproductive justice and digital security for a long time. Read on for your coworker’s abortion story followed by a collection of resources.
\n\nBy a coworker
\n\nHello there,
\n\nIt’s your coworker. You know me, we’ve shared some laughs and some drinks. We are friendly, but we keep things professional. And in our professional relationship, there is no space for so much of what makes us human.
\n\nI’m hoping to change that today: I am going to tell you about something very personal that happened to me, and I hope that after reading this you will think about all the other people in the office who are affected by Friday’s Supreme Court decision to strip away our bodily autonomy.
\n\nTen years ago I had an abortion that I have never regretted.
\n\nMy relationship with my boyfriend was never good. I was nineteen and he was nine years my senior when we met. I was young and stupid and he came with baggage heavier than anyone could lift, unprocessed trauma that he took out on me. My time with him was constant worry that I would make a mistake and set him off. The punishment for saying the wrong thing was the silent treatment and coldness for days. Breaking a glass would cause him to spiral. I hated it and I despised him, but I didn’t know how to leave — he threatened to kill himself when I tried.
\n\nWhen I went to a competition in another country (one more attempt to get away), I didn’t realize my period was late. When I got sick with bronchitis while there, I didn’t notice my period never came. But everything started to feel wrong. There were swastikas graffitied on the buildings by my apartment. The old city was beautiful, but the air made me sick. The people were friendly enough, but there was something so sinister about it all that I couldn’t put my finger on. Pneumonia made it difficult to breathe, but something else entirely made my experience rotten. This wasn’t for me — I dropped out of the competition after a week and flew back home. I was nauseous constantly, sad, scared, and I didn’t understand what was happening to me.
\n\nA pregnancy test confirmed it. I ran up the stairs to our apartment. “I need an abortion,” I cried to him. He was supportive, disarmed, allowing me to take the lead. “OK,” he said. “OK.”
\n\nThe days waiting for my appointment were excruciating. There was something growing in my uterus, metastasizing. A tumor. I felt disgusting, claustrophobic within my own body, with nowhere to run.
\n\nThe day of the abortion, we rode the train to midtown, walked past the lone protestor with the bible quotes and the bloody fetus pictures, past the police barricades, through the doors, past the security, and rode up the elevator to an unbelievably high floor. There were other people waiting for their appointments, coupled up, sitting silently, keeping their eyes looking straight ahead or at the floor. My 2012 abortion cost $500, paid in cash, leaving no record — a secret.
\n\nMy abortion meant, to me, my freedom. In the ten years since, I switched careers, moved states, met my husband, and had a very, very wanted baby. In the ten years since, I have learned what it means to really love and be loved. To love without taking, without strings. To adore without pressure, to care for another person gently, and with my full heart. I take that love, and I give it to my little one, too.
\n\nWhen we decided to have a baby, I was worried about the claustrophobia and fear returning. But it never did. My second pregnancy, my wanted pregnancy, while very difficult and dangerous (as so many are) felt like home to me, and I shared this space with a little, hiccupping, kicking creature until his early birth at the start of the pandemic.
\n\nI think about aborting my first pregnancy often, but never with regret. I think about how much I have to give this child of mine every day, through every milestone reached and every ER trip taken, through the tears and the bumps and the bruises, through the terrifying seizures and the everyday disappointment he experiences when things don’t go his way, and I think how good it is that this is my child with my person now. How little space I had in my heart and how ill-equipped I was ten years ago, when I was trapped in a relationship that made me hate myself and fear my boyfriend. How good it is that I didn’t go through with putting into this world a person that would have to take on so much trauma, so much anger, so much sadness. I stopped the cycle. I broke free.
\n\nHow to stay secure:
\nHow to access abortion services:
\nWhere to donate and volunteer:
\nWhat we can do as workers in and around tech:
\nToday is the start of elections for LOU (LISA Operators United), the workers behind AppFolio’s award-winning property management chatbot. While many were recruited from opera and classical music, a white, middle-class culture that can be more cut-throat than tech, the LOU crew has worked hard to overcome that background – as well as AppFolio’s management. If you have the means, consider supporting LOU’s mutual aid fund.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Today is the start of elections for LOU (LISA Operators United), the workers behind AppFolio’s award-winning property management chatbot. While many were recruited from opera and classical music, a white, middle-class culture that can be more cut-throat than tech, the LOU crew has worked hard to overcome that background – as well as AppFolio’s management. If you have the means, consider supporting LOU’s mutual aid fund.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAs we begin voting for a union today, we’re proud of our organizing so far. We have clear majority support and don’t necessarily need fence-sitters to join us, but we do want to build a strong, worker-led union for everyone in our unit of 75 operators. The story of how and why we got here might be enough to change some hearts and minds.
\n\nIn 2019, AppFolio acquired a company called Dynasty, which created LISA. As it so happens, Dynasty recruited students in opera, classical music, and creative writing graduate programs, paying $25/hr. Many of us have been operating LISA for two or three years. Our tenure at the company comes with perspective. We know how we got here, both as coworkers and as students from opera and classical music programs either moonlighting or working full-time in tech.
\n\nPeople tend to imagine people behind chatbots in a desperate socio-economic position, not as opera singers. We imagine ourselves a certain way, too. LISA wasn’t always our main job and it may not be in the future. We are singers, conductors, stage managers, and more, with hopes and dreams and career ambitions.
\n\nTo build our union, we’ve had to unlearn a lot of biases. Many of us come from a culture in opera and classical music that can be just as individualistic and cut-throat as we’ve come to find in tech. We aim to do things differently. What’s more, many performing arts unions charge initiation fees in the thousands of dollars, and folks feel like they may not benefit enough relative to the gig work they receive in certain times in their lives. One of us used to be super involved in that scene as a musician and continually reminds our group, “We are our own union, and we’re doing it better.” We might even do a learning club on the book Class, Control, and Classical Music to discuss why classical music is predominantly white and middle-class but also has stark race and class differences that show up in our workplace – and in our organizing, too.
\n\nIn many ways, it doesn’t really matter what AppFolio does as a company. We run LISA, a chatbot for leasing and property management. Landlords and real estate professionals occupy a very different position in our society and economy compared to most other workers, and we toil away behind the award-winning “AI solution” that powers their work, for example, helping them schedule appointments with prospective residents.
\n\nIronically, our own schedules are a mess. For three years, management has made minimum hours worse and worse. We used to get an average of at least 10 hours per week. Due to our studies and other odd jobs, many of us go through bouts of needing to work less, then needing to work a lot more. Some weeks we could work very little, and all we had to do was make it up another week. Then management changed it to 20 hours each and every week, NOT an average, with 20-24hrs/week during peak season or 16-20hrs/week during off season (since the pandemic, no one really knows when the “season” begins or ends). As of six months ago, we wanted at least 5-10 hours per week and were struggling to get any hours at all, and now some of us are drowning. If management can’t guarantee us hours, why do they get to demand hours from us when it’s beneficial for them?
\n\nWe’ve tried bringing up issues but management dismisses, delays, and gaslights us. They claim that we only want to know how much money we’re going to get for the holidays. The truth is, we need work to survive. That’s why we’re organizing. While we’ve observed management make our schedules more erratic while walking back on guaranteed hours, we’ve collected evidence of changes — every day, for months — to show the trends.
\n\nOur organizing has yielded some results so far, at least with sick leave. One of us was facing a particularly traumatic domestic violence situation, and worked right through it all. Yet AppFolio avoided providing paid sick leave to them and other workers who qualify by state law. For months, we emailed requests for the company to comply with state law and were promised time and time again that there would be a meeting with legal. Finally, after one of us took legal action, the company decided to make up for lost sick time, and many, many workers who deserved overdue sick time made requests on the company HR platform. Merely complying with state benefits like paid sick leave is just one of the concerns we’ve raised in our union vision statement. Our list grows as the struggle continues.
\n\nFrom scheduling to sick leave, it’s almost comical how management makes changes fast, sporadic, and without warning. One fence-sitting coworker who was skeptical about a union read our vision statement and said, “This part doesn’t seem accurate” – we replied, “You’re right! The company changed our job expectations overnight!” We agreed it was ridiculous.
\n\nSeveral of us have experience in unions and do our best to live up to our abolitionist politics, but we didn’t ever think it was possible to organize in a tech company full of musicians with a double dose of competition and individualism.
\n\nBut one day, one of us who had helped with past union campaigns got a message from a coworker about meeting to discuss grievances after work, and thought, “This is it! It’s happening! We’re going to organize and make this company better for ourselves and for people who depend on us” – not landlords, but our families and community members.
\n\nThe company response to our vision statement might have been predictable. Instead of voluntary recognition, our CEO responded with a nine-page rebuttal, but this only happened after they asked for time to respond, which we gave. Management then started info sessions with non-supporters first, and then later with supporters separately, which was obviously strategic on their part.
\n\nOur director of AI hosts a series of captive audience meetings titled “intros to unions and elections” and “unions as businesses” and so on. She’s not making it clear these are 100% optional – in fact, she DMs everyone with reminders to make sure they see the invitation. But many of our supporters attended to management’s slides and talking points.
\n\nOne of us ended up the only person in attendance in a meeting with the host, and said to her, “You’ve never been part of a union campaign but have been at the company for seven years and I’ve been an organizer for seven years. Maybe the roles should be reversed?” So that’s what we did. She said she wouldn’t do the presentation and for the first 20 minutes I explained how all the things she was bringing up were false or fake. She had been “devastated” she got our letter and “nobody came to me with these problems” – but no, we’ve tried, we’ve DM’d, and we’ve been shot down. After hearing that, the host seemed upset and abruptly decided to do the presentation anyway.
\n\nManagement’s questions seem to either misunderstand or misrepresent what our union might become, likely to delegitimize our organizing, demands, and unity in our bargaining unit. “What exactly is going to be in the contract?” “Why are you paying union dues?” We can only say, “This is a collaborative process,” “We pay dues but we’re also hopefully getting raises and better schedules.” Even without management’s influence, some of our coworkers have no or negative exposure to unions – and not just from opera school. One operator asked, “What exactly does it mean to ‘win’ a union?” We thought this person was not on board, but she went to a training, loved it, joined our organizing committee, and comes to every meeting! Another operator posted in our company Slack the same questions presented in captive audience meetings, and people called them “brave” for speaking up. Meanwhile, we’ve watched our Slack admin delete pro-union posts and replies, saying they were “unethical.”
\n\nWe don’t want to be reactive or get bogged down. We need to keep up a positive approach. For years, we’ve been very supportive of one another. We have a mutual aid fund, but we hesitate to dip into it. We sought the backing of CWA, and the biggest reason we’re not an independent union is because we assumed AppFolio is going to hire a union-busting firm. We need to get work done while we organize, and we’re exhausted. Many of us don’t have the wherewithal to set up a 1-on-1 conversation with a coworker, but we’ve figured out logistics to scale our efforts. After all, we come mainly from opera and work in tech.
\n\nToday, union ballots go out to LISA coworkers. We’ve done so much to get to this point. We’ve put in a ton of unpaid time and effort, above and beyond our jobs. As a group, and soon a union, we’ve worked through a lot of skepticism and cultural doubts that come from music and tech and society at large. We’re optimistic about this election, our power as a group, and our vision for an industry that puts the most vulnerable workers first.
\n\nThe vote count is scheduled for June 7. In the meantime, we’re here to discuss anything with our coworkers who might be on the fence – you can email us any time. To our fellow workers and community allies, please support our mutual aid fund if you can.
\n\nAnd finally, please remember to be kind to your chatbots.
\n\nThe LOU crew wants to thank our friends and allies in TWC for helping us think through our strategy and story.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/05/03/issue-8/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/05/03/issue-8/", "title": "The NY Times Tech Workforce and its Big, Boring Union", "date_published": "2022-05-03T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-05-03T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "With roughly 600 members, the Times Tech Guild is the country’s largest union with collective bargaining rights in or around tech. With all the flash and hype around tech, labor, and unions, software engineer Goran Svorcan shares a refreshingly boring account of the hard work that makes the excitement possible. He walks and talks through the journey from the early decision to build worker power with a union to the successful election and explains how the organizing effort sustains itself in the ebbs and flows of campaigning, card signing, filing, voting, and bargaining.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "With roughly 600 members, the Times Tech Guild is the country’s largest union with collective bargaining rights in or around tech. With all the flash and hype around tech, labor, and unions, software engineer Goran Svorcan shares a refreshingly boring account of the hard work that makes the excitement possible. He walks and talks through the journey from the early decision to build worker power with a union to the successful election and explains how the organizing effort sustains itself in the ebbs and flows of campaigning, card signing, filing, voting, and bargaining.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMost people think of The New York Times as a print newspaper, not a tech company. But at this point most companies have substantial tech departments, and The Times is no exception. By sharing our story and the example of a large unit like ours achieving success, we hope to inspire folks in other industries who also feel compelled to unionize themselves.
\n\nNone of us woke up one day thinking, “Let’s unionize.” We drew inspiration from existing examples of collective action already happening in our own workplace. We saw people coming together and working towards and achieving a common goal, something that can happen in any workplace, unionized or not. We realized it would be great to have an existing system to facilitate more of that energy consistently, not just on an issue-by-issue basis. That’s the idea — a union is a legally protected structure for collective action that you can call on when you want to make change in your workplace.
\n\nSome of us decided to seek out this more formalized structure and approached The NewsGuild, a logical partner based on their many recent successful organzing campaigns including The Times’s own WireCutter, not to mention The Times newsroom which has been unionized for around 80 years. We started small, with lots of support by the great full-time organizers at The NewsGuild to help us expand our effort. None of us had much union organizing experience previously so we had to learn on the job. But because we focused on listening to our coworkers about how they’d like to change their workplace, rather than dictating an issue platform to them, we stayed grounded and committed to our common cause. For us, it wasn’t about the headlines, but making The Times the best place to work.
\n\nWhile there has been a great resurgence of organizing recently, starting a union from scratch is still a daunting task. There are, however, many existing unions out there ready and willing to help that you can reach out to. The key is to keep your efforts member-led, focusing on your fellow workers and not getting distracted by broader union politics.
\n\nOnce we decided to organize, we took steps to hear directly from people across the company. We did individual 1:1 outreach and had conversations with our fellow workers about what issues most resonated with them, and what they wanted the power to change. These conversations evolved over time, and went beyond the more general points used in our initial meetings. Building trust with individual coworkers is a slow and steady process, bringing one person at a time over into the union effort. Most people we talked to hadn’t been part of a union before, so this took some work. Our organizing committee was very passionate, but we had to keep ourselves grounded and adjust if we ever got out of step with our members. It’s important that each union effort draws power from the bottom up, not the top down.
\n\nRather than us as organizers being arbiters of what issues to fight for, we aim to decide those matters democratically within the union. As an example, pay equity was a major point of concern. The tech industry is somewhat notorious for the large variations in pay among even folks who share the same title. It is not always nefarious, but without something like a union there usually isn’t a strong, accountable way of enforcing equal pay for equal work. Even without a legally recognized union however, encouraging salary-sharing was a way of getting people talking and building worker power, breaking the taboo of talking about salaries and even empowering them to demand fair pay.
\n\nAnother major issue for our coworkers was just cause. As at-will employees, we can be fired at any time for any reason without a guaranteed opportunity to defend ourselves. A union can protect against this by requiring a fair and just process for any disciplinary action, ensuring that management must provide reasonable cause for their actions. In addition to protecting workers in need, unions can establish clear and fair career ladders, giving workers the power to demand to be given a title commensurate with their work.
\n\nDiversity, equity, and inclusion are also a central issue in our organizing, intersecting with all of the issues already covered. Pay equity, job protections, career growth: All of these factors add up to create a better work environment for marginalized groups in addition to the more directly DEI-specific initiatives our members are committed to and passionate about. By exercising their legal right to request information from an employer, union workers could conduct their own pay equity studies, seeing for themselves whether there are pay inequities that fall along marginalized group lines, and then use that data to fight and win change in their workplace.
\n\nRobber baron CEOs may exist, but leadership at The Times does care about their workers. Unfortunately, due to the conditioning of the modern workplace, many workers don’t feel comfortable speaking up about the change they’d like to see, and without a bottom-up approach these issues can be easily missed by management. A union, however, empowers each worker to speak up, knowing they have the support of their coworkers, and removing the fear, intentional or not, that’s all too common. It gives you a seat at the table to have a say in your workplace.
\n\nWhen we started this process, many people were new to formal union campaigns, so help from The NewsGuild was really valuable in learning the basics of organizing: having conversations with your colleagues, listening rather than talking, hearing people’s concerns, and building trust to build solidarity.
\n\nThese conversations can be difficult, especially with your colleagues, with whom we’re taught to be conflict-averse. You’re making concrete asks of people - “Will you sign this union card?”, “Will you come to a meeting?” - about something they might have never thought about before. So we needed to get comfortable being empathetic but direct. We found that dropping any specific script was more effective, and that it was important to ask open-ended questions, allowing for silence rather than filling the space with words in order to give people the space to express themselves. Starting with bread-and-butter issues like pay and benefits was also helpful as an introduction to the more concrete elements of what a union can fight for.
\n\nWe want to make sure we’re not dismissing people’s concerns, either. Even when someone is vehemently saying, “I think unions are bad” or “My only experience with unions is from the outside looking in”, we need to be receptive, truly hear them, and to incorporate what we’re hearing. Appealing to just our supporters doesn’t build solidarity, and making space for all opinions, while not always easy, is very important. After all, the union is all of us and the organizing process should reflect that.
\n\nWe’re not here to be a second layer of management or management 2.0; we’re here to be something different. Building solidarity takes different forms and we tried an “all of the above” approach. We created a union Slack for our members to have a non-company controlled space to talk in. We started a union book club and hosted social events, both online and off. We all changed our avatars on company Slack to show the company, and most importantly each other, that we stand together. All these added up to us seeing each other as one big unit working together instead of individuals going it alone.
\n\nWe moved from organizing people one-on-one to asking people to sign cards and requesting voluntary recognition from the company. After they turned us down, we continued organizing. With a petition signed by a supermajority of our members, we asked for an online AAA election, which management disappointingly also denied. We filed with the NLRB shortly thereafter and continued our organizing efforts, making sure our members stayed engaged and informed. Management then fought us on our unit definition: we thought our unit should consist of everyone who works together cross-functionally, but they insisted on separate units for each job type. Due to their unwillingness to negotiate this point, we had to go to a hearing in front of the board to determine our unit’s scope, and thankfully the board agreed with what we already knew was true: that people who work together deserve to bargain together.
\n\nRight before the election, we asked our members to sign a pledge saying why they’re excited to vote yes in the election so we could all remind each other of what we’re excited to do together. We then made sure everyone knew exactly how the ballots worked, how they could confirm whether the board got theirs, and how they could request new ones if they needed them. We even made a lovely little TikTok about how to fill in and mail out a ballot.
\n\nWhen you’re bargaining a contract, management can’t speak to the entire unit at once; however, through continued organizing and mass participation, we can make sure that every member feels heard and has a chance to be involved in the process in whatever way makes sense for them. Bargaining is not just what you say at the table, but how you reconcile the competing needs, opinions, and desires of the membership, as well as how to ensure that regardless of how small a group is they feel empowered by the larger whole.
\n\nThe power a union wields at the bargaining table is a direct result of that organizing and solidarity. It is not through clever language or legal tactics that a strong contract is won, but through collective action. Be it changing a Slack avatar, wearing a button to the (now virtual) office, or ultimately striking, behaving collectively is what moves negotiations forward and builds the trust needed to win.
\n\nUltimately, contracts aside, all a union is is a democratic structure for making change in your workplace. Nothing about it is set in stone, and it’s all shaped by the workers within it, even in tech. The folks at Kickstarter have a more traditional wall-to-wall bargaining unit using their power to build binding change for their entire workplace, while those at the Alphabet Workers Union operate as a solidarity union, eschewing a contract for more flexibility both in membership and action. There is no perfect system, but if you focus on building a solid foundation of trust and camaraderie amongst your coworkers, you’ll win and you’ll win big.
\n\nI’d like to thank the fine people at TWC for helping me share our story with everyone. A lifelong thank you to all the organizers at The NewsGuild and my colleagues at The Times who made this all happen. It may sound boring, but I’m excited to build tech solidarity and win a great contract for our members.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/04/19/issue-7/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/04/19/issue-7/", "title": "Shutterfly Will Remember My Dead Dog Forever", "date_published": "2022-04-19T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-04-19T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "People use photo printing service Shutterfly to memorialize their loved ones. Today, artist and writer Renée Reizman reflects on her dearly departed pet Maude, the blurry line between personal and professional social media, and how content creation often goes against our wishes.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "People use photo printing service Shutterfly to memorialize their loved ones. Today, artist and writer Renée Reizman reflects on her dearly departed pet Maude, the blurry line between personal and professional social media, and how content creation often goes against our wishes.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShutterfly shows me photos of my dead dog at least once a year.
\n\nAs an artist and writer, posting photos to my social media accounts, especially of my dogs, past and present, has become an integral part in shaping my reputation and earning money. Being a #DogPerson has become part of my personal brand, enabling me to write cultural criticism about dog movies and television shows for pay. And Maude helped make this happen.
\n\nMaude was the first dog I adopted as an adult. Before I came around, the five-year-old Chow Chow mix had experienced unnamed trauma that made her wary of most people. Though she snapped at strangers and bared her teeth at other dogs, when we met, she gently licked my hand and let me run my fingers through her beautiful red-orange coat. I adopted her that week.
\n\nIn the three years I had with Maude, she went from an anxiety-ridden, paranoid mess to a calm, semi-social café companion. She let me give her belly rubs and slept at the foot of my bed. I took her on road trips and long hikes off-leash. We eventually made a couple dog friends in the neighborhood, and she even let children pet her sometimes. I was devastated when she was diagnosed with cancer. At 8, she was still considered young. It was aggressive, and grew back almost immediately after I got her tumors removed.
\n\nThe photos came about when we were running out of time. I asked a friend, a professional photographer, if she would take pictures of us. We spent a day in the park, dangling treats just out of frame, getting Maude to shine her sparkling eyes at the camera while I threw my arms around my aloof floof. I joked that we were taking engagement photos.
\n\nA month later, Maude died. A respiratory infection took her faster than cancer. I returned from work and discovered her stiff body blocking the door. She had been waiting for me to come home.
\n\nThese events happened to strike during a grocery store Monopoly game promotion. I had collected a bunch of coupons for Shutterfly, the print-on-demand photo service, and decided to print out some of the photos I took with Maude as a memento. I got a 20 page, 5x7 photo book and two magnets. I placed the book on a shelf next to her ashes. Whenever I wanted to remember Maude, I could flip through this book and relive our best moments.
\n\nAnd now, once a year, Shutterfly cheerily reminds me to reorder photos of my dead dog.
\n\nWhen this happened, I tried to pitch a story about how Shutterfly helped me grieve. Nothing ever came from it — perhaps I was too distressed to make a coherent argument? — but I’m glad I never wound up writing a story that celebrated Shutterfly’s role in helping me move on, because, over time, the photo service actually ended up reopening old wounds. Shutterfly’s reminders of Maude’s life, over time, have become unwanted, unplanned reminders of trauma.
\n\nLosing Maude was difficult and I wanted to control my ability to recall her as much as I could. In real life, this was pretty easy to manage. I boxed up her possessions and hid them in the back of my closet, and I stopped scrolling through my phone’s old photos.
\n\nI didn’t have much control over Maude’s digital footprint, especially since she had been uploaded to every social media platform I used to attract engagement for my career. I still used Facebook to promote new articles and art programming, and without warning, the timeline would regularly show me memories of our adventures. I’d see Maude at a campsite near the Bristlecone Forest, Maude outside a bookstore in Marfa, Texas, or Maude riding in the back of my friend’s convertible, purple tongue out. With my mind on work instead of nostalgia, I wasn’t prepared to re-experience these memories. I’d tear up and navigate to a new tab.
\n\nMany content creators mix the personal and professional on their social media accounts because this helps them attract an audience. I try to strike a balance between the two worlds, making sure that my feed’s constant self-promotion didn’t look like spam, while posting just enough personal content to be a fun follow. Disentangling the two had always felt out of the question, because people wanted to hire people they both respected and could relate to. Even this article, for instance, was commissioned based on a tweet.
\n\nAnd yet, I have very limited control over the tools for my job. I was able to subdue Maude’s presence by switching off Facebook’s “On This Day” feature and avoiding Instagram’s Stories Archive. This helped, but photos always slipped through the cracks. I didn’t know how to specifically tell the companies to remove Maude from my feed. Because she didn’t have any social media accounts, I didn’t have the option to untag or block her, which I had once done to an ex boyfriend I never wanted to see again.
\n\nRightly noticing that people do like to revisit their past, developers have created archive features that prioritize old, popular posts. These are delivered with relentless optimism, sometimes surrounded by cheerful borders, embedded in poppy music slideshows, or infused with cheerful greetings. Unfortunately, negative posts that attract a lot of attention are swept into the algorithms that choose which content to include in these moments, resulting in users revisiting bad memories against our will.
\n\nPart of the issue is a simple, flawed assumption on the part of engineers, content moderators, and others behind platforms. They operate on the assumption that every user has a positive association with what they post online. They write and fine-tune algorithms that respond to engagement, without taking sentiment or emotions into account. Life ends, relationships sour, and homes burn down, and announcing these events draws in many comments and reactions. Developers know that people mourn, but still struggle to create algorithms with necessary context after someone dies.
\n\nI don’t want all of my personal life to become material or content for platform engagement, especially not against my wishes. And grief is a personal journey that I try to follow on my own terms. At the very least, if I select Shutterfly products that are tagged “sympathy” or “memorial,” I ought to automatically opt-out of the reminder emails I get to reorder magnets of my dead dog.
\n\nIt’s been four years since Maude passed away. My Shutterfly photo book is still prominently displayed on my bookshelf, and a few times a year, I pull it down to reminisce. I do this when nostalgia compels me, and I tear up every time.
\n\nThree years ago, I got a new dog named Flora, another Chow Chow. She has completely different quirks that make our bond special. We have a photoshoot planned in a few weeks, not because she’s dying, but because she is full of life – and because I won a contest on Instagram. Their algorithm knows that, once again, I’m a pet owner, and I want to create special memories of my dog. I wonder if the only way to opt out of reminders is to just delete my social media entirely. I want to document Flora’s chaos and share it with the world. I just want to be in control of when that happens.
\n\nThis piece is also dedicated to my beautiful canines of the past and present, Maude and Flora Dog. Many thanks to Danny, Tamara, and the rest of the TWC team for pushing my cynical humor into thoughtful analysis.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/04/12/issue-6/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/04/12/issue-6/", "title": "Thousands of Drivers Unionizing Uber in Bangladesh", "date_published": "2022-04-12T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-04-12T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "In 2019, three youths in Bangladesh murdered an Uber driver. This spurred ‘app-based’ workers to move from protesting to forming unions in multiple cities and a national organization, The App-Based Drivers Union of Bangladesh. This nascent union demands ride-hail reform for workers’ rights in the face of hostility from app-based companies, abuse by riders, and the indifference of the state. Today, union members share the origins of their struggle and their bold, careful organizing to improve socio-economic conditions.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "In 2019, three youths in Bangladesh murdered an Uber driver. This spurred ‘app-based’ workers to move from protesting to forming unions in multiple cities and a national organization, The App-Based Drivers Union of Bangladesh. This nascent union demands ride-hail reform for workers’ rights in the face of hostility from app-based companies, abuse by riders, and the indifference of the state. Today, union members share the origins of their struggle and their bold, careful organizing to improve socio-economic conditions.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy The App-Based Drivers Union of Bangladesh
\n\nIn 2019, one of our fellow drivers was murdered. This murder changed everything for us, but before getting to this turning point, we should start at the beginning, in 2016, when Uber first entered the Bangladesh market.
\n\nBefore we began working for Uber in 2016, we were involved in other types of “offline ridesharing,” driving taxicabs and private hire vehicles. We moved to “online ridesharing” because of bonuses. We were told that we would be able to earn up to 80,000 Bangladesh Taka or BDT, approximately USD $930. Many of us have not had the benefit of a high level of education and were in low-income occupations, so we were lured in by this sum. We should have known that it was too good to be true. Perhaps our momentary greed prevented us from realizing this, for which we feel guilty. Now we know we were misled.
\n\nWe come from different backgrounds and joined Uber for different reasons. Some of us had been working other jobs; a few of us had returned from long spells working abroad and were looking for new opportunities at home. We saw our friends work for Uber, learned about the bonuses, and decided to give it a try. One of us even had a corporate sales job at a bank, but the terms of Uber and Pathao, a local motorcycle ride-hailing company, meant that they could earn more than in an office job. To begin working for these app-based companies, we took out loans and even bought cars and motorcycles. We spent millions of Taka for a car or between 150,000-200,000 BDT for a motorcycle. Everything seemed to be going well.
\n\nHowever, after about the first year, in late 2018, we saw losses. Bonuses dried up and transaction fees spiked to 25-30%. Commissions fluctuated from week to week and some drivers’ low level of literacy meant they couldn’t keep up with these changes. Fees began to eat into our profits, and in Bangladesh, vehicle taxes and maintenance costs are high. Nowadays, they also pay us a week to 10 days late, using the local money remittance service bKash. This means that the transfer costs of 1.85% per ride and all emergency upfront expenses, such as sudden repairs, have to be paid out of our own pockets. By collecting and aggregating all of our earnings, even for a short period, Uber accrues a significant amount of interest. In the name of digital payments, we are being turned into serfs, where they are exploiting our hard-earned money and labor to enrich themselves.
\n\nWe’ve sent complaints to Uber about issues like these, but we receive nonsensical replies from offices in India and California. The Uber representatives in Bangladesh are not helpful at all and try to avoid responsibility. It wasn’t just Uber, of course, that was guilty of this: all app-based companies were doing similar things. While it is possible to go to the Pathao office who seem to share ‘national interests’, there isn’t much of a difference between these app-based companies.
\n\nYou have to understand, it’s very hard to live in a city like Dhaka on 30,000 BDT a month, not to mention maintaining a vehicle in good condition. Some of us work from 6am to 1am to make a living, not seeing our children and not speaking to our parents. We just eat and fall asleep. If at the end of the day we still have zero money, how can we continue living like this? But because of what we’ve already invested and the debts we’ve accrued, we can’t extricate ourselves. Lured in by bonuses, discounts, and other incentives, we end up 90,000 BDT in debt on average per year. We know this is theft, but what can we do?
\n\nStarting in late 2017, some of us drivers in Dhaka brought complaints to these app-based companies and shared our frustrations online. On social media platforms like our Facebook page and on messaging apps, we found other drivers who shared our grievances and worries. We decided, initially, that we would organize a movement, rather than a union, and protest in front of the Uber office and the National Press Club in Dhaka. Our protests drew some attention from local media. In 2019, some of us sat down with representatives from the app-based companies to discuss our concerns. It quickly became clear that they didn’t care about our health or wellbeing.
\n\nIn June 2019, tensions came to a head. One of our fellow drivers, Md. Arman, received a ride request on Uber from a remote location in the outskirts of Dhaka. Three youths got in the car, but the Uber account holder did not, a fact we complained about later. These youths had been repeatedly ordering and canceling rides, until they saw Arman’s expensive, valuable Toyota Allion. In the cover of darkness, the three youths attempted to hijack Arman’s car. In the struggle, they pulled his hair, slit his throat, and collided into a tree. They escaped, and though they were soon arrested, our friend was still murdered. Subsequently, litigation was brought and a demand was made for 5,000,000 BDT as compensation for Arman’s family — Uber offered just 200,000 BDT, around USD $2,325. This is a grossly inadequate sum for someone’s life and it fell on us to take care of Arman’s family.
\n\nArman’s death was the catalyst for launching the Dhaka Ridesharing Drivers’ Union (DRDU) on August 31, 2019. In order to change attitudes towards us and our work, and hopefully change ourselves, too, we needed a permanent representative organization instead of sporadic protests. We’ve brought our demands to local app-based companies in the past, but their business is not doing well or their business model is not very different from Uber. We’ve also expressed concerns to relevant government authorities and have begun exploring avenues for legal action.
\n\nThere was, and continues to be, extremely asymmetrical treatment of drivers and riders by Uber and other app-based companies. Drivers cannot change destinations on our smartphone application and we have to take photos to show that we are driving, but riders do not have to prove anything. Some of us have been kicked off motorcycle ride-hailing applications because we turned down three rides — which we do because the trip is not worth the pay. When fares on the app are higher than expected, we face verbal and physical abuse from riders. For example, one of us, M, went on a trip in October 2019 that initially showed 250 BDT on the application, but was ultimately 550 BDT at the time of drop-off. The trip was to an isolated, uninhabited area. M tried to explain that the reason for the higher fare could be a problem with the application’s GPS. The rider responded by threatening the driver with a pistol. M pressed the emergency button in the application, but there was no response. M begged for the rider to leave, without paying, but the rider did not leave. M called the police but it took over half an hour before they arrived. Later, M called the Uber office and requested they investigate — and 2.5 years and many follow-ups later, there is still no response. We deal with wealthy riders that are unruly, inebriated, and possessing illegal substances who often get us hard-working people into trouble.
\n\nDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, especially at its peak, our income dropped to zero. We saw no government subsidies or support. There have been more murders, but they still do not budge. Uber hasn’t helped, and the government hasn’t taken any steps either. New enlistment requirements in 2017 put the burden on drivers, including for our own safety. When we complain, they tell us to call the police through the national emergency line 999, but given the state of our police, our corpses may rot before they arrive.
\n\nInstead, we have to look out for one another. Although DRDU operates on social media platforms and doesn’t have formal registration as a union, we’ve created an online group to allow drivers to tell each other about their whereabouts at night, sometimes sending voice messages instead of texts. Since the founding of DRDU, we’ve organized informal unions in other cities, namely Chattogram and Sylhet, and arranged physical protests and sit-ins. The last major protest was in September 2021 and took place in multiple cities. We are now organized nationally under the umbrella of The App-based Drivers Union of Bangladesh, where representatives from DRDU and the unions in Sylhet and Chattogram are present. Having a national-level organization allows us to formulate uniform demands, while still being responsive to the particular needs and concerns of city-level unions.
\n\nIn September 2021, our unions announced 6 demands: (1) ending police harassment, (2) recognizing of app-based drivers as workers under local labor law, (3) lowering the transaction fee of rides to 10% from 25%+, (4) organizing parking space for ride-hailing vehicles in Chattogram, Dhaka and Sylhet, (5) exempting listed ride-hailing vehicles from Advance Income Tax (AIT) and (6) returning the AIT collected from listed vehicle owners previously. The transaction fee is an important one for us as with a lower transaction fee, we will be able to manage financially. Other concerns were about the gaming of consumers’ and workers’ ratings, which occasionally led to drivers experiencing physical harm.
\n\nYou should know that we still have a long way to go. Unfortunately, Uber has not been at all responsive to our demands and in some cases even charges up to 35% of our fare in transaction fees. When these companies decide to deplatform us, they still don’t tell us why they are punishing us—who complained and what the alleged offense was to block our access to the app. There isn’t much of a difference between suspending us from the application and hanging us.
\n\nWhile the number of registered ride-hail drivers in Bangladesh has recently declined from 400,000 to around 250,000, that means we are growing in both absolute and relative terms: more than 35% of drivers now are involved in our unions, up from 30%. Yet, like many other informal unions, we are struggling to be registered and recognized as representatives. Firstly, this is due to the fact that we are not considered Uber employees. Secondly, we struggle to find legal counsel who appreciate the nature of our work. Thirdly, we have been informed that trade unions’ registration is district-centric, not national. There are substantial consequences of not being registered. We filed a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission of Bangladesh that our human rights have been violated by these app-based companies, which was then brought to the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority, but they dismissed our arguments on the basis that we are an unregistered entity. It is perhaps for the same reason that the government hasn’t been receptive to our demands for parking places and reforming AIT. Nevertheless, despite these obstacles, we’re still pushing forward with our ambition of being formalized: we’ve submitted a form with details of our members and we will continue working on this after the end of Ramadan in May 2022. We continuously increase our membership and ideally we’ll cover 60% of all ride-hailing drivers in the country. Despite regulatory and financial obstacles, we serve our members and communities by organizing safe driving courses and even blood drives.
\n\nThere have been some modest gains following our strike action. Now, after every five completed trips out of 10 requests, the Uber app indicates the rough location of where the next trip will be. This allows us to better plan our workday and navigate the considerable traffic in Bangladesh. Pathao has also reduced their transaction fees, with certain conditions, to 15% during peak hours (7-10 AM and 2-6:30 PM) on weekdays (Sunday-Thursday), while the transaction fee of 25% remains during off-peak hours. We have been approached by local app-based companies that wish to charge us around 10%-12% in transaction fees. We are cautiously observing their activities and we have told them that for us to work for them, they have to give us full pay for our work (i.e., deductions for payment transfers) and provide us with insurance. We have also said that there has to be more due process and involvement of the App-based Drivers Union when deciding to fine or suspend a driver. We have also suggested that their app deduct small amounts from our payment for each trip and then return these deductions in three lump sums, during the two Eids and in January, when we have expenses for our children. We have requested this as the reality is that we have difficulty in keeping cash in hand, as we always have immediate expenses to pay.
\n\nWe are not against ride-hailing. We do not want to deprive anyone of their livelihoods. After all, when the drivers’ wheels are turning, the economy’s wheels will turn, too. We want Uber or Pathao to meet our demands and reduce their fees. We want a “win-win-win” situation. If steps are not taken to address our grievances, we will go on strike again. We think our demands are reasonable, as we have seen Uber reduce transaction fees in India. If we are not able to exercise our workers’ rights, then the gig economy is a curse for us. As it has turned out to be for Arman’s family, for whom we are still seeking justice.
\n\nWe want to close by expressing solidarity with our comrades in other countries. We have coordinated international strikes with some fellow drivers in the UK and New York City, but have not been in touch with workers in other industries in the so-called ‘gig economy’, like on-demand cleaning.
\n\nFinally, we want to take this opportunity to share our perceptions about gig economy terminology. In our view, data entry, graphic design, and the like, all outsourced to countries like Bangladesh from the rest of the world, are the real ‘gig’ workers as they do such activities to top up their income and aren’t invested. In contrast, we have to pay for vehicles, maintenance, taxes, and more; our livelihoods depend on the application. There is a difference between inhaling smoke while sitting in congested traffic and sitting in front of a computer. ‘App-based’ is an adequate description. Please do not describe our 12-14 hours of full-time, hard labor as gig work. Companies call us gig workers, and use the language to exploit us. But we are real, full-time workers with no labor rights, which is why we’re organizing.
\n\nWe welcome allies around the world to reach out via the DRDU Facebook page and organize with us in this struggle. We extend our thanks to Morshed, Danny, and Tamara for the discussions and editing that resulted in this piece.
\n\nApril 14, 2022 at 6pm Pacific Time, on Zoom - RSVP here
\n\nWhat is surveillance capitalism, how does it harm us in different ways, and what can we do to stop it? Join us for a free community panel to explore the implications of surveillance capitalism in the border region and beyond. We’ll discuss the current intersection of the police state and private tech corporations, and learn strategies to build public safety without surveillance and beyond policing.
\n\nPanelists include: Science fiction author Cory Doctorow, Sarah T. Hamid of the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, Khalid Alexander of Pillars of the Community, and Pedro Rios of American Friends Service Committee.
\n\nThis event is organized by the Tech Workers Coalition San Diego, Democratic Socialists of America San Diego, Groundwork Books, Chop Shop Economics, and the American Friends Service Committee. Help us promote the event by forwarding this email or retweeting this tweet.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/04/05/issue-5/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/04/05/issue-5/", "title": "From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb", "date_published": "2022-04-05T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-04-05T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Airbnb brands itself as creating community and fostering belonging. Today, former Airbnb software engineer Sahil describes how “Airfam” ignores internal inequities among different workers and shuts down those who question its culture of overwork. Despite it all, Sahil and coworkers built a genuine community based on transparency and mutual respect.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Airbnb brands itself as creating community and fostering belonging. Today, former Airbnb software engineer Sahil describes how “Airfam” ignores internal inequities among different workers and shuts down those who question its culture of overwork. Despite it all, Sahil and coworkers built a genuine community based on transparency and mutual respect.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Sahil S.
\n\nI’ve yearned to belong my entire life. Growing up, I was excluded from communities that I saw others accepted in: my family was fragmented, I was bullied away from Indian culture, and I struggled to perform masculinity. Despite having many relationships on paper, I erased myself to fit in. I never felt accepted.
\n\nI felt most like my authentic self when I was building things. Work, I had been told by both Indian and American society, was core to my existence, and my joy for computing turned out to be highly employable. If I was useful to my employer, I would earn the money, prestige, and purpose that certified my acceptance. I internalized that if I was useful, I could belong.
\n\nIn 2016, two years into my career, I joined Airbnb. The company’s mission was, and still is, to “create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.” To achieve this mission, Airbnb championed the power of community, created by millions of hosts around the world “opening their homes.” Silicon Valley treated the founders as visionaries for pursuing such a humane - and lucrative - idea. Their vision seeped into the employee culture. Just as the founders considered each host a stakeholder belonging to the Airbnb community, the executives regarded each employee as a stakeholder belonging to the “Airfam,” empowered to make contributions and shape the culture. I initially gagged at the brand-colored Kool-Aid, but I couldn’t ignore the optimism of the office, its international decor and bright skylight inspiring us to forget limits and imagine only possibilities.
\n\nThis attitude was especially true for engineers. Our performance ratings were based on, above all else, our ability to “own our impact” to the business. No problem was too big, no goal too ambitious, and we produced, produced, produced. The engineering community was dedicated to the craft and welcomed me. I found mentors and role models overjoyed to build tech that kept business booming and practices that kept the culture great. Being part of this community was more than just work - through small ways like social channels and happy hours, big ways like fine dining and offsites at wineries, and the biggest ways like friendships that shaped my mid-twenties in San Francisco. Here, I could thrive. If what I produced could be accepted by this community, then maybe it would accept me, too.
\n\nOne lofty manifestation of Airbnb’s ambitions was its tradition of launches, where we all sprinted towards a big press announcement. Three months into the job, I was put through my first launch. The BBC was planning to publish an article investigating our rising user account fraud rates. To preempt this article, our executives gathered my fiftyish person org into a “war room” and mandated a plan of action to “protect the Airbnb community.” I was eager to be of service. For days, we worked late until 2 or 3 AM, sometimes pulling all-nighters. We patched ancient holes, built new defenses, and polished the user experience. We delivered tons of new features, lowered fraud rates, and enabled a successful announcement to refute the BBC article. I had held my own in the trenches, and as we clinked glasses of vodka, I felt accepted, even proud.
\n\nAfter the launch, org leadership hosted a team all-hands to celebrate the work and answer any questions. A veteran data scientist asked: “We worked days in a row until 3 AM. Does the executive staff understand the pressure they put us under to announce something that could’ve been done under a more reasonable timeline?” Only then did the collective fatigue in that room hit me too. For every feature we had shipped, the ultimate rationale was that “the founders really want this.” That refrain had exhausted me, particularly when my director told me at midnight that my highest priority was to make a cursor stop blinking over a textfield. But one of Airbnb’s unofficial values was to “assume good intent,” and who was I to question the intent of the executives. In response to that data scientist, leadership stressed that “we’ve relayed that feedback, but this launch was crucial to the mission,” and encouraged us to take some time off to recharge. I was grateful to that data scientist for voicing our concerns.
\n\nStill, I wanted to do even more. As exhausted as I was, working through those nights had rewarded me with camaraderie and respect. To someone craving usefulness, and without caretaking responsibilities, it felt like a fair bargain. I volunteered to re-architect our most complex anti-fraud user experience system, manage the on-call rotation, participate in the org-wide site reliability rotation, conduct interviews, travel for college recruiting, facilitate presentations on allyship, and support employee resource groups. I volunteered for as many opportunities as I could because I felt exhilarated to earn my place in the community. Leaning into this spirit paid off - everything I produced for the company I got back in titles, money, and respect, and by those metrics, acceptance. I belonged.
\n\nIn December 2018, I decided to join what is now called Airbnb.org, a social impact housing program for those displaced by crises such as natural disasters or conflict. Founded by designers, Airbnb exalted “product” roles - especially engineers, product managers, and designers. But as I built products for this program, I realized the importance of customer service, partnerships management, policy, community engagement, marketing, and many other roles. When the tech hit its limits, such as when Airbnb.org needed to coordinate with governments and international aid agencies, or when an NGO partner couldn’t find housing for survivors on the website, it was these unsung roles that made Airbnb.org (and Airbnb more broadly) successful.
\n\nHowever, Airbnb’s altruism did not align with its workplace policies, and I began to notice disparities in my coworkers’ experiences. At least one-fourth of the Airbnb.org team were contractors, and Airbnb worked with around 500 contractors in total. In many cases, it seemed like contractors were doing the work of a full-time employee, but with fewer benefits, workplace privileges, and advancement opportunities. My contractor friends were frustrated with being kept in limbo - one week they would be told that they were going to be hired (“we can’t imagine not having your expertise full-time!”) and the next, be given a lukewarm non-answer (“we’ll have to see”). One weary colleague remarked “some of us are putting starting a family on hold until we know if we’re getting employed.” Airbnb claimed that belonging also meant having the psychological safety to “voice critical opinions,” but how could anyone feel safe to dissent with their livelihoods in such precarity?
\n\nContractors made up a small proportion of Airbnb’s 7,000-plus workforce, but I saw the gaps in our experience mirrored everywhere. In sharing our salaries, I learned my non-product coworkers sometimes made 65% or lower than me, despite having deep expertise and doing work equally essential as mine, if not more so. On top of that, the non-product career ladder did not have clear expectations for advancement. “Airbnb fucked up my career growth,” I heard. I was floored to hear that the customer service wage started at only $18 an hour, and hadn’t changed for seven years. I realized employee resource group leadership, a second job for some, was uncompensated. These material conditions bled into work-life - while some of us took Ubers to work and shopped at Barney’s, others maxed out credit cards or could only afford to live in the East Bay. And, of course, I observed that BIPOC women experienced the compounding of these conditions. I couldn’t fathom the drain from microaggressions, code switching, and gatekeeping, which cut across the product orgs, too.
\n\nLeaders preached that each worker was responsible for our culture, and that had largely been true for me: I was given a career ladder, a salary, and opportunities that made me feel empowered. Yet through direct messages, one-on-ones, and whispered conversations, I saw evidence that the company instituted barriers to empowerment and rewarded each of us very differently for our contributions. I struggled to assume good intent from the company without some of the policies that might have proven that intent: a clearer non-product career ladder, compensation for all types of labor, and pay scale transparency. Belonging to this workplace, it seemed, was a story we all heard but not a reality we all experienced.
\n\nJust as we began conversations about improvements, the pandemic struck. The travel industry, our business, cratered. Virtual war rooms sprouted across the entire company to generate new revenue, cut costs, or handle the avalanche of customer service requests. Like prior launches, we pushed our service, our codebase, and ourselves to the brink. But as we burned to a crisp trying to save the company, the founders announced that they had no choice but to lay off all 500ish contractors and around 1,900 employees. The CEO cried on a broadcast that we needed to say goodbye to some of our Airfam and called on us to support each other through this difficult time. “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers played at the end of the broadcast. I was shocked, and then, with the rest of the Airbnb community, I grieved.
\n\nIn an era of heartless pandemic layoffs, the public story of Airbnb’s layoffs was one of community love through hard times, proven by generous severance packages and job hunting resources for laid off colleagues. I did not believe this story. This was Airbnb. It was a “unicorn.” I was sure that refraining from lavish lunches, canceling ski offsites, and raising $1 billion from emergency venture capital investments was enough to keep Airbnb afloat, so I grew skeptical that executives had considered everything in the budget when trying to save jobs. I was making well over six figures and volunteered to take a pay cut, but was denied by Human Resources, and I saw sympathy but no action from the multi- and deca-millionaires in leadership roles. Having experienced burnout from launches and having seen the inequities in my coworkers’ experiences, I realized that the company had always seen the Airfam as a line item to minimize, even through its most bullish days. What evidence was there that Airbnb - and its biggest profiteers - would suddenly prioritize us when its revenue was threatened? After the company IPO’d in December 2020 at a valuation of $47 billion, the devastation of these layoffs was referred to as “financial discipline.”
\n\nShortly after the layoffs, the company accelerated again to multiple launches per year. Losing one out of four colleagues left many teams understaffed. The most repeated advice was to “talk to your manager if your workload was too much,” but even the most supportive managers could not push back against the top-down demands “to do more with less.” After every launch, my friends across the company and I would gather to share our frustrations. Our specific concerns varied depending on our role, but across the company, we were demoralized by opaque career advancement policies, bias towards short-term results, and unsustainable workloads. Yet in every forum, the highest levels of leadership drummed “we hear you, but this is just the Airbnb way,” as if we were not stakeholders in the Airbnb way, as if having any concerns was incompatible with belonging to the Airfam. With enough complaints, we would get superficial concessions such as time off, a little headcount, or a leaner roadmap, before being hurled into the next launch. The cycle continued as travel picked up, the stock price popped, and the media praised Airbnb for its innovation and humanitarianism, as everything blared “we’re achieving the mission.”
\n\nThe hollow reminder to “take care of yourself” distributed all accountability away from those with decision-making power and onto each of us. But I still internalized it. Half a decade of hearing that I was empowered to shape the culture had burrowed into my psyche. As burnt out as I was, I worked even more, clinging to this promise of acceptance, hoping that I could somehow work myself into being enough. Trying to meet relentless expectations, I erased myself. I lost all joy and confidence in my skills as an engineer. I abandoned my hobbies. I declined invites from friends. I neglected partners. I responded to Slack messages during a launch instead of texts from my sister during Hurricane Irma. I produced, produced, and produced, earning more promotions and praise, hyperventilating through anxiety attacks in the minutes between back-to-back Zoom meetings. I ignored the somatic response in my body, until, at the lowest points of my life, I considered ending it. To survive, I made the heartbreaking decision to leave Airbnb.
\n\nI could have left Airbnb before things got so bad. But despite all that I observed and experienced, I truly loved my job. I got tremendous career opportunities, was privileged to build wealth, and felt accepted by a passionate, brilliant, and supportive community. This community of workers, those who cared for my well-being just as much as my work, kept me sustained. Every time I second-guessed my experience, someone was there asking a brave question or reaching out to me in an honest conversation, assuring me that I wasn’t alone. Those conversations in turn helped me empathize with my coworkers and pull others out of isolation. Only because of this collective was I able to endure as long as I did.
\n\nThere is truth in our collective experience. For us to contribute our best work while sustaining ourselves, that truth must be reflected in our working conditions. Our belonging depends on it. If the Airbnb way is to ignore this truth while extracting all it can from us, then not only is it antithetical to the Airbnb mission, but it is also fundamentally unjust. As stakeholders, we deserve accountability and systemic change instead of platitudes and concessions, and only by engaging with each other in mutual honesty and respect can we chart how to get there. Perhaps then, we will have a workplace community to which we truly belong.
\n\nMy deep thanks to Tamara, Yindi, Danny, and the rest of the TWC Newsletter crew. Thanks also to dear friends that helped me process and articulate my experiences, and sustained me throughout these years.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/03/15/issue-4/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/03/15/issue-4/", "title": "The HR Origins of Workplace Trauma", "date_published": "2022-03-15T00:00:00-07:00", "date_modified": "2022-03-15T00:00:00-07:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Last month, user researcher Alba Villamil co-authored a study on common corporate responses to workplace dysfunction facing design professionals. Many of these “solutions” are just as traumatic as the crises they were meant to address. Today, Alba and anti-oppression consultant and educator Kim Tran talk about their respective work and possible ways forward for better workplaces.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Last month, user researcher Alba Villamil co-authored a study on common corporate responses to workplace dysfunction facing design professionals. Many of these “solutions” are just as traumatic as the crises they were meant to address. Today, Alba and anti-oppression consultant and educator Kim Tran talk about their respective work and possible ways forward for better workplaces.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKim: I’d love to do introductions, since we do similar work but haven’t really met yet. How did you get here? How did you get into this kind of research?
\n\nAlba: I’m an independent user researcher who works mainly in the social sector, making products and services more equitable for historically marginalized and underserved groups. I’m also a facilitator and partner at a company called HmntyCntrd, where we work with company leaders to help them cultivate healthy and trauma-informed workplaces.
\n\nSomething we’ve noticed in conversations with leaders is that companies invest a lot of money into initiatives around mental health and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) but employee burnout, disatisfaction, and resignation rates remain at an all time high. That made us curious about how these initiatives were actually being implemented and what were some of the unexpected effects these company responses had on employees.
\n\nSo I did a research study with Vivianne Castillo at HmntyCntrd and Karen Eisenhauer at dscout. We surveyed design professionals about how their organizations responded to major events like COVID-19. And what we found was that many of these companies had a very limited or poor understanding of organizational trauma. So that’s what I’m up to right now.
\n\nKim: I started my career doing mental health with queer and trans youth, and seeing your study from that perspective is easy, since folks in that work know what trauma-informed approaches look like. So how do we broaden these definitions and categories of trauma for the workplace? Who is experiencing organizational trauma, and why?
\n\nAlba: Our study tries to push against several ideas about trauma. One is the idea that trauma is only experienced by people who are traditionally categorized as “vulnerable” and have experienced Trauma with a capital T, like veterans, refugees, people who have been in serious car accidents. The other idea is that trauma is only experienced at the individual level.
\n\nInstead, trauma can also emerge at the organizational level, meaning it is experienced by many people within the same workplace. It can happen after a cataclysmic event, like COVID 19, that completely disrupts the way an organization works. It can happen after a major re-org or layoff that was handled poorly by leadership. And it can happen because of ongoing issues within that organization, like discrimination, harassment, or abusive managerial tactics. But what was most striking for us was how the very nature of work can cause trauma like when your company asks you to design a product that violates your sense of ethics.
\n\nKim: Can you explain what you found when you looked at these traumatizing experiences? Your study talks about playbooks organizations and managers use that have a particularly harmful impact. What were those?
\n\nAlba: We found that American companies respond to these different sources of organizational trauma in one of four ways, which we call “playbooks”. Organizations tended to apply certain sets of tactics or playbooks to address employee trauma without actually considering the ways such tactics could negatively impact them.
\n\nHere’s a quick run down. When organizations recognize an employee need for mental health support but rely on individualistic solutions like floating mental health days or a subscription to meditation apps, we call that the DIY playbook. Organizations technically provide resources, but they’re usually one-off, inadequate, and require an unreasonable amount of effort for employees to sign up for. Other organizations create “space” for workers to express their experiences, like employee resource groups (ERGs) but then don’t actually do anything with that feedback. We call those Empty Empathizers. These two playbooks reinforce trauma by “betraying” employees – they promise help but then give no relief.
\n\nWe also saw playbooks that actively harmed employees. Unlike the first two organizational responses, which mainly harmed employees through neglect, other organizations used common abuse tactics to keep employees in order. Organizations that used the Minimizer playbook downplayed serious workplace issues with toxic positivity and gaslighting. But the playbook that was most emotionally damaging for employees were the organizations that publicly released statements of support for employee wellness and DEI but then behind the scenes would retaliate against employees actually trying to get those initiatives off the ground. We called that playbook the Performer.
\n\nWhat each of these playbooks had in common is that by either downplaying the cause of employee trauma or providing inadequate change, they ended up exacerbating the problems they were meant to address or creating new ones. Despite these solutions, the workers we surveyed reported organizational wide mental and physical health issues. The majority had thought about quitting their job in the last year or had already done so.
\n\nKim: I feel like I’ve seen little snippets of this everywhere in DEI work. Consultants come in to do an assessment, help craft a public statement, maybe form ERGs. I hear a lot of “change your relationship to the trauma that you’re experiencing!” But this serves existing power by socializing the risk of trauma and individualizing the healing. One thing I appreciate about the study is that you encourage folks to shift away from thinking about trauma as a behavioral issue. How is that different from the usual personal solutions?
\n\nAlba: We definitely want to challenge the concept of individual resilience and confront companies with the fact that their organizational-wide solutions – the DEI consultants they’ve worked with, the mental health resources they’ve invested in, the internal resource groups they’ve initiated – every single one of these recommendations, if not implemented with care, can be useless and even destructive.
\n\nKim: One of my struggles is that we’re working at two different levels. The first is more abstract, a matter of getting coworkers to recognize that everyone uses these playbooks, and organizational trauma is real. The second level is more grounded but overwhelming, the result of actually acknowledging our role in organizational trauma – “I’m one manager, but I’ve done all this harm.” What are you hoping for after that point?
\n\nAlba: This speaks to a larger issue of leaders developing the foundational skills to process their shame around organizational harm while leaning into their power to represent the interests of their reports with care.
\n\nPeople in leadership roles often feel trapped and isolated after recognizing they’ve harmed their teams. Others, to avoid those intense feelings, create shields that resemble the harmful behavior that contributed to the organizational trauma in the first place. What we do at HmntyCntrd is help folks deconstruct those feelings and context of shame so they can develop healthier coping strategies. To lead in times of organizational trauma, they need to operate from a point of discomfort.
\n\nKim: And managers too, right? I just read a report by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that said if you could only train one part of your organization on preventing gender-based harm, 95% of your time it should be managers. What impact are you trying to have on middle managers? What do you want them to do? What do you want them to feel after reading this?
\n\nAlba: I once had a client whose design team was completely burnt out. At first, I assumed it was because of the company’s fast paced “workplace culture.” But in working with the team, I began seeing patterns in how their manager misinterpreted business objectives and then communicated project scoping to their team. The team was burnt out because they were expected to deliver back-to-back intensive research projects that their business stakeholders ultimately had no appetite for. That, coupled with the sensitive topic of the work (healthcare access), meant that the team was continuously being exposed to potentially traumatizing participant interactions. Burnout was a symptom of that dynamic.
\n\nSo much of the trauma we learned about in our survey stemmed from design managers not being accountable to their role in creating harmful conditions. Design work is hard because it requires a high degree of empathy and often exposes professionals to emotionally difficult experiences. Managers should invest in building an infrastructure of care for their teams like contingency and debriefing protocols or aftercare resources. But at an even more basic level, managers can help create more trauma-informed organizations by just being better at stakeholder management and assigning their teams the right projects at the right pace.
\n\nPart of that restoring care I mentioned earlier comes from managers recognizing that work as a culture and work as a practice are intimately tied together. It’s about managers exercising their sphere of influence but in sustainable, trauma-informed ways.
\n\nThanks to Kim and the TWC newsletter crew for the opportunity to give workers why so many well-intended HR-led initiatives aren’t working, and what to do about it. Check out our full study, “The Corporate Playbooks Used to Combat Organizational Trauma (And Why They’re Not Enough),” and our work at HmntyCntrd.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/02/08/issue-3/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/02/08/issue-3/", "title": "An Ethical Google, and Other Fairy Tales", "date_published": "2022-02-08T00:00:00-08:00", "date_modified": "2022-02-08T00:00:00-08:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Last Wednesday, researchers Alex Hanna and Dylan Baker quit Google’s Ethical AI team and wrote letters about how Google maintains white supremacy and inequalities amongst their workforce. Both are joining the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, or DAIR, which Timnit Gebru formed after being fired in late 2020. Today, we’re reprinting both of their letters in full.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Last Wednesday, researchers Alex Hanna and Dylan Baker quit Google’s Ethical AI team and wrote letters about how Google maintains white supremacy and inequalities amongst their workforce. Both are joining the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, or DAIR, which Timnit Gebru formed after being fired in late 2020. Today, we’re reprinting both of their letters in full.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Alex Hanna
\n\nToday (Wednesday, February 2, 2022) is my last day at Google. It’s been a year and two months after my former manager Timnit Gebru was fired, and nearly a year after my next manager Meg Mitchell was given the same treatment. I’m following Timnit and joining her at the Distributed AI Research Institute as Director of Research, effective tomorrow.
\n\nIn resignation letters, this is where you write how much you appreciated the people you worked with. And I’m definitely going to do the same. But this is in spite of the culture of Google, rather than because of. The Ethical AI team created by Meg Mitchell and Timnit Gebru was one of the most inclusive on which I’ve ever worked or had the fortune of witnessing firsthand. Throughout many teams I’ve experienced in tech and academia, this one’s members have shown each other the most mutual respect, care, admiration, and appreciation. Even though it was unstated, Google’s Ethical AI team has (and continues) to exemplify a deep ethic — learned and emerging from a Black feminist tradition — of growth, nurturing, and wanting to see each other succeed. For that, I want to give our erstwhile co-leads the deepest appreciation. I’m going to deeply miss all of my teammates.
\n\nBut Google’s toxic problems are no mystery to anyone who’s been there for more than a few months, or who have been following the tech news with a critical eye. Many folks — especially Black women like April Curley and Timnit — have made clear just how deep the rot is in the institution. I am quitting because I’m tired. I could spend time rehashing the litany of ill treatment by Google management from prior organizers or how the heads of diversity and inclusion are implicated in the company’s union-busting, which we know thanks to the case brought by the whistleblowers illegally fired for organizing against ICE, CPB, and homophobia on YouTube. I could describe, at length, my own experiences, being in rooms when higher-level managers yelled defensively at my colleagues and me when we pointed out the very direct harm that their products were causing to a marginalized population. I could rehash how Google management promotes, at lightning speed, people who have little interest in mitigating the worst harms of sociotechnical systems, compared to people who put their careers on the line to prevent those harms.
\n\nI could do that. But I’ve also learned, thanks to my doctoral training in sociology, that one must expand one’s personal problems into the structural, to recognize what’s rotten at the local level as an instantiation of the institutional. Our best public sociologists, like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco, do this exceptionally well.
\n\nI could also provide quantitative evidence of the rot. Like how, prior to Timnit’s hiring, Google Research management had never recruited a Black woman as a research scientist. Or how in one town hall around Googlegeist (Google’s annual workplace climate survey), a high-level executive remarked that there had been such low numbers of Black women in the Google Research organization that they couldn’t even present a point estimate of these employees’ dissatisfaction with the organization, lest management risk deanonymizing the results. These data points are sad. They are also expected from the first-person experiences, discrimination lawsuits, and labor complaints made across the tech industry by Black people, Indigenous people, Dalits, people with disabilities, and queer and trans people.
\n\nInstead, I’d rather start working out the ways in which Google, like so many other tech organizations, maintains white supremacy behind the veneer of race-neutrality, both in the workplace and in their products. I also want to think through the methods tech workers can use to challenge and expose their employers’ ongoing investment in white supremacy. Much of the theoretical substance here is informed by theories of the racialized organization, developed by sociologists Melissa Wooten, Lucius Couloute, and Victor Ray.
\n\nIn a word, tech has a whiteness problem. Google is not just a tech organization. Google is a white tech organization. Meta is a white tech organization. So are Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and others that are announced in the same breath when we discuss the “techlash”. But so are research centers like OpenAI who are backed by oodles of venture capital from Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, or the Allen Institute for AI, founded by Paul Allen from Microsoft. More specifically, tech organizations are committed to defending whiteness through the “interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings”, the techniques of reproducing the organization. In this case, that means defending their policies of recruitment, hierarchization, and monetization. Sociologist Amber Hamilton discusses how corporate actors, tech organizations included, rarely named the symptoms of whiteness — that is, their own racist organizational practices — in their responses to the racial reckoning of 2020, one of the largest social movements of our lifetimes.
\n\nMy methodological approach comes from thinking along with Sara Ahmed’s work on complaint. By “complaint”, I mean grievances we lodge within our workplaces, which can look both like formal complaints made to human resources (excuse me, I mean “people operations”) and informal complaints which we hold between our peers, comrades, and friends. Anyone who has engaged in the process of a formal complaint can tell you how exhausting it is to register one, how management and decision-makers can stall, and how much one has to relive their trauma to do so.
\n\nAhmed teaches us how much we can learn from complaints. “The path of a complaint… teaches us something about how institutions work,” what she calls institutional mechanics. Complaints are often tethered to the individual racist or misogynist, a replication of what Alan Freeman calls the perpetrator perspective implicit in US anti-discrimination law. But, more importantly, complaints can tell us much more about organizational practices, and how those practices reinforce white supremacy. Because of the time we commit to the complaint, we intimately learn the rules that have gone unwritten and the standards that are applied to the letter for marginalized people, but only loosely for white (and upper class/caste Asian) men. Complainers learn the racialized nature of institutions much better than the bureaucrats themselves.
\n\nExamples of white supremacy within tech organizations abound. Like the racialized, sexist practices in the performance review process which don’t account for the huge amount of care work which has fallen on women and femmes during the pandemic, or the pushback on candidates of color from hiring committees which are nebulous and unaccountable to lower-level managers. In Timnit’s case, she was fired when Jeff Dean, the head of Google Research, claimed that her paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Large Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” did not go through the proper publication approval process. The claim made by Dean that the process is one in which “we engage a wide range of researchers, social scientists, ethicists, policy & privacy advisors, and human rights specialists from across Research and Google overall” was laughable; as one of only a handful of social scientists on staff, I recognized the claim as patently false. Google management remained silent when an article on the Google Walkout page pointed out that there were many counterexamples, like how nearly half of papers in the system were approved within a day or less of the deadline.
\n\nFortunately, complaint can operate in a positive mode, namely as a strategy of coalitioning and solidarity. It can be a way of acting as a “feminist ear”, as Ahmed calls it: “To become a feminist ear is to indicate you are willing to receive complaints.” It also speaks to the effectiveness of telling stories about tech institutions, as a diagnostic, as an analgesic, and an organizing device. Complaint can work as a type of praxis, a Marxian workers’ inquiry of sorts, as Tamara Kneese has argued.
\n\nSo in this sign-off, I encourage social scientists, tech critics, and advocates to look at the tech company as a racialized organization. Naming the whiteness of organizational practices can help deconstruct how tech companies are terrible places to work for people of color, but also enable an analysis of how certain pernicious incentives enable them to justify and reconstitute their actions in surveillance capitalist and carceral infrastructures. For tech workers: continue to complain, to be a feminist ear for others, and to develop institutional analyses of your own (and for gods’ sakes, download Signal).
\n\nBy Dylan Baker
\n\nAt the end of February I will be leaving the Ethical AI team and joining Timnit Gebru at the Distributed AI Research Institute.
\n\nI’m one of many people leaving Google with ethical concerns in mind; there’s little I can say about that that hasn’t been said. I’m standing among people who’ve put their careers on the line to speak up, who’ve anatomized Google’s harms and injustices more thoroughly and articulately than I could.
\n\nSo, I’m writing this to share a few experiences and observations that feel important to me.\nI first came to Google through the Engineering Residency Program. When I joined in 2017, the program assembled extremely diverse cohorts of new graduates in computer science and related fields, and gave us a lower-paying, fixed-term version of a new-grad engineering job. While this program has been more or less discontinued (after ceaseless organizing on the part of many current and former Residents!), finding ways to codify the undervaluation of marginalized professionals through “opportunities” has certainly not ended, at Google or elsewhere in tech.
\n\nThis was the start of a lot of cognitive dissonance.
\n\nAs a Resident, I was cocooned by the office perks that make full-time Googlers feel so valuable — and was reminded that this was all temporary unless I had proven myself worthy within a year. As a full-time engineer in Google Research, I heard managers and leaders speak earnestly about the critical importance of a diverse workforce, about the role our work could be playing in addressing hardships and injustices, about how fortunate we were to be able to operate so freely — and the hiring demographics looked the same to me year after year. Most of the work I saw rewarded was, at most, superficially engaged with material ethical concerns (a veritable ocean of disability dongles!). And all those “Googley” perks drew a firm, uncomfortable line between us as full-time workers and the temps, vendors, and contract workers that worked alongside us.
\n\nAt first, I coped with this cognitive dissonance the way a lot of people do, by giving Google as much benefit of the doubt as I could at the time. These Are Challenging And Complex Issues, after all. At least leadership Sees Us And Hears Our Concerns. And I could brush off the paternalism — being an early career engineer from a marginalized background, I was often patronized, anyhow.
\n\nIt also helped to find other optimistic, ideologically-motivated colleagues. The way they saw their own roles gave me a sense of purpose, too — Google has a massive impact on the world, and that impact is driven by us. By Googlers.
\n\nBut “us” was never meant to include over half of Google’s own workers. It was never meant to include April Curley or Shannon Wait, not workers trying to curtail Google’s military involvement, not Drs. Gebru or Mitchell.
\n\nMaybe at the company’s founding, Google was a place where the impact really was driven by the employees. But when the employees are a small clique of largely white Stanford graduates in a skyrocketing industry with a firehose of capital and limited legal oversight, there was no reason for it not to be.
\n\nNow, Google leadership has made it clear that there is simply no reason to let employees impact the direction of the company if that direction deviates from ravenous, short-sighted consumption and growth at any cost. They’ll continue to isolate, silence, and divide workers who speak up about critical issues in the future of technology; they’ll continue to consolidate power and evade responsibility. Responding to petitions, transparency in town halls, “don’t be evil” — they’re simply not perks worth offering anymore.
\n\nWhen I joined Google, I was cautiously optimistic about the promise of making the world better with technology. I’m a lot less techno-solutionist now. I understand in vivid detail how far Google leadership will go to feel like they’re protecting their precious bottom line. I feel viscerally how easy it is to become jaded to the point of exhaustion.
\n\nAt the same time, I can’t speak highly enough of how insightful, brilliant, and unwaveringly collaborative my colleagues have been. I have never felt so valued, trusted, and encouraged in a work environment as I have on the Ethical AI team. Drs. Gebru and Mitchell laid incredible groundwork, and I owe them — and the entire team — an enormous debt of gratitude.
\n\nAnd organizing with my fellow Engineering Residents and the Alphabet Workers’ Union were deeply grounding, heartening experiences. I’ve found solidarity to be not only indispensable in effecting change but also personally restorative. Being in community with other people, taking care of each other, taking action together — it motivates me in a way no free company-provided 1-on-1 counseling or motivational wellness talk ever could.
\n\nMeredith Whittaker put it really well in a recent interview in Logic Magazine:
\n\n\n\nWe’re trying to figure out how we, as people within these environments, protect ourselves and each other. In my view, the answer to this question doesn’t start with building a better HR, or hiring a diversity consultant. It’s rooted in solidarity, mutual care, and in a willingness to understand ourselves as committed to our own and others’ wellbeing over our commitments to institutional standing or professional identity.
\n
So, even after four years at Google, I remain cautiously optimistic.
\n\nI believe technology can be good. I want efficiency to mean everyone can work less, I want it to mean justice and accessibility and less suffering and more leisure and joy. I want us to be able to spend more time planting seeds and less time putting out fires.
\n\nI have enormous faith in Dr. Gebru and the DAIR team in working towards just that. I’m tremendously excited to start my next chapter there.
\n\nThank you to TWC for the opportunity to reprint our stories with allies in and around tech, and thanks for editing help from Emily, Emma, Remi, Ellen, and of course, Timnit and Meg. Learn more about our work at DAIR and follow us at @dairinstitute.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/02/01/issue-2/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/02/01/issue-2/", "title": "An invitation to talk with fellow workers", "date_published": "2022-02-01T00:00:00-08:00", "date_modified": "2022-02-01T00:00:00-08:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Our goal in this newsletter is mutual aid, tech workers for tech workers. The most valuable, enjoyable part of our process is talking with fellow workers – the stories we publish are a bonus.
\n\nNow, we invite you to talk with fellow workers too. To have a safe and trusting space with people in different workplaces but similar situations. To leverage experience among allies in labor and tech. To get perspective and get organized.
\n\nSign up to give or get peer support.
\n\nWe’ll reach out to everyone who fills in the form. And there’s more coming this fall, including an intergenerational teach-in that builds on our series about the IBM Black Workers Alliance.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Our goal in this newsletter is mutual aid, tech workers for tech workers. The most valuable, enjoyable part of our process is talking with fellow workers – the stories we publish are a bonus.
\n\nNow, we invite you to talk with fellow workers too. To have a safe and trusting space with people in different workplaces but similar situations. To leverage experience among allies in labor and tech. To get perspective and get organized.
\n\nSign up to give or get peer support.
\n\nWe’ll reach out to everyone who fills in the form. And there’s more coming this fall, including an intergenerational teach-in that builds on our series about the IBM Black Workers Alliance.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople need groceries. Mutual aid projects need systems. Today, Erik talks about architecting the South Bay Mutual Aid project and volunteer network, which has helped move nearly $80,000 in groceries, diapers, and PPE to San Jose residents. It surfaces the formal and informal structures in any organizing effort, which cybernetics comrade Stafford Beer characterized for Chile’s socialized economy many decades ago. The ongoing effort demonstrates how tech systems work best with autonomy, accountability, and active efforts to counter the corporate nonprofit tendencies we pick up.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "People need groceries. Mutual aid projects need systems. Today, Erik talks about architecting the South Bay Mutual Aid project and volunteer network, which has helped move nearly $80,000 in groceries, diapers, and PPE to San Jose residents. It surfaces the formal and informal structures in any organizing effort, which cybernetics comrade Stafford Beer characterized for Chile’s socialized economy many decades ago. The ongoing effort demonstrates how tech systems work best with autonomy, accountability, and active efforts to counter the corporate nonprofit tendencies we pick up.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Erik
\n\nIn 2018, I quit my job as an operations engineer and took a position washing dishes on a major tech campus. Having grown up around Silicon Valley, I’ve seen first-hand how tech industry wealth is built on the backs of the poorest, from tech campus janitors to food delivery workers making below minimum wage. This perspective can be disheartening, but I believe the small distance between these extremes is a weak point in our economy – and participating in mutual aid can build a path to bringing these worlds together, while also overcoming shame, undoing fear of failure, and preventing burnout.
\n\nMy organizing experience also revolves around tech. It’s a response to how the industry’s growth impacts those who live and work here, and how the products impact the rest of the world. There is a powerful organizing scene in Silicon Valley that punches above its weight: organizers fought against San Jose when the city sold out public resources to Google, and we campaigned to make Palantir so unwelcome that they relocated their headquarters. We can push back against the worst of the industry, and win.
\n\nMy introduction to mutual aid was witnessing the grassroots response to the 2018 Northern California Camp Fire. People came together on a large scale in the face of tragedy, showing widespread awareness of how interdependent we are. Unfortunately, it also showed how easily such goodwill could be co-opted by moralistic narratives. Mutual aid provided direct money and resources to people who had lost their homes in the fire, many of whom descended into Chico, which like most cities in California had its own unhoused population. Some of the mutual aid efforts implicitly separated the two groups, viewing one group as legitimate victims and the other as undeserving of even charity. And yet climate change and homelessness are disasters arising from the same root cause: a small, shrinking group gaining power and wealth to our collective detriment.
\n\nThe beauty of mutual aid lies in its simplicity. The approach to solving an acute disaster can be applied to take on the larger ones: Something terrible happened, so what do people need, and how do we take care of them? I observed common tendencies and structural problems, including burnout and power consolidation, across various mutual aid efforts. Promising efforts can slide backwards and revert to top-down, unaccountable models, which is why organizers need to think about these efforts systemically. To make mutual aid sustainable, we need systems that empower as many people as possible to get involved and do the work, share the load, and grow the effort at scale.
\n\nWhen a large-scale disaster like COVID hit, organizers in San Jose and beyond knew how to respond, based on recent experience overcoming uncertainty and government inaction. We wanted to use our capacity to help others who were facing layoffs, illness, and other issues. As more people became involved, these efforts were formalized into South Bay Mutual Aid. While many projects operated under this umbrella, including N95 mask giveaways and unhoused outreach, the largest was the survival grocery delivery program for Santa Clara County, an alternative to local state sponsored programs, such as Catholic Charities or Second Harvest Food Bank. In the year after the coronavirus hit, SMBA was able to redistribute $70–80K worth of groceries and other neccessities.
\n\nWhile mutual aid and charity can look similar in practice, charity often exacerbates the problems it purports to address, from placing arbitrary conditions and requirements on those who receive help, to paying their own workers poverty wages. Charity is the powerful passing out a fraction of their wealth to those they deem worthy, while mutual aid means sharing what we have to ensure our own survival and ultimately topple that divide entirely.
\n\nOur mutual aid effort didn’t gather any demographic data on those receiving aid other than where groceries were dropped off. The vast majority of goods went to Central and East San Jose, and to various pockets of rent-controlled apartments scattered across the valley. Unsurprisingly, these areas hardest hit by COVID are also the places most negatively impacted by the tech industry, both being at risk of tech-fueled gentrification, and being where its service workforce lives.
\n\nIn order to design systems for our work, we used concepts from management cybernetics, pioneered by British theorist Stafford Beer in the mid-20th century. Cybernetic systems can be described as processes for maintaining equilibrium, with examples that can be found throughout the natural and human worlds, from individual biological systems to organizations and self-replicating social structures. The viable system model has five levels, each with specific tasks and relationships to the other levels and outside bodies, which work together to steer a system without the need for leadership. The large-scale implementation of this theory, in partnership with the government of Salvador Allende, was an attempt to use early computer networks and build feedback loops in order to run the Chilean economy. Although this project showed great promise, it was ultimately unsuccessful after a US-backed military coup toppled the democratically-elected Allende government in 1973 and installed a military junta which ran the country for the next 25 years. This is foreshadowing.
\n\nApplying cybernetic analysis to universal human needs like food and shelter, we can imagine systems for meeting our needs outside of capitalism. To make this real, we have to start with small-scale local needs. For our own implementation of management cybernetics, we divided the work into two systems, with “System 1” referring to the day-to-day practices that help the community, and “System 2” referring to higher-level functions. System 1 is praxis, theory in practice. Any project responding to community requests can use a similar system: weekly food distribution like the long-running group Food not Bombs, prisoner support and phone zaps, providing aid for workers or tenants or homeless populations, even building a neighborhood Wi-Fi network.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn our implementation of System 1, we were able to assess people’s needs in the community in a straightforward way: an online form, first hosted on Google Sheets, and later moved to Airtable in order to accommodate a higher volume of requests. Because of COVID, many potential volunteers were not comfortable providing in-person help, so to accommodate this we developed a two-step process to respond to these requests. Members of the aid coordinator team, working from home, could view outstanding tickets and respond to the ones they felt most comfortable with based on languages spoken, location, and so on. Aid coordinators could then get a list of items for delivery or point them to other services if they had needs beyond that. If they needed groceries delivered, the aid coordinator would reach out to a list of volunteer delivery drivers to find a willing volunteer in the area. The list of items was passed on for the driver to pick up and drop off, and then the driver could request reimbursement through a financial portal. No requirements or quotas were imposed on coordinators or delivery drivers, so volunteers were free to participate as much or as little as they chose, based on their own comfort or schedule.
\n\nThe coordinator task of responding to these requests quickly became the most challenging role. Many of us, myself included, didn’t have experience with this sort of contact, and it could be especially painful when the needs were beyond what we could provide. The team met weekly to discuss challenges and provide support for one another, and as more people became involved, a sustained community began to form.
\n\nOne purpose in getting people involved with this type of service work is building a movement around your specific material goals. Power comes when the widest range of people can participate and see the value in your work, and can draw from their own background and experience to find new and better ways to support it. Mutual aid efforts can draw a wide range of people, including lifestyle activists – those who throw around political language without putting in much work – and people who may have little political education or use reactionary language but who are always willing to help out. If you listen and consistently deliver on a community need, you will naturally build a constituency that can be further organized. For example, people who are asking for help with groceries might also need help organizing against their landlord or their boss.
\n\nDirect contact with the community also connects this power to accountability. Your legitimacy comes from your ability to serve. People are extremely receptive to being further organized by those who have already demonstrated a willingness and ability to meet their basic needs. Conversely, attempting to further organize without being able to meet these needs is the organizational equivalent of biting off more than one can chew, at which point you may need to refocus on the fundamentals. Providing hot meals to people is unambiguously good, but unless they can be provided on a regular schedule, people will still have to worry where their next meal will come from. At the beginning of the project, we had volunteers cooking and delivering meals, but with the amount of labor required we realized that outside of a disaster situation, it made a lot more sense to provide groceries or direct financial support.
\n\nSystem 1 work brings acute awareness of others’ struggles, and directly works to break down the ego and build political consciousness. Many existing programs to help people with food or shelter I previously thought were available either required untenable hurdles to access or simply didn’t work. After an illegal eviction, one person I met would have been forced to euthanize their pet – their only companion – in order to access a few days at an emergency shelter. One person requesting groceries was already signed up for a program through the city, but so far had only received boxes of rotten produce. Direct service brings us closer to the real-time cycles of human needs that must be addressed if we want to build power and change our current circumstances. Hunger and need for shelter have hard deadlines that we either meet or we don’t.
\n\nSystem 2 is for higher-level functions. How well these functions are implemented can determine whether the project grows or fails. Because higher-level functions are not directly tied to community needs, the systems of accountability are not always naturally occurring, but where they don’t exist, they need to be built. There is no template for how they will look, but generally, as many people as possible should be trained and comfortable performing any system function. Access to meeting spaces, finances, social capital and online clout – all can constitute single points of failure. Ideally, no one should feel unable to step back without it causing an impact.
\n\nSimilar to System 1, creation of a self-sustaining program will come from bringing the widest and most diverse perspectives together around how to best support those doing on-the-ground work, rather than managing. In my experience, higher-level duties are best run by those who have been involved in lower-level work, but even when not, should be governed by the dictates of those on the ground level. The most common issues I’ve seen in organizations arise when reproductive labor isn’t recognized, as people in difficult roles will quickly leave when they feel their efforts aren’t being respected. Within our project, the strongest sense of solidarity and building of community came when those involved with steering were intentional about celebrating the individual contributions necessary for the project to function. System 2 efforts like recruitment, fundraising, social media, finances, outreach, etc. may be higher level, but need to be first and foremost accountable to the organizational System 1 purpose (or purposes). As this system grows, its functions should continue to operate even as the lines between individual roles blur.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnfortunately, because System 2 functions can be performed without direct community input, mutual aid formations face co-optation in subtle ways, like letting established organizations control the flow of funds. There is real danger that fundraising and recruitment become their own program, removed from the context of the service work needing to be done, by a small number of self-selected activists. Consolidation of power and responsibilities falling onto a few individuals, even with the best of intentions, will inevitably lead to burnout and breakdown. And from the perspective of those doing on-the-ground work, and those being served, there is very little difference between resources not being distributed in a timely manner and being withheld outright.
\n\nAnyone embarking on mutual aid projects, especially with relative privilege, should aim to facilitate the redistributive process in a way that those with the greatest understanding of the need can eventually run it. In practice, this means being aware of organizational choke points and making sure that work is distributed and can be taken on by anyone willing to make the effort. Any sudden influx of resources should be a growth opportunity; the world we exist in has absolutely no shortage of need.
\n\nMany people who participate in mutual aid work are not explicitly anarchists, which also speaks to the universality of support we encountered that political projects aren’t always able to capture. The goal isn’t to work towards a specific outcome or to build an organization, it’s to build a process. We can be working towards an anarchist mutual aid-based society, building dual power counter to the existing state, or simply creating systems of care; at this level it doesn’t matter. Ultimately we want to build a culture capable of survival and growth outside of capitalism: a better way of living. This sort of work comes far more naturally to those involved in schools or churches, rather than activist circles.
\n\nMutual aid work is simple, but still difficult. People come into this work for various reasons and don’t all get the same thing out of it, yet that’s exactly how we start to recognize this movement as something bigger than ourselves. Not every project will succeed, but no project will fail; these are all opportunities for learning about which systems serve us, and how to improve them as an even stronger foundation for their work. Failure can only come when we refuse to acknowledge missteps and continue to reproduce unaccountable, oppressive systems – sometimes of our own design.
\n\nAt its core, mutual aid is the belief that no matter how well we may do as individuals, collective survival requires collective wellbeing. We may not be victims of the latest natural or economic disaster, but the individualist fantasy of escaping to a bunker holds us back from accepting the fact that eventually we all have to ask for help.
\n\nThanks to Sunny, Tamara, Danny, Jonathan, and Wendy for the discussion and editing that resulted in this piece. If you’re interested in learning more cybernetics and mutual aid, check out Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, and your local mutual aid effort. Countless projects need support at this moment, but if you have cash burning a hole in your pocket I’d suggest dropping it with Subvert UD, a coalition of students and community members providing hot meals and survival gear to residents of Seattle’s University District, and North Beacon Hill Mutual Aid, an organization providing aid and political education to unhoused communities in Beacon Hill.
\n" }, { "id": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2021/12/28/issue-27/", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2021/12/28/issue-27/", "title": "Lessons from Poland: Amazon is international, but so are we", "date_published": "2021-12-28T00:00:00-08:00", "date_modified": "2021-12-28T00:00:00-08:00", "author": { "name": "Tech Workers Coalition", "url": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org", "avatar": "https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/img/newsletter-team.png" }, "summary": "Dear readers, death comes fast and slow at Amazon warehouses. Workers suffered a tornado in Illinois, COVID worldwide, and holiday season production exhaustion. Today, Polish warehouse worker Magda Malinowska talks about shop floor organizing and how Amazon failing to properly measure “energy expenditure” led to the fatal overwork of her coworker Darek. But while her union organizes to improve conditions, Amazon avoids accountability by escalating its anti-union campaign. As Amazon expands internationally, shop floor organizing requires international solidarity, too. In light of Magda’s recent firing, we decided to close this year by creating a fundraiser to support Magda’s organizing with her union – donate here.
\n\n\n", "content_html": "Dear readers, death comes fast and slow at Amazon warehouses. Workers suffered a tornado in Illinois, COVID worldwide, and holiday season production exhaustion. Today, Polish warehouse worker Magda Malinowska talks about shop floor organizing and how Amazon failing to properly measure “energy expenditure” led to the fatal overwork of her coworker Darek. But while her union organizes to improve conditions, Amazon avoids accountability by escalating its anti-union campaign. As Amazon expands internationally, shop floor organizing requires international solidarity, too. In light of Magda’s recent firing, we decided to close this year by creating a fundraiser to support Magda’s organizing with her union – donate here.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy Magda Malinowska
\n\nAccording to Amazon’s logic, I must be a magician.
\n\nOn September 6, 2021, the company claims I was hiding in my car outside the Poznań warehouse where I had been working for 6 years – and at the very same moment, it claims I was also inside the warehouse photographing the corpse of a coworker who had just died on the job. This was the story Amazon gave when it fired me in November, two months after the death of Darek, my coworker and my friend.
\n\nThe truth is closer to the more mundane horrors of work at Amazon. For a while Darek had complained about excess physical demands at his workstation and was denied his request for support. That day, he collapsed. And instead of calling for paramedics, management said they couldn’t let paramedics in because of covid – despite the fact that there were thousands of people in the warehouse. So Darek was forced to go downstairs and get to the paramedic’s office on his own. He made it, but after making such a huge effort, he died on the spot.
\n\nAs a union rep and health and safety inspector, I went to Amazon’s HR and tried to convince them to put me on the post-accident team to investigate what happened. They denied my request. So I went out to call our lawyer. Just then, they closed the doors to all workers, and HR and security were outside transporting the corpse of my friend into a funeral van. I just sat in my car surrounded by the crowd. Then, two months later, Amazon came out with the magician story and fired me. Mind you that, as per Polish law, Amazon had one month from the alleged incident to dismiss me for disciplinary reasons. Moreover, workers with union positions like myself have legal protections. So I sued to get reinstated, but it will take three years if I’m lucky, five years if not.
\n\nWorkers at Amazon are dying quick and slow deaths. The company is trying to break any organization we build to fight for our health and our lives. Here’s the story of our struggle, and how I ended up in it — perhaps someday you will find yourself in a similar struggle.
\n\nI graduated from university in 2010, but as a philosophy graduate, I couldn’t find work so easily. I was doing odd jobs and seasonal jobs abroad for a few years.
\n\nBy then I also was making films and doing journalistic work with the grassroots union Inicjatywa Pracownicza (IP), or Workers’ Initiative in English. In 2013, we made a report about special economic zones in Poland and I did a tour around Italy meeting logistics workers – fantastic people. I was in meetings with hundreds of workers who were struggling against the exploitative cooperative system, with temporary contracts, unstable jobs, and poor wages. We realized that the logistics sector is growing the same way in Poland! After the trip to Italy, I got a warehouse job in England to earn some money to live. I went with my comrade Kris from IP and together with friends from Angry Workers of the World, we started to organize ourselves as temp workers. We worked in an area that processed 60% of the food consumed in London. Mainly migrants work there. My family lived nearby. We started to organize and did a slowdown. I worked there for almost a year, and when I lost the job, I came back to Poland.
\n\nIt was 2014 and Amazon had arrived in Poland. My plan was to work for just a few months to get insurance. I worked well and was fast. After a few months, I got converted from a temp agency contract to an Amazon contract, and then a permanent contract — the first in my life. And then I became an official union rep with IP.
\n\nAmazon workers are everyone. Younger workers in their first job, older workers with many different past jobs, migrants from all over. The warehouse I worked in had people from maybe 30 different villages. It’s difficult to find one single message.
\n\nBut something we often hear, especially among younger workers, is that they don’t deserve better than Amazon or better working conditions. They’re still influenced by the American dream from the 90s, that you have to make all the changes yourself to get a better job, and if you can’t, don’t complain. It is a common belief in Poland that working people are failures. As a result, employees do not believe in each other. They do not believe that we can act together and achieve something together, that when I stop working, others will follow me.
\n\nOf course, there are exceptions – and successful actions. We organized many high-profile protests, such as last year’s blockade of trucks entering Amazon in Wrocław, which we did with the international campaign Make Amazon Pay. Trucks waited several hours for entry: we had blocked all access to the warehouse and the nearby highway. Amazon suspended some work in the warehouse. Workers liked it.
\n\nBut the most important thing is to engage the workforce directly. We have held a strike referendum twice now at Amazon in Poland. In both cases, 5,000 workers participated – 30% of Amazon’s entire workforce in Poland! – and nearly all of them voted in favor of holding a strike. We were proud of the result. It’s so difficult to organize such a thing in such a huge and dispersed company. Unfortunately, we did not meet the 50% participation threshold required by Polish labor law. Amazon workers could go on strike in any other country in Europe, but not in Poland.
\n\nBeyond the lack of mass solidarity, there is also an issue with union legitimacy: some people from the 90s who saw unions betray them, so they don’t trust unions. A large proportion work for temp agencies, so joining a union is less useful. And permanent workers doubt they’ll get support from temp workers if, for example, they do a slowdown. So we try to bring together temp and permanent workers. We try to convince them we’re on the same team. Our first strike vote had hundreds of temps showing up to sign attendance lists with their names and addresses — they weren’t scared.
\n\nThen there is the Christmas peak season – the warehouses are not prepared for such a huge influx of new workers. They’re overworked and have many accidents. Amazon pushes workers to hit new records of sent parcels. So we talk with people about the fact they don’t have to break health and safety rules for targets, work when sick, and so on. We also distribute newspapers with tips and info for workers, and in case anything happens, they can get in touch with us.
\n\n\n\nIndeed, we have been tackling health and safety problems for some time. Three years ago, we convinced Poland’s National Labor Inspection to measure workers’ “energy expenditure” – calories burned during a shift. The results of the research by the Labor Inspection were terrifying. Some women expended two to three times more energy than the legal limit. In simple words, they slowly kill themselves at work.
\n\nWith Darek’s death, our union accused Amazon of being liable since they failed to measure the energy expenditure. Even when Darek complained about doing the work of three people, he got no support. And Amazon knows the reports prepared by the Labor Inspection. They should automatically measure all jobs in the warehouse in the proper way and change working conditions accordingly. They did none of that.
\n\nIn 2014, when Amazon opened in Poland, things were different. We thought they’d close warehouses next door in Germany and rely on our cheap labor to serve the German market. But Amazon doesn’t close; they just kept expanding. We earn three times less than German workers, so we work overtime to survive. And whenever workers strike in Germany, Amazon asks us to work even more to fulfill the orders rerouted to Poland. This makes it hard to discuss the idea of working less. Our friends from Germany wanted to make a statement that wages in Poland and Germany should be the same, to strengthen both Polish and German worker power. We still haven’t done it because of pushback within the bureaucracy of their union, Verdi. But no matter what, we respect and like our friends from Germany. Our cooperation is very strong. I got so much support from them and from Verdi when I was fired. Thanks to that, instead of being depressed, I got new energy for organizing.
\n\nAt the beginning, Amazon didn’t want to push us too much. We felt strong for a few years. We won demands around wages, around health and safety. We have more workers in the union and in efforts around the world. But at the same time, Amazon is more aggressive and unafraid. They are ready to break the law to get rid of unionists and squeeze workers. Turnover is very high. I sometimes feel that every year we have to start from scratch with new people, to mobilize them, explain things, and show that we’re here.
\n\nThe pandemic gave us focus. In the early months, we cooperated with European and US workers in warehouses and in corporate offices. We made common demands – and Amazon met many of them. We got hazard pay, health and safety improvements, and more. We made demands on an international level. It was quite difficult, sharing information day after day on Zoom calls, sometimes at 2am to connect with people in the US. The pandemic was difficult, but it helped us strengthen cooperation and accomplish a lot. To build on that, we need to expand our efforts and push our demands. And we need support: journalists investigating situations, academics analyzing experiences, politicians changing laws. And we need workers in both warehouses and corporate offices linking it all together in a body that’s able to face Amazon — from groups in headquarters like Amazon Employees for Climate Justice to transnational networks like Amazon Workers International, which we formed in Europe and have made efforts to extend to the US and beyond.
\n\nAmazon is not just an e-commerce company. They dictate labor market standards and lobby against labor protections. When we stop organizing for a while or give up, they take back what we won. If we want to live decent lives or at least keep what we have now, we don’t have a choice. We have to keep fighting and moving forward. It’s better to be in this together.
\n\n\n\nThank you to Nantina V, Danny S, and Tamara K for helping pull the story together. I highly recommend workers talk with them – and one another! To learn about our international efforts, visit the links above. And donate to support IP’s union organizing via GoFundMe here.
\n" } ] }